Catholic Convulsions > Archbishop Vigano called Francis a False Prophet - now charged with schism

 

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò summoned to Vatican for trial over schism charge

JUN 21, 2024 11:00 AM BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò regards the schism charges being brought against as “an honor,” which is understandable, considering that the Church has become a foremost exponent of wokeism, and has in many ways abandoned its Christian tradition, as with its relentless pandering to Islam.

Archbishop Viganò says he faces schism charges

from Vatican’s doctrinal office

National Catholic Register, June 20, 2024:

The disgraced former papal nuncio to the United States, Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, announced that he has been charged with schism by the Vatican’s doctrinal office, after a six-year rogue period in which he called for Pope Francis to resign and labeled him a “false prophet.”

I wonder... did he call him a false prophet, or The False Prophet? 

On June 20, the archbishop posted on his own website a two-page decree from the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith ordering him to appear for a trial regarding “public statements that show a denial of points necessary for the preservation of communion with the Catholic Church.”

The decree is dated June 11 and is signed by Msgr. John Kennedy, secretary of the doctrinal office’s disciplinary section, requesting that Viganò present himself on June 20 at 15:30 to formally receive the accusation and evidence against him.

In 2018, Viganò penned an 11-page letter alleging a widespread Vatican cover-up of allegations against ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and called on Francis to resign. Since then, many of the claims he alleged have been discredited, but the Italian archbishop has become something of a hero to some right-wing Catholics for his support of former U.S. President Donald Trump, opposition to the COVID-19 vaccines, spreading of Q-Anon conspiracy theories, and his outright rejection of the Second Vatican Council.

While many mainstream Catholics have dismissed the former Vatican diplomat, he has continued to use his website and social media to promote his radicalized views, with his posts being shared by high-profile individuals such as Trump and being widely promoted within certain pockets of the U.S. Catholic Church. 

In the weeks following Viganò’s 2018 attack against Francis, many bishops’ conferences around the globe issued statements specifically denouncing the former nuncio. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops did not and more than two dozen U.S. bishops issued statements of support for Viganò at the time.

In October 2021, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the then-head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, penned a fiery response to Viganò charging him with carrying out a “political frame job” and labeling his actions as “extremely immoral.”

More recently, in 2022, Italy’s military chaplain, Archbishop Santo Marciano, published an open letter to Viganò condemning his spread of conspiracy theories.

In his June 20 blog post, Viganò said he considered the charges brought against him to be an “honor,” adding that Vatican II is a “moral and liturgical cancer of which the Bergoglian ‘synodal church’ is a necessary metastasis.”..

Corruption is Everywhere > Cardinal Imprisoned in Vatican for Embezzlement

Lest you think embezzlement in the Vatican is an unusual event, you should read David Yallop's

"In God's Name"

Cardinal is convicted of embezzlement

in Vatican financial trial

A Vatican tribunal on Saturday convicted a cardinal of embezzlement and sentenced him to 5 ½ years in prison in one of several verdicts handed down in a complicated financial trial that aired the city state’s dirty laundry and tested its justice system.

By:NEWS WIRES

Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the first cardinal ever prosecuted by the Vatican criminal court, was absolved of several other charges and his nine co-defendants received a mixed outcome of some guilty verdicts and many acquittals of the nearly 50 charges brought against them during a 2 ½ year trial.

Becciu’s lawyer, Fabio Viglione, said he respected the sentence but would appeal.

Prosecutor Alessandro Diddi said the outcome “showed we were correct.”

The trial focused on the Vatican secretariat of state’s 350 million euro investment in developing a former Harrod’s warehouse into luxury apartments. Prosecutors alleged Vatican monsignors and brokers fleeced the Holy See of tens of millions of euros in fees and commissions and then extorted the Holy See for 15 million euros to cede control of the building.

Becciu was accused of embezzlement-related charges in two tangents of the London deal and faced up to seven years in prison.

In the end, he was convicted of embezzlement stemming from the original Vatican investment of 200 million euros into a fund that invested in the London property. The tribunal determined canon law prohibited using church assets in such a speculative investment.

He was also convicted of embezzlement for his 125,000 euro donation of Vatican money to a charity run by his brother in Sardinia and of using Vatican money to pay an intelligence analyst who in turn was convicted of using the money for herself.

The trial had raised questions about the rule of law in the city state and Francis’ power as absolute monarch, given that he wields supreme legislative, executive and judicial authority and had exercised it in ways the defense says jeopardized a fair trial.

The defense attorneys did praise Judge Giuseppe Pignatone's even-handedness and said they were able to present their arguments amply. But they lamented the Vatican’s outdated procedural norms gave prosecutors enormous leeway to withhold evidence and otherwise pursue their investigation nearly unimpeded.

Andrea Tornielli, the Vatican's editorial director, said the verdicts showed the defense had ample space to present their case and that the defense rights were respected. 

“The outcome of this trial tells us that the judges of the tribunal, as is right, acted with full independence based on documentary proofs and witnesses, not pre-confectioned theories," he wrote in an editorial in Vatican News.

Prosecutors had sought prison terms from three to 13 years and damages of over 400 million euros to try to recover the estimated 200 million euros they say the Holy See lost in the bad deals. 

In the end, the tribunal acquitted many of the suspects of many of the biggest charges, including fraud, corruption and money-laundering, determining in many cases that the crimes simply didn't exist. 

But it nevertheless ordered the confiscation of 166 million euros from them and payment of civil damages to Vatican offices of 200 million euros. One defendant, Becciu's former secretary Monsignor Mauro Carlino, was acquitted entirely.

The trial was initially seen as a sign of Francis' financial reforms and willingness to crack down on alleged financial misdeeds in the Vatican. But it had something of a reputational boomerang for the Holy See, with revelations of vendettas, espionage and even ransom payments to Islamic militants.

Much of the London case rested on the passage of the property from one London broker, Raffaele Mincione, to another in late 2018. Prosecutors allege the second broker, Gianluigi Torzi, hoodwinked the Vatican by maneuvering to secure full control of the building that he relinquished only when the Vatican paid him off 15 million euros.

For Vatican prosecutors, that amounted to extortion. For the defense — and a British judge who rejected Vatican requests to seize Torzi’s assets — it was a negotiated exit from a legally binding contract. 

In the end, the tribunal convicted Torzi of several charges, including extortion, and sentenced him to six years in prison. Mincione was convicted of embezzlement for the original London investment but was absolved of, among other things, of inflating the cost of the building when the Vatican bought into it.

It wasn't clear where the suspects would serve their time, if the convictions are upheld on appeal. The Vatican has a jail, but Torzi's whereabouts weren't immediately known and it wasn't clear how or whether other countries would extradite the defendants to serve any sentence.

The former heads of the Vatican financial intelligence agency, Tommaso di Ruzza and Rene Bruelhart, were absolved of the main charge of abuse of office. They were convicted only of failing to report a suspicious transaction involving Torzi to prosecutors and fined 1,750 euros apiece.

They had argued they couldn’t tip off Vatican prosecutors to the transaction because they had initiated their own cross-border financial intelligence-gathering operation into Torzi after Francis asked them to help the secretariat of state get possession of the property.

A Vatican official, Fabrizio Tirabassi, was convicted of extortion along with Torzi and a money-laundering charge. The Vatican’s long-time financial adviser, Enrico Crasso was convicted of several charges including embezzlement and sentenced to seven years in prison.

The original London investigation spawned two other tangents that involved the star defendant, Becciu, once one of Francis’ top advisers and himself considered a papal contender.

Prosecutors accused Becciu of embezzlement for sending 125,000 euros in Vatican money to a Sardinian charity run by his brother. Becciu argued that the local bishop requested the money to build a bakery to employ at-risk youths and that the money remained in the diocesan coffers.

The tribunal acknowledged the charitable ends of the donation but convicted him of embezzlement, given his brother's role.

Becciu was also accused of paying a Sardinian woman, Cecilia Marogna, for her intelligence services. Prosecutors traced some 575,000 euros in wire transfers from the Vatican to a Slovenian front company owned by Marogna and said she used the money to buy luxury goods and fund vacations.

Becciu said he thought the money was going to pay a British security firm to negotiate the release of Gloria Narvaez, a Colombian nun taken hostage by Islamic militants in Mali in 2017.

He said Francis authorized up to 1 million euros to liberate the nun, an astonishing claim that the Vatican was willing to make ransom payment to al-Qaida-linked militants.

(AP) 

Cardinal Angelo Becciu

Corruption is Everywhere > Mining Crypto in Russian Metro; Buying ICU Beds in Free Hospital in Lima; Presidential Coup; Vatican Cardinal $412 Million

..

Two engineers for Russian Metro system under investigation after

covertly stealing electricity to mine cryptocurrency at work

22 Jul, 2021 15:34

© Global Look Press / Michael Gruber

The chief engineer of a Russian Metro system has handed in his resignation after being caught using the subway’s electricity grid substation to mine for bitcoin, consuming thousands of dollars of energy at the company’s expense.

That’s according to MUP Metroelectrotrans, the company that powers the Kazan Metro. Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan, a city around 800km (500 miles) east of Moscow.

The resignation comes after a report on Thursday from the Tatarstan Investigative Committee, which revealed that it had opened a criminal case against two employees of the Metro for abuse of official powers. They are suspected of unauthorized installation of cryptocurrency mining equipment at a power substation, consuming electricity worth 352,000 rubles ($4,700).

They have both admitted to the crime, it was reported.

Cryptocurrency mining uses electricity and high-powered computers to solve computational math problems. The solutions are so complex that they are impossible to be solved by hand and would even be difficult for regular computers to successfully complete.

Once a problem is solved, the computer owner is rewarded with a cryptocurrency coin, such as bitcoin. The two Kazan Metro employees were found to be stealing electricity for their high-powered devices, and they, therefore, could have potentially made a lot of money.

While bitcoin is not legal tender in Russia, a bill signed by President Vladimir Putin last summer allowed for cryptocurrency assets to be counted on a par with physical assets, enabling Russian citizens to legally own virtual money from the start of 2021. Before then, currencies such as bitcoin were in a legal ‘grey zone,’ having been neither legalized nor prohibited.

$21,000 per bed: State hospital workers arrested in Peru

for charging desperate Covid patients to access ICU

22 Jul, 2021 10:55

© REUTERS/Sebastian Castaneda

Nine people have been arrested in Lima for having allegedly illegally profited from patients suffering from the deadly coronavirus. The state hospital workers are suspected of selling access to intensive care unit (ICU) beds.

Arrests have been made following a raid on Guillermo Almenara Irigoyen public hospital, in the Peruvian capital, on Wednesday, local police said. According to a prosecutor, administrators of the hospital that provides free care are among the alleged criminal network that illegally charged their seriously ill patients, local media reports.

There are 80 beds in the hospital’s ICU, and many patients have had to be added to the unit’s long waiting list due to a lack of capacity. However, in a suspected scam scheme, the family of people severely ill with Covid have allegedly been asked to pay as much as 82,000 soles (around $20,800) to gain access to an ICU bed. A patient’s relative tipped off the police after making the payment to skip the line for a family member in need of urgent care. The patient, who had been the 20th on the waiting list, had not been transferred to the ICU even after his relative paid the money, and subsequently died.

Speaking to the press following the arrests, Peruvian Health Minister Oscar Ugarte called the case “totally reprehensible” and said no one would get away with it.

The Latin American nation has registered the world’s highest fatality rate among Covid-19 patients per capita. More than 195,000 people have died, and more than two million Covid cases have been recorded among the nation’s 32.5 million-strong population. During pandemic peaks, when there has been a shortage of beds in state-run hospitals, many have paid large sums to access Covid treatment at private clinics.

While the virus has been raging worldwide, various corruption scandals have emerged. A similar scam involving hospital beds was recently uncovered in India. An official in Bengaluru claimed beds had been allocated to Covid patients in exchange for bribes, after an “artificial shortage” had been created, local media reported in May. According to the official, hospital care had been provided to asymptomatic patients, while those who were severely ill and needed urgent treatment had been denied it. Those asking for payment had since been arrested, he claimed. Meanwhile in Uganda, a different Covid-related scam has been uncovered, with hundreds having been injected with “more water than anything else,” instead of real vaccines.

Tunisian president accused of launching 'coup' after sacking PM,

freezing parliament

Kais Saied's moves come as Tunisia grapples with an economic, COVID-19 crisis

Thomson Reuters · 

Posted: Jul 25, 2021 4:52 PM ET

Tunisian President Kais Saied is seen on TV announcing the dissolution of parliament and Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi's dismissal on Sunday. (Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images)

Tunisia's president dismissed the government and froze parliament on Sunday in a dramatic escalation of a political crisis. Huge crowds filled the capital in his support, but his opponents labelled the moves a coup.

President Kais Saied said he would assume executive authority with the assistance of a new prime minister, in the biggest challenge yet to a 2014 democratic constitution that split powers between president, prime minister and parliament.

Crowds of people quickly flooded the capital's streets, cheering and honking car horns in scenes that recalled the 2011 revolution that brought democracy and triggered the Arab Spring protests that convulsed the Middle East.

However, the extent of support for Saied's moves against a fragile government and divided parliament was not clear and he warned against any violent response.

"I warn any who think of resorting to weapons... and whoever shoots a bullet, the armed forces will respond with bullets," he said in a statement carried on television.

People celebrate in Tunis following Saied's announcement on Sunday. (Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images)

Years of paralysis, corruption, declining state services and growing unemployment had already soured many Tunisians on their political system before the global pandemic hammered the economy last year and COVID-19 infection rates shot up this summer.

Protests, called by social media activists but not backed by any of the big political parties, took place on Sunday with much of the anger focused on the moderate Islamist Ennahda party, the biggest in parliament.

'A new page in history is turning': Polls suggest political outsider Kais Saied winner in Tunisia election

"We have been relieved of them," said Lamia Meftahi, a woman celebrating in central Tunis, speaking of the parliament and government.

"This is the happiest moment since the revolution," she added.

Ennahda, banned before the revolution, has been the most consistently successful party since 2011 and a member of successive coalition governments.

Parliament Speaker Rached Ghannouchi, head of the moderate Islamist Ennahda party, speaks to supporters during a rally in opposition to Saied in Tunis on Feb. 27. (Zoubeir Souissi/Reuters)

Its leader Rached Ghannouchi, who is also parliament speaker, immediately labelled Saied's decision "a coup against the revolution and constitution" in a phone call to Reuters.

"We consider the institutions still standing, and the supporters of the Ennahda and the Tunisian people will defend the revolution," he added, raising the prospect of confrontations between supporters of Ennahda and Saied.

Disputes over constitution, economic reforms

Saied said in his statement that his actions were in line with Article 80 of the constitution, and also cited the article to suspend the immunity of members of parliament.

"Many people were deceived by hypocrisy, treachery and robbery of the rights of the people," he said.

The president and the parliament were both elected in separate popular votes in 2019, while Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi took office last summer, replacing another short-lived government.

Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi is seen in Tunis in September 2020. (Riadh Dridi/The Associated Press)

Saied, an independent without a party behind him, swore to overhaul a complex political system plagued by corruption. Meanwhile, the parliamentary election delivered a fragmented chamber in which no party held more than a quarter of seats.

Disputes over Tunisia's constitution were intended to be settled by a constitutional court. However, seven years after the constitution was approved, the court has yet to be installed after disputes over the appointment of judges.

The president has been enmeshed in political disputes with Mechichi for over a year, as the country grapples with an economic crisis, a looming fiscal crunch and a flailing response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Violent demonstrations broke out on Sunday in several Tunisian cities as protesters expressed anger at the deterioration of the North African country's health, economic and social situation. (Zoubeir Souissi/Reuters)

Under the constitution, the president has direct responsibility only for foreign affairs and the military, but after a government debacle with walk-in vaccination centres last week, he told the army to take charge of the pandemic response.

Tunisia's soaring infection and death rates have added to public anger at the government as the country's political parties bickered.

Meanwhile, Mechichi was attempting to negotiate a new loan with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that was seen as crucial to averting a looming fiscal crisis as Tunisia struggles to finance its budget deficit and coming debt repayments.

Disputes over the economic reforms seen as needed to secure the loan, but which could hurt ordinary Tunisians by ending subsidies or cutting public sector jobs, had already brought the government close to collapse.

Senior cardinal of Roman Catholic Church and former close ally

of Pope Francis goes on trial in $412mn fraud case

27 Jul, 2021 12:40

FILE PHOTO. Vatican. © AFP / Andreas SOLARO; (inset) Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu.

© AFP / ANDREAS SOLARO

The trial of 73-year-old former Cardinal Angelo Becciu over allegations he fraudulently spent $412 million of church money began in a special Vatican courtroom on Tuesday, months after he was removed from his post by Pope Francis.

The court case marks the culmination of a two-year investigation that discovered the cardinal had been involved in spending €350 million ($412 million) to purchase a property on Sloane Avenue in the posh London neighborhood of Chelsea that went awry.

Prior to his dismissal in September, Becciu was in charge of donations at the Vatican office that handles Church funds. He had been a close ally of Pope Francis and is the most senior Vatican official to stand trial for financial misconduct. The crimes he is accused of include funneling donations to businesses run by his brothers on the Italian island of Sardinia. Becciu has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Alongside the cardinal, nine other defendants, who all deny wrongdoing, are on trial for extortion, embezzlement, money laundering and abuse of office. The case is being heard in a special courtroom set up in the Vatican Museums that has the space required to conduct the trial in a Covid-safe setting.

Two hearings will be held this week before the trial is expected to be adjourned until October. The case is set to last for several months before a judgment will be rendered. It comes after Pope Francis announced in April that he will allow lay judges to oversee cases involving cardinals and bishops, rather than it being handled by cardinals, as had been tradition. 

“I think this trial marks a turning point that can bring about greater credibility of the Holy See in financial areas,” Father Juan Antonio Guerrero, the Vatican’s newly appointed finance chief said. He pledged to make the Church’s financial matters more transparent.

If you are shocked by this revelation, you need to read David Yallop's In God's Name.

Corruption is Everywhere > Even in the Vatican; Zuma Resists Prison; Avenatti to Prison; Giuliani's Law License; Scientific Research Corruption

..

This stunning event is, unfortunately, about 40 years overdue. David Yallop documented these kinds of corruption in his amazing book "In God's Name" in 1984. 

Italian cardinal among 10 people charged by Vatican in landmark case

involving embezzlement, money laundering & extortion

3 Jul, 2021 12:52

FILE PHOTO: St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. ©  AFP / Andreas Solaro

The Vatican will prosecute 10 individuals, including Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, in a case involving embezzlement and extortion. The indictments are seen as a historic crackdown by Pope Francis on Church-linked crime.

The Holy See announced on Saturday that Becciu and nine others have been ordered to stand trial for alleged crimes stemming from the Vatican's purchase of a luxury property in London, as well as speculative investments that resulted in serious financial losses for the Church.

The cardinal was charged with embezzlement, abuse of office, and subordination. An Italian woman who worked for the senior Church official was also charged with embezzlement. 

Among their co-defendants are the former heads of the Vatican's financial intelligence unit, as well as two Italian brokers involved in the shady deal. Charges include extortion, fraud, and money laundering. 

Charges were also brought against four companies associated with individual defendants. Two of the firms are located in Switzerland, one in the United States, and one in Slovenia. 

The trial will begin on July 27, according to a Vatican press release. 

Becciu has now become the highest-ranking Vatican-based Church official to be accused of financial crimes. According to Christopher Lamb, Rome correspondent for the Catholic journal The Tablet, the cardinal’s indictment is without precedent. 

“This is the first time a cardinal has been prosecuted in this way, and the decision to charge marks a new, and potentially decisive, step in Pope Francis’ reforms of Vatican finances,” he wrote. 

Unless, of course, he ends up like John Paul 1.

As per Church law, the pontiff had to personally approve the decision to indict Becciu. The Italian cardinal has always maintained his innocence during the investigation into the affair, which began in 2019. However, he left a top post in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State last September after allegations of embezzlement surfaced. 

The move comes less than a month after the Council of Europe’s top financial watchdog called on the Vatican to ensure transparency in procedures to prosecute senior officials accused of money laundering and other crimes. The Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism noted that the procedure for obtaining papal consent in order to bring legal action against senior clerics is “not fully transparent.”

In April, Pope Francis issued a decree allowing bishops and cardinals working in the Vatican to be judged by a lay tribunal. Before this reform, senior clerics were answerable only to a body of high-ranking Church officials, known as the Court of Cassation.

Former South African President Jacob Zuma resists prison sentence

By Clyde Hughes

Zuma, South Africa's president between 2009 and 2018, says the court's sentence is essentially a death sentence

because of his age, 79, and the coronavirus danger in South Africa.  File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI

July 6 (UPI) -- Former South African President Jacob Zuma found himself in a legal standoff with the country's Constitutional Court Tuesday after he refused to turn himself over to authorities for failing to appear at a previous corruption hearing.

The court sentenced Zuma to prison (4th story on link) last month when he declined to participate in an inquiry focused on his time in power from 2009 to 2018. He was given 15 months in prison on contempt charges for failing to appear at a required hearing.

Zuma said the court's decision was essentially "sentencing [him] to death" because of his age, 79, and the coronavirus danger in South Africa, according to CNBC.

He filed court challenges to the sentence with the Constitutional Court itself and the Pietermaritzburg High Court.

The high court case will be heard on July 12, but the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture said that court does not have jurisdiction to hear it.

"A high court in this country has inherent jurisdiction and national jurisdiction to enforce court orders, even of other courts, of other provinces, even of other tribunals, such as arbitration and even something that is to be done in a foreign jurisdiction," Zuma's attorney Dali Mpofu told The South African, arguing for the high court's intervention.

The Constitutional Court has ordered the minister of police and justice minister to take "legal steps" to arrest Zuma if he does not turn himself in.

UPDATE: 8 July 2021

South Africa's former president Jacob Zuma, who has been in police detention since Wednesday night as he starts a 15-month prison sentence for contempt, will be eligible for parole after around four months, the justice minister said.

Zuma turned himself in to police to begin his jail term for defying a court order to attend an inquiry into corruption while he was in power from 2009 to 2018.

‘Drunk on the power of his platform’: Former CNN regular

Michael Avenatti sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for extortion

8 Jul, 2021 21:35

Michael Avenatti following his sentencing for an extortion scheme against Nike at the United States Courthouse

in New York City ©  REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Michael Avenatti, a lawyer best known for representing Stormy Daniels and appearing frequently on CNN, has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison after being found guilty of trying to extort Nike.

Avenatti was convicted last year of trying to extort more than $20 million from the sportswear company, but his new sentence presents only the beginning of his legal troubles. Avenatti is also facing a trial in Los Angeles later this year on charges of fraud – and he’s been charged in New York City with cheating his once-star client, Daniels, out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

At his sentencing on Thursday, Avenatti reportedly wept and said, “I and I alone have destroyed my career, my relationships, my life, and there is no doubt that I deserve to pay, have paid, and will pay a further price for what I have done.” 

His misfortune represents quite a fall from grace, as the celebrity lawyer was once a regular on left-leaning networks including CNN in 2018 and 2019, where he would often talk about Daniels’ suit against Trump – she claimed the ex-president once paid her hush money to cover up an affair, which he denies. Hosts would at times talk up the amateur pundit’s potential chances in 2020 running against Trump for Democrats. He appeared on CNN and MSNBC no less than 229 times across a two-year period, according to a Media Research Center analysis. 

CNN’s Brian Stelter even called him a “serious” contender against Trump in 2020, long before the lawyer faced his current legal troubles. 

Critics were all too happy to celebrate Avenatti’s downfall, and many used the news of his sentencing as an excuse to remind the world just how glowing and fawning Avenatti’s media appearances really were at the height of his anti-Trump fame. 

One mashup clip of Avenatti media appearances especially made the rounds following his sentencing. Among the bits in the footage, former ‘The View’ co-star and liberal activist Ava Navarro compares Avenatti to “the Holy Spirit.”

“It was around this time 3 years ago there were serious think-pieces arguing that Avenatti should run for president, on top of the glowing profiles and glossy magazine spreads,” Business Insider’s Grace Panetta tweeted. 

Though he reportedly acknowledged through tears that he would never practice law again, Avenatti did leave his future fairly open.

“I still feel positive. I know I can do better. I can be the person I dreamed of being,” he said. 

Avenatti was originally charged last year for the attempted Nike extortion. He was retained by a youth basketball league organizer who claimed the company was corruptly paying players. Avenatti took his client’s complaints and accusations and tried threatening Nike with bad publicity in exchange for a massive payout. 

US District Judge Paul G. Gardephe called Avenatti’s behavior “outrageous” at the Thursday sentencing, telling Avenatti he had become “drunk on the power of his own platform.”

Rudy Giuliani's DC law license suspended pending outcome

of New York case over his election-fraud claims

8 Jul, 2021 01:44

©  Reuters / Jonathan Ernst

Fresh from his New York law license being suspended for allegedly false election-fraud claims in support of former President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani has also lost his rights, at least temporarily, to practice in Washington.

A District of Columbia court on Wednesday suspended Giuliani's law license in the nation's capital, pending the outcome of disciplinary proceedings against him in New York. Such suspensions are required in DC when a lawyer faces disciplinary sanctions by another jurisdiction. 

A New York court last month suspended the former mayor's license there on accusations that he made “demonstrably false and misleading” claims to “courts, lawmakers and the public at large” while he helped Trump challenge Joe Biden's victory in last November's presidential election.

Giuliani was among the lead lawyers who represented Trump in trying to prove that Biden won the election through massive fraud. The legal challenges were thrown out in federal and state courts, in many cases based on technicalities.

Democrat politicians, such as US Representative Ted Lieu (D-California), were among the lawyers who lobbied for Giuliani to be disbarred and celebrated his New York suspension. The court rebuked him for allegedly inflaming “tensions that bubbled over into the events of January 6, 2021, in this nation's Capitol.”

Giuliani reportedly wasn't permitted to present a case in his defense in the New York proceedings, but he may appeal the ruling. He has said that there was no reason for disciplinary action because the election battle has ended and “he has and will continue to exercise personal discipline to forbear from discussing these matters in public anymore.” 

Giuliani also faces defamation lawsuits by voting-system firms Smartmatic and Dominion, which claimed they were damaged by his false claims.

More than half of scientists admit to research misconduct,

landmark survey with 6,800+ participants reveals

8 Jul, 2021 11:11

FILE PHOTO: © Pixabay

A major survey conducted across academia in the Netherlands has found that more than a half of scientists admitted to engaging in some type of questionable research practice in their work. 

The landmark study was conducted through the Dutch National Survey on Research Integrity, funded by the Dutch government.

The scientists sent out anonymized questionnaires to nearly 63,780 academics working in 22 universities and research centers across the Netherlands. The survey asked about various questionable research practices, ranging from insufficient attention to equipment and the use of unsuitable measurement instruments to improper citations and unfair reviews of manuscripts. 

A total of 6,813 respondents fully completed the survey, the results of which were published as a preprint on MetaArXiv this week. The study, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, has found that 51.3% of participants admitted to having often engaged in at least one questionable research practice.

“We find that, across disciplinary fields, one in two researchers engaged frequently in at least one [questionable research practice] over the last three years,” the authors wrote. They added that one in 12 had reported having falsified or fabricated their research at least once during that time.

“Being a PhD candidate or junior researcher increases the odds of any frequent [questionable research practice], as does identifying as male and doing empirical research,” the authors wrote.

Gowri Gopalakrishna, the survey’s leader and an epidemiologist at the Amsterdam University Medical Center, told Science magazine that the guarantee of anonymity to respondents had helped to receive more truthful data.

“That method increases the honesty of the answers,” she said. “So, we have good reason to believe that our outcome is closer to reality than that of previous studies.”

It is, unfortunately, only about 11% of the total number of scientists queried. We can speculate as to the reasons why the remaining 89% did not. 

The question I would really like to see answered is whether or not a scientist had the luxury of finding a result that was not in keeping with those who funded the research.