Tuesday, Feb 19th
Last update05:20:13 AM GMT
International Glance
Around 80 graves have been desecrated at a Jewish cemetery in eastern France. It comes before planned demonstrations in Paris against the rising number of attacks on France's Jewish community.
President Emmanuel Macron has condemned anti-Semitic abuse after a prominent intellectual was targeted over the weekend.
Vincent Doyle, a psychotherapist in Ireland, was 28 when he learned from his mother that the Roman Catholic priest he had always known as his godfather was in truth his biological father.
The discovery led him to create a global support group to help other children of priests, like him, suffering from the internalized shame that comes with being born from church scandal. When he pressed bishops to acknowledge these children, some church leaders told him that he was the product of the rarest of transgressions.
Former Vice President Joe Biden isn't in the 2020 presidential race yet, but he made it clear at an international gathering that he thinks President Donald Trump has undermined America's ability to claim moral leadership.
The former vice president said the U.S. doesn't want to turn its back on its closest allies and cherishes democracy, the rule of law and a free press. Biden spoke after current Vice President Mike Pence, who used his speech to tout the Trump administration's accomplishments.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reportedly nominated President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize on the request of the U.S. government.
Reuters, citing a report from the Japanese newspaper Asahi, noted that the U.S. government reached out to Abe months after the president's summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore.
An unidentified Japanese government official told the newspaper about the request, according to Reuters.
U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to release 800 ISIS fighters captured in Syria unless European allies agree to accept them and put them on trial.
"The United States is asking Britain, France, Germany and other European allies to take back over 800 ISIS fighters that we captured in Syria and put them on trial," Trump wrote.
"The alternative is not a good one in that we will be forced to release them."
Trump’s threat, characteristically in a tweet, drew confusion and some outrage from European officials and security experts gathered Sunday at the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany.
Former U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been defrocked by Pope Francis after Vatican officials found him guilty of sexual crimes against minors and adults, the Vatican said Saturday.
McCarrick was a powerful fundraiser in the church. He is the highest-ranking clergy to be laicized by the clerical state. The action strips McCarrick, 88, of priestly connections and bars him from celebrating Mass.
Hundreds of priests have been defrocked for sexual abuse, but laicizing someone of McCarrick's rank is an “almost revolutionary,” move for the church, Kurt Martens, a Catholic University of America canon law professor, told The New York Times.
The Saudi regime “seriously curtailed and undermined” the Turkish investigation into the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, according to a UN human rights expert looking into the case.
Agnes Callamard, a UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, said the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist was the victim of a “brutal, premeditated killing planned and perpetrated by officials of the state of Saudi Arabia”.
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