Vatican gives UN new
stats on sex abuse: 848 priests defrocked, 2,572 disciplined since 2004
GENEVA — The Vatican revealed Tuesday that over the past decade, it has defrocked 848 priests who raped or molested children and sanctioned another 2,572 with lesser penalties, providing the first ever breakdown of how it handled the more than 3,400 cases of abuse reported to the Holy See since 2004.
The Vatican’s U.N. ambassador in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, released the figures during a second day of grilling by a U.N. committee monitoring implementation of the U.N. treaty against torture.
Tomasi insisted that the Holy See was only obliged to abide by the torture treaty inside the tiny Vatican City State, which has a population of only a few hundred people.
But significantly, he didn’t dispute the committee’s contention that sexual violence against children can be considered torture. Legal experts have said that classifying sexual abuse as torture could expose the Catholic Church to a new wave of lawsuits since torture cases in much of the world don’t carry statutes of limitations.
Tomasi also provided statistics about how the Holy See has adjudicated sex abuse cases for the past decade. The Vatican in 2001 required bishops and religious superiors to forward all credible cases of abuse to Rome for review after determining that they were shuffling pedophile priests from diocese to diocese rather than subjecting them to church trials. Only in 2010 did the Vatican explicitly tell bishops and superiors to also report credible cases to police where local reporting laws require them to.
Alibaba Group seeks
$1 billion in long-awaited
IPO that will also yield windfall for Yahoo
SAN FRANCISCO — China’s Alibaba Group is aiming to raise $1 billion in a long-awaited IPO likely to have ripple effects across the Internet.
Tuesday’s filing sets the stage for the technology industry’s biggest initial public offering since short messaging service Twitter and its early investors collected $1.8 billion in its stock market debut last fall. Alibaba could still try to raise more money and even surpass the $16 billion that Facebook did two years ago, depending on investor demand for its stock.
For now, Alibaba isn’t specifying how much stock will be sold in the IPO or setting a price range. Those details will emerge as the IPO progresses, a process is likely to take three to four months to complete before Alibaba’s shares begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Although it’s not nearly as well-known as Facebook, Alibaba has emerged as an e-commerce powerhouse that has been making more money than Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. combined. What’s more, the company is still growing at a rapid clip as its network of online services, including Taobao, Tmall and Alipay, mine a Chinese Internet market that already has twice as many Web surfers as the U.S.
The IPO is expected to provide Alibaba with the financial firepower to expand into other markets, including the U.S. Signaling its intent to extend its reach, Alibaba recently bought digital mapping service AutoNavi Holdings Ltd. for $1.5 billion and acquired a 16.5 percent stake in video website Youku Tudou in a $1.2 billion deal. Alibaba also just invested $215 million in Silicon Valley startup Tango to gain a toehold in the mobile messaging market.
Ukraine tightens cordon around eastern city:
30 pro-Russia insurgents,
4 troops killed
DONETSK, Ukraine — A pro-Russia militia holding an eastern Ukrainian city came under further pressure Tuesday from advancing government troops, but militants acted with impunity elsewhere in the turbulent region.
The foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia met Tuesday, but their open disagreements did nothing to suggest a diplomatic solution was near.
Diplomacy was to be taken up again on Wednesday during a meeting in Moscow between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Swiss President Didier Burkhalter, whose country currently chairs the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Russia and the West have expressed a desire for the OSCE to play a greater role in defusing the tensions in Ukraine.
Ukrainian military operations that began Monday to expunge pro-Russia forces from the city of Slovyansk were the interim government’s most ambitious effort so far to quell weeks of unrest in Ukraine’s mainly Russian-speaking east.
Four government troops and 30 militants were killed in the gunbattles, Ukraine’s interior minister said Tuesday. The pro-Russia militia said 10 people were killed, including civilians. There was no immediate way to reconcile the figures.
By wire sources
