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Disturbing Report: 330,000 Children Victims of Church Sex Abuse

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An estimated 330,000 children were victims of sex abuse within France’s Catholic Church over the past 70 years, according to a report released Tuesday that represents the country’s first major accounting of the worldwide phenomenon.

The figure includes abuses committed by some 3,000 priests and other people involved in the church — wrongdoing that Catholic authorities covered up over decades in a “systemic manner,” according to the president of the commission that issued the report, Jean-Marc Sauvé.

The head of the French bishops’ conference asked for forgiveness from the victims, about 80% of whom were boys, according to the report. The bishops are meeting Tuesday to discuss next steps.

The independent commission urged the church to take strong action, denouncing “faults” and “silence.” It also called on the Catholic Church to help compensate the victims, notably in cases that are too old to prosecute via the courts.

“The consequences are very serious,” Sauvé said. “About 60% of men and women who were sexually abused encounter major problems in their emotional or sexual life.” (Read more from “Disturbing Report: 330,000 Children Victims of Church Sex Abuse” HERE)

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WATCH: Joe Biden Enjoys a Bike Ride by the Beach While Southern Border Disintegrates

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President Joe Biden biked near a Delaware beach Sunday amid the ongoing migrant surge at the U.S.-Mexico border and a recent diplomatic crisis.

France recalled its ambassadors to the U.S. and Australia due to the two countries’ joint agreement with the U.K. to give nuclear submarines to the Australian government, which violated a previous agreement to send French submarines down under, Fox News reported. The president did not answer any reporters’ questions on the issue and continued on his bike ride to Gordon’s Pond Trail in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, with First Lady Jill Biden.

Meanwhile, the migrant crisis has continued to surge at the southern border, with a recent influx of over 15,000 Haitian migrants entering Del Rio, Texas, with migrants camping under the international bridge in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. The administration deployed 400 federal agents to the bridge and ramped up deportation flights. . .

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) revealed Wednesday that border agents encountered 208,887 migrants in August, slightly decreasing from the 212,000 in July after a steady increase of encountered migrants throughout the year, the outlet reported. The number of migrants increased by 317% in comparison to Aug. 2020 and 233% at the same time in 2019. (Read more from “Joe Biden Enjoys a Bike Ride by the Beach While Southern Border Disintegrates” HERE)

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WH Scrubs French President Lecturing Biden From Call Record

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French President Emmanuel Macron lectured President Joe Biden on the “moral responsibility” their two nations owed to Afghanistan during a call with the president on Thursday.

A readout of the call released by the French included a pointed note of Macron’s message to Biden.

“The head of state emphasized our collective moral responsibility toward the Afghan men and women who need our protection and who share our values,” it read. “We cannot abandon them.”

The United States readout of the call did not include similar rhetoric, noting that both leaders “underscored the importance of continued close coordination among allies and democratic partners on Afghanistan,” and the importance of “humanitarian assistance and support for refugees.”

Typically, call readouts between foreign leaders err on the side of diplomacy, so for Macron to include the pointed message to Biden demonstrates an intentional effort to separate himself from the American narrative on Afghanistan. (Read more from “WH Scrubs French President Lecturing Biden From Call Record” HERE)

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Man Who Tossed An Elderly Jewish Woman Off A Balcony While Yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’ Avoids Trial Because He Smoked Weed

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France’s top court ruled on Wednesday that the killer of an elderly Jewish woman will not go on trial, France24 reported.

Kobili Traoré admitted to murdering his neighbor, Sarah Halimi, in 2017. He shouted “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is great” in Arabic, and “I killed the devil,” shortly before throwing her off the balcony of her third-floor Paris apartment, The New York Times said.

On Wednesday, the Court of Cassation – France’s final court of appeal – affirmed two prior judgments that ruled that Traoré could not be held criminally responsible for his actions because he was in a state of drug-induced psychosis.

Traoré, a drug dealer, smoked pot every day for 13 years and had up to 15 joints a day, Israel Hayom reported. Toxicological analysis revealed the presence of cannabis in his blood on the day he was arrested, the French newspaper Libération said.

The court noted that “a person is not criminally responsible if suffering, at the time of the event, from psychic or neuropsychic disturbance that has eliminated all discernment or control,” The Times said. (Read more from “Man Who Tossed An Elderly Jewish Woman Off A Balcony While Yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’ Avoids Trial Because He Smoked Weed” HERE)

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Protests Erupt Across France After Announcement of Surveillance Bill (VIDEO)

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Protests turned destructive across France after President Emmanuel Macron’s administration announced a bill that would expand the use of surveillance tools while restricting the ability of citizens to share images of police officers in the media.

Thousands of French citizens poured into the city streets of Paris, Marseille, and Lille with signs that read “France, land of police rights” and “Withdrawal of the security law” after the government issued a ban on the sharing of images online “with the manifest aim to harm.”

The bill came after the beating of French music producer Michel Zecler by Parisian police officers in late November caused outrage across the country. Images of the incident from closed-circuit television and cellphones were distributed online. (Read more from “Protests Erupt Across France After Announcement of Surveillance Bill (VIDEO)” HERE)

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Hospital Stops Hydroxychloroquine Treatment Over Major Cardiac Risk; NIH Begins Trial to Test Hydroxychloroquine for Treating COVID-19

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By Newsweek. A hospital in France has had to stop an experimental treatment using hydroxychloroquine on at least one coronavirus patient after it became a “major risk” to their cardiac health.

The University Hospital Center of Nice (CHU de Nice) is one of many hospitals trialing hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 patients. It announced it had been selected for the trial on March 22. A statement from the hospital said it was testing four experimental treatments, one of which included hydroxychloroquine. It hoped to establish its effectiveness and side effects of this and the other treatments being tested.

In an interview with the French daily newspaper Nice-Matin, Professor Émile Ferrari, the head of the cardiology department at the Pasteur hospital in Nice, said the side effects had already been identified, with some patients having to stop treatment because of the risk posed.

He said electrocardiogram recordings of patients involved with the trial were being constantly monitored. An ECG measures electrical activity in the heart, and represents this on a graph as a QT interval. Ferrari said these recordings are interpreted and, if anomalies are reported, treatment is stopped. (Read more from “Hospital Stops Hydroxychloroquine Treatment Over Major Cardiac Risk” HERE)

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NIH Begins Trial to Test Hydroxychloroquine for Treating COVID-19

By Reuters. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said on Thursday it was testing anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19, days after several U.S. doctors said they were using the drug on infected patients without evidence that it worked.

The use of the decades-old drug, which has been touted by President Donald Trump as a potential weapon against COVID-19, has soared as the United States has quickly become the epicenter of the pandemic.

The study will evaluate the safety and the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and be conducted by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH. (Read more from “NIH Begins Trial to Test Hydroxychloroquine for Treating COVID-19” HERE)

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Disabled Man Dies After 9 Days of Court-Ordered Forced Starvation

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Following nine days of starvation, after French courts gave the green light to his slow, torturous means of death at the hands of French doctors, 42-year-old Vincent Lambert passed away Thursday.

The Catholic Herald reported that Lambert, a disabled French man and former nurse, died in Reims, France, after a years-long legal battle between his wife and his parents.

The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life tweeted that Lambert’s death was a “defeat for our humanity.” In a separate statement, Pope Francis urged: “Let us not build a civilization that discards persons those whose lives we no longer consider to be worthy of living: every life is valuable, always.”

Lambert was left a quadriplegic after sustaining massive head injuries during a 2008 traffic accident. His wife wanted to take him off life support years ago; his parents didn’t. After years of legal battles that went all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Cassation in June overruled an order to maintain Lambert’s feeding and hydration support, a story at Aleteia explained.

On July 2, doctors informed the family that Lambert’s tube would be removed, effectively condemning the man to a slow death by starvation and dehydration.

Following the July decision, Lambert’s mother, Viviane, issued a final, desperate plea to save her son.

“I am launching a call for help today. Without your intervention, my son will be euthanized due to his brain handicap,” Viviane told a U.N. panel in Geneva, explaining that her son was “in a state of minimal [consciousness] but he is not a vegetable.”

“In May, when learning about his planned death, [Vincent] cried,” Viviane continued. “We are deeply upset this is why we have turned to the U.N. Committee of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities because the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities prohibits depriving a person of food and drink.”

“He sleeps at night, wakes up during the day, and looks at me when I talk,” Viviane said. “He only needs to be fed through a special device and his doctor wants to deprive him of this so that he can die, while legal experts have have shown that this is not necessary.”

“It’s murder in disguise,” Vincent’s 90-year-old father, Pierre Lambert, told reporters at the hospital earlier this week. “It’s euthanasia.” (For more from the author of “Disabled Man Dies After 9 Days of Court-Ordered Forced Starvation” please click HERE)

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France Terror Suspect Shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ Before Attacking Christmas Market

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Before he opened fire on a crowded Christmas market in Strasbourg, France on Tuesday, 29-year-old Cherif Chekatt yelled “Allahu Akbar,” Paris’ public prosecutor said Wednesday — the first official statement pegging the deadly shooting as an Islamic terror attack.

Though no groups have claimed responsibility for the attack, Islamic terrorists have a history of plotting assaults at Christmas markets — including one disrupted plot in which nearly a dozen militants sought to bomb the Strasbourg market around the millennium.

Chekatt escaped from the scene in a taxi, bizarrely bragging to the driver about being injured in a firefight with soldiers after killing 10 people, officials said. Police said three people were killed in the attack.

A wide-scale manhunt was underway near Strasbourg as the French government raised the security level and sent police reinforcements to the city, located about 305 miles east of Paris. But a top French official admitted Chekatt may no longer be in the city and could have slipped through the police dragnet into neighboring Germany, where he’d spent time in prison. . .

[Senior Interior Ministry official Laurent] Nunez said Chekatt had been radicalized in prison and was being monitored by French intelligence services since at least 2015 due to his suspected religious extremism. Authorities did not say which religion; however, supporters of the Islamic State terror group were celebrating the shooting online, according to the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence group, which monitors jihadi communications worldwide. (Read more from “France Terror Suspect Shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ Before Attacking Christmas Market” HERE)

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Terrorist Attack: Gunman Opens Fire at Christmas Market, Kills 3

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By The Guardian. France has upgraded its security threat level as police hunted a gunman who shot three people dead and injured 12 others in a terror attack on Strasbourg’s celebrated Christmas market on Tuesday evening.

Six hours after the gunman disappeared after firing at passers-by in the busy city centre, interior minister Christophe Castaner said the government had raised the risk level to the highest category. . .

French media reported that gendarmes had attempted to arrest the man for a separate crime at his home in the Neudorf district of southeast Strasbourg earlier on Tuesday. The suspect was not home, but officers reportedly found “grenades” in his apartment.

Shortly before 8pm local time, the man, armed with an automatic rifle, walked over one of Strasbourg’s many bridges around the Grand Île toward the Christmas market, which attracts millions of visitors every year. Witnesses said the man fired a first volley of rounds and then walked down the street before opening fire again. . .

Strasbourg’s Christmas Market, which started in 1570, is one of France’s most popular seasonal events. The “Grande Ile” where the market is held is surrounded by water, on one side the main channel of the River Ill and the other by the Canal du Faux-Rempart, is only accessible by bridges. (Read more from “Terrorist Attack: Gunman Opens Fire at Christmas Market” HERE)

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Strasbourg Shooting: Gunman at Large After Three Killed and 12 Injured Near French Christmas Market

By The Independent. Three people have been killed and 12 others injured after a gunman opened fire near a Christmas market in the French city of Strasbourg on Tuesday evening. . .

Thousands of people were confined to buildings as police searched for the gunman. Many have since been released.

Members of the European Parliament, which is based in the city, were sent a message warning of what “seems to be several gun attacks”. They were told to stay in buildings if they were in the city centre. . .

The attack came despite tight security, with unauthorised vehicles banned from streets surrounding the market during opening hours and access points to search pedestrians’ bags. (Read more from “Strasbourg Shooting: Gunman at Large After Three Killed and 12 Injured Near French Christmas Market” HERE)

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Watch: Shocking Video Shows ‘Yellow Vest’ Riots Exploding Across Central Paris

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French authorities detained hundreds Saturday as the “yellow vest” protests, aimed at French President Emmanuel Macron’s economic and climate change policies, entered their fourth weekend.

The BBC reports that at least 1,000 people have been taken into custody across France. Dozens were injured — including a handful of police officers — in demonstrations that drew more than 10,000 people to Paris’ city center, and more than 100,000 to the streets across France, including in “Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille and Grenoble.” . . .

The French government reportedly dispatched more than 90,000 law enforcement officers nationwide, with 8,000 dispatched in Paris alone. Police used heavy armored vehicles to control the crowd which stayed contained, again, primarily to the Champs-Elysées, Paris’ primary thoroughfare.

Freelance reporter Clement Lanot captured footage of small tanks deployed to protect major tourist attractions like the Arc de Triomphe, the massive Louvre museum, and the Musee D’Orsay, which hosts some of the world’s more precious Impressionist works.

French authorities said Saturday that they felt confident the protests were contained and, indeed, the protests in Paris were smaller than they have been in previous weeks — thanks, likely, to concessions made on the part of Macron’s government to scale back and indefinitely delay gasoline taxes designed to curb French reliance on fossil fuels by pricing domestic fuel users out of the market. (Read more from “Watch: Shocking Video Shows ‘Yellow Vest’ Riots Exploding Across Central Paris” HERE)

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