VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis took the unusual decision Wednesday to expel 10 people — a bishop, priests and laypeople — from a troubled Catholic movement in Peru after a Vatican investigation uncovered “sadistic” abuses of power, authority and spirituality.

The move against the leadership of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, or Sodalitium of Christian Life, followed Francis’ decision last month to expel the group’s founder, Luis Figari, after he was found to have sodomized his recruits.

The decision was announced by the Peruvian Bishops Conference, which posted a statement from the Vatican embassy on its website.

The statement was astonishing because it listed the abuses uncovered by the Vatican investigation that have rarely been punished canonically with such measures, and the people responsible. According to the statement, the Vatican investigators uncovered physical abuses “including with sadism and violence,” sect-like abuses of conscience, spiritual abuse, abuses of authority, economic abuses in administering church money and the “abuse in the exercise of the apostolate of journalism.”

The latter was presumably aimed at a Sodalitium-linked journalist who has attacked critics of the movement on social media.

Figari founded the movement in 1971 as a lay community to recruit “soldiers for God,” one of several Catholic societies born as a conservative reaction to the left-leaning liberation theology movement that swept through Latin America, starting in the 1960s. At its height, the group counted about 20,000 members across South America and the United States. It was enormously influential in Peru.

Victims of Figari’s abuses complained to the Lima archdiocese in 2011, although other claims against him reportedly date to 2000. But neither the local church nor the Holy See took concrete action until one of the victims, Pedro Salinas, wrote a book along with journalist Paola Ugaz detailing the twisted practices of the Sodalitium in 2015, entitled “Half Monks, Half Soldiers.”

An outside investigation ordered by Sodalitium determined that Figari was “narcissistic, paranoid, demeaning, vulgar, vindictive, manipulative, racist, sexist, elitist and obsessed with sexual issues and the sexual orientation” of Sodalitium’s members.

The investigation, published in 2017, found that Figari sodomized his recruits and forced them to fondle him and one another. He liked to watch them “experience pain, discomfort and fear” and humiliated them in front of others to enhance his control over them, the report found.

Still, the Holy See declined to expel Figari from the movement in 2017 and merely ordered him to live apart from the Sodalitium community in Rome and cease all contact with it. The Vatican was seemingly tied in knots by canon law that did not foresee such punishments for founders of religious communities who weren’t priests.

But according to the findings of the latest Vatican investigation, the abuses went beyond Figari and included harassing and hacking the communications of their victims all the while covering up crimes committed as part of their official duties.

The highest-ranking person ordered expelled was Archbishop Jose Antonio Eguren, whom Francis already forced to resign as bishop of Piura in April over his record, after he sued Salinas and Ugaz for their reporting.

The Vatican, in the statement, said the Peruvian bishops join Pope Francis in “seeking the forgiveness of the victims” while calling on the troubled movement to initiate a journey of justice and reparation.
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HELSINKI — Finland will return two giant pandas to China in November, more than eight years ahead of time, as the zoo where they live can no longer afford their upkeep, the chair of the zoo’s board told Reuters on Tuesday. 

The pandas, named Lumi and Pyry, were brought to Finland in January 2018, months after Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the Nordic country and signed a joint agreement on protecting the animals. 

Since its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China has sent pandas to foreign zoos to strengthen trading ties, cement foreign relations and boost its international image. 

The Finnish agreement was for a stay of 15 years, but instead the pandas will soon go into a month-long quarantine before they are shipped back to China, according to Ahtari Zoo, the pandas’ current home. 

The zoo, a private company, had invested over 8 million euros ($8.92 million) in the facility where the animals live and faced annual costs of 1.5 million euros for their upkeep, including a preservation fee paid to China, Ahtari Chair Risto Sivonen said. 

The zoo had hoped the pandas would attract visitors to the central Finland location but last year said it had instead accumulated mounting debts as the pandemic curbed travel, and that it was discussing a return. 

Rising inflation had added to the costs, the zoo said, and Finland’s government in 2023 rejected pleas for state funding. 

In all, negotiations to return the animals had lasted three years, Sivonen said. 

“Now we reached a point where the Chinese said it could be done,” Sivonen said. 

The return of the pandas was a business decision made by the zoo which did not involve Finland’s government and should not impact relations between the two countries, a spokesperson for Finland’s foreign ministry said. 

Despite efforts by China to aid the zoo, the two countries in the end jointly concluded after friendly consultations to return the pandas, the Chinese embassy in Helsinki said in a statement to Reuters. 
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Athens — Greece and Turkey will explore whether they can start talks aimed at demarcating their maritime zones, Greece’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

Neighbors Greece and Turkey, both NATO allies but historic foes, have been at odds for decades over a range of issues from airspace to maritime jurisdiction in the eastern Mediterranean and ethnically split Cyprus.

An agreement on where their maritime zones begin and end is important for determining rights over possible gas reserves and power infrastructure schemes.

Tensions have eased in recent years and both countries agreed last year to reboot their relations, pledging to keep open channels of communication and work on the issues that have kept them apart.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan met on the sidelines of the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday and discussed bilateral ties, according to statements from the Turkish presidency and the Greek foreign ministry.

“The two leaders tasked the foreign ministers to explore whether conditions are favorable to initiate discussions on the demarcation of the continental shelf and exclusive economic zone,” Greek Foreign Minister George Gerapetritis said.

Foreign ministers from the two countries will start preparations for a high-level meeting to take place in Ankara in January, the Greek prime minister’s office said.
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WARSAW, Poland — Climate change has made downpours like the one that caused devastating floods in central Europe this month twice as likely to occur, a report said on Wednesday, as its scientific authors urged policymakers to act to stop global warming.

The worst flooding to hit central Europe in at least two decades has left 24 people dead, with towns strewn with mud and debris, buildings damaged, bridges collapsed and authorities left with a bill for repairs that runs into billions of dollars.

The report from World Weather Attribution, an international group of scientists that studies the effects of climate change on extreme weather events, found that the four days of rainfall brought by Storm Boris were the heaviest ever recorded in central Europe.

It said that climate change had made such downpours at least twice as likely and 7% heavier.

“Yet again, these floods highlight the devastating results of fossil fuel-driven warming,” Joyce Kimutai, a researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute and co-author of the study, said in a statement.

“Until oil, gas and coal are replaced with renewable energy, storms like Boris will unleash even heavier rainfall, driving economy-crippling floods.”

The report said that while the combination of weather patterns that caused the storm – including cold air moving over the Alps and very warm air over the Mediterranean and the Black Seas – was unusual, climate change made such storms more intense and more likely.

According to the report, such a storm is expected to occur on average about once every 100 to 300 years in today’s climate with 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming from pre-industrial levels.

However, it said that such storms will result in at least 5% more rain and occur about 50% more frequently than now if warming from pre-industrial levels reaches 2 C, which is expected to happen in the 2050s.
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Joe Biden used his final presidential address before the U.N. General Assembly to urge unity in the face of challenges that include conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan. VOA White House correspondent Anita Powell reports from New York.
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A new school year begins in Russia, the third that is starting with Moscow’s war in Ukraine as a backdrop. Elizabeth Cherneff narrates this report from Ricardo Marquina on what critics say are Russia’s moves to militarize education by introducing new subjects that explain and justify its full-scale assault on Ukraine.
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GENEVA — Police in northern Switzerland said Tuesday that several people have been detained and a criminal case opened in connection with the suspected death of a person in a “suicide capsule.”

The “Sarco” capsule is presumably designed to allow a person sitting in a reclining seat inside to push a button that injects nitrogen gas into the sealed chamber. The person is then supposed to fall asleep and die by suffocation in a few minutes.

Exit International, an assisted suicide group based in the Netherlands, said it is behind the 3D-printed device that cost over $1 million to develop.

Swiss law allows assisted suicide so long as the person takes his or her life with no “external assistance” and those who help the person die do not do so for “any self-serving motive,” according to a government website.

A law firm informed prosecutors in Schaffhausen canton that an assisted suicide involving the Sarco had taken place Monday near a forest cabin in Merishausen, regional police said in a statement. They said that “several people” were taken into custody and that prosecutors opened an investigation on suspicion of incitement and accessory to suicide.

Dutch newspaper Volkskrant reported Tuesday that police had detained one of its photographers who wanted to take pictures of the use of the Sarco. It said Schaffhausen police had indicated the photographer was being held at a police station but declined to give a further explanation.

The newspaper declined to comment further when contacted by the Associated Press. 

In an email, the Dutch Foreign Ministry told the AP that it was in contact with the newspaper and Swiss officials. 

“As always, we cannot interfere in the legal process of another country. At the same time, the Netherlands stands firmly for press freedom. It is very important that journalists worldwide can do their work freely,” it said. 

Exit International, the group behind the Sarco, said in a statement a 64-year-old woman from the U.S. Midwest — it did not specify further — who had suffered from “severe immune compromise” had died Monday afternoon near the German border using the Sarco device.

It said Florian Willet, co-president of The Last Resort, a Swiss affiliate of Exit International, was the only person present and described her death as “peaceful, fast and dignified.”

Dr. Philip Nitschke, an Australian-born trained doctor behind Exit International, has previously told the AP that his organization received advice from lawyers in Switzerland that the use of the Sarco would be legal in the country.

In the Exit International statement on Tuesday, Nitschke said he was “pleased that the Sarco had performed exactly as it had been designed … to provide an elective, non-drug, peaceful death at the time of the person’s choosing.”

The claims of Nitschke and Exit International could not be independently verified.

On Monday, Health Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider was asked in Swiss parliament about the legal conditions for the use of the Sarco capsule. She suggested its use would not be legal.

“On one hand, it does not fulfill the demands of the product safety law, and as such, must not be brought into circulation,” she said. “On the other hand, the corresponding use of nitrogen is not compatible with the article on purpose in the chemicals law.”

In July, Swiss newspaper Blick reported that Peter Sticher, a state prosecutor in Schaffhausen, wrote to Exit International’s lawyers saying any operator of the suicide capsule could face criminal proceedings if it was used there — and any conviction could bring up to five years in prison.

Prosecutors in other Swiss regions have also indicated that the use of the suicide capsule could lead to prosecution.

Over the summer, a 54-year-old U.S. woman with multiple health ailments had planned to be the first person to use the device, but those plans were abandoned.

Switzerland is among the only countries in the world where foreigners can travel to legally end their lives and has organizations that are dedicated to helping people kill themselves. But unlike others, including the Netherlands, Switzerland does not allow euthanasia, which involves health care practitioners killing patients with a lethal injection at their request and in specific circumstances.

Some lawmakers in Switzerland have argued that the law is unclear and have sought to close what they call legal loopholes.
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Berlin — Germany’s leading economic institutes have downgraded their forecast for 2024 and now see Europe’s largest economy shrinking by 0.1%, people familiar with the figures from the autumn joint economic forecast told Reuters on Tuesday. 

Germany’s economy was the weakest among its large euro zone peers last year with a 0.3% contraction.  

Even with inflation on a downward trend, consumption remains weak and high energy costs, feeble global orders and high interest rates are still taking their toll.  

The latest economic data paint a gloomy picture. German business morale fell for a fourth straight month in September and by more than expected, a survey showed on Tuesday. 

Data earlier this week showed German business activity contracted in September at the sharpest pace in seven months, putting the economy on track to notch up a second consecutive quarter of falling output. 

The economic institutes have also slashed their forecasts for the coming years, according to the sources. The growth forecast for 2025 has been cut to 0.8% from 1.4%, and for 2026, the institutes envisage growth of 1.3%, the sources said. 

The institutes’ joint economic forecast is due to be published on Thursday, meaning the figures could still change slightly before then. 

The economy ministry incorporates the combined estimates from the institutes — Ifo, DIW, IWH, IfW and RWI — into its own predictions. 

According to its latest forecast, the German government expects the economy to grow 0.3% this year. An update is due in October.  
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STOCKHOLM — Swedish authorities said on Tuesday that Iran hacked into a text messaging service last year and sent thousands of messages urging Swedes to take revenge against Koran burners.  

In 2023, individuals in Sweden on several occasions set fire to Islam’s holy book in public, prompting outrage in the Muslim world and raising fears of attacks by jihadists. 

“The security police is able to establish that a cyber group acted on behalf of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to carry out an influence campaign,” the Swedish Security Service said in a statement.  

“The purpose was, among other things, to paint the image of Sweden as an Islamophobic country and create division in society,” it said. 

Sweden last year raised its terrorism alert following the Koran burnings.  

In a separate statement, the Swedish Prosecution Authority said the investigation showed it was the Iranian state via the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that carried out the data breach. 

The Swedish agency said it had identified the individual hackers carrying out the breach but would not press charges.  

“Since the perpetrators are acting for a foreign power, in this case Iran, we make the assessment that the conditions for prosecution abroad or extradition to Sweden are lacking,” it said. 

Iran’s embassy in Stockholm could not immediately be reached for comment. Iran’s foreign ministry had no immediate comment.  
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