Pope Francis has rejected a German cardinal's offer to resign, over the mishandling of the Catholic Church's sexual abuse crisis. Cardinal Reinhard Marx said earlier this month that he should share responsibility for the "catastrophe" of abuse by Catholic priests. Cardinal Marx is Archbishop of Munich, and one of the Church's most influential liberal figures. He is not under investigation himself, either for abuse or for covering it up.
The human rights organisation Amnesty International has said China is committing crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, the north-western region that is home to the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. In a report published on Thursday, Amnesty called on the UN to investigate, and said China had subjected Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslims to mass detention, surveillance, and torture. Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, accused Chinese authorities of creating "a dystopian hellscape on a staggering scale".
US President Joe Biden has launched his first official overseas trip with a warning to Russia that it faces "robust and meaningful" consequences if it engages in "harmful activities". Mr Biden made clear his intention to strengthen ties with US allies, following strained relations under the Trump administration. President Biden arrived in the UK on Wednesday. He will meet PM Boris Johnson to agree a new "Atlantic Charter". The pact will be a modern version of the one agreed between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, with a focus on challenges including climate change and security.
The US has reached an agreement with Pfizer to buy 500m doses of their coronavirus vaccine to distribute to nearly 100 countries around the world, as the centrepiece of Joe Biden’s initiative to help vaccinate the world against Covid-19, according to US reports. Under to the scheme, which Biden is expected to announce in the UK on Thursday, the US would pay for the vaccines at cost price. The first 200m doses would be distributed this year, and the remaining 300m in the first half of next year.
Top Democrats are preparing to make the case to impose new limits on the filibuster, in a move that could bring to a head six months of smoldering tensions over an expected Republican blockade of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda. The Senate had its first filibuster of this Congress last week, when Republicans used the tactical rule to block a bipartisan House-passed measure to create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack perpetrated a pro-Trump mob.
Details claiming to reveal how little income tax US billionaires pay have been leaked to an news website. ProPublica says it has seen the tax returns of some of the world's richest people, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett. The website alleges Amazon's Mr Bezos paid no tax in 2007 and 2011, while Tesla's Mr Musk paid nothing in 2018. A White House spokeswoman called the leak "illegal", and the FBI and tax authorities are investigating. ProPublica said it was analysing what it called a "vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data" on the taxes of the billionaires, and would release further details over coming weeks.
Joe Biden’s plans to overhaul the international tax system face mounting opposition from his Republican opposition who have called the proposals “crazy” and are threatening to block the historic deal’s passage in the US. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has led the Biden administration’s attempts to broker a global agreement on how companies are taxed, which comes amid a wider push to reshape corporate taxation in the US. Those efforts were rewarded over the weekend when the G7 group of wealthy nations backed a global minimum rate of at least 15% and agreed that countries should be able to tax some of the profits made by big companies based on the revenue they generate in that country, rather than where they are based for tax purposes.
Legault should be forced to carry the weight of Quebec’s more than 11,000 pandemic deaths to his grave.
On Saturday, RCMP and protesters squared off on a logging road deep in the forests of southwest Vancouver Island
When G7 Finance Ministers meet this weekend, they will discuss President Biden’s proposal to agree to a global minimum corporate tax rate. While other G7 countries have pledged support for this, Canada has remained silent.