Author: Reporter

One afternoon in mid-December, Pope Francis had a meeting that was not on his official agenda or otherwise recorded, that underscored the utter dysfunction of the Catholic Church’s response to the global clergy sex abuse scandal. In the main reception room of the Vatican hotel where he lives, Francis met for more than an hour with a Spaniard who as a young seminarian was molested by his spiritual director. The former seminarian was desperate. He had lodged a complaint with the Toledo, Spain Archdiocese in 2009, and visited Vatican offices multiple times to deposit damning documents and demand action...

A Hong Kong court’s order to liquidate China Evergrande, the world’s most heavily indebted real estate developer, is only a tentative step toward resolving a debt crisis that is haunting financial markets and dragging on the Chinese economy. Evergrande owes $340 billion to its creditors. Experts said it was unclear if the January order would be enforced in mainland China, where the company and 90% of its assets are based. Lenders inside of China already have claims on most of those “onshore” assets, and Beijing is likely to favor them. The order by the Hong Kong High Court also...

U.S. officials said in early February they disrupted a state-backed Chinese effort to plant malware that could be used to damage civilian infrastructure, as the head of the FBI warned that Beijing is positioning itself to disrupt the daily lives of Americans if the United States and China ever go to war. The operation, announced just before FBI Director Chris Wray addressed House lawmakers, disrupted a botnet of hundreds of U.S.-based small office and home routers owned by private citizens and companies that had been hijacked by the Chinese hackers to cover their tracks as they sowed the malware....

Wisconsin, along with other state governments and federal regulators, were already moving to keep individuals’ reproductive health information private when a U.S. senator’s report in February offered a new jolt, describing how cellphone location data was used to send millions of anti-abortion ads to people who visited Planned Parenthood offices. Federal law bars medical providers from sharing health data without a patient’s consent but does not prevent digital tech companies from tracking menstrual cycles or an individual’s location and selling it to data brokers. Legislation for federal bans have never gained momentum, largely because of opposition from the tech...