News of the World

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Jill Biden celebrates new childhood cancer partnership with Costa Rica

First Lady Jill Biden visited a children’s hospital in Costa Rica’s capital on Sunday to celebrate a new partnership to combat childhood cancer.

“Together, we can end cancer as we know it,” Biden said in remarks celebrating the partnership between Costa Rica, the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“We can give families, here in Costa Rica, the United States and every corner of the globe, the treatments and cures that they need to live longer, healthier lives,” she added.

Biden was speaking from the National Children’s Hospital of Costa Rica in San José, the same hospital President John F. Kennedy visited during a 1963 tour of Costa Rica.

Biden to lay out in Japan who’s joining new Asia trade pact

The White House says the new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework will help the United States and Asian economies work more closely on issues including supply chains, digital trade, clean energy, worker protections and anticorruption efforts.
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Biden is in the midst of a five-day visit to South Korea and Japan — the first trip to Asia of his presidency — that wraps on Tuesday. The White House announced plans to build the economic framework in October as a replacement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the U.S. dropped out of in 2017 under then-President Donald Trump.

The new pact comes at a moment when the administration believes it has the edge in its competition with Beijing. Bloomberg Economics published a report last week projecting U.S. GDP growth at about 2.8% in 2022 compared to 2% for China.
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It doesn’t offer incentives to prospective partners by lowering tariffs or provide signatories with greater access to U.S. markets. Those limitations may not make the U.S. framework an attractive alternative to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which still moved forward after the U.S. bailed out. China, the largest trading partner for many in the region, is also seeking to join TPP.

By the way, it also mentions that Australia has a new prime minister, namely Mr. Anthony Albanese.

Vatican airs dirty laundry in trial  over London property

Recent hearings showed a church bureaucracy that used espionage, allowed outsiders with unverified qualifications to gain access to the Apostolic Palace and relied on a pervasive mantra of sparing the pope responsibility — until someone’s neck was on the line.
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The investigation was borne of the secretariat of state’s 350 million-euro ($370 million) investment in a London property, which was such a debacle that the Vatican sold the building this year at a cumulative loss of more than 200 million euros ($210 million).

Prosecutors have accused Italian brokers, the Vatican’s longtime money manager and Vatican officials of swindling the Holy See out of tens of millions in fees and commissions and of extorting it of 15 million euros (nearly $16 million) to finally get control of the London building.
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Three years on, though, the investigation has cast an unwelcome spotlight on some of Francis’ own decisions and how Vatican monsignors managed a 600 million-euro ($630 million) asset portfolio with little external oversight or expertise.
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Angelo Becciu, is accused of embezzlement for having donated 125,000 euros ($130,000) in Vatican money to a Sardinian charity run by his brother.

Linked to him is another codefendant, Cecilia Marogna, a security analyst who is accused of embezzling 575,000 euros (over $600,000) that Becciu had intended as payment to liberate a Colombian nun held hostage by al-Qaida militants. They both deny wrongdoing, as do the other defendants.