Swedish report finds no evidence a Chinese-flagged ship intentionally damaged Baltic Sea cables
STOCKHOLM — Authorities did not find any evidence that a Chinese-flagged ship in the Baltic Sea intentionally damaged two undersea cables last year, according to a Swedish report released Tuesday.
The Swedish Accident Investigation Board's report says investigators only had access to limited information and therefore were not able to figure out with certainty whether the data cables were damaged in Swedish waters intentionally or not.
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San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Sweden faces call to halt international adoptions after inquiry finds abuses and fraud
STOCKHOLM (AP) — A Swedish commission recommended Monday that international adoptions be stopped after an investigation found a series of abuses and fraud dating back decades. Sweden is the latest country to examine its international adoption policies after allegations of unethical practices, particularly in South Korea, The commission was formed in 2021 following a report by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter detailing Sweden's problematic international adoption system. Monday's recommendations were sent to Minister of Social Services Camilla Waltersson Grönvall, who said her department would review the report. 'The assignment was to investigate whether there had been irregularities that the Swedish actors knew about, could have done and actually did,' Anna Singer, a legal expert and the head of the commission, told a press conference. 'And actors include everyone who has had anything to do with international adoption activities. "It includes the government, the supervisory authority, organization, municipalities and courts. The conclusion is that there have been irregularities in the international adoptions to Sweden.' The commission called on the government to formally apologize to adoptees and their families. Investigators found confirmed cases of child trafficking in every decade from the 1970s to the 2000s, including from Sri Lanka, Colombia, Poland and China. Singer said a public apology, beside being important for those who are personally affected, can help raise awareness about the violations because there is a tendency to downplay the existence and significance of the abuses. An Associated Press investigation, also documented by Frontline (PBS), last year reported dubious child-gathering practices and fraudulent paperwork involving South Korea's foreign adoption program, which peaked in the 1970s and `80s amid huge Western demands for babies. The AP and Frontline spoke with more than 80 adoptees in the U.S., Australia and Europe and examined thousands of pages of documents to reveal evidence of kidnapped or missing children ending up abroad, fabricated child origins, babies switched with one another and parents told their newborns were gravely sick or dead, only to discover decades later they had been sent to new parents overseas. The findings are challenging the international adoption industry, which was built on the model created in South Korea. The Netherlands last year announced it would no longer allow its citizens to adopt from abroad. Denmark's only international adoption agency said it was shutting down and Switzerland apologized for failing to prevent illegal adoptions. France released a scathing assessment of its own culpability. South Korea has sent around 200,000 children to the West for adoptions in the past six decades, with more than half of them placed in the U.S. Along with France and Denmark, Sweden has been a major European destination of South Korean children, adopting nearly 10,000 of them since the 1960s.
3 hours ago
Sweden faces call to halt international adoptions after inquiry finds abuses, fraud
STOCKHOLM -- A Swedish commission recommended Monday that international adoptions be stopped after an investigation found a series of abuses and fraud dating back decades. Sweden is the latest country to examine its international adoption policies after allegations of unethical practices, particularly in South Korea, The commission was formed in 2021 following a report by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter detailing the Scandinavian country's problematic international adoption system. Monday's recommendations were sent to Minister of Social Services Camilla Waltersson Grönvall. 'The assignment was to investigate whether there had been irregularities that the Swedish actors knew about, could have done and actually did,' Anna Singer, a legal expert and the head of the commission, told a press conference. 'And actors include everyone who has had anything to do with international adoption activities. "It includes the government, the supervisory authority, organization, municipalities and courts. The conclusion is that there have been irregularities in the international adoptions to Sweden.' The commission called on the government to formally apologize to adoptees and their families. Investigators found confirmed cases of child trafficking in every decade from the 1970s to the 2000s, including from Sri Lanka, Colombia, Poland and China. Singer said a public apology, besides being important for those who are personally affected, can help raise awareness about the violations because there is a tendency to download the existence and significance of the abuses. An Associated Press investigation, also documented by Frontline (PBS), last year reported dubious child-gathering practices and fraudulent paperwork involving South Korea's foreign adoption program, which peaked in the 1970s and `80s amid huge Western demands for babies. The AP and Frontline spoke with more than 80 adoptees in the U.S., Australia and Europe and examined thousands of pages of documents to reveal evidence of kidnapped or missing children ending up abroad, fabricated child origins, babies switched with one another and parents told their newborns were gravely sick or dead, only to discover decades later they'd been sent to new parents overseas. The findings are challenging the international adoption industry, which was built on the model created in South Korea. The Netherlands last year announced it would no longer allow its citizens to adopt from abroad. Denmark's only international adoption agency said it was shutting down and Switzerland apologized for failing to prevent illegal adoptions. France released a scathing assessment of its own culpability. South Korea sent around 200,000 children to the West for adoptions in the past six decades, with more than half of them placed in the U.S. Along with France and Denmark, Sweden was a major European destination of South Korean children, adopting nearly 10,000 of them since the 1960s.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Trump just turned on the architect of his biggest first-term victories
Last week, Donald Trump turned his fire on the Federalist Society, a powerful conservative advocacy group, and its co-founder Leonard Leo, a key adviser to Trump on judicial nominations during his first term. In a post on Truth Social, Trump called Leo a 'sleazebag' and blamed the Federalist Society for 'the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations.' The impetus for the post was a ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade holding that he did not have legal authority for his most sweeping tariffs (an appeals court paused the ruling the following day). When something goes wrong for Trump, he always looks for a scapegoat — and his political allies aren't immune to such treatment. However, in the Federalist Society and Leo, Trump may have chosen the wrong targets. It is self-destructive to throw them under the bus when they have deep and continuing ties to members of the Supreme Court's conservative majority, and when their political operation was crucial to Trump's judicial nominations in his first term. As Politico reports, 'Trump's relationship with [Leo] is known to have grown strained' after the fiasco of Trump's 2020 election denialism and coup attempt. The president was sorely disappointed that the Supreme Court, including the three justices he appointed in his first term, did not do what it had done 20 years earlier when it, in effect, threw the election to George W. Bush. Both the Federalist Society and Leo had played key roles in helping the president choose those three nominees: Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. As NPR reported in 2022, all three were on a list of potential justices that Trump shared during the 2016 campaign — 'A list that was personally curated by Leo.' Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are also close to Leo, who played a key role in securing their nominations and confirmation. Leo has become, as former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told ProPublica, a 'den mother' to the justices, helping 'take care of the judges even after they had made it to the highest court in the country.' For Trump, for whom every action is transactional, the conservatives' failure to help him stay in the White House would be seen as a betrayal — not just by the justices but by their patron. However, Politico reports that 'despite the falling out between Trump and Leo, many legal conservatives said in recent months that they expected him to remain influential in the choices Trump makes for judicial nominations in his second term.' This week's ruling, however, seems to have changed that. Already, a group Leo helped funded, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, had challenged Trump's tariffs on Chinese imports, raising the same claims of executive overreach that the trade court accepted Wednesday. And one of the three judges on the trade court who made that decision, Judge Timothy Reif, was appointed by Trump during his first term. It is not clear what, if any, role either the Federalist Society or Leo played in Reif's elevation to the bench. But it is clear that during his first term, Trump credited both of them for helping him transform the federal judiciary. Leo had laid the groundwork for that transformation, as ProPublica reported in 2023: Decades ago, he'd realized it was not enough to have a majority of Supreme Court justices. To undo landmark rulings like Roe, his movement would need to make sure the court heard the right cases brought by the right people and heard by the right lower court judges. Leo began building a machine to do just that. Besides pampering members of the Supreme Court, he placed Federalist Society members in 'clerkships, judgeships and jobs' not only at the federal level but throughout the states as well. That, it seems, was then. Now, says Trump, Leo is 'a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America.' The president's changing mood doesn't change the fact that, as Time reporter Chad de Guzman explains, 'the President may be relying on Leo's greatest accomplishment to ultimately push his agenda through.' Already, however, Republican-appointed judges are ruling against Trump's second administration nearly as often as Democratic-appointed judges. And while there were far fewer vacant judgeships at the start of Trump's second term compared to his first, there are still nearly 50 empty seats. But replacing Leo's voice with more combative, less experienced voices like Trump aide Mike Davis means that nominating candidates for those seats will likely be a slower, more fraught process than in Trump's first administration. 'Conservative judges are going to be much more open to stepping down if they're confident that their replacements will be high quality,' former Bush administration lawyer Ed Whelan told The New York Times. 'Trump's bizarre attack on his judicial appointments in his first term doesn't inspire confidence.' Even the president, as he raged at Leo, seemed to recognize the importance of the latter's project. Referring to the trade court decision, he said, 'Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY.' But lashing out at a 'den mother' is hardly the way to curry favor with those who are the beneficiaries of their care. This article was originally published on
