Terrorism suspected in Paris stabbings
PARIS -- French terrorism authorities are investigating a double-stabbing outside the former Paris offices of a satirical newspaper where a dozen people were killed in 2015, and two suspects have been arrested in Friday's violence, authorities said.
France's counterterrorism prosecutor said authorities suspect a terrorist motive because of the place and timing of the stabbings: in front of the building where Charlie Hebdo was based until the Islamic extremist attack on its cartoonists and at a time when suspects in the 2015 attack are on trial across town.
Prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said that the chief suspect in Friday's stabbings was arrested, along with another person. Ricard said the assailant did not know the people who were stabbed, a woman and a man working at a documentary production company who had stepped outside for a smoke break.
The suspects' identities have not been released, and it is unclear exactly what prompted the attack. An investigation was opened into "attempted murder in relation with a terrorist enterprise," according to an official at the terrorism prosecutor's office.
French Prime Minister Jean Castex said the lives of the two wounded workers were not in danger.
London officer fatally shot at station
LONDON -- A police officer was shot dead inside a London police station early Friday by a suspect he was detaining, who then appears to have turned the gun on himself.
The London police force said the officer was shot at the station in the south of the city just after 2 a.m. He was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead.
The 23-year-old man being detained is in critical condition in a hospital with a gunshot wound. The force said no police weapons were fired.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said "early indications are that the suspect shot himself."
Dick said the dead officer, whose name was not immediately released, was a long-serving sergeant on the force.
"We are all deeply shocked and saddened.," she said. "The Met is a family. Policing is a family, within London and across the United Kingdom, and today we are all mourning a great loss."
The force has opened a murder inquiry and the independent police watchdog also is investigating.
It is rare for police officers to be shot and killed in the U.K., which has strict firearms laws. The officer is the 17th from the London force to be killed by a firearm since 1945.
Anti-police column deemed free speech
BERLIN -- German prosecutors said Friday that they won't open an investigation of a newspaper column that disparaged police and infuriated the country's interior minister, finding that it was covered by the right to freedom of expression.
Berlin prosecutors looked into the matter after receiving more than 150 criminal complaints about the column published in June by the left-leaning Tageszeitung newspaper, which was headlined "All cops are unfit for work" and suggested that police officers would be better off working on garbage dumps.
They concluded that, despite its "extremely disparaging assessment," the column was covered by the right to free speech. It can be seen as a "pointed article in the context of the current public discussion about 'police violence' and racism inside the police," they added in a statement.
In June, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said he would file a criminal complaint against the column's author, but backed off the threat after heavy criticism after Chancellor Angela Merkel intervened.
Fired cardinal denies embezzling funds
ROME -- The financial scandal that toppled Cardinal Angelo Becciu, one of the Vatican's most powerful officials, mounted Friday with evidence that he directed hundreds of thousands of dollars of Vatican and Italian church funds to a charity controlled by his brother.
But Becciu denied he did anything wrong, much less criminal, during a news conference, a day after Pope Francis fired him and yanked his rights and privileges as a cardinal. The 72-year-old Becciu said his downfall was "surreal," but that he had a clean conscience.
Becciu said Francis had asked him to step down as prefect of the Vatican's saint-making office during a "troubled" 20-minute meeting Thursday evening in which the pope said he "no longer had confidence in me."
Becciu had gone to the pope's residence for a previously scheduled meeting to go over possible sainthood candidates when the pope told him that documents from the Italian financial police alleged he had embezzled $100,000 of Holy See money.
"I don't think I've committed any crime," Becciu said during the news conference, sitting in front of a giant silver crucifix in a religious institute just off St. Peter's Square.
"If they want me to clarify, I'll clarify," Becciu said of Vatican prosecutors. "All the more now because the pope took away my rights as a cardinal and there's no more obligation" that he be judged solely by the pontiff.
