��������

LYON: French prosecutors in the city of Lyon said Friday they had charged and detained seven people over the alleged kidnapping of a Swiss man for a cryptocurrency ransom.
The seven suspects — six adults and a 17-year-old — were charged and taken into custody after investigating magistrates in Lyon questioned them on Thursday.
The prosecutors’ office did not specify the charges, but it had said on Thursday they were being questioned for kidnapping, false imprisonment and extortion by an armed gang.
Officers of the elite GIGN police unit freed the 22-year-old man last Sunday in a raid in the city of Valence, southeast France, the prosecutors office told AFP.
He had been abducted the previous Thursday and once the alarm was raised, around 150 gendarmes were mobilized in the operation to find him.
His abductors had been demanding a ransom be paid in cryptocurrency, said prosecutors.
Swiss police said in a statement Friday that the affair might have had its roots in a dispute over digital assets.
They said they had contacted French police after having received a tip-off from an anonymous source a day after the kidnapping.
The victim, who lives in the Vaud canton of Switzerland, had been seriously beaten up while he was held, the statement added.
French authorities have been dealing with a string of kidnappings and extortion attempts targeting the families of wealthy individuals dealing in cryptocurrencies.
In January, kidnappers seized French crypto boss David Balland and his partner. Balland co-founded the crypto firm Ledger, valued at the time at more than $1 billion.
Balland’s kidnappers cut off his finger and demanded a hefty ransom. He was freed the next day, and his girlfriend was found tied up in the boot of a car outside Paris.
In May, the father of a man who ran a Malta-based cryptocurrency company was kidnapped by four hooded men in Paris.
The victim, whose finger was also severed by the kidnappers and for whom a ransom of several million euros was demanded, was released 58 hours later during a raid by the security forces.

ROME: Pope Leo XIV fed fish in the fishpond, pet horses and visited organic vineyards Friday as he inaugurated the Vatican’s ambitious project to turn Pope Francis’ preaching about caring for the environment into practice.
Leo formally opened Borgo Laudato Si, a 55-acre utopian experiment in sustainable farming, vocational training and environmental education located on the grounds of the papal summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo. The Vatican hopes the center, open to student groups, CEOs and others, will be a model of ecological stewardship, education and spirituality for the Catholic Church and beyond.
Leo traveled by helicopter to Castel Gandolfo and then zoomed around the estate’s cypress-lined gardens in an electric golf cart to reach the center, which is named for Francis’ landmark 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si,” or Praised Be. The document, which inspired an entire church movement, cast care for the planet as an urgent and existential moral concern that was inherently tied to questions of human dignity and justice, especially for the poor.
Leo has strongly reaffirmed Francis’ focus on the need to care for God’s creation, and celebrated the first “green” Mass in the estate’s gardens earlier this summer, using a new set of prayers inspired by the encyclical that specifically invoke prayers for creation. On Friday, some 10 years after Laudato Si was published, Leo presided over a liturgy to bless the new center after touring its gardens, farm and classrooms.
Leo recalled that according to the Bible, human beings have a special place in the act of creation, created in the “image and likeness of God.”
“But this privilege comes with a great responsibility: that of caring for all other creatures, in accordance with the creator’s plan,” he said. “Care for creation, therefore, represents a true vocation for every human being, a commitment to be carried out within creation itself, without ever forgetting that we are creatures among creatures, and not creators.”
A greenhouse inspired by St. Peter’s Square
Leo spoke from the heart of the project: a huge greenhouse in the same curved, embracing shape as the colonnade of St. Peter’s Square that faces a 10-room educational facility and dining hall. Once it’s up and running, visiting groups can come for an afternoon school trip to learn about organic farming, or a weekslong course on regenerative agriculture.
The center aims to accomplish many of the goals of the environmental cause. Solar panels provide all the power the facility needs, plastics are banned and recycling and composting systems used to reach zero-waste. Officials say water will be conserved and maximized via “smart irrigation” systems that use artificial intelligence to determine plants’ needs, along with rainwater harvesting and the installation of wastewater treatment and reuse systems.
There is a social component as well. The Vatican’s first-ever vocational school on the grounds will aim to provide on-site training in sustainable gardening, organic winemaking and olive harvesting to offer new job opportunities for particularly vulnerable groups: victims of domestic violence, refugees, recovering addicts and rehabilitated prisoners.
The products made will be sold on-site, with profits re-invested in the educational center: Laudato Si wine, organic olive oil, herbal teas from the farm’s aromatic garden and cheese made from its 60 dairy cows, continuing a tradition of agricultural production that for centuries have subsidized monasteries and convents.
While school groups are a core target audience, organizers also want to invite CEOs and professionals for executive education seminars, to sensitize the world of business to the need for sustainable economic growth.
Officials declined to discuss the financing of the project, other than to say an undisclosed number of partners had invested in it and that confidential business plans precluded the Vatican from releasing further information.