The head of an Australian inquiry into the abuse of children in detention resigned yesterday, four days after being appointed to investigate prison video of Aboriginal boys being abused, citing his lack of support from the country’s indigenous leaders.

A senior Vatican official told an Australian sex abuse inquiry that he did not act when a boy raised abuse allegations against a cleric in the 1970s.

Pope Francis’s finance minister has denied an allegation that he offered a bribe to a victim of clergy abuse to protect a paedophile priest.

Church in Australia says clergy should get psychosexual training

Children from the North who were sent to Australia shortly after the Second World War faced grave sexual and physical violence after arrival in institutions, witnesses have told a public inquiry.

A century ago the theft in Dublin Castle exposed a bunch of ‘unsavoury characters’ at the top of society. It was a scandal, says Caomhan Keane.

The report used by Bord Iascaigh Mhara to allay fears about the threat posed to wild salmon stocks by salmon farming has been dismissed as “flawed” by international marine scientists.

Australia opened a national probe into child sex abuse yesterday, with premier Julia Gillard warning of “uncomfortable truths” as institutions including schools and churches come under scrutiny.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny described the current economic conditions of the country as “what is in reality a temporary, hand-me-down, financial straitjacket”.

Settling a 1980 case that split Australia and led to a mistaken murder conviction, a coroner ruled that a dingo took a baby from a campsite in the Outback, just as her mother said from the beginning.

SPIKE ISLAND cast a dark shadow over the life of Patrick Tierney, alias Edward O’Connor.

A MOTHER who was wrongly convicted of murdering a baby who infamously disappeared in the Australian outback 30 years ago has pleaded for her daughter’s death certificate to be changed to state a dingo was responsible.

THE money is good, the sunshine is free and if you’re a garda looking for a change of uniform as well as scenery then the police service of Western Australia regard you as a fair cop.

A SENIOR executive from the Irish operation of reinsurance firm General Re has been charged in the US with assisting fraud at insurance giant American International Group (AIG).

Ian Guider

GENERAL Re, the reinsurance company whose Dublin branch is at the centre of an international investigation, yesterday agreed to respond to a regulatory probe in Australia.

DURING the 1830s a number of learned men presented evidence to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws concerning the ‘growing evil’ of bastardy.

Airlines should be charged for polluting the atmosphere and the money ploughed back into more environmentally friendly means of transport, a British Royal Commission said today.