News Story of the Day

The Sun Daily, March 5, 2017

NEW DELHI: Five nuns and a doctor are on the run in India after being accused of concealing the birth of a baby to a teenager who alleges that a priest raped her, police said Sunday.

Arrest warrants have been issued for the six and for two hospital staff. They are accused of concealing the 16-year-old's delivery from authorities and hiding the baby in a Catholic orphanage at Kunnur in the southern state of Kerala.

"They deliberately hid the incident from officials," Prajish Thottathil, a senior police officer, told AFP, adding some of the accused likely also knew about the alleged assault.

Irish Times, March 3, 2017

Human remains of a significant number of babies and infants up to three years of age have been found on the site of the former mother and baby home in Tuam, Co Galway. This follows work by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation which carried out planned excavations there.

March 2017, A U Bulletin 

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) has introduced a revised version of the Child Victims Act that would remove the statute of limitations on prosecution of abusers in public and private institutions around the state.

Cuomo’s proposal would allow adults who were abused as children to file civil lawsuits up to 50 years after the attacks occurred, and would allow victims who couldn’t bring their cases to court due to current statute-of-limitations laws to have a one-year window to do so.

By Michael Short, February 25, 2017, The Age

The Catholic Church, which has presided over a decades-long international cover-up of countless cases, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of child rape and other sexual abuse is arguably guilty of crimes against humanity.

In Australia, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, launched in 2013, has heard much harrowing evidence that for decades child rapists have been protected by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. 

By Charles WhiteSunday,  26 Feb 2017, Metro.co.uk

Pope Francis has reduced punishments for paedophile priests who abused children as young as 12.

The leader of the world’s biggest faith wants to apply his vision of a ‘merciful’ church and has changed the punishments for a handful of priests.

BY NICOLE WINFIELD, ASSOCIATED PRESS, February 25, 2017

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Francis has quietly reduced sanctions against a handful of pedophile priests, applying his vision of a merciful church even to its worst offenders in ways that survivors of abuse and the pope's own advisers question.

By Teresa Huizar, HuffingtonPost.com, February 21, 2017

Children simply cannot consent to sex with adults.

It seems that former Breitbart editor and alt-right propagandist Milo Yiannopoulos loves to be hated. He has penned incendiary anti-feminist articles opining that women experiencing online harassment should simply stop using the internet, that birth control makes women “unattractive and crazy,” and that women are underrepresented in tech because they “suck at interviews.” 

By Teo Kermeliotis, February 23, 2017, Aljazeera

Greek police say they have arrested a French cleric suspected of sexually abusing unaccompanied refugee children he had sheltered in his house in Thessaloniki, Greece's second-biggest city.

By Haidee V Eugenio, February 22, 2017, Pacific Daily News

Four more former altar boys filed separate federal lawsuits Wednesday, alleging that former island priest Louis Brouillard sexually molested them repeatedly when they were children in the 1970s, bringing to 22 the total number of clergy sexual abuse cases filed on Guam.