Pope aide Pell hits out at ‘anti-religion’ agendas…Read full details

Vatican finance chief Cardinal George Pell of Australia speaking to the media at the Quirinale hotel in Rome. Pell on February 9, 2017 hit out at calls that he return to Australia to assist in a child sex probe into him, railing against "anti-religion" agendas. / AFP PHOTO / ANDREAS SOLARO

Vatican finance chief George Pell Thursday hit out at calls that he return to Australia to assist in a child sex probe into him, railing against “anti-religion” agendas.

Pell, the country’s most senior Catholic cleric, was interviewed in Rome by Australian police last October over historical sex assault claims. He strongly denies the allegations and no charges have yet been laid.

The Melbourne Herald Sun this week said a brief of evidence concerning the matter had now been handed to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

It coincided with the final stages of a long-running national inquiry into institutional responses to child sex abuse, which heard on Monday that seven percent of Catholic priests were accused of abusing children between 1950 and 2010.

Pell has appeared before the royal commission three times, once in person and twice via video-link.

The Greens party on Wednesday filed a motion in the upper house Senate, which was widely supported, calling for him to return to assist police and prosecutors.

“The Greens have opted for an obvious political stunt while knowing full well Cardinal Pell has consistently cooperated with the royal commission and the Victorian police,” his spokesman said in a statement to AFP.

“The suggestion that Cardinal Pell should be accountable for all the wrongdoings of Church personnel throughout Australia over many decades is not only unjust and completely fanciful but also acts to shield those in the Church who should be called to account for their failures.”

The statement added that Pell had taken “decisive actions to address the evils of abuse”.

“Their (the Greens) anti-religion agenda is notorious and most fair-minded Australians would see this motion as pathetic point-scoring,” he said.

The Greens said Pell had “done a very good job at avoiding a return to Australia”.

“We know that the Victorian police now have allegations of criminal misconduct against Cardinal Pell. It is time he came back to Australia to assist with investigations on this matter,” they said in a statement.

The allegations against him came from two men, now in their 40s, who said he groped them in summer 1978-79 at the Eureka pool in Ballarat, Australia, where the cleric grew up and worked.

The allegations were the subject of the police interview in Rome.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has also alleged Pell was naked in front of three young boys, believed to be aged eight to 10, in a surf club changing room in summer 1986-87.

There have also reportedly been complaints relating to his time as Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s.

During the royal commission, ordered by the government in 2012, Pell admitted he “mucked up” in dealing with paedophile priests in Victoria state in the 1970s.

Indian doctor pulls live cockroach from woman’s skull…Read full details

cockroach PHOTO: AFP / Sam YEH

It’s the stuff of nightmares — a cockroach crawls up your nose in the middle of the night, burrows in and drives you mad with scratching behind your eyes. But for one Indian woman, this horror story proved all too real.

The 42-year-old had a painful crawling sensation behind her eyes when she woke up, so rushed to a local clinic where her nose was flushed and she was sent home.

But the sensation didn’t subside, and it wasn’t until a specialist explored her nasal passages with an endoscope that she learned the awful truth.

“I saw some tiny legs moving inside,” M.N. Shankar, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Chennai’s Stanley Medical College Hospital, told AFP on Wednesday.

“I looked further in and almost five centimetres from the tip of the nose I saw something unusual.

“I realised I was actually looking at the bottom of a cockroach.”

The invasive critter had burrowed deep inside her nose, almost to the base of the skull, and was still alive after roughly 12 hours, Shankar added.

Using an instrument akin to a vacuum cleaner, Shankar managed to extract the cockroach from her skull intact — still alive and kicking.

It was the first time Shankar had seen anything like it in his three decades of medical practice.

The woman was doing “absolutely fine” following the 45-minute procedure, he said, but was “embarrassed she had a cockroach up her nose”.

“It was an out of the world kind of thing for her,” he said.