Australia opened a national probe into child sex abuse on Wednesday, with premier Julia Gillard warning of "uncomfortable truths" as institutions including schools and churches come under scrutiny. Gillard ordered the inquiry in November after a decade of growing pressure to investigate widespread allegations of paedophilia, two months after the Catholic Church in Victoria revealed hundreds of children had been abused.

SEOUL, March 29 (Yonhap) -- President Park Geun-hye pledged Friday to root out sex crimes against children as she unveiled a plan to set up a body responsible for protecting children's human rights. The proposed organization will be established under the prime minister's office, she said, without elaborating on specific time frame for the organization. "I will root out sex crimes by fostering better communication between ministries on the issue of toughening punishment for sex crimes against children," Park said in a meeting with the minister of gender equality and family.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African cardinal on Monday apologised for offending victims of child abuse when he described paedophilia as an illness and not a crime in a media interview. Victims' rights groups and others said the comments by Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier, the Catholic Archbishop of Durban, comments were insensitive, especially given perceptions the Catholic Church has not done enough to root out abuse.

The founder of a French alternative school on a boat admitted in court Friday that he had sexually abused three of the children in his charge. "I admit everything that has been said," Leonide Kameneff, 76, told his ongoing trial for rape, reacting to testimony from a victim who had described the abuse he had suffered at the hands of the former child psychotherapist between 1992 and 1995. The victim, now 33, testified to having been subjected to masturbation, oral sex and an attempted rape by Kameneff that he described as part of a pattern of systematic abuse.