Man convicted, acquitted of abuse will publish diary

Demonstration allowed; others banned over virus concerns

Cardinal George Pell, the former Vatican finance minister who was convicted and then acquitted of sexual abuse in his native Australia, is set to publish his prison diary musing on life in solitary confinement, the Catholic Church, politics and sports.

Catholic publisher Ignatius Press told The Associated Press on Saturday the first installment of the 1,000-page diary would likely be published in spring 2021.

Pell served 13 months in prison before Australia’s High Court in April acquitted him of molesting two choirboys in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne while he was archbishop of Australia’s secondlargest city during the 1990s.

PARIS — Hundreds of people in Paris protested Saturday against racism and police violence and in memory of Black men who died following encounters with French police or under suspicious circumstances.

Many protesters congregated in the central Place de la Republique. Some carried a placard bearing the words “Justice For Ibo,” a reference to Ibrahima Bah, 22, who died in an October motorbike crash in the Paris suburbs of Villiers-le-Bel wile allegedly trying to escape a police check. Bah’s family blames the police for his death.

The protesters marched to the former home of Lamine Dieng, a 25-year-old Franco-Senegalese man arrested in 2007 who died in a police van. A separate demonstration in support of undocumented workers that drew hundreds of protesters planned to join up with the anti-racism march.

Last week, it emerged that the French government agreed to pay $162,000 to Dieng’s relatives after protracted legal wrangling.

“We are here to show that from now on we are going to create a resistance movement … and that there should be no more Lamine Diengs,” Franco Lollia of the the Brigade Anti-Negrophobie, a French activist group, said at Saturday’s demonstration.

Others linked the protest with the case of of George Floyd, an African American man whose death in Minneapolis galvanized protesters around the globe.

“It’s a reality we hear that there are people currently who are killed by the police. George Floyd was the hair that broke the camel’s back in the United States, but it’s not just George Floyd,” demonstrator Lylia Boukerrouche said.

“In France, though it’s different, it’s a similar situation. It was a colonial state, and we see that today police violence occurs against Blacks and Arabs, the descendants of immigrants,” Boukerrouche added.

In Paris, both of Saturday’s protests were authorized by French authorities, who have been exercising caution as the country emerges from coronavirus restrictions.

Other protests on Saturday in the French capital have, however, been banned, including an anti-racism demonstration near the U.S. Embassy by the Black African Defense League.

George Pell