PARIS (AP) — France’s Catholic Church agreed on Monday to financially compensate sex abuse victims in what the president of the country’s Bishop Conference hailed as a “decisive step.” Conference President Eric de Moulins-Beaufort said in a speech that the Church has recognized its “institutional responsibility”. The Bishops Conference held its annual meeting a month after a report revealed large-scale child sex abuse within the French Catholic Church. The study released by an independent commission estimated that some 330,000 children were sexually abused over 70 years by priests or other church-related figures. The report published last month described “systemic” coverup of abuses by the Catholic Church, and urged the church to respect the rule of law in France. It said the tally of 330,000 victims includes an estimated 216,000 people abused by priests and other clerics, and the rest by church figures such as Scout leaders and camp counselors. The estimates were based on a broader research by France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research into sexual abuse of children in the country. France is a traditionally Roman Catholic country, but adheres to a strict form of secularism in public life based on a 1905 law separating church and state.

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PARIS (Reuters) -- A policeman survived a knife attack in the French Riviera city of Cannes on Monday. The policeman emerged from the attack unscathed, saved from serious injury or worse by his bulletproof vest, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said. The assailant suffered life-threatening injuries after he was shot by other officers. The Algerian national held an Italian residency permit, was in France legally and was not on a French watchlist of individuals thought to have takfiri sympathies, the minister said. The attack comes as President Emmanuel Macron tries to persuade voters that his government is in control of security and violent crime, six months before elections in which the far right and conservatives pose the biggest threat to his re-election hopes. Eric Ciotti, a conservative lawmaker from southeastern France, who is challenging for the mainstream centre-right presidential ticket, called the incident a terrorist attack though he did not offer any evidence for that.

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BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s coronavirus infection rate climbed to its highest recorded level yet on Monday as what officials have called a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” gathers pace. The national disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, said the country has seen 201.1 new cases per 100,000 residents over the past seven days. That was above the previous record of 197.6 from Dec. 22 last year. While it’s still a lower rate than in several other European countries, it has set alarm bells ringing. The seven-day infection rate has long ceased to be the only policy yardstick in Germany, with new hospital admissions now an important factor. Those are currently at just under 4 per 100,000 residents over a week — compared with a peak of about 15.5 last Christmas — but officials say hospitals are filling up in badly affected areas.

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LONDON (Reuters) -- An outbreak of highly pathogenic H5 bird flu has been reported at a small poultry unit in central England, the country’s farm ministry confirmed on Monday. All birds on the infected premises, near Alcester in Warwickshire, will be culled. The virus has been spreading across Europe during the last few weeks with outbreaks in several countries including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Denmark. Poland also reported several outbreaks at poultry farms with flocks totalling nearly 650,000 birds, the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) said on Monday.

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FREETOWN (Reuters) - The death toll from a fuel tanker explosion in Sierra Leone’s capital on Friday has risen to 115, a health ministry spokesperson said on Monday. Local authorities previously said 99 people had died when the tanker exploded following a collision in a suburb of Freetown. The crash provided a major challenge for Freetown’s health service already creaking from years of underfunding. The 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic gutted the country’s ranks of medical staff, 250 of whom died, and the system has not recovered. Accidents with tanker trucks in Sub-Saharan Africa have previously killed scores of people who gathered at the site to collect spilled fuel and were hit by secondary blasts. In 2019, a tanker explosion in Tanzania killed 85 people, while around 50 people were killed in a similar disaster in Democratic Republic of Congo in 2018.

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TBILISI (Reuters) -- Former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili was transferred to a prison hospital on Monday, authorities said, just over five weeks after he declared a hunger strike in jail. Saakashvili, 53, was arrested on Oct. 1 this year after returning to Georgia on the eve of local elections to rally the opposition, in what he described as a mission to save the country. He was jailed in the town of Rustavi, south of the capital Tbilisi, where he declared a hunger strike. He faces six years in prison after being convicted in absentia in 2018 of abusing his office during his rule as president of the former Soviet republic from 2004 to 2013 - charges he rejected as politically motivated.