Almost 100 schoolchildren are thought to have been ‘possessed’ by the devil – and see visions of a man in black trying to kill them.
In what has been described as a mass case of demonic possession, the pupils in Peru are experiencing seizures alongside their horrifying hallucinations.
Experts have struggled to explain the strange goings-on, which also include widespread convulsions and fainting at the school , reportedly built on a Mafia graveyard. Continue reading…
HAGÅTÑA, Guam — Amid calls for the Catholic Church’s spiritual leader in Guam to resign because of allegations of sexual abuse 40 years ago, the archbishop released a video Tuesday in which he denied the allegations.
Roy T. Quintanilla, 52, who now lives in Honolulu, came forward Monday to accuse now-Archbishop Anthony Apuron, 70, of abusing him when he was an altar boy at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Agat, Guam, and Apuron was a parish priest. Quintanilla said Apuron had asked him to stay over at the priest’s house one night and requested that he sleep in Apuron’s bedroom, where he was abused. Continue reading…
Following the recent water crisis in Flint, it’s no wonder that the U.S. public has begun to question exactly how safe our drinking water actually is. What was once taken for granted — the idea of safe, pure, drinkable water for everyone — is now in serious question.
In addition to the continuing problems with lead contamination, it has come to light in recent years that public water supplies are now contaminated with trace levels of pharmaceutical drugs, including oral contraceptives and mood stabilizers.
These drugs end up in our water inadvertently; however, there’s one pharmaceutical that is intentionally added to our tap water: Fluoride. Continue reading…
A mother’s voice may do far more than soothe her child, new research suggests.
When moms spoke, several areas of their children’s brains were activated, the researchers reported. These included regions involved in emotion and reward processing, social functions, facial recognition and the detection of what is personally relevant. Continue reading…
Pope Francis says that London’s election of the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital is an example of how migrants can be integrated in Europe.
Voters in the English capital elected Sadiq Khan, the son of a Pakistani bus driver, on May 6 after a campaign in which the Conservative candidate, Zac Goldsmith, was criticized for focusing on Labour candidate Khan’s religion.
In an interview with French Catholic newspaper La Croix published on Tuesday, the leader of the Catholic Church said that Khan’s election provided an encouraging sign as other parts of Europe put up borders to migrants coming from the Middle East and Africa. Francis, 79, cited the orchestrators of the Brussels attacks—in which suicide bombings at an airport and metro station killed 36 people in March—as an example of the consequences of not integrating migrants. Many of the perpetrators of both the Brussels attacks and Paris attacks that killed 130 people in November 2015 grew up in the Molenbeek district of the Belgian capital, seen as a haven for extremists. Continue reading…
Facebook is a for-profit company that makes money packaging its users’ information to sell to advertisers and other entities. The company’s goal is not to produce a “balanced” information diet for its users. People who are shocked that Facebook might be skewing their newsfeed probably shouldn’t have trusted them with their news diet in the first place, given its history. Remember those confusing and ever-changing privacy settings, and that experiment to see whether users’ moods could be manipulated by changing the newsfeed? This is not the company I’d trust to tell me what’s important in the world. Continue reading…
DAVAO CITY, Philippines — The police warned 14-year-old Bobby Alia that there would be consequences after he was accused of stealing a cellphone in November 2003, the boy’s mother said. A few days later he was dead, stabbed in the back with a butcher knife.
He was the third of Clarita Alia’s sons to die in Davao, the southern Philippines’ largest city, in killings that remain unsolved. A fourth was killed in 2007. All had been accused of crimes, all were stabbed and all, Ms. Alia said, had received similar warnings from the police.
For years, rights groups have called for an investigation into whether Davao’s mayor, Rodrigo Duterte — the tough-talking politician who next month will become president of the Philippines — was complicit in the killings of hundreds of people in Davao since the 1980s by what they describe as government-sanctioned death squads. Continue reading…
NEW YORK — Three out of every 10 gay or bisexual men in several cities in the U.S. South have been diagnosed with the AIDS virus, three times the national rate, according to a study about how common HIV infections are in metro areas.
The study echoes other research that reported higher rates of HIV diagnoses in the South, in urban areas, and in gay and bisexual men, but it is the first to look at how common HIV diagnoses are in these men by city.
“For the first time, we can see not only the numbers, but the proportions,” said Dr. Jonathan Mermin of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report found 21 of the 25 metro areas with the highest levels of HIV diagnosis in gay and bisexual men were in the South. HIV was diagnosed in about 3 in 10 gay and bisexual men in El Paso, Texas; Augusta, Georgia; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In Jackson, Mississippi, the rate was 4 in 10, the highest in the nation. Continue reading…
May 17 marks the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. In the U.S., President Barack Obama said the country is committed to the principle that everyone must be treated fairly and with respect, but there is work to be done.
“In too many places, LGBT individuals grow up forced to conceal or deny who they truly are for fear of persecution, discrimination and violence,” Obama said in a statement.
The president added that his administration has made “great strides,” including marriage equality as a result of last year’s landmark Supreme Court decision. Continue reading…
MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on Tuesday proposed legalizing gay marriage, a move that would enshrine on a national level a Supreme Court ruling last year that it was unconstitutional for states to bar same-sex couples from wedding.
Speaking at an event on the International Day Against Homophobia, Pena Nieto said he signed initiatives that would seek to add same-sex marriage provisions to Mexico’s constitution and the national civil code. Continue reading…