Something very strange and disturbing happened to me this week. If it was just relevant to me, it wouldn't be that important (except perhaps to me), and I wouldn't be writing this column about it. But it's something that is likely more important and more ominous than we can even imagine.

There are already common fraudulent schemes being perpetrated by both telephone and internet. One know as the "Grandparent Scam" is particularly reprehensible, first because it is perpetrated on elderly people who are, in general, more susceptible to tech-savvy criminals and second because it is based on the manipulation of familial love, trust, and compassion. The criminal running the Grandparent Scam calls or emails the victim, pretending to represent a grandchild who is now in trouble with the law or who needs money for a hospital bill for an injury that can't be discussed, say, with parents, because of the moral trouble that might ensue. They generally call late at night — say at four in the morning — because that adds to the confusion. The preferred mechanism of money movement is wire transfer — and that's a warning: don't transfer money by wire without knowing for certain who is receiving it, because once it's gone, it's not coming back.

Greta Thunberg's trans-Atlantic voyage on a 'zero-carbon yacht' has been rocked by revelations that crew will fly to New York in a gas-guzzling plane to bring the boat back to Europe.

It is claimed that this would generate more emissions than the yacht saves and threatens to leave the 16-year-old's plans to chart an environmentally friendly route to the United States in tatters.

On Wednesday, the Swedish eco-campaigner left Plymouth on the Malizia II for a two-week journey to the United Nations headquarters where she will address a climate change meeting.

But last night, it was confirmed that two crew will have to fly to the US east coast city to man the 60ft yacht on its return.

'We added the trip to New York City at very short notice, and as a result two people will need to fly over to the US in order to bring the boat back,' a Team Malizia spokeswoman told the Times.

After years of failed attempts to sue Yeshiva University, 38 former students who say they were sexually abused by three rabbis and other school staff decades ago can now seek justice under the Child Victims Act.

The victims say while they attended all-boys Yeshiva University High School, the principal, Rabbi George Finkelstein, and four other staffers variously sexually abused them, beginning in 1955 and continuing through 1986, according to the Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit.

The school received more than 20 complaints from parents and students about the alleged abuse but did nothing, the court papers allege.

One victim, Mordechai Twersky, claims he was twice sexually abused by Finkelstein in 1980 — and despite letting school officials know, they kept the rabbi at the school and even gave him the "Educator of the Year" award in 1985.

In 1995, Finkelstein was given the Heritage Award while the school had quietly fired him, the court documents allege.

The other former students — including 33 who filed suit anonymously — brought similar claims against the various staffers. Many of the victims claim they sought years of therapy because of the trauma of the incidents, the suit says.

A "hoax device" that looked like a pipe bomb led police to completely shut down the George Washington Bridge on Thursday night, a law enforcement source said.

The fake device — a piece of pipe capped on both ends — was planted in the middle of the upper level near the bridge's New Jersey tower, said the source.

A passing motorist noticed the pipe and called the cops.

The bridge's upper level was shut around 9:37 p.m., the Port Authority said. The lower level was reported shut at 10:21 p.m.

Frustrated motorists took to Twitter to ask when the bridge would reopen. The incident also caught Mayor de Blasio's attention.

Amid a rising tide of crime, inequality, and literal human waste, San Francisco, California has chosen to sanitize - language. Felons, offenders and addicts will now have to be called new, more politically correct names.

The new "person-first" language guidelines were recently introduced by the city's Board of Supervisors, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. From now on, a convicted felon released from jail will be called a "justice-involved person" or a "returning resident."

A juvenile delinquent will now be delicately referred to as a "young person impacted by the juvenile justice system." A drug addict will be called "a person with a history of substance use," while someone out on parole will be called a "person under supervision."

A four-year-old was among more than 1,000 children caught in possession of a blade at school last year, with one child threatening a teacher that they we re going to stab and kill them, according to Freedom of Information requests.

Figures obtained from police through FOI requests by 5 News reveal that there were a total of 1,144 knife possession offences recorded in England, Scotland, and Wales over the past 12 months, where the suspect was a child.

Weapons seized by officers included hunting knives, machetes, and a samurai sword, with a police force in Wales called to one school where teachers were concerned that a four-year-old had a knife.

Details also revealed that an 11-year-old child in Manchester, who replaced the nib of a highlighter pen with a blade, told another pupil: "Listen to me or else I'll stab you."

Two brothers charged with murdering a Pakistani social media star and prompting Islamabad to tighten laws against "honor killings" might be set free - after their parents said they forgive them for killing their own sister.

Social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch, dubbed "Pakistani Kim Kardashian," was found dead in July 2016. Her brothers Waseem and Aslam were charged with her murder, apparently in a practice known as "honor killing." Now their parents are trying to get them released by telling the court that all is forgiven.

The affidavit filed by the family on Wednesday uses an old provision in Pakistani law that once allowed perpetrators of 'honor killings' to walk free if forgiven and pardoned by other family members. However, the Pakistani parliament unanimously passed a new law closing this loophole back in 2016 - prompted by Baloch's death, no less.

A priest wrapped a teen boy in plastic and tape and left him in a janitor's room for more than an hour at a Michigan church, prosecutors alleged Thursday as they filed a charge of false imprisonment.

The alleged incident occurred in 2013. But the attorney general's office, citing records from the Kalamazoo Diocese, said the Rev. Brian Stanley "had been engaging in this type of conduct with the binding materials for decades."

Stanley, 57, was in custody and not immediately available for comment. He appeared via video feed for a hearing in Allegan and was formally charged with unlawful imprisonment. He was being held on $5,000 bond and ordered to have no contact with minors as a condition of his bond.

The attorney general's office said the incident occurred at St. Margaret Church in Otsego where Stanley had been asked by the boy's family to counsel him. Investigators said the teen was wrapped in plastic and his mouth and eyes were covered with tape.

We have entered a new era of mass Historical Amnesia, and oddly enough, we really seem to be enjoying it. To force a metaphor, it's like we're burning the entire library of history so we can toast marshmallows on the flames.

The main reason for this new period of forgetting is the internet. And this is ironic because the internet was supposed to be the great engine of eternal remembering, the infinite library of Jorge Luis Borges brought to life. Once information entered the net it was supposed to remain there, fixed and saved forever, or so the pioneering seers of the internet proclaimed back in the 90s. However, without us realizing it, the internet has unleashed a spate of unintended consequences — as all unmonitored mass psycho-social experiments tend to, and all are connected to different aspects of amnesia; from brain function to historical erasure.

The first form of the New Amnesia is the shrinkage of concentration spans caused by mobile phone usage. A Microsoft Corp study of 2015 revealed that the attention spans decreased from 12 seconds on average in 2000 to just 8.25 seconds in 2015. That's a human attention span which is shorter than that of a goldfish (9 seconds). This is going on while we rewire our brains to skim and flick, with the average phone user picking up their phone 1,500 times per week, or 214 times a day. That's a lot of distraction.

In "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," journalist Nicholas Carr claimed that the internet is teaching our brains, through neuroplasticity, to inhabit a distracted mode, more and more of the time. We're fooling ourselves into thinking we're multi-tasking when all we are doing is learning how to skim, forget and move on. This habit prevents people from retaining content because so much information is being presented at the same time. We're overloaded and we're forgetting even as we watch.

In our increasingly tech-dependent society exposure to cell phone radiation may also negatively affect the brains of adolescents, causing potentially harmful effects to their memory performance, according to a research team at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. We're also becoming dependent on the internet to 'be our memory for us'. Rather than trawl our minds for facts, we jump on Google. How many times have you done this yourself, when stuck for a word or fact while in company with friends? "Wait," you say 'I'll Google it". As a result, we're letting natural personal brain memory atrophy and 'digital dementia' is occurring, according to German neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer.

Even before The New York Times launched its "All Slavery, All the Time" project, no one could accuse that paper of skimping on its race coverage, particularly stories about black males killed by white(ish) police officers.

Here's one you haven't heard about. I happened upon it by sheer accident.

Antwon Rose II was a 17-year-old boy shot by an East Pittsburgh police officer in June 2018 after he bolted from a jitney car that had been stopped by the officer. The Times published about a half-dozen stories on Antwon Rose — or as the Times calls him, "Antwon, who was unarmed."