A Louisiana priest received a standing ovation from his church over the weekend following new details about sexual abuse of a 9-year-old boy in the 1970s.

A report released by Minnesota Public Radio last month included a never-before-published affidavit, which had been sealed by a federal judge in 1995. The document indicated that Father Gilbert Dutel "had been accused of coercing young adult men into having sex."

"Well, he would just put his arms around me and he was I guess trying to be consoling, kind of gentle and then he just started playing with me and he unzipped my pants," the victim recalled, according to the affidavit. "He performed oral sex on me."

The victim said that he had around eight sexual encounters with Dutel in total. Two other priests were also mentioned in the affidavit, but this was the first time that Dutel's name had been made public. According to Minnesota Public Radio, Bishop Harry Flynn later told lawyers that Dutel had been "cured," and that the diocese needed to keep him due to a shortage of priests.

My heart is broken as I witness the suffering of the Palestinian people and the seeming indifference of Israelis. All my life I've been a champion of Israel, proud of its many accomplishments in science and technology that have benefited the world, insistent on the continuing need for the Jewish people to have a state that offers protections from anti-Semitism that has reared its head continuously throughout Christian and Islamic societies, willing to send my only child to serve in the Israeli Army (the paratroopers unit-tzanchanim), and enjoying the pleasures of long swaths of time in which I could study in Jerusalem and celebrate Shabbat in a city that weekly closed down the hustle and bustle of the capitalist marketplace for a full 25 hours. And though as editor of Tikkun I printed articles challenging the official story of how Israel came to be, showing its role in forcibly ejecting tens of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 and allowing Jewish terrorist groups under the leadership of (future Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir) to create justified fears that led hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians to flee for their lives, I always told myself that the dominant humanity of the Jewish people and the compassionate strain within Torah would reassert itself once Israel felt secure.

That belief began to wane in the past eight years when Israel, faced with a Palestinian Authority that promoted nonviolence and sought reconciliation and peace, ignored the Saudi Arabian-led peace initiative that would have granted Israel the recognition that it had long sought, an end to hostilities, and a recognized place in the Middle East, refused to stop its expansion of settlements in the West Bank and imposed an economically crushing blockade on Gaza. Even Hamas, whose hateful charter called for Israel's destruction, had decided to accept the reality of Israel's existence, and while unable to embrace its "right" to exist, nevertheless agreed to reconcile with the Palestinian Authority and in that context live within the terms that the PA would negotiate with Israel.

The New York Police Department said on Tuesday it was investigating a report that two emergency medical technicians jumped in to stop four police officers who were punching a handcuffed patient.

The NYPD's Internal Affairs unit was looking into the report that the officers repeatedly struck a shackled and handcuffed patient on a stretcher before the New York Fire Department EMTs intervened to end the beating, an NYPD spokesman said.

He declined to confirm details of the July 20 incident at the 67th Precinct station house in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, which was first reported by the New York Daily News. Fire Department officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Citing an FDNY report, the Daily News said the police officers and the EMTs had been called to the station house to help transport the patient, who was combative and banging his head against the wall, to a nearby hospital.

The emotionally disturbed patient spit on the officers and swore at them, and they responded by hitting him in the face, pulling him off the stretcher to the ground and then hurling him back onto the stretcher, the Daily News said.

Now in its fourth year, the Syrian war is as bloody as ever, with more than 170,000 people killed in the conflict since 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Journalist and photographer Ben Taub has spent recent weeks in Kilis, a Turkish city near the Syrian border, documenting the lives of people displaced by the ongoing horror of war.

"Syria's war can be heard every day in distant booms and ambulance sirens," Taub told BuzzFeed. "For most Syrians, escaping the line of fire does not qualify as having left the war behind, as the crisis continues to haunt those from whom it took homes, friends, family members, pets, comfort, and sometimes limbs."

Taub said he wants his work to "give a sense of this loss, but also a glimmer of hope through the strength and resilience Syria's civilians demonstrate in spite of what war has taken from them."

"Bakri Douer's son didn't give a name, but did explain that he's in need of medical care for a congenital heart condition. A long-healed scar bisects his ribcage from prior heart surgery. While medical care and NGO support is readily available to registered Syrian refugees in southern Turkey, residents of the makeshift camp lack documents and have no addresses, no running water, and no electricity for which to pay and show utility bills as proof of residency. Proof of residency would render him eligible for the medical treatment he needs. Meanwhile, he can sometimes be found begging in front of the few hotels in Kilis."

A mother, alerted by a foul odor, found out her son died four days earlier in their Pennsylvania home, and on Monday an autopsy was under way and the boy's father remained jailed in the case.

The 8-year-old boy, Jarrod Tutko, Jr., was among five children in the family who suffer from medical or developmental problems, according to the Harrisburg Patriot-News website.

He was being cared for by his father in an upper bedroom of the Harrisburg home while his mother, Kimberly Tutko, tended to his 10-year-old sister, who is comatose, on another floor, according to the Patriot-News website.

The mother had not seen the boy, who was prone to smear feces on himself, in four years out of fear she would carry an infection back to his sister, the news site reported.

One of Britain's most powerful businessmen has sharply criticized EU-US sanctions against Putin's government, warning they lack foresight and could result in countless UK job losses.

Lord Bramford, chairman of engineering firm JCB, said it was "absurd" that his company - a prolific dealer to Russia and Britain's market leader in construction machinery - would be severely impacted by an array of sanctions emanating from Brussels. Decisions orchestrated by EU diplomats, could jeopardize British jobs, he added.

Lord Bramford's comments followed an EU government decision to enforce further economic sanctions against the Russian Federation in the aftermath of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 tragedy in eastern Ukraine in July.

In the most heated phase of geopolitical tensions between Moscow and the West since the close of the Cold War, the sanctions are targeted at Russia's oil, defense, dual-use goods and sensitive technology industries.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has urged his government to come up with countermeasures to Western sanctions imposed against Russia over the Ukrainian conflict.

Putin stressed that Moscow's response should be "cautious."

"Obviously we need to do it cautiously in order to support domestic manufacturers, but not hurt consumers," he said on Tuesday.

The president expects the government to present a response to the sanctions as soon as possible.

Putin said that the political tools of pressure being used against the Russian economy are unacceptable, stressing that they go against international rules and norms.

Putin's comments come on the same day Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said that Moscow will consider possible responses to EU sanctions against Russian airlines.

A British citizen has renounced her dual nationality by burning her Israeli passport outside Downing Street in a protest against the IDF's assault on Gaza, and the British government's ongoing support for Israel.

Sonya Levene, supported by the campaign group Jews For Justice For Palestine, told onlookers she wished to denounce Israel's actions in Gaza, which have killed more than 1,800 people according the official UN estimates.

"Why should I, a third generation British Jew of Eastern European heritage with no link to Israel, accept what the Zionists would have you believe is written in the Bible?" Levene said in a speech at the gates to Downing Street.

The dual citizenship was forced upon Sonya, she claims, after she attempted to leave Israel after a year spent with her family around 20 years ago. She was told she needed to accept the citizenship if she wished to return to Israel. She understands it is now very unlikely she will ever see her family there again.

Over 460,000 Gazans have been displaced by Operation Protective Edge, with over 80 percent of those killed believed to be civilians. Israel has lost a total of 64 IDF troops since the assault began.

The US whistleblower Edward Snowden has visited Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre in his first public appearance since coming to Russia a year ago. Reporters were hardly able to recognize the former CIA employee without his signature look glasses.

The NSA whistleblower apparently decided to mark a year of asylum in Russia by making a public appearance. He attended the Tsar's Bride opera in Moscow's historic Bolshoi Theatre.

Эдвард Сноуден тайно посетил оперу в Большом театре http://t.co/Vm9E3twAH9pic.twitter.com/RsvMrH9Ez7
- LIFENEWS (@lifenews_ru) August 5, 2014

Snowden slipped in almost unnoticed. He sat in one of the theatre's boxes, admiring Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov's opera that recounts a tragic love story during the time of Ivan the Terrible's reign in Russia.

Religious scholar Reza Aslan blasted proponents of the so-called "prosperity gospel" last month, claiming the materialistic Christian movement ran directly counter to the teachings of Jesus.

Aslan was speaking at the 2014 Indian Summer Festival in Vancouver about his book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

During a question and answer session, the University of California at Riverside professor was asked about the portrayal of Jesus in movies.

"I love all fictional presentations of Jesus. I think they are fantastic, whether it is the Last Temptation of Christ or The Passion - both of which are fiction. But - sorry about that, did I break that to you? - but again for me what is fascinating about those is it is just a representation of what I have been talking about all along, which is the incredible malleability of the Christ story, the way that it can become whatever you want it to become."