João Teixeira de Faria, known as "John of God," was arrested in December, and faces accusations from dozens of women, who allege he sexually abused them while they were seeking spiritual guidance and treatment.

On Wednesday, Rosângela Rodrigues dos Santos, a judge in Abadiânia, the small town in central Brazil where Faria's spiritual center is located, accepted the charges brought against him by four women, and said he must face trial.

Prosecutors allege that Faria raped two of the women, and used fraudulent means to sexually abuse the other two.

Faria, who became internationally famous when Winfrey broadcast a report on his psychic healing methods in 2013, has said he is innocent, and denied the accusations.

The most dire diplomatic crisis of the Trump administration, or maybe just the weirdest, began without much notice in November 2016, some three weeks after the new president was elected. An American working at the U.S. Embassy in Havana-some call him Patient Zero-complained that he had heard strange noises outside his home. "It was annoying to the point where you had to go in the house and close all the windows and doors and turn up the TV," the diplomat told ProPublica. Zero discussed the sound with his next-door neighbor, who also worked at the embassy. The neighbor said, yeah, he too had heard noises, which he described as "mechanical-sounding."

Several months later, a third staffer at the embassy described suffering from hearing loss he associated with a strange sound. Before long, more and more people at the embassy were talking about it. They, too, started to get sick. The symptoms were as diverse as they were terrifying-memory loss, mental stupor, hearing problems, headaches. In all, some two dozen people were eventually evacuated for testing and treatment.

The outbreak at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba wasn't the only mysterious illness to pop up in the headlines. Around the same time that embassy officials were preparing to fly home, more than 20 students at an Oklahoma high school suddenly came down with baffling symptoms-uncontrollable muscle spasms, even paralysis. A few years before, a similar incident at a school in upstate New York had caught the attention of the local Fox News affiliate, which sent parents into a panic over the possibility that their children had been stricken by an unidentified immune disorder. But the Cuban mystery, the Trump administration insisted, was different. It was not some environmental mishap, but something far more diabolical.

Encouraged by U.S. officials, the media quickly unfurled a story that the mysterious sound was an "attack"-an act of war. Some kind of "acoustic weapon" had been secretly aimed at the diplomats, in an effort to reduce them to brain-damaged zombies. The story got told with a side helping of Cold War envy. Private contractors and the Pentagon's own hip military lab, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, had long been working to develop an arsenal of sound weapons. There had been some limited success with cumbersome devices like MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio) and LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device), designed to cause excruciating ear pain to disperse mobs on the ground and pirates at sea. The dream, of course, was to get past such giant blunderbusses to something more portable and powerful, like a Flash Gordon ray gun. But the air force, after some experiments, concluded that any such effort using sound waves would be "unlikely" to succeed due to "basic physical principles." If someone had developed a portable acoustic weapon, they had leapfrogged well beyond the skill set of a Raytheon or Navistar and into the arsenal of Q Branch from the Bond movies.

Trump was right!
The #FakeNews media is the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE...

The Washington Post has a guest contributor who ordered the deaths of 26 journalists in Yemen.

The Islamist contributor Mohammed al-Houthi likes to carry an AK47 with him even to interviews.And now this...
Mohammed al-Houthi was recently filmed launching a shoulder-fired missile while chanting "Death to Israel!... Death to America!"

A race row has broken out in South Africa after health officials advertised for 100 new doctors, but did not allow white medics to apply for specialist roles.

The health department in the KwaZulu-Natal province expanded its registrar programme for 2019 from 314 to 414, but aimed to fill the new posts with only black candidates.

Health bosses said the move was implemented to redress the country's historical racial imbalance of Apartheid that saw most high-ranking positions filed by white doctors.

Campaigners and human rights activists have branded the recruitment policy 'discriminatory, unconstitutional and racist'.

Leaked documents show the department wanted to train a total of 366 black doctors and had already recruited 32 Indian, 12 white and four mixed race registrars, but need a further 100 black medics to meet employment equity targets.

Thousands of requests by men to bring in child and adolescent brides to live in the United States were approved over the past decade, according to government data obtained by The Associated Press. In one case, a 49-year-old man applied for admission for a 15-year-old girl.

The approvals are legal: The Immigration and Nationality Act does not set minimum age requirements for the person making the request or for that person's spouse or fiancee. By contrast, to bring in a parent from overseas, a petitioner has to be at least 21 years old.

And in weighing petitions, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services goes by whether the marriage is legal in the spouse or fiancee's home country and then whether the marriage would be legal in the state where the petitioner lives.

The data raises questions about whether the immigration system may be enabling forced marriage and about how U.S. laws may be compounding the problem despite efforts to limit child and forced marriage. Marriage between adults and minors is not uncommon in the U.S., and most states allow children to marry with some restrictions.

With swelling transient encampments abutting seven-figure homes, the beachside enclave has emerged as a flashpoint for the inequality shaping Los Angeles - and a real-world test case for the liberal ideology of the area's showbiz residents.

After the first attack, Randy Osborn figured it was just his turn. Tire slashings in his east Venice Beach neighborhood had become commonplace. But when his vintage Land Rover was hit a sixth time in the course of a few months, Osborn, who runs a small virtual reality company and has lived in Venice for seven years, began to worry he was being singled out.

"It may have been random, but it sure felt targeted and concentrated," says Osborn, who now protects his tires each night with a jury-rigged plywood-and-chain contraption that has so far deterred the assailants. Every time he takes his family out of town, he worries about his house being robbed. "It's not a very fun way to live," he says. A lot of residents within Osborn's 15-block area just east of Lincoln Boulevard - where actor Viggo Mortensen owns a home and director Jon Favreau is opening a production office - have similar stories. And though they can't say for sure, Osborn and others suspect the crime is tied to several homeless encampments that have sprung up nearby in the past 15 months.

Los Angeles is grappling with a homeless epidemic. "It's the worst human catastrophe in America," says Andy Bales, a pastor who runs the Union Rescue Mission on Skid Row. Faced with a growing crisis, city leaders last year budgeted more than $100 million for affordable housing, addiction treatment, job placement and mental health services. And yet, as L.A.'s real estate prices soar, so does the city's homeless population. And nowhere have the twin forces of inaccessible housing and inequality created a more explosive mix than in Venice Beach, a hotbed of entertainment executives and talent where the median home price is $1.9 million. Many of these residents are now grappling with a quality-of-life issue that defies their own liberal ideals.

The Internal Revenue Service ignores warnings from the Social Security administration about illegal aliens using fake Social Security numbers.

This practice is now coming under scrutiny following the revelation that Gustavo Perez Arriaga was using at least two fake Social Security numbers to live in the United States. Arriaga has been charged with the murder of California police corporal Ronil Singh. It is not known whether the IRS ever ignored Arriaga's fake Social Security numbers directly.

Arriaga was using two fake Social Security numbers, according to available information provided by a source close to law enforcement: 537-89-0142 and 667-28-2314.

Arriaga lived in the United States long enough to rack up multiple arrests for impaired driving. Arriaga was officially wanted for four years, but ICE officers had no contact with him prior to Corporal Singh's shooting. Stanislaus County sheriff Adam Christianson blames the lack of contact with ICE on sanctuary laws, saying at a press conference that law enforcement should be able to do its job without legislative interference.

Who is going to kill all my spiders?

This week, the American Psychological Association delivered some sad news for fans of "traditional masculinity." According to the organization's new "Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men," the "harmful" ideology of masculinity - marked by "stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression" together with "anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence" - has got to go.

Here I imagine a mournful, windswept cowboy - preferably Val Kilmer from Tombstone, or maybe Harrison Ford from Indiana Jones, but wearing a ten-gallon hat - riding off into the sunset, slumped and grim, dragging a sad cache of uneaten rare steaks and unused power tools behind him. Farewell, traditional masculinity! You are too toxic! The APA told us so! Don't let those swinging Old West barroom doors hit you on the way out, causing the old-timey piano music to abruptly stop and all the dust-strewn poker players who may or may not have tuberculosis to turn and stare at you in shock and dismay!

This document reviews a proposed draft for the treatment of men and boys presented before the American Psychological Association's Council of Representatives in August, 2018

Peer-Review of Draft Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men

I read with great interest the draft guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men. I appreciated the hard work and time (13 years) that went into this. I also appreciated some of the important points the draft guidelines bring up, such as the importance for therapists to be familiar with working with men and boys who may be non-traditional in their approach to masculinity. However, I felt that the good messages get lost in a lot of potentially anti-male rhetoric that I suspect might be offensive to many men (and women) particularly those who identify as "traditional." Indeed, much of the manuscript is quite repetitive and tends to read a bit like a screed against traditional masculinity rather than a thoughtful, objective piece. Also, literature on the neurobiological origins of gender are missing, and more tangentially, the piece tends to make sweeping generalizations about other controversial areas (such as claiming media violence viewing is a risk factor for aggression, a belief increasingly in doubt) that detract from the article's central points. I hope my following observations will be viewed as constructive, even where critical, which is my intent.

"Your heart
is too small to hold
this many people"
lyrics to a song of the Yellow Vests addressed to Macron

"I am not a seed of Chance
I, the moulder of the new life
I am a child of Need
and a mature child of Wrath...
...Listen to the voice of the winds
For thousands of years!
Inside my word
all humanity hurts..."
Kostas Varnalis (1884-1974), The Guide (Ο Οδηγητής) (*)

On the evening of 14 July 1789, the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt woke King Louis XVI to inform him about the storming of the Bastille.

"Why, is this a rebellion?"the King wondered.

"No Sir. It's a revolution", replied the Duke.

What is happening today in France is one of the most significant political developments on the European continent after the collapse of the Soviet Union almost thirty years ago.