These days, it's not entirely uncommon to hear that Jesus' image has been found in the most unlikeliest of places. On pieces of toast, windows and in other bizarre locations, the Christian figure's likeness has purportedly appeared. Last week, though, a new location was added to the ever-growing list of apparitions, as Brian Krantz, a resident of Saugus, Mass., claims he found Christ's face on a drop-cloth.

In an interview with WHDH-TV, Krantz explained that he first used the cloth when he was painting his shutters four years ago. Then, he subsequently used it 50 or 60 additional times after that, before noticing what he believes could be a sign from God.

"My heart went a million miles an hour. I was hyperventilating," he told the outlet. "I can't deny this. This is what it is. It looks like Jesus Christ."

If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons" then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.

Bonnie Kerness and Ojore Lutalo, both of whom I met in Newark, N.J., a few days ago at the office of American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch, have fought longer and harder than perhaps any others in the country against the expanding abuse of prisoners, especially the use of solitary confinement. Lutalo, once a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, first wrote Kerness in 1986 while he was a prisoner at Trenton State Prison, now called New Jersey State Prison. He described to her the bleak and degrading world of solitary confinement, the world of the prisoners like him held in the so-called management control unit, which he called "a prison within a prison." Before being released in 2009, Lutalo was in the management control unit for 22 of the 28 years he served for the second of two convictions - the first for a bank robbery and the second for a gun battle with a drug dealer. He kept his sanity, he told me, by following a strict regime of exercising in his tiny cell, writing, meditating and tearing up newspapers to make collages that portrayed his prison conditions.

"The guards in riot gear would suddenly wake you up at 1 a.m., force you to strip and make you grab all your things and move you to another cell just to harass you," he said when we spoke in Newark. "They had attack dogs with them that were trained to go for your genitals. You spent 24 hours alone one day in your cell and 22 the next. If you do not have a strong sense of purpose you don't survive psychologically. Isolation is designed to defeat prisoners mentally, and I saw a lot of prisoners defeated."

Lutalo's letter was Kerness' first indication that the U.S. prison system was creating something new - special detention facilities that under international law are a form of torture. He wrote to her: "How does one go about articulating desperation to another who is not desperate? How does one go about articulating the psychological stress of knowing that people are waiting for me to self-destruct?"

"Americans have a remarkable ability 'to look reality right in the eye' and deny it."
~Garrison Keillor~

The World Health Organization defines mental health as "a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community." A state of well-being is obviously more than just the absence of disease. It assumes that a human being is reasonably functional mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Similarly, this definition can be applied to healthy communities with the addition of social functionality as another aspect of well-being.

However, most readers are aware of the decline in mental health treatment within the past three decades. Whereas thirty years ago many working people had insurance benefits for outpatient psychotherapy as well as in-patient treatment, not only have the benefits dramatically decreased, but massive unemployment makes it virtually impossible for millions of people to pay for any kind of health care, physical or mental.

Meanwhile, nearly all inhabitants and communities of industrial civilization are struggling to cope with living in societies in unprecedented decline. Energy depletion, climate change, economic contraction, and the collapse of myriad institutions such as healthcare, education, infrastructure, and police and fire services weigh heavily on the wallets and emotions of millions. In the United States, the realities of the sequester debacle will only exacerbate the unraveling, and for many, avoiding homelessness and starvation are top priorities with nothing left over for any kind of healthcare. Yet it is precisely this demographic who are contending with monumental stress, and for many of them, just as they may be one paycheck away from being homeless, they may also be one stress away from mental and emotional meltdown.

The head of the Colorado Department of Corrections has been shot and killed at his home, and authorities say the gunman is on the loose.

Sheriff's Lt. Jeff Kramer says Tom Clements was shot to death around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday night when he answered his front door in Monument, north of Colorado Springs. Police are searching for the shooter.

Clements, 58, lived in Monument and was appointed to serve as the head of the DOC by Governor John Hickenlooper in January 2011, reports CBS station KCNC in Denver. He oversaw operations of state and private prisons and parole operations. Clements came to Colorado from Missouri, where he worked for 31 years in the Missouri Department of Corrections.

Editor's warning: This story contains graphic content.

An Ohio judge has sentenced T.J. Lane, the Ohio teen charged with shooting three students to death and wounding three others last February, to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Lane showed up to his sentencing wearing a white T-shirt with the word "KILLER" in capital letters scrawled on it -- the same word police say he had emblazoned on his shirt the day of the shootings at Chardon High School.

Lane, 18, pleaded guilty last month to all charges against him in the Feb. 27, 2012, shootings, in which he opened fire on a cafeteria table full of students in the rural community of Chardon.

In a brief statement during his sentencing on Tuesday, Lane flipped his middle finger at people in the courtroom, which included family members of his victims, reported NBC affiliate WKYC.com. He revealed his "KILLER" T-shirt to the court once he was inside, taking off a blue button-down he had worn on the way in, the station reported.

A Rothville, Mo., woman, who had been reported missing along with her young daughter, allegedly faked her abduction, according to the county sheriff.

Rachel Koechner, 28, and her 4-year-old daughter, Zoee Sandner, were reported missing last Thursday night by Koechner's mother and boyfriend after the boyfriend received a text that read "help me." They had last seen the pair earlier that same day, Brenda Koechner, Rachel's mother, said.

"I didn't know what to think," Brenda Koechner said.

The elder Koechner says she was worried and didn't have a clue as to where her daughter and granddaughter might be.

Police received information that Koechner and her daughter had been spotted in the nearby town of Brookfield that same day, where Devon Sandner, Koechner's ex-husband and the father of her child lives, so it was believed they might all be together, Chariton County Sheriff Chris Hughes said.

He had a knack for soothing soldiers who'd just seen their buddies killed by bombs. He knew how to comfort medics sickened by the smell of blood and troops haunted by the screams of horribly burned Iraqi children.

Capt. Peter Linnerooth was an Army psychologist. He counseled soldiers during some of the fiercest fighting in Iraq. Hundreds upon hundreds sought his help. For nightmares and insomnia. For shock and grief. And for reaching that point where they just wanted to end it all.

Linnerooth did such a good job his Army comrades dubbed him The Wizard. His "magic" was deceptively simple: an instant rapport with soldiers, an empathetic manner, a big heart.

For a year during one of the bloodiest stretches of the Iraq war, Linnerooth met with soldiers 60 to 70 hours a week. Sometimes he'd hop on helicopters or join convoys, risking mortars and roadside bombs. Often, though, the soldiers came to his shoebox-sized "office" at Camp Liberty in Baghdad.

Linnerooth knew when to be a friend and when to be a professional Army officer. He could be tough, even gruff at times, but he also was a gentle soul, a born storyteller, a proud dad who decorated his quarters with his kids' drawings and photos. He carried his newborn daughter's shoes on his ruck sack for good luck.

Linnerooth left Iraq in 2007, a few months short of the end of his 15-month tour. He couldn't take it anymore. He'd heard enough terrible stories. He'd seen enough dead and dying.

A dog in Oklahoma City came home on Saturday carrying a dead newborn in its mouth.

A house sitter, whose name has not been released, was at the home at the time, KOCO reported.

The house sitter told KFOR that the dog, a 6-month-old mixed-breed named Luke, showed up at the door with the body of a three to five-pound infant in his mouth.

"He was carrying it just like a momma pup," she told the station, "and layed it at my feet."

The house sitter stressed that the body had no markings or signs of trauma, and that Luke would never have hurt anyone. She believes the dog was trying to help the infant.

"I believe [Luke] found it, picked it up and brought it. There was no trauma you could tell he inflicted," she said.

With the appointment of an emergency manager on Thursday, Detroit became the largest city in US history to be taken over by the state government. The new manager, bankruptcy lawyer Kevin Orr, will have vast powers and one essential task: to carry out a brutal assault on the jobs and living conditions of the working class.

What is taking place in Detroit has national and international significance. The Financial Times of London cited one person involved in the discussions on the imposition of a financial manager as saying, "This will be the best case study of what it means to restructure a city." In an editorial, the newspaper called for "radical - and unpopular - action" to address Detroit's financial woes, a position shared by virtually every mass circulation newspaper in the US.

The "restructuring" of Detroit is a euphemism for a slash and burn policy of destroying city jobs, cutting wages and pensions, gutting social services from sanitation and firefighting to health care and education, and handing over city assets to private bankers and speculators. The very social forces responsible for the city's present state are utilizing the crisis of their own making to step up their plundering of public resources and further redistribute the wealth from the bottom to the top.

Contamination from Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions and other military-related pollution is suspected of causing a sharp rises in congenital birth defects, cancer cases, and other illnesses throughout much of Iraq.

Many prominent doctors and scientists contend that DU contamination is also connected to the recent emergence of diseases that were not previously seen in Iraq, such as new illnesses in the kidney, lungs, and liver, as well as total immune system collapse. DU contamination may also be connected to the steep rise in leukaemia, renal, and anaemia cases, especially among children, being reported throughout many Iraqi governorates.

There has also been a dramatic jump in miscarriages and premature births among Iraqi women, particularly in areas where heavy US military operations occurred, such as Fallujah.

Official Iraqi government statistics show that, prior to the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people. By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000 people, and, by 2005, it had doubled to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. Current estimates show the increasing trend continuing.

As shocking as these statistics are, due to a lack of adequate documentation, research, and reporting of cases, the actual rate of cancer and other diseases is likely to be much higher than even these figures suggest.

"Cancer statistics are hard to come by, since only 50 per cent of the healthcare in Iraq is public," Dr Salah Haddad of the Iraqi Society for Health Administration and Promotion told Al Jazeera.

"The other half of our healthcare is provided by the private sector, and that sector is deficient in their reporting of statistics. Hence, all of our statistics in Iraq must be multiplied by two. Any official numbers are likely only half of the real number."