Jerry Nadeau, 72, (left) and his husband, John Banvard, 100, stand outside their home in Chula Vista, Calif.

Cam Buker for StoryCorps

When John Banvard, 100, met Gerard “Jerry” Nadeau, 72, in 1993, neither of them had been openly gay.

“When we met, we were sort of in the closet, and I’d never had a real relationship. Now, we’ve been together almost 25 years,” Jerry tells John during a StoryCorps interview.

“What would it have been like if you didn’t meet me?” Jerry asks John.

“I would have continued being lonely,” John says. “I’d been absolutely lost.”

Both are veterans, having served in World War II (John) and Vietnam (Jerry), and when they moved into the veterans home together in Chula Vista, Calif., in 2010, Jerry says people there wondered what their relationship was.

“Well, when we got married, they knew what our relationship was,” Jerry says, laughing.

The couple married in 2013, and John says he was surprised by the warm reception they received. “I was expecting we’d be ridiculed, and there was very little of that,” he says.

“We’d gotten married at the veterans home, and we said, ‘If you came to see the bride, you’re out of luck.’ Do you remember that?” Jerry asks John.

“Yes, of course,” John says. The two indulge in the memory of a casual wedding — a frank display, if you will, of their unabashed love — featuring hot dogs as a main course, which, John says, “is hardly wedding food.”

Later, their achievement was affirmed by a simple introduction. “I was with you in the cafeteria, and somebody came up with their family, and they said, ‘This is Gerard Nadeau, and this is his husband, John,’ ” Jerry recounts. “I’d never heard that before.”

“Yes, that was very nice,” John says.

“You’ve made my life complete,” Jerry tells John.

“I could say the same to you,” John replied. “I think we’re probably as happy together as any two people you’re likely to meet.”

Produced for Morning Edition by Liyna Anwar.

StoryCorps is a national nonprofit that gives people the chance to interview friends and loved ones about their lives. These conversations are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, allowing participants to leave a legacy for future generations. Learn more, including how to interview someone in your life, at StoryCorps.org.

All images courtesy of Brad Abrahams. Detail from First Time by David Huggins (left); Film still of Huggins from Love and Saucers (right)

Losing your virginity is supposed to be memorable. Most people look back on the act with affection and, probably, a little embarrassment. But David Huggins says the first time he had sex was more—er, out of this world—than most.

“When I was 17, I lost my virginity to a female extraterrestrial,” the 74-year-old says in a documentary about him called Love and Saucers. “That’s all I can say about it.”

The coitus in question allegedly went down in 1961, when Huggins was a teenager living on his parents’ farm in rural Georgia. It wasn’t the first time extraterrestrials had appeared to him; he’d been seeing strange creatures since he was eight. But on this day, as he was walking through woods near his house, an alien woman appeared and seduced him. “I thought, if anything, I’d be losing it in the backseat of a Ford—something like that. But it didn’t work out that way,” he says in the film.

Film still from Love and Saucers, picturing Huggins holding his painting First Time

According to Huggins, these visits from extraterrestrials, and his sexual relationship with them, continued into adulthood. When I interviewed him for this story, Huggins told me his last encounter with Crescent, his name for the woman in the woods, was six months ago. “I was sitting down in a chair, and the woman, Crescent, was behind me, and she put her arms around me,” he said. “And that’s about it. I don’t know anything else outside of that.”

Huggins is unnervingly matter-of-fact when he talks about his encounters. It sets him apart from what most of us expect from truthers and UFO enthusiasts. He’s not in it for the notoriety and doesn’t care if anyone believes him. When Huggins talks about fathering hundreds of alien babies—and yes, that’s another facet of his encounters—he sounds about as even-keeled as a farmer explaining crop rotations.

It’s one of the things that drew filmmaker Brad Abrahams to track Huggins down in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he lives now. Abrahams heard Huggins’s story on a podcast about UFOs and the paranormal. “In a sea of outlandish claims, there was one that rose to the surface,” he said. “And that was David’s story.”

https://oembed.vice.com/pj61Ns6?playerjs=true&img=1

Huggins was born in rural Georgia in 1944. In Love and Saucers, he talks about hunting for arrowheads in nearby fields for fun and not liking the evangelical Baptist church his grandparents took him to sometimes. When strange beings that no one else could see started appearing to him around the farm, he thought he was losing his mind.

“I am sitting under a tree, and I hear this voice say, ‘David, behind you.’ And I turned around and there is this little hairy guy with large glowing eyes coming straight towards me. I thought it was the bogeyman. I didn’t know what to think of it,” he says in the film. Another day, an “insect-like being” that reminded Huggins of a praying mantis appeared. “I was very terrified,” he says. “It was like, ‘What in the world am I looking at?’ And for an eight-year-old, you don’t know what to think.”

Once the shock wore off, Huggins says his encounters were weird, but not all that threatening. When he left Georgia in the mid 60s for art school in New York City, the beings followed. Nocturnal visits from Crescent, the ET who deflowered him, became routine. “My relationship with Crescent was warm and friendly. A little strange. What do I mean, a little. Very strange. She was my girlfriend, really,” Huggins says in the film. “A very unconventional relationship,” he adds.

Floating Up, David Huggins (left); Huggins in his studio with a painting of an alien woman he says he had sex with (right)

One of the first paintings Huggins ever made was of him and Crescent, having sex. “[The painting’s] not really all that good. She was on top of me, I reach my climax, then she and the insect being leave,” he says. Similar paintings fill his apartment. They’re surreal and a little childlike, dominated by deep blues and greens.

This is another thing that sets Huggins apart from most people with alien abduction stories: He paints his encounters. It started in 1987, when Huggins started remembering details from early visits. He says the deluge was triggered by Budd Hopkins’s book Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods.

“It was like a compulsion. I was being led to the book,” he says in the film. “There is this chapter ‘Other Women, Other Men,’ and I start reading it. And I go, Oh my God, this is the woman I never told anyone about. As I was reading it, memory upon memory came flooding back. It was image upon image. They wouldn’t stop. I think what bothered me the most is I didn’t know what to do with it. I was so scared.”

“It seemed like he was almost going crazy… from not being able to process these experiences that happened to him. What were they? Why him? It really sounded like he was losing his grip on his life and reality,” Abrahams told me. “And then, apparently, he got this message from [the beings] that he should paint the experiences, and as soon as he started doing that, it changed him.

“He said it was a release. He was able to sleep for the first time in weeks. And since then, he has painted every single detail of every encounter. A hundred-something paintings. It is art therapy. I don’t know if that’s how David would describe it, but that was a big part of what I wanted to show, too. Once he found a way to show the rest of the world, or even just himself, [what happened] visually through art, he was able to process, make sense of, and come to peace with whatever it was that happened to him,” Abrahams said.

David Huggins works on a painting (left); Caught, David Huggins, oil on canvas, 1989 (right)

What makes Love and Saucers a very good documentary about a man who paints himself having sex with aliens is that Abrahams lays out the details of Huggins’s story and lets viewers come to their own conclusions. At its core, Love and Saucers is a film about belief. The first half is Huggins telling his own story, but the second half is interviews with his friends and neighbors. Some of them weren’t aware of Huggins’s encounters beforehand. But they all believe him.

Then there is Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University in Texas. He spent the early part of his career studying erotic mysticism, which led him to study alien abduction literature. “The whole history of religions is essentially about weird beings coming from the sky and doing strange things to human beings, and historically, those events or encounters have been framed as angels or demons or gods or goddesses or what have you. But in the modern, sort of secular, world we live in, they get framed as science fiction,” he says in Love and Saucers.

Kripal believes Huggins. He says the mix of terror and euphoria Huggins describes lines up with age-old descriptions of humans encountering the sacred. Plus, details of Huggins’s abductions mirror those described by other people Kripal has interviewed who believe they’ve had supernatural experiences. “I’m completely convinced they’re not lying; they’re being very sincere. But again, what it is is an entirely different question, and that’s where I think we need a lot more humility,” he says.

Her Eyes, David Huggins

Whether or not you think Huggins has really been having sex with aliens for the past 50 years, what’s apparent is that Huggins himself believes it. “Consider that this man isn’t lying and that he’s communicating something that he’s experienced, but it doesn’t have to be taken literally. Someone can not be crazy but still claim to have these completely unexplainable experiences,” Abrahams said.

What I think is more fascinating than whether or not “the truth is out there” is what stories like Huggins’s say about the impulse to explain away what we do not understand, and our limited ability to interpret all the sensations, experiences, and randomly firing neurons that come with being human.

When I asked Huggins why he thinks the beings appear to him, he said, “I have a feeling that tens of millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions, have had [similar] experiences. Mainly as children. That’s all I can really say, but I think as children we are so open to things, that these beings can appear to us. I know I never closed up on it, because it has continued through my whole life.”

Love and Saucers is available to watch on a number of platforms here.

Original Article

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WZTV) — UPDATE: A Google spokesperson has responded to this story and said they are temporarily disabling certain responses of religious figures. Click here for the full response.

Audio technology like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa are becoming a dominant source for information.

But now, it appears one of the most common names is unknown to Google Home.

And some people are sounding the alarm about what the technology tells you when you ask about Jesus.

Brentwood resident David Sams owns a Google Home and an Amazon audio speaker. He says both give two different answers when asking “Who is Jesus Christ?”

“I even asked Google who is David Sams? Google knew who I was, but Google did not know who Jesus was, Google did not know who Jesus Christ was, and Google did not know who God was,” Sams said.

Smart speakers are a technology owned by about 40 million Americans — that’s about one in six people in the nation.

And this religious conversation at home is making waves on social media.

Comments, videos and test results posted asking “Who is Jesus?”

The general response from Google Home is “I’m not sure how to help you with that.”

There’s still no response from Google as to why that is the response.

“It’s kinda scary, it’s almost like Google has taken Jesus and God out of smart audio,” Sams said. “First it started with schools.”

Google Home refers to Jesus Christ when asking about the Last Supper and even Saint Peter.

And there’s plenty of information on the prophet Muhammed, Buddha — even Satan.

Nashville resident Martin Collins says she thinks this feeds into a bigger problem.

They took prayer out of schools, they think just taking Jesus out of everything is politically correct these days and I think that’s the stem of a lot of our problems,” Collins said.

Collins has no doubt Google has purposefully programmed Jesus out of its audio speakers.

“To keep from stepping on toes, political correctness,” Collin said. “That seems to be more important these days than what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Sams is calling for answers from Google as it’s become the main source of information readily available that so many are coming to depend on.

“I don’t know if there’s some kind of wizard making these decisions or if it’s some kind of oversight,” Sams said. “But whatever it is, they need to address it immediately.”

Original Article

Using a civil rights hero to sell cars in a Super Bowl commercial may seem absurd on its face, but it’s particularly ridiculous when said civil rights icon actually spoke out against car commercials.

During Sunday’s Super Bowl, Ram Trucks used parts of one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches to sell pickup trucks. Ram plucked a seemingly innocuous section of King’s “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, told 50 years ago to the day of Super Bowl on Sunday, using it to reinforce the idea that its Ram trucks are “built to serve”:

If you want to be important, wonderful. If you want to be recognized, wonderful. If you want to be great, wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That’s a new definition of greatness. … By giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great. … You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know the theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.

As Nathan Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs, demonstrated in a YouTube video (embedded at the top of this article), it’s easy to show the disparity between King’s message and the ad itself. Robinson overlaid the video of the commercial with other parts of the exact same speech Ram quoted — exposing a sermon that is actually anticapitalist and even criticizes car advertisements:

Now the presence of this instinct explains why we are so often taken by advertisers. You know, those gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion. And they have a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you into buying. In order to be a man of distinction, you must drink this whiskey. In order to make your neighbors envious, you must drive this type of car. In order to be lovely to love you must wear this kind of lipstick or this kind of perfume. And you know, before you know it, you’re just buying that stuff. … I got to drive this car because it’s something about this car that makes my car a little better than my neighbor’s car. … I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I’m going to continue to say it to America.

Over the years, people have been taught and remembered King’s words of peaceful protest, unity, and service. But they by and large have forgotten more controversial aspects of his political protest — particularly his message about economic justice and the destructiveness of poverty. The Ram commercial exploits this, using apolitical parts of a speech that, in reality, mocks car advertisements — perhaps figuring that people wouldn’t remember what King really said because they by and large haven’t been taught his full message in their middle and high school history classes.

It’s hard to imagine how King would react to this blatant twisting of his words. But it certainly seems to go against what he preached.

Correction: Ram trucks are no longer affiliated with Dodge, as this post originally suggested.

Original Article

Yes, Uma Thurman is mad.

She has been raped. She has been sexually assaulted. She has been mangled in hot steel. She has been betrayed and gaslighted by those she trusted.

And we’re not talking about her role as the blood-spattered bride in “Kill Bill.” We’re talking about a world that is just as cutthroat, amoral, vindictive and misogynistic as any Quentin Tarantino hellscape.

We’re talking about Hollywood, where even an avenging angel has a hard time getting respect, much less bloody satisfaction.

Playing foxy Mia Wallace in 1994’s “Pulp Fiction” and ferocious Beatrix Kiddo in “Kill Bill,” Volumes 1 (2003) and 2 (2004), Thurman was the lissome goddess in the creation myth of Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarantino. The Miramax troika was the ultimate in indie cool. A spellbound Tarantino often described his auteur-muse relationship with Thurman — who helped him conceive the idea of the bloody bride — as an Alfred Hitchcock-Ingrid Bergman legend. (With a foot fetish thrown in.) But beneath the glistening Oscar gold, there was a dark undercurrent that twisted the triangle.

“Pulp Fiction” made Weinstein rich and respected, and Thurman says he introduced her to President Barack Obama at a fund-raiser as the reason he had his house.

“The complicated feeling I have about Harvey is how bad I feel about all the women that were attacked after I was,” she told me one recent night, looking anguished in her elegant apartment in River House on Manhattan’s East Side, as she vaped tobacco, sipped white wine and fed empty pizza boxes into the fireplace.

“I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone, the way I did. Quentin used Harvey as the executive producer of ‘Kill Bill,’ a movie that symbolizes female empowerment. And all these lambs walked into slaughter because they were convinced nobody rises to such a position who would do something illegal to you, but they do.”

Thurman stresses that Creative Artists Agency, her former agency, was connected to Weinstein’s predatory behavior. It has since issued a public apology. “I stand as both a person who was subjected to it and a person who was then also part of the cloud cover, so that’s a super weird split to have,” she says.

She talks mordantly about “the power from ‘Pulp,’” and reminds me that it’s in the Library of Congress, part of the American narrative.

Original Article

California is seeking to treat homeschool families as presumptive child abusers. Lawmakers in that state have indicated plans to categorically require homeschool parents to prove — through home visits, interviews, and other government oversight — that indeed the parent is not abusive if they choose to exercise a legally protected and valid option for school choice. This measure would shift the burden to the parent to prove to the government’s satisfaction his or her parental fitness.

This is absurdly unconstitutional.

But in light of the remarkably horrifying case of Riverside County couple David and Louise Turpin, whose 13 children were reportedly chained, malnourished, and clearly abused, the media and lawmakers have chosen to focus on one coincidental detail — the Turpins were also registered as homeschoolers.

Using the Turpins’ case as one extreme example to bolster their platform, legislators are now looking to increase government regulations of homeschooling in California, which may lay the groundwork for increased regulation nationwide. Already, state legislators have suggested they will introduce legislation to cure the supposed “problem” of laxity in private school choice options, which includes homeschooling.

Suggested measures have included options for involuntary quarterly home visits and interviews from child protective services and other government agencies. This kind of government regulation and oversight would reduce the valid legal option of homeschooling from a fundamental parental right, to direct the education and school choice for children, to compelled consent to government intrusion upon the sanctity and privacy of the home and school choice.

These kinds of alarming “solutions” to an unfounded problem rises to the level of a government search of the family’s home and interviews of children, under the pretext that homeschool choice infers that parents are more likely to be child abusers. It’s a similar illogical path as inferring that because a person chooses to be an independent contractor as a legitimate employment option, they are more likely to evade tax filings, or because a person chooses to exercise any other valid legal option, they are doing so for some other unrelated nefarious purpose, and on that basis alone the government has grounds to treat them as suspect.

Moreover, the data just aren’t there to support any logical connection between homeschooling as a school choice option and child abuse. In published studies among such experts as the World Health Organization, the U.S. Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities, the American Psychological Association, the Mayo Clinic, and others, none of these sources list homeschooling as a risk factor for child abuse and neglect. In other words, there is no evidence or data to even suggest that homeschooled children are being harmed or at risk of harm at a rate higher than children in other nonhomeschooled and private schooling communities.

In fact, the data suggest the complete opposite in terms of the benefits to children who are enrolled in alternative school choice options, specifically homeschooling. In a recent piece in Business Insider titled “Homeschooling could be the smartest way to teach kids in the 21st century — here are 5 reasons why,” Chris Weller discusses how homeschooling is not only a mainstream choice, but also that “homeschooled kids have the same access to online learning, friendships, and extracurricular activities as the typical public school student — but without many of the drawbacks, like standardized lesson plans and bullying.” Many parents choose homeschooling to better tailor the educational and environmental needs of children.

The law also recognizes the fundamental right of the parent to make choices about their child’s education and upbringing, and homeschooling is a valid legal option in all 50 states. For lawmakers to correlate instances like the Turpins, where child abusers are also homeschoolers, is to manufacture a problem looking for a solution. The data is insufficient to make that correlation a legitimate argument that homeschooling is the causal factor precipitating abuse.

Further, these types of proposed “solutions” pose a myriad of constitutional problems. First, it treats homeschool families as suspect child abusers without any legitimate legal basis. It is similar to requiring all drivers to undergo a breath or blood test to prove they are not under the influence simply because they chose to exercise a valid legal option of driving.

The Constitution requires the government to have probable cause before any test, and the burden is always on the government to prove their case, not for an individual to waive the presumption of innocence simply because they chose to drive. Parents who choose to “drive” in the homeschool lane constitutionally must have all of the same rights and protections as parents who choose to “drive” in the traditional public school lane.

Second, this would unconstitutionally force warrantless searches within the privacy of a family dwelling and subjects compelled testimony from children that is expressly for the purposes of potential future litigation. Imagine if the government could label any category of parent as alleged child abusers and thus treat the parents as suspect. What if your choice as a parent to raise your children in California suddenly meant the government could invade your home and look for evidence you might be a child abuser simply because the Turpins also resided in California?

In Iowa, a measure was introduced last year to force all families operating under the state’s Independent Private Instruction Choice or the Private Instruction Choice to undergo an annual assessment. The bill would mandate that every homeschool family’s home is involuntarily invaded once per quarter, with government officials interviewing or observing every child in the household registered as a homeschooler and perform a “check on the health and safety” of the children.

There was no clear definition of what “health and safety” meant in the context of the checks, nor did the measure advance any constitutional basis for such a search.

Homeschool Legal Defense Association President Mike Smith said in a message last week to members and friends of the organization, “These efforts incorrectly assume that homeschooling is the problem here. Hasty legislation based on horrific and criminal behavior — behavior that has nothing to do with homeschooling — would be unfair to the thousands of law-abiding families in California who work hard to provide a safe and loving environment for their children.”

Child abuse does happen, and it is a terrible thing. But we have to be very careful not to overreact and presume all parents are child abusers. They aren’t. We must preserve the presumption of innocence and constitutional protections for every family and parent in the context of school choice and in all areas of parental rights.

Jenna Ellis (@jennaellisorg) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is an attorney and professor of constitutional law at Colorado Christian University, fellow at the Centennial Institute, radio show host in Denver, Colo., and the author of the Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.

Original Article

Original Article

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned Saturday new legislation in Poland which bars any mention of crimes by the “Polish nation” during the Holocaust, calling on Israel’s ambassador in Warsaw to meet with the Polish prime minister on the contentious bill.

“The law is baseless. I strongly oppose it. History cannot be changed and it is forbidden to deny the Holocaust. I ordered the Israeli embassy in Poland to meet with the Polish Prime Minister and express my firm stand against the law,” Netanyahu said.

>> Haaretz’s Special Coverage of Holocaust Remembrance Day <<

The deputy Polish ambassador in Israel has been called in for a reprimand at the Foreign Ministry. The Polish ambassador is currently abroad.

In a statement from the President’s Office, President Reuven Rivlin also  criticized the bill, saying that “on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, more than ever, and above all considerations, we are faced with our duty to remember our brothers and sisters who were murdered.”

On Friday, the Polish parliament approved a controversial law forbidding any mention of participation of the “Polish nation” in crimes committed during the Holocaust. Yair Lapid, the head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, got into a Twitter feud with the Polish embassy in Israel on Saturday and even had to remind them not give him, the child of Holocaust survivors, a lesson on the subject, prompting them to label him “shameless.”

>> ‘Orgy of murder’: The Poles who ‘hunted’ Jews and turned them over to the Nazis <<

“I utterly condemn the new Polish law which tries to deny Polish complicity in the Holocaust. It was conceived in Germany but hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier,” Lapid tweeted Saturday.

The law also forbids use of the term “Polish death camp” to describe the death camps where Jews and others were murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. Anyone who violates the new law, including non-Polish citizens, will be liable to a fine or imprisonment for up to three years.

“There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that,” Lapid wrote. However, the Polish embassy in Israel quickly responded, writing Lapid: “Your unsupportable claims show how badly Holocaust education is needed, even here in Israel.”

The embassy also linked to a statement by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an international organization representing 27 nations and dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust, which supports the idea that it is “historically unsupportable to use the terms ‘Polish death camps.'”

“There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that,” Lapid wrote. However, the Polish embassy in Israel quickly responded, writing Lapid: “Your unsupportable claims show how badly Holocaust education is needed, even here in Israel.”

The embassy also linked to a statement by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an international organization representing 27 nations and dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust, which supports the idea that it is “historically unsupportable to use the terms ‘Polish death camps.'”

Original Article

The final caller to Lars Larson’s conservative talk radio show on Jan. 5 was Rachel from Forest Grove.

“Our son is a junior at Banks High School,” Rachel said. “He informed us this week that he has two teachers in his school that have taken down the American flag and replaced it with a gay flag.”

Is that grounds for a complaint to the school district? she asked.

Larson thought it was, because a teacher was pushing a political message.

“Let me spitball this one, Rachel,” Larson said. “I’m guessing that the reason the rainbow flag went up is that perhaps the teacher who put it up may be gay or bisexual or whatever.”

Even if he agreed with the sentiment, Larson said anything political in the classroom is inappropriate. Particularly if, as he speculated, the flag was in support of the teacher.

“The school does not exist to meet the needs of the teachers,” he said. “The school exists to meet the needs of your children.”

There are, however, at least two problems with this narrative.

The American flag was not taken down.

And it was never about the teacher.

“It’s for the students,” said 16-year-old Sam Munda, who brought the rainbow flag to school last month. “It was so students knew Banks High School is supportive of them. Having parents upset, that was not my intention. It’s not what I wanted at all.”

Sitting at the local pizza parlor, a giant American flag hanging behind us, Munda expressed surprise that the LGBTQ flag created such a scandal. Since the radio segment aired, parents have complained publicly to the school board, the superintendent sent out a press release denying any American flags were removed, and insults were hurled across social media. An online petition claims the flag should be removed because it “creates a hostile learning environment.” It has more than 100 signatures.

On Wednesday, Munda took to a community Facebook page to clear things up.

“I am a part of the LGBTQ+ community, and I was the student who had asked to put up the rainbow flag,” Munda wrote on the Banks Community Bulletin Board group. The flag wasn’t meant to “force any beliefs on any students” or make anyone believe differently than they already do, Munda wrote. It “was not meant in any way to start a war in (Banks), but that is what has happened.”

The flag was intended to signal a safe space for other kids like Munda who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning.

“There are a lot of LGBTQ youth in Banks, which most people don’t know about,” Munda said. Those students told Munda they’re afraid to come out to their parents or friends, “because they are scared that they’re going to get bullied or they aren’t going to be accepted and they’re going to be treated different. And so, having put up the flag, it was a way to say that Banks High School is a safe place and a supportive community.”

Munda grew up in Banks, a small community in western Washington County home to about 1,700 residents, several Christmas tree farms and a 72-year tradition of truck and tractor pulls. Munda is graduating a year early and will study criminal justice at Ferris State University. Munda plans to become a police officer.

Last year, Munda began openly identifying as gender fluid and requesting they/them pronouns.

“I wanted people to start using my pronouns and the only way I could do that was to be open,” Munda said. “I lost a few friends. I used to go to church and was kicked out of church because I wouldn’t change. They wanted me to be a girl and to be straight.”

Munda bought the rainbow flag at a Portland Pride event last year. In December, Munda asked if it would be OK to hang it in the government and economics classroom, and the teacher said yes. The flag was a bit larger than sheet of legal paper.

“There didn’t seem to be a lot of space around the classroom so we put it up in front of the class where the projector is,” Munda said. “It was next to the American flag.”

There are now a total of three rainbow flags in three classrooms. Despite some parent complaints, they remain.

In email, Banks Superintendent Jeff Leo wrote the district was following legal advice that state law “allows a teacher to display such items as they are supportive of a class of persons protected by Oregon and federal law.”

Some of the parents objected because the rainbow flag was viewed as taking a political stance. But what stance is that?

This flag is only a political issue if you believe equity for LGBTQ students is still up for debate – and in Oregon public schools, it simply is not. Oregon public schools ban discrimination against sex or sexual orientation.

Racial equality, women’s suffrage and abolitionism are political views, too. We do not debate the worth of these topics in school. We should not debate the worth of gay youth either.

For every nasty online comment posted about the flag, there is a teenager who is absorbing those words.

Larson is right about one thing: The school exists to meet the needs of the children.

And for every adult who heard about the flag and was offended, there was a student who saw the flag and was assured.

Original Article

Chinese authorities have demolished a well-known Christian megachurch, inflaming long-standing tensions between religious groups and the Communist Party.

Witnesses and overseas activists said the paramilitary People’s Armed Police used dynamite and excavators to destroy the Golden Lampstand Church, which has a congregation of more than 50,000, in the city of Linfen in Shanxi province.

ChinaAid, a US-based Christian advocacy group, said local authorities planted explosives in an underground worship hall to demolish the building following, constructed with nearly $2.6m (£1.9m) in contributions from local worshippers in one of China’s poorest regions.

• READ MORE

Chinese Communist Party cracks down on religion

The church had faced “repeated persecution” by the Chinese government, said ChinaAid. Hundreds of police and hired thugs smashed the building and seized Bibles in an earlier crackdown in 2009 that ended with the arrest of church leaders.

Those church leaders were given prison sentences of up to seven years for charges of illegally occupying farmland and disturbing traffic order, according to state media.

There are an estimated 60 million Christians in China, many of whom worship in independent congregations like the Golden Lampstand. Millions of Christians, Buddhists and Muslims also worship in state-sanctioned assemblies.

But the surging popularity of non-state-approved churches has raised the ire of authorities, wary of any threats to the officially atheist Communist Party’s rigid political and social control.

The Golden Lampstand Church in Linfen, Shanxi province, pictured in 2009 (AP)

Freedom of religion is guaranteed under China’s constitution, so local authorities are often seen as using technicalities to attack unregistered churches. Charges of land or building violations and disturbing the peace are among the most common.

The state-run Global Times newspaper reported the official reason for the demolition was the building did not hold the necessary permits.

“A Christian offered his farmland to a local Christian association and they secretly built a church using the cover of building a warehouse,” a government department official was quoted as saying.

Religious groups must register with local religious affairs authorities under Chinese law, the report said, adding the church was illegally constructed nearly a decade ago in violation of building codes.

Pictures distributed by ChinaAid showed the church’s steeple and cross toppled in a large pile of rubble.

“The repeated persecution of Golden Lampstand Church demonstrates that the Chinese government has no respect for religious freedom or human rights,” said ChinaAid president and founder Bob Fu.

He added: “ChinaAid calls on the international community to openly condemn the bombing of this church building and urge the Chinese government to fairly compensate the Christians who paid for it and immediately cease these alarming demolitions of churches.”

A pastor at a nearby church, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he saw large numbers of paramilitary police on Tuesday surrounding the area around the church, which was being taken apart by heavy machinery. He later heard a loud explosion.

The Golden Lampstand Church was built by husband and wife evangelists Wang Xiaoguang and Yang Rongli as a permanent home for their followers.

The couple had been preaching around Linfen since 1992, establishing congregations in improvised spaces such as factory dormitories and greenhouses.

While authorities did not block the church’s construction, they later cracked down on it, and the couple and other church leaders were sent to prison.

ChinaAid said authorities also demolished a Catholic church in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province, on 27 December. Officials smashed crosses and confiscated statues, the Eucharistic altar, and other religious artefacts as they demolished the building with heavy machinery, the organisation said.

The demolition prompted more 100 church members to protest in front of government offices this week.

Original Article

In the midst of the “fake news” hysteria last year, Google launched a project to help curate reliable information for its readers by identifying articles and sites that need fact-checking. And this may come as a surprise to some of you, but it looks like the tech giant’s truth project is imbued with a tiny bit of ideological and political bias.

Eric Lieberman at The Daily Caller recently found that the fact checks displayed in Google’s search engine results are targeted almost exclusively at conservative publications. You can test it out yourself.

Now, you may believe that conservatives are hopeless liars in need of relentless correcting, so I’ll concede the point for argument’s sake. Even then, you’d have to admit it’s a small miracle that, according to Google’s search engine, not a single prominent liberal or mainstream site in the entire universe has ever uttered a dubious or questionable claim.

Luckily for us, there are methods available to analyze the veracity of Google’s project. One way, for example, is to take a “reviewed claim” made against The Federalist, the site I happen to know best, and contrast it to the coverage of other sites.

Original Article

Original Article

In both urban and rural areas, about 40 percent of women surveyed were currently married to a member of the opposite sex. Only about 30 percent of the rural women of childbearing age had no children, versus roughly 41 percent of urban women.

Westend61/Getty Images

Where you live — in a city versus a rural area — could make a difference in how old you tend to be when you first have sex, what type of birth control you use and how many children you have.

These are the findings from federal data collected using the National Survey of Family Growth, which analyzed responses from in-person interviews with more than 10,000 U.S. women, ages 18 to 44, between 2011 and 2015.

On average, women living in rural areas said they had their first sexual encounter earlier than women living in urban areas, according to the survey. The mean age of first sexual intercourse among women living in rural areas was 16.6 years old. For women living in urban areas, the average age of first intercourse was 17.4.

That difference of less than a year isn’t really what’s most striking about the survey results, says Dr. Eleanor Bimla Schwarz, a research epidemiologist who specializes in women’s health at the University of California, Davis, and wasn’t involved in the survey. Rather, she says, it’s that “sexual activity is a lot younger than a lot of people like to imagine it is in their own home — despite a more conservative and church-going environment in many rural areas.”

By age 18, nearly 80 percent of women living in rural areas reported having experienced sexual intercourse, and 68.6 percent of women in cities.

When it comes to heterosexual marriage and cohabitation, there was no significant difference between women in urban and rural areas — about 40 percent of women in all regions surveyed were currently married to a member of the opposite sex. And the percentages who said they were living with an opposite-sex mate without being married were also very similar — 15.7 pecent for urban women and 18.6 percent for rural women. (The study didn’t report data on non-heterosexual relationships.)

The survey did point up rural vs. urban differences in the number of children the women had. More women in the survey who were living in cities had no children (around 41 percent) compared to women living in rural areas (roughly 30 percent). And about 5 percent more women in rural areas had two or more children compared to urbanites.

When asked about contraception, one in five women in both groups reported they’d had sexual intercourse without using contraception. And, notably, more women in urban areas reported using less effective birth control methods to prevent pregnancy (a condom or withdrawal, for example) than their rural counterparts, who were more likely to use one of the most effective contraceptive methods — an IUD or sterilization.

Schwarz questions lumping IUDs — a readily reversible form of birth control — in the same category as sterilization.

“The real issue is that reversible and highly effective methods of birth control are less available to rural women than they are to urban women,” she says, which may partly explain why more rural women choose sterilization as their method of birth control.

“If we really want to help young women and teens have a healthy and safe sexual life, we need to get effective resources and education to them before 16,” Schwarz says — no matter where they live. Unfortunately, she notes, many of the teen pregnancy prevention programs that have been so effective in recent years in reducing teen pregnancy rates are being shut down in schools and communities nationwide under President Trump’s administration.

Original Article

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s parliament passed an amendment on Tuesday that would make it harder for it to cede control over parts of Jerusalem in any peace deal with the Palestinians, who condemned the move as undermining any chance to revive talks on statehood.

A bid to revive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations led by the president’s adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has so far shown no progress.

On Sunday, Netanyahu’s Likud party unanimously urged legislators in a non-binding resolution to effectively annex Israeli settlements built in the West Bank. [L8N1OV0GP]

Political commentators said Likud’s decision might bolster right-wing support for Netanyahu, who could seek a public mandate in an early election while he awaits possible criminal indictments against him on corruption suspicions. He denies wrongdoing.

Parliamentary elections are not due until November 2019 but the police investigations in two cases of alleged corruption against Netanyahu and tensions among coalition partners in his government could hasten a poll.

Some commentators, pointing to an existing law that already sets a similar high threshold for handing over territory in a land-for-peace deal, have said Jewish Home was essentially competing with Likud for support among the right-wing base.

(This version of the story refiles to remove extraneous word in paragraph 14.)

By Sandee LaMotte

Rate your responses on a scale of 1 (completely disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) and add your score. According to Caglar Yildirim, an assistant professor of human computer interaction who created the scale for use in his research at State University of New York at Oswego, a score of 20 or below means you’re not an addict; a score of 21 to 60 means you’re mildly nomophobic; and a score of 61 to 99 means you probably can’t go long without checking your phone.

“It might be a good idea to be conscious of that,” Yildirim said, “but we are only concerned if it starts to interfere with your daily life.”

Did you score between 100 and 200? You’re probably struggling with severe anxiety when you can’t access your cell phone, he said.

“This might negatively affect your social life and relationships with friends and family,” Yildirim said. “There are studies that show those who score high on the test tend to avoid face-to-face interactions, have high levels of social anxiety and maybe even depression.

Original Article

Americans Paid $400 Billion in Taxes & Internet Surcharges for Fiber Optic Upgrades that Never Came

South Korea is the poster child for high-speed internet: its fixed-connection and mobile download speeds are consistently among the fastest in the world, and its capital city, Seoul, is completely saturated with Wi-Fi.  How did they do it?

Being densely populated helped: it’s easier and cheaper to wire-up crowded cities than empty countrysides.  But the key element was the government’s pro-broadband policies.  Not only did they open up the market for competition among internet service providers, but they also invested in hard infrastructure.

Back in 2011 the New York Times reported that the South Korean planned investments of $24.6 billion in digital infrastructure.  It paid off: South Korea’s internet remains among the world’s fastest, according to testing done by Speedtest—and this is in spite of massive recent gains and investments made by other countries.

Meanwhile, America’s internet connections are slow.  This summer Forbes Magazinereported:

The US ranks 9th in the world in fixed broadband speed at 70.75 Mbps average download and 27.64 Mbps average upload. Ranking in the top ten is good but the US’s average download speed is less than half top-ranked Singapore’s 154.38 Mbps. Both upload and download speeds increased steadily from July 2016 to July 2017 and the US’s rank increased from 11 to 9.

The picture for the US is not nearly as good when you look at mobile internet speed where the US ranks 46th, just ahead of Albania and behind Oman. Average download speed in the US is 23.05 Mbps which is less than half the average download speeds in Norway, the Netherlands and Hungary. Average upload speed in the US is 8.26 Mbps. While mobile download speed increased by almost 20% from July 2016 to July 2017, the US’s world ranking fell from 44th to 46th. Not good.

Since then America’s fallen down to 11th place in terms of fixed connection download speed, and 47th in terms of mobile download speed.  Basically, America’s internet is slow, and it’s getting relatively slower.  This will have big economic consequences down the road as the world grows increasingly digital.

But that’s not the real story here.  More important is America’s failure to keep pace with countries like South Korea despite absolutely astronomical investments in broadband technology.

According to a fairly recent book (2015) called The Book of Broken Promises, the American people have been charged some $400 billion by telecom companies (at the insistence of government) for fiber optic upgrades that have not materialized.  The author writes:

By the end of 2014, America will have been charged about $400 billion by the local phone incumbents, Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink, for a fiber optic future that never showed up. And though it varies by state, counting the taxes, fees and surcharges that you have paid every month (many of these fees are actually revenues to the company or taxes on the company that you paid), it comes to about $4000-$5000.00 per household from 1992-2014, and that’s the low number.

You were also charged about nine times to wire the schools and libraries via state and federal plans designed to help the phone and cable companies.

And if that doesn’t bother you, by year-end of 2010, and based on the commitments made by the phone companies in their press statements, filings on the state and federal level, and the state-based ‘alternative regulation’ plans that were put in place to charge you for broadband upgrades of the telephone company wire in your home, business, as well as the schools and libraries — America, should have been the world’s first fully fibered, leading edge broadband nation.

In fact, in 1992, the speed of broadband, as detailed in state laws, was 45 Mbps in both directions — by 2014, all of us should have been enjoying gigabit speeds (1000 Mbps).

Of course, this didn’t happen.  America has relatively slow internet, and just a 9.4 percent penetration rate for fiber optic cables, according to Business Insider—this is less than half the OECD average.

The Trump administration would be wise to make improving America’s digital infrastructure a priority.  The South Korean model, market liberalizations combined with hard investments, could be a viable model.

Original Article

By Steven Musil

Bitcoin exchange Coinbase has lost a bid to keep the IRS from seeing customers’ trading records as part of a tax-avoidance probe.

US Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley for the US District Court in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that the exchange must supply the tax agency with the identities of all users in the US who conducted at least one bitcoin transaction equivalent to at least $20,000 between 2012 and 2015. Corley said a “reporting gap” gave the IRS legitimate reason to demand the information.

“That only 800 to 900 taxpayers reported gains related to bitcoin in each of the relevant years and that more than 14,000 Coinbase users have either bought, sold, sent or received at least $20,000 worth of bitcoin in a given year suggests that many Coinbase users may not be reporting their bitcoin gains,” Corley wrote in her judgment. “The IRS has a legitimate interest in investigating these taxpayers.”

The Justice Department said in a filing last year that an IRS agent had identified three cases in which cryptocurrencies were used to avoid paying taxes. Two of those cases involved Coinbase customers with millions of dollars in annual revenues, the filing alleged.

The ruling comes as bitcoin makes historic valuation gains on a near daily basis. Bitcoin, which attracted attention by allowing for anonymous transactions, on Wednesday traded at more than $11,000 per coin for the first time, a day after it broke the $10,000 barrier. The cryptocurrency’s value has increased 1,000 percent since the beginning of the year.

With the order, Coinbase will be required to turn over the names, addresses and tax identification numbers on 14,355 account holders out of its nearly 6 million customers.

Coinbase, the largest bitcoin exchange in the US, has opposed the demand since last year, arguing it was “extremely concerned with the indiscriminate breadth of the government’s request.”

Coinbase said that while it was disappointed the court didn’t quash the summons completely, it was pleased the judge narrowed the scope of records demanded and reduced the quantity of data it must give the IRS.

“While today’s result is not the complete victory we hoped for, it does represent a substantial and unprecedented victory for the industry and the hundreds of thousands of customers that would have been unfairly targeted if it weren’t for our action,” David Farmer, Coinbase’s director of communications, said in a blog post.

Updated at 5:20 p.m. PT with Coinbase comment.

Special Reports: All of CNET’s most in-depth features in one easy spot.

Original Article

By Cyrus Farivar

A New Hampshire state judge has dismissed a case brought by an elderly doctor who recently gave up her medical license following a handful of allegationsagainst her.

Among other accusations, Dr. Anna Konopka, 84, has refused to use a computer and participate in the state’s new law for an online opioid monitoring program.

“The Court has admiration for Dr. Konopka’s devotion to her patients,” Merrimack County Superior Court Judge John Kissinger wrote in his Monday order to dismiss the case, according to New Hampshire Public Radio.

“Under these circumstances of this case, however, Dr. Konopka has failed to demonstrate that the extraordinary remedy of an injunction allowing her to continue to practice medicine is appropriate. To hold otherwise would be to ignore the process established by the legislature to regulate the practice of medicine in this state.”

In two lengthy phone interviews with Ars earlier this month, Konopka said if she is somehow reinstated by the state’s medical board—at this point, a big “if”—she would be willing to learn how to use the Internet to follow New Hampshire law.

Judge Kissinger agreed with the New Hampshire Board of Medicine‘s motion to dismiss. The Board argued, essentially, that because Konopka voluntarily agreed to relinquish her medical license after a series of investigations, there’s no going back now.

In the agreement with the board, which Konopka signed on September 12, she voluntarily surrendered her license to settle pending allegations regarding her “record keeping, prescribing practices, and medical decision making.”

Those allegations stem from five separate complaints against her. Under the terms of the agreement, she could reapply to regain her license, but the burden would be on her to prove that she did no wrong.

Konopka has denied any misconduct and asserted that she was under duress when she voluntarily surrendered her license. She underscored that she wants to continue practicing medicine but simply is not concerned with what she calls “electronic medicine,” her term for the vast bureaucracy often associated with modern medical practices.

According to NHPR, Konopka has filed a motion for reconsideration.

Original Article

By Aris Folley

A nurse at an Indiana hospital was let go after an offensive tweet suggesting that the sons of white women “be sacrificed to the wolves” was traced back to her Twitter account.

According to officials at the Indiana University Health Methodist Hospital, Taiyesha Baker lost her job over the weekend after being linked to troubling posts online, the Indianapolis Star reported.

One tweet, which accused white baby boys of being future racists, terrorists, and killers, was posted from an account named Night Nurse, under which Baker was reportedly tweeting from.

“Every white woman raises a detriment to society when they raise a son,” the now-deleted post read. “Someone with the HIGHEST propensity to be a terrorist, rapist, racist, and domestic violence all-star. Historically every son you had should be sacrificed to the wolves B-tch.”

The hospital said in a statement last week that it was looking into the incident and would take “appropriate action,” according to the Washington Post.

“IU Health is aware of several troubling posts on social media which appear to be from a recently hired IU Health employee,” the hospital said Saturday. “Our HR department continues to investigate the situation and the authenticity of the posts. During the investigation, that employee (who does not work at Riley Hospital for Children) will have no access to patient care.”

On Sunday, the hospital said: “A recently hired IU Health employee tied to troubling posts on social media this weekend is no longer an employee of IU Health.”

Baker was reportedly licensed as a registered nurse in late October and claimed to have worked in pediatrics, according to deleted social media posts cited by WXIN.

Original Article

By Brett Molina

Here’s one way to put down that smartphone: grab yourself a substitute.

An Austrian designer created a “substitute phone,” which looks like a smartphone, but features stone beads on a track to resemble gestures like swiping or tapping.

The designer, Klemens Schillinger, created the “substitute phone” based on his observations of people constantly scrolling and reading on their smartphones.

“The shape of the Substitute Phone replicates an average smartphone, however, its functions are reduced to the movements we make hundreds of times on a daily basis,” reads a description on his website.

The “phone” offers no digital features. Instead, uses just swipe the stone beads back and forth to simulate gestures you would make on a regular smartphone.

“This calming limitation offers help for smartphone addicts to cope with withdrawal symptoms,” according to the website.

In an email to USA TODAY, Schillinger said he plans to make them available for purchase in the near future.

While the smartphone has become the most important gadget in our lives, there have been concerns whether we spend too much time scrolling on our devices.

Last year, American consumers spent an average of five hours a day on their smartphones, nearly double the amount of time from 2013, says Flurry Analytics, a research firm specializing in analyzing mobile usage.

Original Article

By Timothy B. Lee

Ten out of 12 water utilities in the United Kingdom admitted that their technicians use divining rods to find underground leaks or water pipes, according to an investigation by science blogger Sally Le Page.

Dowsing is a centuries-old technique for locating underground water. Someone searching for water holds two parallel sticks—or sometimes a single Y-shaped stick—called divining rods while walking in an area where there might be water under the surface. The branches supposedly twitch when they’re over a water source.

Needless to say, there’s zero scientific evidence that this technique actually works better than random chance. But Le Page got a bunch of UK water companies to admit that their technicians still employ the superstitious practice.

Le Page heard from her parents, who live in Stratford-upon-Avon, that a technician from their water company, Severn Trent Water, had been using a divining rod to decide whether to do work in the area. Curious, Le Page tweeted at Severn Trent’s Twitter account to see if the utility really had technicians using the age-old technique.

“We do have some techs that still have them in the van and use them if they need to,” the company tweeted. “However, we prefer to use listening sticks and other methods.”

Curious, Le Page sent inquiries to 11 other major water companies in the UK. Amazingly, 10 of them confirmed that their technicians sometimes use divining rods to detect leaks, while just two—Northern Ireland Water and Wessex Water—said they never use the technique.

This didn’t sit well with Le Page.

“You could just laugh this off. Isn’t it a bit silly that big companies are still using magic to do their jobs,” she wrote. “Except if they get it wrong, that could mean the difference between an entire town having safe drinking water or not.”

Original Article

By Amy B Wang and Avi Selk

A California man who planned to launch himself 1,800 feet high on Saturday in a homemade scrap-metal rocket – in an effort to “prove” that Earth is flat – said he is postponing the experiment after he couldn’t get permission from a federal agency to do so on public land.

Instead, Mike Hughes said the launch will take place sometime next week on private property, albeit still in Amboy, California, an unincorporated community in the Mojave Desert along historic Route 66.

“It’s still happening. We’re just moving it three miles down the road,” Hughes told The Washington Post on Friday. “This is what happens any time you have to deal with any kind of government agency.”

Hughes claimed the Bureau of Land Management said he couldn’t launch his rocket as planned on Saturday in Amboy. He also claimed the federal agency had given him verbal permission more than a year ago, pending approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Representatives from the BLM and the FAA did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.

Hughes said he had originally intended to arrive in Amboy on Wednesday to start setting up the rocket. The BLM’s denial, along with some technical difficulties – a motor in his modified motor home quit working for a day – threw a wrench into his plans, according to Hughes.

“I don’t see [the launch] happening until about Tuesday, honestly,” he said. “It takes three days to set up. . . .You know, it’s not easy because it’s not supposed to be easy.”

Assuming the 500-mph, mile-long flight through the Mojave Desert does not kill him, Hughes told the Associated Press, his journey into the atmosflat will mark the first phase of his ambitious flat-Earth space program.

Hughes’s ultimate goal is a subsequent launch that puts him miles above Earth, where the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to photograph proof of the disc we all live on.

“It’ll shut the door on this ball earth,” Hughes said in a fundraising interview with a flat-Earth group for Saturday’s flight. Theories discussed during the interview included NASA being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk making fake rockets from blimps.

Hughes promised the flat-Earth community that he would expose the conspiracy with his steam-powered rocket, which will launch from a heavily modified mobile home – though he acknowledged that he still had much to learn about rocket science.

“This whole tech thing,” he said in the June interview. “I’m really behind the eight ball.”

That said, Hughes isn’t a totally unproven engineer. He set a Guinness World Record in 2002 for a limousine jump, according to Ars Technica, and has been building rockets for years, albeit with mixed results.

“Okay, Waldo. 3 . . . 2 . . . 1!” someone yells in a test fire video from 2012.

There’s a brief hiss of boiling water, then . . . nothing. So Hughes walks up to the engine and pokes it with a stick, at which point a thick cloud of steam belches out toward the camera.

He built his first manned rocket in 2014, the Associated Press reported, and managed to fly a quarter-mile over Winkelman, Arizona.

As seen in a YouTube video, the flight ended with Hughes being dragged, moaning from the remains of the rocket. The injuries he suffered put him in a walker for two weeks, he said.

And the 2014 flight was only a quarter of the distance of Saturday’s mile-long attempt.

And it was based on round-Earth technology.

Hughes only recently converted to flat-Eartherism, after struggling for months to raise funds for his follow-up flight over the Mojave.

It was originally scheduled for early 2016 in a Kickstarter campaign – “From Garage to Outer Space!” – that mentioned nothing about Illuminati astronauts, and was themed after a NASCAR event.

“We want to do this and basically thumb our noses at all these billionaires trying to do this,” Hughes said in the pitch video, standing in his Apple Valley, California, living room, which he had plastered with drawings of his rockets.

“They have not put a man in space yet,” Hughes said. “There are 20 different space agencies here in America, and I’m the last person that’s put a man in a rocket and launched it.” Comparing himself to Evel Knievel, he promised to launch himself from a California racetrack that year as the first step in his steam-powered leap toward space.

The Kickstarter raised $310 of its $150,000 goal.

Hughes made other pitches, including a plan to fly over Texas in a “SkyLimo.” But he complained to Ars Technica last year about the difficulty of funding his dreams on a chauffeur’s meager salary.

A year later, he called into a flat-Earth community web show to announce that he had become a recent convert.

“We were kind of looking for new sponsors for this. And I’m a believer in the flat Earth,” Hughes said. “I researched it for several months.”

The host sounded impressed. Hughes had actually flown in a rocket, he noted, whereas astronauts were merely paid actors performing in front of a CGI globe.

“John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are Freemasons,” Hughes agreed. “Once you understand that, you understand the roots of the deception.”

The host talked of “Elon Musk’s fake reality,” and Hughes talked of “anti-Christ, Illuminati stuff.” After half an hour of this, the host told his 300-some listeners to back Hughes’s exploration of space.

While there is no one hypothesis for what the flat Earth is supposed to look like, many believers envision a flat disc ringed by sea ice, which naturally holds the oceans in.

What’s beyond the sea ice, if anything, remains to be discovered.

“We need an individual who’s not compromised by the government,” the host told Hughes. “And you could be that man.”

A flat-Earth GoFundMe subsequently raised nearly $8,000 for Hughes.

By November, the AP reported, his $20,000 rocket had a fancy coat of Rust-Oleum paint and “RESEARCH FLAT EARTH” inscribed on the side.

While his flat-Earth friends helped him finally get the thing built, the AP reported, Hughes will be making adjustments right up to the launch.

But he won’t be able to test the rocket before he climbs inside and attempts to steam himself at 500 mph across a mile of desert air. And even if it’s a success, he’s promised his backers an even riskier launch within the next year, into the space above the disc. He told Ars Technica last year that the second phase of his mission might involve floating in a balloon up to 20,000 feet above the ground, then rocket-packing himself into outer space.

“It’s scary as hell,” Hughes told the AP. “But none of us are getting out of this world alive.”

This is true. And yet some hope to live to see its edges.

Original Article

By Tim Elfrick

The call came from California. A woman told Coral Springs Police she had recently learned something terrible: A South Florida man had molested her daughter for years. It began when the girl was just 4 years old.

An officer noted the information and called the victim, who was then a teenager. She confirmed the story in stomach-churning detail.

The man had forced her to perform oral sex, she said. He would regularly “finger and fondle her” genitals, make her touch his penis, and “dirty talk” to her. The abuse lasted until she was a teenager, she told the cop. She’d never even told her family about the crimes.

By the end of that harrowing call on August 20, 2015, police knew the accused predator was no ordinary suspect. His name was Bob Coy, and until the previous year, he’d been the most famous Evangelical pastor in Florida.

Over two decades, Coy had built a small storefront church into Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale, a 25,000-member powerhouse that packed Dolphin Stadium for Easter services while Coy hosted everyone from George W. Bush to Benjamin Netanyahu. With a sitcom dad’s wholesome looks, a standup comedian’s snappy timing, and an unlikely redemption tale of ditching a career managing Vegas strip clubs to find Jesus, Coy had become a Christian TV and radio superstar.

But then, in April 2014, he resigned in disgrace after admitting to multiple affairs and a pornography addiction. Coy shocked his flock and made national headlines by walking away from his ministry, selling his house, and divorcing his wife.

The sexual assault claims, which have never before been divulged, raise new questions about the pastor, his church, and the police who handled the case. Documents show that Coral Springs cops sat on the accusations for months before dropping the inquiry without even interviewing Coy. His attorneys, meanwhile, persuaded a judge with deep Republican ties to seal the ex-pastor’s divorce file to protect Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale from scrutiny.

The revelations come at a sensitive moment for Calvary’s national network of about 1,800 churches, which have been riven by legal infighting and dogged by claims that bad pastors have been allowed to run amok. In fact, at least eight pastors, staffers, and volunteers in Calvary Chapel’s network around the United States have been charged with abusing children since 2010. In one case, victims claimed the church knowingly moved a pedophile to another city without warning parents.

“Religious leaders have a tremendous amount of power over their flock,” says Scott Thumma, a professor of sociology of religion at Hartford Seminary who has studied the Calvary movement. “If Calvary gives these pastors this much authority and they use and abuse it with no accountability, they have to blame themselves.”

Coy, who was never charged with a crime, lay low after leaving Calvary but recently turned up at Boca Raton’s Funky Biscuit, where he helps manage the club. (Update:The club has now terminated its relationship with Coy and says it had no inkling of the allegations against him.) Tracked down at the bar on a recent weeknight, the well-dressed ex-pastor looks no different from the days when he preached to thousands of followers. He declined to discuss the child abuse case except to say he is innocent and passed a polygraph test to prove it.

“I can’t discuss it on the record,” he said, before adding cryptically: “If you’re foolish enough to go through with this story… it would hurt a lot of people.”

Were there other abuse claims against Coy during the nearly three decades he controlled Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale? The church won’t say, though a spokesman says the chapel was “saddened to hear of the allegations.” That’s not good enough, critics say.

“There could be other victims out there,” says Michael Newnham, an Oregon-based pastor who runs a blog critical of Calvary Chapel. “We need answers.”

Illustration by Joseph Laney

Coy’s life story is biblical in scope and obvious in moral lessons. Long before his epic fall from grace, the pastor used his own struggles with sex and drugs to preach that anyone could find redemption in Jesus.

Born in 1955 and raised in Royal Oak, a suburb north of Detroit, he grew up in a strict Lutheran family but didn’t buy into the church. “I was brought up in a very religious, traditional Midwestern home,” he told Ed Stetzer, a Wheaton College professor, in a 2013 interview for a video series. “I was brought into the Lutheran church without a choice… that’s where I learned what a religious environment was like, but I was missing the spiritual thing.”

Instead, Coy drifted to his hometown’s specialty: rock music. In his 1973 senior class portrait, his dark hair, parted neatly down the middle, hangs well past his shoulders. After graduating, he found a career in the entertainment industry. In fact, he says Capitol Records paid him to party.

“I was living a life of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, literally,” Coy told Stetzer. “My job was to make sure that the artists on Capitol Records were happy and entertained when they were in my city. That lent itself to a very youthful, crazy, wild lifestyle. So crazy that I became addicted to cocaine.”

Even in the chemically altered ’70s music business, Coy’s appetites were too voracious. So after some unspecified “very embarrassing behavior,” Capitol fired him. Coy then moved to an even more debauched scene: Las Vegas. He found work as the entertainment director at the Jolly Trolley, a storefront casino and strip club, where he said he wasted away his early 20s in a haze of sex, coke, and alcohol.

But in 1981, his life changed forever thanks to an epic holiday hangover and his brother Jim, who’d already found religion.

“I had been invited to his house for Christmas dinner and I skipped it,” Coy told Stetzer. “We had a big party at the casino — girls, cocaine, alcohol, the whole thing. I was feeling horrible.”

When a blitzed, 26-year-old Coy went to see his brother the next day, Jim threw a Bible at him and told him to read it. Coy opened it to the Gospel of John, and by the time he hit 3:16 — “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” — he said he was weeping uncontrollably.

He was ready to give his life to the church.

He quit the cocaine and strippers, began training as a preacher, met his wife Diane, and moved to South Florida. Coy rented space for his church from a funeral parlor in Oakland Park and made ends meet by selling shoes while his wife worked as a waitress.

Coy aligned his fledgling church with Calvary Chapel, a movement started in Southern California in the 1960s by Chuck Smith, a laid-back West Coaster who wore Hawaiian shirts while he preached a fire-and-brimstone, old-school religion. Smith was among the first pastors to make a startling discovery: Many of the hippies and disaffected youth who’d come for the Summer of Love had realized psychedelic drugs and the Grateful Dead weren’t filling the holes in their lives. They wanted spirituality but could never go back to their parents’ churches.

At Smith’s church, “you could come in jeans, and it didn’t matter what your hair looked like or how long your beard was,” says Thumma, the Hartford professor. “It was attractive on both sides, for the Christians who hadn’t really gotten into the drug culture but were younger and wanted something new… and for the people who had come through ’60s free love and drugs and needed some stability.”

Smith even launched a music label and began fusing Evangelical faith with electric guitars and drum kits. His idea was a huge hit, one of the first in a wave that has become known as the Jesus movement. His church started with just 25 members in a Costa Mesa lot in 1965, but by the mid-2000s, it had grown to include hundreds of affiliated chapels around the nation and internationally plus a lucrative array of radio stations.

With his tale of drug addiction and strip clubs, the newly redeemed Coy was a perfect fit for Calvary’s edgier message. And Coy turned out to be a charismatic preacher. He’s an engaging storyteller — “somewhere between Billy Graham and Billy Crystal,” the Miami Herald once suggested — with an easy laugh and a voice that excitedly rises into high nasal registers.

By 1986, his church had outgrown the funeral parlor and attracted about 1,200 regulars to an Oakland Park chapel. He had a staff of 13. Like his mentor Smith, he looked for converts in unusual places. As spring breakers poured into Fort Lauderdale to bong beers, he set up “The Recovery Room” at the Jolly Roger motel, where he offered live music, first aid, and — of course — Evangelical literature. Coy soon upgraded again, by moving to a warehouse in Pompano Beach, where thousands came every week to watch him preach.

“We loved him because of his realness. He never hid who he was,” says Tina Rivera-John, who began attending Calvary in the mid-’90s when she was 12 years old. “He was just transparent, and he could be very funny as well.”

Like Smith, though, Coy used his relaxed persona to sell a deeply conservative brand of Christianity. He ran gay-conversion groups and preached that all nonbelievers would go to Hell. As his star rose and his congregation grew into the tens of thousands, the Sun Sentinel solicited weekly faith columns written by Coy. In a piece about the Iraq War, he called Saddam Hussein a “rabid dog” and wrote that “we cannot simply sit idly by and let evil happen.” In another, he called adultery “the ultimate betrayal of trust in human relationship” and cautioned that “repentance is not just being sorry that you were caught.”

In 1996, the church paid $21 million for a 75-acre campus just east of Florida’s Turnpike off Cyprus Creek Road, where Coy often dipped into politics to guide his massive flock. His church fought in 2002 to remove LGBT people from protection under Broward’s Human Rights Ordinance, and Coy loudly defended George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War: “I believe in war because it’s biblical, scriptural, and religious,” he told his followers in one sermon. In 2004, he even campaigned with Dubya around South Florida.

Coy sued Fort Lauderdale in 2003 after the city tried to block Calvary from placing a sign with a Christian message at a Christmas light show. Coy’s church won the suit — plus $81,000 in damages and fees — and the city, which organized the event, stopped offering sponsorships out of concern that hate groups might take advantage of the ruling.

Coy became a key endorsement for local Republicans, including conspiracy theorist U.S. Rep. Allen West, whom Calvary hosted as a keynote speaker at a conference to train more than 100 local conservatives to run for office more effectively.

Calvary was among the first churches in the nation to air podcasts, stream services online, and simulcast sermons at satellite campuses (the church had opened campuses in Plantation and Boca). His popularity soared. He toured the nation on Evangelical radio and TV shows, hung around with Billy Graham, and published books and CDs.

In 2005, Coy’s church rented out Dolphin Stadium on Easter Sunday and drew more than 20,000 people. The next year, he raised an insane $103 million in donations — the most by a single megachurch to date. He sat on a U.S. presidential advisory board and received weekly updates straight from GOP mastermind Karl Rove. In 2006, gubernatorial candidates Charlie Crist and Tom Gallagher personally pleaded for Coy’s endorsement, though he declined.

Coy had forsaken rock ‘n’ roll for Jesus but then became a rock star anyway. Huge crowds hung on his every word. Young women begged for photos. And somewhere along the line, Coy slipped right back into his old life.

Illustration by Joseph Laney

On a Sunday evening in April 2014, thousands packed into Calvary Chapel’s sanctuary, a cavernous space that looks more like a midsize city’s convention center than a church. As they sank into plush, arena-style seats and flipped open well-thumbed copies of the Bible, Coy’s followers quickly noticed something was very wrong. The rock band that usually played raucous hymns to start services was missing. And a grim-looking assistant pastor, gripping a letter, was walking across the stage.

Pastor Bob had suddenly resigned, the assistant pastor told the stunned crowd. He had admitted to a grave “moral failing.” Ushers passed tissue boxes down the rows as his followers wept.

“People were really, really hurt,” says Colleen Healy, a Broward resident who began following Coy in 1995. “I was really hurt. I’ll never forget that meeting.”

Coy’s preaching career ended with shocking speed, but his sex scandal was far from the first for Calvary Chapel. In fact, the church had been battling accusations nationwide for years that it empowered predatory pastors while demanding little accountability.

The root of Calvary’s problems, critics say, lies in its unique structure. Unlike many Protestant churches, which set up powerful boards of elders to oversee ministers, Calvary used a management style Smith called the “Moses method.”

“Moses was the leader appointed by God,” Smith told Christianity Today in 2007. “We are not led by a board of elders.”

Instead, the pastors Smith installed in his hundreds of megachurches, which are similar to Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale, had nearly unlimited power over budgets, personnel, and message. And even if complaints arose, Smith’s answer was often to give wayward preachers second and third chances.

In 2007, Christianity Today spoke to numerous Calvary pastors across the country. Some complained anonymously that Smith was “dangerously lax in maintaining standards for sexual morality” among his preachers. “Those men cannot call sin sin,” one 20-year veteran of the church complained to the publication.

There were ample cases to make that point. In 2003, John Flores, a pastor at Smith’s flagship in Costa Mesa, was arrested for having sex with the 15-year-old daughter of another pastor. According to Christianity Today, he’d been fired twice before for sexual misconduct, including once after getting caught having sex on church grounds, but kept getting his job back. (Flores was eventually convicted of sex with the minor.)

Two years later, a Calvary Chapel in Laguna Beach fired its pastor for adultery and embezzlement — but Smith quickly rehired him to preach at the nearby Costa Mesa church.

That same year, the church found itself in a bizarre scandal centered on a lucrative, 400-station radio network and its head, Idaho-based Pastor Mike Kestler. He had been in hot water in the ’90s when multiple women in his church claimed he’d sexually harassed them, but Smith gave him another chance.

In a lawsuit, a woman named Lori Pollitt said after she had moved from Texas to Idaho to work for Kestler, he repeatedly demanded she divorce her husband, give up her children to adoption, and marry him. When she rebuffed him, she said he stalked her and put a “hangman’s noose” in front of her house.

This time, Smith and his son Jeff actually turned on their pastor, pushing him out. They ended up locked in dueling lawsuits, with the pastor accusing Calvary’s leaders of skimming profits and the Smiths charging that he used his influence running the radio stations to pressure women into sex. (The cases were settled out of court.)

The next year, Santa Ana police investigated the Costa Mesa chapel after a 12-year-old told a staffer that a pastor had been touching her inappropriately. Police said they couldn’t find enough evidence to press charges, but the staffer claimed the church forced him to resign for alerting the authorities.

In 2006, Coy’s church in Fort Lauderdale landed in court over claims of lax oversight. A Calvary Chapel member named Rodger Thomas was arrested that year and charged with repeatedly molesting a 15-year-old girl at a high school run by the church. Two years later, her family sued Calvary, alleging leaders should have done more to stop Thomas. A jury awarded the family $360,000 but ruled Calvary wasn’t culpable.

The most serious claim against Calvary’s national church came in 2011, when four men in Idaho filed a federal suit alleging a youth minister named Anthony Iglesias had molested them between 2000 and 2003. Even worse, they said church officials knew full well he was a pedophile: He’d been kicked out of another Calvary youth ministry in California after being charged with sex crimes there.

That case was settled out of court, but the attorney who brought the case says that, in general terms, Smith’s habit of forgiving and rehiring pastors who have committed sexual offenses is a recipe for disaster.

“Typically, how it goes in these cases is you have a violator in the church, but the leaders will have this notion that if he repents, he’s forgiven, and then we don’t have to talk about it any more,” says Leander James, who specializes in church child abuse cases. “That whole approach always ends up hiding pedophiles.”

Neither Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, the movement’s flagship, nor the Calvary Chapel Association returned messages from New Times seeking comment for this story.

It’s still not clear how Coy’s sexual indiscretions came to light in 2014. But two weeks after his surprise resignation, Assistant Pastor Chet Lowe filled Coy’s followers in on what had happened.

“Our former pastor was caught in sin,” Lowe said April 16, according to the Sun Sentinel. “Our pastor, he committed adultery with more than one woman. Our pastor, he committed sexual immorality, habitually, through pornography. Rest assured, God will not be mocked.”

Coy’s flock, which had followed him for decades as the church became Florida’s largest, was devastated. Hundreds left or found other churches while Calvary scrambled to find a new leader, eventually settling on Pastor Doug Sauder, a less flashy but respected veteran of the organization.

“When Pastor Bob left, people definitely left too because they wanted to follow him or because they were just hurt,” says Healy, the longtime church member.

Coy’s faithful didn’t know it, but just over a year after the pastor’s resignation for adultery, Coral Springs Police launched their investigation into a far worse allegation. It’s unclear how seriously they took the claim of the teenager — whom New Times is not naming in accordance with our policy on reporting on victims of sexual abuse — who said Coy had forced her to have sex even when she was only 4 years old. But the case soon stalled.

The department assigned the case to Det. Jeff Payne, a veteran investigator in the usually sleepy, affluent suburb of 120,000. Payne had experience with sensitive cases involving sex crimes; earlier that year, he’d investigated a high-ranking cop for allegedly assaulting a 13-year-old girl. Payne had taken his case against Fort Lauderdale Police Maj. Eric Brogna to the Broward County State Attorney’s Office, but prosecutors declined to press charges.

In the Coy case, though, Payne never made that kind of headway. Shortly after resigning, the disgraced pastor moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Calvary Chapel has another affiliate church. (It’s unclear if he worked there.) Coy says he was never approached by the police about the allegations.

Indeed, police records show no progress on the case until eight months later, on April 4, 2016, when Coy’s young accuser showed up at Coral Springs Police headquarters. She told Payne she was “moving tomorrow [overseas] on a mission trip with the church, and asked if it was possible to destroy any record of [her] abuse,” the detective wrote in a closeout memo. The woman told him “she had an experience with God and has found forgiveness” for Coy over his abuse.

The detective told her that he couldn’t destroy the files, but he closed the case that day. Coy wouldn’t be charged over her allegations. Broward State Attorney Mike Satz says he was never notified about the investigation.

“The law enforcement agency makes [its] decision on whether to bring the case to us,” says Ron Ishoy, a spokesman for Satz. “They do what they feel is right based on the evidence they have.”

Illustration by Joseph Laney

It’s October 2017, and Bob Coy hunches over a laptop in a far corner of the Funky Biscuit, a dimly lit club in Mizner Park in Boca Raton. The New Jersey-based folk-rock band Driftwood is still a few hours from taking the stage, and a handful of early arrivals sip beer and laugh over the canned blues soundtrack.

Although he’s spent years away from the altar, Coy still looks straight out of central casting for a hip Evangelical preacher. His gray goatee is neatly trimmed, and he wears a light-blue plaid shirt and expensive jeans. But since returning to South Florida, he’s spent most nights here, helping run the Funky Biscuit — a late return to his music industry roots.

Coy is friendly and voluble, but his lively green eyes suddenly brim with tears when he’s asked about the sexual assault claims.

“If we go off the record, I could tell you a lot,” he says. “I took a polygraph.” But he declines to share the results of the test, which he says was not done for the police. He claims his record as pastor at Calvary Chapel was unblemished by sexual harassment or molestation claims.

“There were no other allegations,” he says. “Never.”

Coy has never been criminally charged, and if there were other cases of sexual harassment or abuse in the decades he ran Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale, neither the church nor cops have revealed them. The church didn’t respond to a detailed set of questions from New Times, instead sending a general statement about the former pastor.

“We learned of this report after it was disclosed and reported to the appropriate authorities,” says Michael Miller, a church spokesman. “We take every allegation of abuse seriously, and our prayers are with the Coy family as they pursue redemption and healing.”

The church Coy helped build has moved on without him, but the national Calvary organization has struggled. In late 2013, Chuck Smith died at the age of 86 after battling lung cancer. His daughter, Janette Manderson, and his widow, Kay, sued the organization, alleging its leaders conspired to take over Smith’s empire and even denied him emergency medical care on his deathbed. Their lawsuit was dismissed this past July. (Attorneys for both sides declined to comment on the terms.)

Amid that legal battle, the movement essentially split in half shortly after Smith’s death. The founder’s son-in-law, Brian Brodersen, left the network of Calvary churches and started his own organization with many of the chapels, including Coy’s old church in Fort Lauderdale. Others stayed in Smith’s original system.

“When Chuck Smith died, there was nothing left to hold back all the competing factions,” church critic Michael Newnham says. “They have been at war ever since.”

This year, Calvary has been hit by even more sexual abuse claims. In May, Matt Tague, an assistant pastor at North Coast Calvary Chapel in San Diego, was arrested on 16 counts of lewd and lascivious acts on a minor under 14 years old. Police say the victim wasn’t a church member, and Calvary Chapel says it immediately fired Tague upon learning about the claims.

Then, on July 18, police arrested 41-year-old Roshad Thomas, who had spent 13 years as a volunteer youth pastor at Calvary Chapel Tallahassee. He’s accused of molesting at least ten children aged 13 to 16 over several years, victimizing members of the youth group he led after taking them back to his apartment.

Police say Thomas has admitted to the abuse (though his criminal trial is pending). The chapel’s founder, Kent Nottingham, told a local TV station that there’d been no suspicion of abuse and that he was “shocked.”

Coy has also been dragged through legal battlefields since his resignation from the church. In January 2016, he and Diane filed for divorce in Broward County. They’d already sold their Coral Springs house about six months after he resigned; the settlement divided their substantial remaining assets — including a $330,000 Hillsboro Beach condo he still owns — and defined custody of their two children. The divorce file includes nearly 30 pages of documents related to their finances and settlements.

But on February 22 of that year, the case went to Judge Tim Bailey, a member of a powerful conservative family; his father, Patrick, founded the Pompano Beach Republican Club, and both father and son had chaired Broward’s Judicial Nominating Commission. That body recommends candidates for higher legal office to the governor. In Coy’s case, Bailey made a relatively unusual ruling: All financial documents would be kept secret. Why? To “avoid substantial injury” to Coy’s former employer — Calvary Chapel — according to the court file.

To critics such as Newnham, there’s only one reason to fight for a ruling like that: to hide from churchgoers the amount of cash the church gave Coy to go away. The case reeks of political favoritism. “These guys have been covering for Coy for a long time,” Newnham says, “and they’re still covering for him now.” (Judge Bailey didn’t respond to messages from New Times to comment on this story.)

If Coy’s resignation stunned his followers, it hasn’t hurt Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale much in the long run. The church still claims about 20,000 members, and on a recent Wednesday night, thousands of them poured in for a service led by Pastor Sauder, Coy’s replacement.

The chapel’s grounds are more expansive than those of many colleges and brim with high-end features: an Astroturf soccer field, a huge playroom stuffed with kid-size toy airplanes and plush animals, even a fine-dining restaurant where sermons and musical performances are live-streamed as guests feast on cooked-to-order steaks.

In the huge sanctuary, a ten-piece band — including four guitarists, a drummer surrounded by glass sound walls, and two keyboardists — rocked out in front of a laser display that wouldn’t be out of place on a Justin Bieber tour. As churchgoers held their hands up in ecstasy, Sauder read from Matthew and promised that Jesus was ready to heal.

If you’re broken, Jesus will be gentle with you in your anger and disillusionment,” Sauder said. “If you’re angry or you’re disillusioned or you’re fearful, if you embarrass yourself or you disappoint yourself… he can take all the mess and turn it into something beautiful.”

Coy certainly paid a heavy price for his infidelity: His family has broken to pieces, and his chapels packed with thousands of adoring fans have been replaced with a half-full nightclub in Boca.

But Newnham says the pastor still has more to answer for — especially because his sources say Coy has been trying to mobilize investors to start a new church.

“He’s contacted many former associates to try to get funding. There’s no question he wants back in the game,” Newnham says. “We need to stop him. In my opinion, if he did this [to one victim], it’s just a question of how many others are out there. He can’t be put in a position of power ever again.”

Original Article

CHAPTER 1

STANDPOINT FROM A PSYCHOLOGIST

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CHAPTER 2

PREVENTING FRAUD

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CHAPTER 3

MORE ABOUT TRANSRACIAL

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STANDPOINT FROM A PSYCHOLOGIST

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PREVENTING FRAUD

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NEWS

STANDPOINT FROM A PSYCHOLOGIST

He’s part of a small, but growing community.

CHAPTER 1 OF 3

Author:Garin Flowers

Published:8:13 AM EST November 19, 2017

Dr. Stacey Scheckner is a licensed psychologist with a B.A. from Washington University, plus M.A. and doctorate from Florida State. She hasn’t had a client who wanted to change their race but has worked with many clients wanting to change their body in some way.

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“If someone feels that they feel at home with a certain religion, a certain race, a certain culture, I think that if that’s who they really feel inside life is about finding out who you are. The more knowledge you have of yourself, the happier you can be,” she said.

“And, as long as it’s not hurting yourself or anyone else, I don’t see a problem with that.”

Ja Du hasn’t told his family yet because he believes they will laugh at the notion of changing your ethnicity. The public was very critical of Dolezal and might be for him as well, but Scheckner believes everyone should be more understanding.

“If that’s who they are and they want to celebrate it and enjoy it, then you have to think what harm is it doing? All they want to do is throw themselves into that culture and celebrate it.”

“I think before we get offended, we need to take a step back and think about what is the harm.”

But, with someone making such drastic changes, she does think they should speak to a professional.

“I work with a lot, in my 15 years, a lot of transgender people. Before the doctors that I send them to do any type of physical changes to their body, they go through a long process with me and actually most the people, they are not upset about it because they want to make sure that they’re doing the right thing.”

That brings up another major change with Ja Du. He is also transsexual and is considering changing his gender as well. He has spoken to his mom and family about that.

NEWS

PREVENTING FRAUD

CHAPTER 2 OF 3

Your race can make you more marketable and in some cases eligible for certain benefits, jobs and scholarships. After quick Google search for ethnic scholarships, we found that a Filipino scholarship was the second option that popped up.

Many might question Ja Du’s intentions or say that he is a perfect case of cultural appropriation.

He knows this can be a problem, but says he’s not trying to take advantage of anything.

“I believe people will [take advantage] just like other people have taken advantage of their identity to get their way, but the difference between me and them Garin is that I don’t want that. I think that we all have the freedoms to pursue happiness in our own ways,” he said.

NEWS

MORE ABOUT TRANSRACIAL

CHAPTER 3 OF 3

The term was normally used to describe someone (or a couple) of a certain race adopting a baby of another race. But, now after the story of Rachel Dolezal, it’s becoming associated with someone who identifies with another ethnicity or race.

If you Google the term now, you will find plenty of stories and information referring to both definitions for the term.

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Original Article

OKLAHOMA CITY, OK (KRQE/KOCO) – The driver of a stolen pickup truck led police on a wild chase through Oklahoma City that lasted nearly three hours.

He weaved through neighborhoods, squeezed through gates and went to wrong way down the road, barely missing oncoming traffic.

Police threw spikes, but he got around them.

A stranger even tried to stop him, but police finally got the upper hand when the driver flew backward into a pond.

He then started running, falling several times while trying to keep his pants on. Police tased him and finally led the suspect off in handcuffs.

In an interview with KOCO 5, a pastor says he opened fire on the man. He said he saw the chase on TV, spotted the suspect, and decided to follow him.

Craig Wright said he parked his car on the road in an effort to block the suspect in and asked if he needed any help, but the suspect drove off, KOCO 5 reports. 

That’s when the pastor says he grabbed his gun.

Original Article

By Kyle Swenson

The teenage girls were blindfolded but they could hear the jeering crowd, smell the beer and weed smoke spiking the night air. When their eyes were uncovered, the initiates – freshman members of the Lakeridge High School dance team – saw their school, a well-groomed low-slung campus circled by picturesque hills in suburban Portland, Oregon. A group of 30 older students, boys and girls, stood before them like amped-up ballpark spectators.

The older team members shouted that the freshmen had to do their dance routines, according to court records. As the girls fumbled through the steps, the older teens started bombing them with water balloons, some filled with oatmeal. They were sprayed with large water guns filled with ketchup. The senior team members then told the girls to strip down to the bikinis they had been ordered to wear. They were given garbage bags to don like dresses. A tarp, sticky with maple syrup and feathers, was unrolled on the ground. The young girls were ordered to wrestle.

“Last one standing wins.”

The young girls began toppling each other while helplessly begging. “Please stop, please stop.”

The high school hazing mayhem did not go unnoticed on the night of Aug. 9, 2014. From nearby trees, Taissa Achcar-Winkels secretly filmed her 14-year-old daughter’s public humiliation.

“I was not okay with what had happened,” Achcar-Winkels’s daughter, identified in court records only by initials, told a federal court this week, according to the Lake Oswego Review. “I was terrified. I thought that had I stood up and said I didn’t want to do it, it wouldn’t have ended up well either way.”

The maple syrup wrestling was part of a series of hazing incidents at the center of a trial this week in Portland. Two years ago, Taissa and Ray Achcar-Winkels filed a negligence lawsuit against the Lake Oswego School District, administrators, coaches and others alleging the defendants failed to curb harassment aimed at their daughter and other new members of the high school’s dance team. The gantlet of abuse allegedly played out like “Mean Girls” on steroids – public dares, inappropriate sexual talk, abuse and bullying, according to court documents. But the family alleges the district is also responsible for the retaliation the girl endured after speaking up.

“I was bullied, I was retaliated [against],” the girl told the court this week. “After I spoke up, the principals, the administration did nothing. They just let the girls keep bullying me. I had a really hard time. No one checked to see if I was okay.”

In court this week, the school acknowledged the hazing, but pushed back against the idea the district bore responsibility for the abuse or retaliation.

“No one disputes that this happened,” the school district’s attorney, Karen Vickers told the court, Courthouse News reported. “We all wish those events had never happened. But they did and we are here. The Lake Oswego School District, like all districts in Oregon, has a policy against hazing and bullying. What this case is really about is the challenges faced by high school students, their parents and school officials.”

The student, according to court documents and testimony, was excited to be one of the few freshmen to make the school’s Pacer Dance Team (PDT) during the summer before school started.

The harassment, however, began in June 2014, when the squad went on an overnight “bonding” trip in Gearhart, Oregon, according to a magistrate judge’s findings for the court.

One night during the visit, the team was left alone for a campfire. There, the older members of the squad initiated a game they called “Ten Fingers.” According to the findings for the court, in the game “senior PDT dancers disclosed activities they had previously engaged in and other PDT dancers were to indicate if they had engaged in the same activity by raising a finger. Several senior PDT dancers volunteered that they had taken drugs or engaged in sexual activities, including anal and oral sex.”

The student was so embarrassed by the conversation she had to walk away from the campfire.

In early August, the team gathered at an older member’s house for an “initiation sleepover.” The girls’ phones were taken and they were forced into costumes – “things such as Big Bird, a hot dog, a Skittle, Thing 1 and Thing 2,” the magistrate’s findings state.

Then they were piled into a senior’s car and forced to play “Truth or Dare.” If they chose dare, the girls had to pick their task from a hat. These including running into a restaurant and screaming an obscenity and dancing on the roof of the car.

“They said you have to do it, there was no option. It was just, ‘You’re going to do it,'” the girl told the court this week.

The girls were then blindfolded and taken to the school, where a crowd was waiting with the water balloons and the maple syrup tarp.

Taissa Achcar-Winkels, nervous about what might happen to her daughter during the initiation, had walked to the school and witnessed the hazing. “I was already feeling extremely nervous,” she testified this week. “So I went for a walk. I was just going to go and see what was happening.”

After the wrestling, the initiation wasn’t over. The dancers were next driven to George Rogers Park on the banks of the Willamette River. The new team members were told to get into the water, then asked questions. Every wrong answer meant another step into the frigid river. The teens weren’t allowed to stop until the water was at their shoulders.

The freshman girl voiced her concerns about the hazing to a coach she trusted. The complaints made it to district administrators. They contacted the family, but her father told a school representative the family didn’t want to initiate an official investigation “due to the fear of possible reprisals,” court records say.

Her complaint, however, eventually spread to the rest of the squad and coaches. The other dancers began ignoring her and bullying her on social media, court documents allege. She was also taken off certain dance teams and not allowed to dance at big games – retaliation, the family alleges, for speaking up about the hazing. She quit the team. The school did open an investigation in November.

On Thursday, the school’s principal Jennifer Schiele defended the school’s response to the incidents. “I apologized to her,” she testified, according to the Lake Oswego Review. “I felt terrible about the way she came forward and did not receive support from her peers. I told her if she needed anything, she could come to me. I felt terrible for her.”

Original Article

A surrogate mother from California, who gave birth to two babies, found out one of the children was biologically hers.

Jessica Allen became pregnant with her own biological child while she was carrying another baby as a surrogate for a Chinese couple.

Mrs Allen said doctors first thought the second was an identical twin.

As a result, both babies were given to the other woman after delivery and the Allens had to fight to get back their biological son.

‘Not explained’

Mrs Allen had already given birth to two healthy children, but had decided to become a surrogate mother.

She told Newsday on the BBC World Service she had ovulated despite being pregnant.

“I was pregnant through IVF already and at about six, seven weeks they found another embryo and they labelled it that the one embryo that they transferred split and turned into twins.

“My body naturally still ovulated while I was already pregnant – that’s very rare – no one really knows about it but obviously, with my situation, more people are learning about it.

“It’s called superfetation – it has a medical term to it, so why this process is not explained to surrogates, I don’t know. They don’t give this as a possibility.”

‘We definitely want our son’

Mrs Allen said she did not see the babies when they were born last December, but the other mother then texted her pictures of the babies when they were a few weeks old.

The intended mother also said she was waiting for Mrs Allen to feel well before revealing that she had doubts about the origin of one of the babies.

“I immediately freaked out and I asked my case worker, ‘what’s going on, how can this be, what’s happened, how did this happen?’ and she didn’t have any answers for me,” Mrs Allen told Newsday.

“So she [the case worker] said the next thing we need to do is to get me to have a DNA test.”

The intended mother also took the baby for a DNA test and within a fortnight asked Mrs Allen for a Skype call.

“That’s when she announced that the results indicated that I was his genetic mother,” Mrs Allen said.

“During the Skype call she did suggest that we could give him up for adoption and they already had a couple thinking about adopting him.

“At this point we had no idea what to do, so by the end of the call we told her we were going to talk about it, because we needed to figure out how we’re going to get ready for a baby literally overnight.”

However, the next day Mrs Allen told the woman: “We definitely want our son.”

Not on the birth certificate

But Mrs Allen and her husband ran into difficulties because – legally – they were not the parents.

They were told that because the intended mother signed the baby’s birth certificate, she was his legal mother and then if she wanted to give him up for adoption, she could

“I’m not on his birth certificate but I am his genetic mother, my husband is his genetic father and we have that proof through DNA,” said Mrs Allen, who added she and her husband were also asked to pay back part of the fee to the couple because they had paid her to carry more than one child.

They had also incurred fees for a lawyer they had hired to help them get custody of their son.

The Allens were finally reunited with their baby boy, who is now 10 months old.

When she met her son, Mrs Allen said she was a nervous wreck.

“When she [the case worker] pulled him out of her car and walked towards me, I just snatched him from her and said ‘give me my baby’ and I was just kissing him and trying to look at his face for the first time.

“I sat in the back seat with him so I could see him and talk to him and stuff.”

Original Article

Leaders at the church that George Washington attended decided that a plaque honoring the first president of the United States must be removed.

Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia will take down a memorial marking the pew where Washington sat with his family, saying it is not acceptable to all worshipers.

“The plaques in our sanctuary make some in our presence feel unsafe or unwelcome,” leaders said, a reference to the fact that Washington was a slaveholder.

“Some visitors and guests who worship with us choose not to return because they receive an unintended message from the prominent presence of the plaques.”

Original Article

By Marty Griffin

http://cbsloc.al/2gMddyM

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — It’s a breathtaking, horrifying and jaw-dropping moment caught on surveillance video which has Pittsburgh Police investigating and deeply concerned.

“They don’t treat animals like that. They wouldn’t treat a dog that way,” says a Pittsburgh woman whose daughter is seen being beaten and lying unconscious on a sidewalk in the video.

A surveillance camera captured the incident in Beechview more than a month ago. It shows a man walk up to the woman, kick her leg out and punch her in the face, knocking her out cold. The man then walks away from the scene.

The next moments may be more disturbing. One young man walks up to the woman, looks at her motionless body, then pulls out his phone and takes a video. Four more young people do the same.

“It’s disgusting. My daughter needs help,” the girl’s mother said.

A source who provided KDKA’s Get Marty with the video said in a text, “They didn’t help her. They took what looks like her phone while she’s out cold.”

One of the young people can be seen in the video clip bending down near the woman and picking something up.

The source went on to say, “Nobody called 911 to help her.”

The source also said of the group of young people, “They actually come back. A kid lays beside her and takes a selfie.”

A source close to the investigation said the woman ended up lying on the sidewalk until she regained consciousness.

KDKA’s Marty Griffin went to Broadway Avenue in Beechview where he found the woman in the video on the streets. She’s a drug addict with several arrests, mostly on drug charges.

KDKA is not identifying her or showing her face.

When first approached, she panicked and ran off, then KDKA’s Marty Griffin called her mother to the scene. She spotted her daughter several blocks away and approached her.

The woman reached out to KDKA in text messages. She told Get Marty:

“I’ll do anything possible to help her, but I’m raising her daughter, and now her daughter has to come first.”

“I told her about you and offered to pick her up and take her away from this situation. She said if I didn’t someone was going to kill her. That’s why we are here… to get her help.”

KDKA’s Marty Griffin: “Do you want some help?”

Victim: “I would like it. But I don’t know what I need help for at this point, I’m not sure at this point.”

Griffin: “I can get you into a rehab facility. So if I make the calls will you make sure…”

Victim’s Mother: “I will make sure she gets there.”

Dr. Neil Capretto, of Gateway Rehab, was shocked by the video.

“She’s lying there like somebody just hit a deer, is lying there on the side of the road,” said Dr. Capretto. “It’s like a sideshow in a circus. This is a human being.”

Dr. Capretto agreed to help the young woman. She was admitted into the facility that day.

“They deserve to be helped. This is my oath to help people who are sick. I, as a physician, this is my oath to help people who are sick. She’s sick and she needs help,” says Dr. Capretto.

KDKA is told she is doing extremely well.

Her mother gave Get Marty this update in a text:

“OMG Marty! I’m just leaving rehab where I just left my daughter. I didn’t think I would really see this day in my life. I really don’t know how to thank you and Dr. Capretto. The police also were very helpful. I’ve never really experienced anything like this before. It really does take a village. Forever grateful to you all.”

Meantime, Pittsburgh Police are continuing to investigate her attack. They believe they know who is responsible.

Original Article

By Carla Bleiker

What the heck? That’s probably what a civic registry office employee thought when he saw the request made by a couple from the central German city of Kassel. The parents wanted to register their newborn son as Lucifer.

The registrar refused to put the rather unusual name into the baby’s birth certificate, the parents refused to choose a different one. The case ended up in court, where, eventually, mom and dad were convinced to not saddle their son with a name that many people across the world associate with pure evil. The baby boy is now named Lucian.

The Latin word “lucifer” means “morning star” or, as an adjective, “light-bringing.” But today the name is a synonym for the devil. In Christian tradition, Lucifer was used as the proper name of the devil before his fall from grace. In popular culture Lucifer is synonymous with the devil or Satan.

Because the name stands for the personification of evil, the Association for the German Language (GfdS) considers it problematic and not appropriate.

“At the center of decisions like this is the well-being of the child,” Frauke Rüdebusch from the GfdS told newspaper Die Welt.

While there are no laws about what parents can name their children in Germany, parents cannot name them anything they want to. The registrar has to approve every name to go on a baby’s birth certificate.

If she is unsure, she can consult with the GfdS or, if she considers a name inappropriate and the parents won’t budge, go to court — all to prevent boys and girls from growing up with names that open them up to ridicule later in life.

Most parents in Germany decide on more conventional names for their children. The GfdS collects records of hundreds of registry offices across the country each year to compile a list of the most popular names. In 2016, they received more than one million individual entries, covering 97% of all baby names given that year.

The most popular names for girls born in 2016 were Marie, Sophie and Sophia. For boys, the top three were Elias, Alexander and Maximilian. More unusual names that were approved in 2016 include Fips and Twain, as in Mark.

In previous years, parents were allowed to name their children Gandalf, Godsgift or Kastanie (German for “chestnut”), for example. Moms and dads who wanted to go with Vespa, Westend or Dracula, on the other hand, were refused and had to go back to the drawing board.

In 2015, a refugee mother was so grateful for her new life in Germany that she named her daughter Angela Merkel, after the German chancellor.

Harriet illegal in Iceland

Other countries have different rules when it comes to naming babies. In Iceland, parents can choose from a list of roughly 1,850 female and 1,700 male names for their babies. If they aren’t happy with any of the choices, they can appeal to the Icelandic Naming Committee. To pass the test, a name can only have letters that are part of the Icelandic alphabet, and must be “capable of having Icelandic grammatical endings.”

This reporter’s name wouldn’t fly in Iceland, since the nation’s alphabet does not include the letter C. Harriet is also a no-go, as a British-Icelandic family found out. The British father and Icelandic mother where aghast when the national registry refused to renew their 10-year-old daughter’s passport in 2014 because it did not recognize her name. Harriet cannot be conjugated in Icelandic.

All citizens of the People’s Republic of China aged 16 and older must carry identity cards, which are processed electronically. That’s why all names must be spelled with characters that can be entered into or processed by a computer. Of the roughly 70,000 known Chinese characters, both simplified and traditional, only around 32,200 fulfill this requirement.

The US is famous for having lax rules on what names are allowed. Celebrities have kids named North, Apple or Blue Ivy. Regular citizens go crazy as well, naming their children Prince Charles, I’munique or Hellzel – who would make a perfect sister to the little German boy almost named Lucifer.

Original Article

By Libby Brooks

The children’s commissioners of Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland are calling for a UK-wide change in the law after the Scottish government confirmed its support for a ban on smacking children.

Scotland is to become the first part of the UK to introduce an outright ban on the physical punishment of children, after the Scottish government said it would ensure that a member’s bill became law.

John Finnie, the justice spokesperson for the Scottish Greens, has proposed removing the defence of “justifiable assault” from Scottish law, giving children the same legal protection as adults.

Along with leading children’s charities, the children’s commissioners for Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland have welcomed the development but expressed concern that legal protection from assault could now vary depending on a young person’s location.

Calling for the law to be changed at UK level, Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner for England, said: “The current legislation in England, which grants an exemption from the law on common assault to allow the physical punishment of children, is outdated. It should be updated to reflect what the vast majority of parents believe: that hitting children is wrong and that there are better and more effective ways of disciplining children and encouraging positive behaviour.”

The UK is one of only four EU countries that have not committed to legal reform over the physical punishment of children. According to section 58 of the ChildrenAct 2004, it is illegal for a parent or carer to smack their own child, except where it amounts to “reasonable chastisement”. Corporal punishment in schools was banned by the Westminster parliament in 1986.

Sally Holland, the children’s commissioner for Wales, expressed her disappointment that a legal defence for hitting children still existed throughout the UK. The defence of “reasonable chastisement”, which applies in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, mirrors the Scottish principle of “justifiable assault”. The Labour party in Wales made the removal of the defence a manifesto pledge in May’s Welsh assembly elections.

Holland said: “I’m delighted to hear today’s announcement from the Scottish government. I’m very pleased that the Welsh government has also committed to removing the defence; something that I think will accelerate a cultural change and will make more parents aware of the long-term damage of smacking.”

Koulla Yiasouma, Northern Ireland’s commissioner for children and young people, said: “Assaults on children have never been right, and it is certainly not right now that protection from assault as a child may depend on where you live in the UK.”

She added: “I am confident that while Scotland may be the first in the UK to ban this, it most certainly won’t be the last. I will be doing everything in my power to make sure Northern Ireland follows suit in due course and combines legal reform with improved support for parents.”

Describing the current legal defence as “untenable”, Bruce Adamson, the children’s and young people’s commissioner for Scotland, said: “Across the political spectrum, there is recognition that this is not only an obligation in human rights law and the right thing to do, but it is something we should have done many years ago.

“Scotland has the potential to be the first country in the UK to bring about the legal change necessary to provide children with equal protection from assault. If we pride ourselves on being a progressive country, a country which values children and is committed to offering them the best outcomes in life, then we need to make sure that this legislative change happens at the very earliest opportunity.”

The NSPCC, which has long campaigned for a change in the law, also made the case for a UK-wide ban. A spokeswoman said: “Closing this loophole would bring Scotland in line with dozens of other countries and give children there equal protection under the law. We urge governments across the UK to do likewise, including in Westminster.”

Explaining the decision to support the member’s bill to give children equal protection from assault, a Scottish government spokesperson said: “Mr Finnie’s proposals are not a Scottish government bill; however, we will ensure the proposals become law. We believe physical punishment can have negative effects on children, which can last long after the physical pain has died away. We support positive parenting through, for example, funding for family support services.”

A three-month public consultation on Finnie’s proposed bill, which took place over the summer, received an overwhelmingly positive response from organisations and individuals, including the Scottish Police Federation, Unicef UK and the NSPCC.

The bill received a further boost as Scottish Labour said supporting it was “the right thing to do”. The party’s education spokesman, Iain Gray, said: “Labour MSPs have discussed John Finnie’s bill and do believe that the time has come to provide children with the same protection as adults under the law.”

A Scottish Conservative spokesman said the party would “consider the bill very carefully”, but added: “I4n general terms, however, we believe the current legislation which permits reasonable chastisement has worked well and that remains our current position.”

Original Article

By Paraic O’Brien

After a lifetime of involvement with the far-right Kevin Wilshaw announces on Channel 4 News that he is leaving the movement – at the same time publicly coming out as gay.

The well known National Front organiser in the 1980s was still active in white supremacist groups earlier this year – including speaking at events.

But tonight on Channel 4 News he explains for the very first time why he is publicly disavowing the movement – sharing his secrets, explaining how he was both a Neo-Nazi and of Jewish heritage , while admitting to violent acts and what motivated his hatred.

Jewish heritage

Kevin Wilshaw also opens up about his Jewish mother.

“She was part Jewish, maiden name was Benjamin, we have Jewish blood on that side.

On an application form to join the National Front, he wrote about his hatred of “the Jews”.

“That term ‘the Jews’ is the global faceless mass of people you can’t personalise it, not individuals. That’s the generalisation that leads to 6 million people being deliberately murdered.

“I didn’t have many friends at school, I wanted to be a member of a group of people that had an aim, and I thought getting involved in that kind of thing would be comradeship. “

“Even though you end up being a group of people that through their own extreme views are cut off from society, you do have a sense of comradeship in that you’re a member of a group that’s being attacked by other people.”

Coming out

“On one or two occasions in the recent past I’ve actually been the recipient of the very hatred of the people I want to belong to … if you’re gay it is acceptable in society but with these group of people it’s not acceptable, and I found on one or two occasions when I was suspected of being gay I was subjected to abuse.”

Mr Wilshaw admits that being a Nazi who is gay – but with a Jewish background – is a contradiction.

“It’s a terribly selfish thing to say but it’s true, I saw people being abused, shouted at, spat at in the street – it’s not until it’s directed at you that you suddenly realise that what you’re doing is wrong.”

“You have other members leading National Front who are overtly gay. And nobody could see the contradiction of it that you have an overtly gay person leading a homophobic organisation, makes no sense.”

“Then you have someone like Nicky Crane, one of the hardest people who would be gay.”

“Even when people found out, they’d rationalise it, ‘He’s not really gay’ or ‘gay and ok’.”

Violent attack

He said he had hurt people, “but not unprovoked, in defence. In a by-election in Leeds I smashed a chair over someone’s head.”

But he denied ever having approached minorities and assaulted them.

“I’d never do that, but I have seen incidents where people were singled out because they were black by a group of people. It turned my stomach, I rejected that, I pushed it to the back of my mind.”

Mr Wilshaw was arrested for vandalising a mosque in Aylesbury in the early 1990s – and in March this year he was arrested for online race hate offences.

Extremist as recently as the start of this year

He joined the BNP after being part of the National Front and flirted with dangerous fringe groups like the Racial Volunteer Force.

Mr Wilshaw says he remembers meeting David Copeland – the Brixton and Soho nail bomber. More recently he took to social media – and until the start of year was still speaking at rallies.

Former National Front activist Matthew Collins, who now works for the anti-racist group Hope not Hate said: “One of things we noticed is there was someone who was struggling, he was becoming more and more extreme.”

“We almost expected the phone call and a cry for help, and that’s what he’s done.”

‘I want to hurt extremists’

“I feel appallingly guilty as well, I really do feel guilty, not only that, this is also a barrier to me having a relationship with my own family, and I want to get rid of it, it’s too much of a weight.”

“I want to do some damage as well, not to ordinary people but the people who are propagating this kind of rubbish – want to hurt them, show what it’s like for those who are living a lie and be on the receiving end of this type of propaganda, I want to hurt them.”

Fearing some level of revenge, Mr Wilshaw says “one or two would want to sort me.. they’d see it as betrayal.”

“I am going to find it difficult, granted, to fill a void that has occupied my life since childhood.”