When mommy blogger Lacey Spears was convicted for the murder of her beloved five-year-old son Garnett, thousands of Spears' social media followers were absolutely shocked. For years prior, the young Kentucky mother had taken to the Internet for support by documenting Garnett's various health struggles. Lacey exhaustively blogged Garnett's medical journey, all the while hiding the one thing that was keeping him sick: unbeknownst to Lacey's faithful supporters, she had been secretly poisoning the child with life-threatening doses of salt through a feeding tube.

In the winter of 2014, Garnett passed away in a New York hospital from toxic amounts of sodium in his bloodstream. Detectives were sent to Spears' home where they discovered Garnett's medications tucked behind a large can of salt. It was then revealed that Spears had asked a neighbor to enter their home and dispose of Garnett's feeding bag which was allegedly filled with the equivalent of 69 packets of salt.

After a highly publicized two-week trial, Spears was sentenced 20-years-to-life for the second degree murder of Garnett. The New York prosecutors called her actions, "nothing short of torture." Death by salt poisoning is extremely painful, and Garnett spent his last days screaming in agony (the hospital-room videos are disturbing) before the decision was made to take him off of life support. The defense blamed the hospital for both the elevated levels of sodium in Garnett's blood and his subsequent death. Spears maintains her innocence and vehemently insists that she does not have Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy. Obviously, the judge thought otherwise, citing "mental illness she refuses to acknowledge."

Religious orders are supposed to provide spiritual guidance to those who join. But some of the women who entered Sisters Minor of Mary Immaculate (SMMI) say they faced physical and emotional abuse.

Patricia Budd, one of the former nuns of SMMI, first entered in 1995 in hopes of connecting with her Catholicism. It was at her first retreat where she met the order’s U.S. delegate, Sister Theresa Kovacs.

“It was a lot of hugs. There was a lot of encouragement,” Budd told HuffPost. “They would listen to you, and you felt really important, and you felt like you’re valued.” But soon after she joined, Budd and the other nuns realized things were not as they seemed.

“I witnessed other girls just being yelled at on a constant basis by Theresa Kovacs,” said Rose, who joined SMMI in 1995. (Three interviewees asked to only be identified by their first names.) According to Rose, a sister named Georgiana often got the brunt of Kovacs’ anger.

“It would be a torrent of the nastiest stuff you could ever say to a human being, she would say to me,” said Georgiana. “It was meant to keep people in line.”

The nuns faced strict rules. They weren’t allowed to speak to each other. They weren’t allowed to go for walks outside the convent doors.

“Basically your food is pretty much less and less,” she said. “And so, that’s pretty much like what a cult is — and break you down. That’s the whole thing. Always to break you down.”

In 2018, Burger King played an April Fools’ prank on its customers, claiming it was now selling a “chocolate Whopper.”

The joke sparked panic among fast food fans, with customers wondering whether the entrée was real. What would a sweet hamburger taste like, anyway?

The item was decidedly a prank, but now, some customers can try a chocolate Whopper for real — if they even want to, that is.

Last week, our social media feeds were flooded by the image of Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, telling US senators that the country was “going in the wrong direction”. The image had a vivid, layered power. Not only did it feel like a national death knell, but Fauci’s appearance – in an imperial-red face mask emblazoned with the insignia of baseball’s Washington Nationals – seemed to signal another culture war. Fauci was making a comment about how to maintain one’s masculinity while wearing a face mask.

Fauci apparently isn’t the only one anxious about face masks impeding his masculinity. The shock jock Joe Rogan, known for his massive following of male listeners, recently suggested that only “bitches” wear masks. Donald Trump Jr was photographed at a packed party in the Hamptons, like a baddie from a John Hughes film, conspicuously sans mask.

No one noticed when an 82-year-old man, forced into quarantine after returning from a trip to another state, died in his home in the village of Mohammadpur Khala in Uttar Pradesh.

His neighbors, who had refused to go near the man’s house out of fear he had brought back the coronavirus with him, only noticed something was wrong when the stench from his decomposing body became overwhelming.

Elsewhere in India, farmers are taking their own lives because they can’t get laborers to harvest their crops. Police are accused of beating lockdown violators to death. Migrant workers are dropping dead after being forced to walk hundreds of miles home. Alcoholics are dying from drinking methanol because all alcohol sales have been banned. Children are dying of starvation.

A Tennessee school district dismissed a student-teacher after the young educator taught a Black History Month lesson to fourth-graders, asking them to recite graphic, violent methods to control slaves, officials said Thursday.

The student-teacher's lesson plan, given to youngsters at Waverly Belmont Elementary School in Nashville, was centered around the notorious — and perhaps apocryphal — 1712 speech by slave owner William Lynch, "The Making of a Slave," officials said.

After reading the material in which Lynch purportedly advocated for physical and psychological torture of slaves, students were asked, "To keep their slaves subservient, plantation owners should" with a series of blank bullet points for youngsters to fill in.

"A student-teacher was dismissed and asked not to return to Waverly-Belmont as a result of teaching material that was not age appropriate or within the scope of sequence for the 4th grade class," according to a statement by Metro Nashville Public Schools.

A dog viciously attacked a 23-year-old woman in Coseley, a suburban area in the north of the Dudley Metropolitan Borough, in the English West Midlands. The incident took place Sunday, local media reports said.

The dog allegedly bit the woman's arm forcing the woman to undergo surgery. The owner of the dog had to euthanize the dog following the attack.