The incident unfolded at the McKinley Senior High School in Canton on May 25 when the 17-year-old player said that head coach Marcus Wattley told him to sit in a chair in the middle of their gym and eat an entire pepperoni pizza. The student had been absent from a voluntary strengthening and conditioning practice.

Gilbert said that the student was under threat of having the other players being punished if he refused to eat the pizza. They also implied that he might be kicked off the team, he claimed. The student received therapy over the trauma from the incident.

I am getting divorced from my wife. Last week, my younger brother (he’s 24, I’m 37) called me and said he’d met this woman at his job who was perfect for me. Then I turned up at the restaurant and she was clearly not in her thirties, and after I sat down and briefly spoke to her, she was clearly not an adult. I have no idea what to do next.

“She proceeded to ask if I was gay in front of the entire class,” former student Maya Phan told WMBD. Phan is one of three former students who filed complaints against Morton High School teacher Kim Johnson who taught an “American Problems” class at the school. The students say she used the class as an excuse to “freely express hostility” towards women, LGBTQ people, and racial minorities.

Last summer, 10-year-old Aidan decided he was going to kill the family dog. He lured her behind the sofa with a sausage before putting his hands over her muzzle and around her neck.

"The crazy thing is that he actually loves the dog and me the most out of anyone," says Aidan's mother, Hazel. "But we are the two that he will target and sometimes he will hurt her to get a reaction out of me."

Aidan kicks and hits, and he used to bite. He tells Hazel that he hates her and wants her to die, that he's going to get a gun and shoot her. He's tried to push her down the stairs, and now that he's worked out where her blind spots are - she has a visual impairment - he throws things at her that she can't see coming. Recently it was a kettle, which fortunately hadn't just been boiled - but Aidan didn't know it was cold when he picked it up and launched it.

Minnesota’s major hospitals and healthcare systems are stepping up their urgency ahead of Thanksgiving this week with a messaging campaign that declares “There’s no more time to be ‘Minnesota Nice.'”

The campaign is called “Fight COVID MN.”

“We need to pull this lever, which is a little bit more in your face,” said Dr. Rahul Koranne, the president and CEO of the Minnesota Hospital Association.

One of the first two posters shows a healthcare worker in PPE with text that says, “We’re not the front line. You are. We’re your last chance.”

The other reads, “We’re sure it’s good, but is Grandma’s pumpkin pie really to die for?”

“I think it’s time to get pretty aggressive,” said Dr. Omobosola Akinsete, HealthPartners’s chair of infectious diseases.

My wife and I (we’re both women) are in an interfaith marriage. I’m a member of a tiny religious minority and my wife is an atheist. Before we got married, we agreed we’d raise our kids in my religion—monthly religious service attendance, religious summer camp, etc.—and then let them choose whether to pursue the religion when they turn 18 and move out. My parents were much more prescriptive with me and I ended up rebelling against it for a long time. It was important to me that our kids make a choice for themselves once they turned 18.

However, my wife is tacitly supportive but pretty much “opts out” whenever she can. She works long hours and basically never wants to come to our religious service because she wants to catch up on sleep. I end up taking the kids by myself. My kids are teens and, seeing my wife opt out, are wondering why they can’t opt out either—which is super valid. My parents always warned me I shouldn’t marry outside the faith so I can’t talk to them about this, because all I’ll get is an “I told you so.” I can’t make my wife a role model for a religion she doesn’t believe in, but it’s incredibly important that my kids have a strong religious foundation and then make the choice from there. What should we do?

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a quasi-independent agency of the federal government, is suing grocery chain Kroger, alleging that two employees were fired because they refused to wear aprons bearing a rainbow heart.

“The women believed the emblem endorsed LGBTQ values and that wearing it would violate their religious beliefs,” says an EEOC press release. The suit alleges the company violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans religious discrimination in employment.

The two, Brenda Lawson and Trudy Rickerd, worked at a Kroger store in Conway, Ark., near Little Rock. They have “sincerely held religious beliefs that homosexuality is a sin,” according to the EEOC complaint, filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without clothes on their backs or roofs over their heads, but most of us would not wish for a world with more people, if they had to live homeless and naked against the elements. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy -- to light their homes and cook their food, and if that level is reached, they’ll be in the market for still more -- to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At moderate levels of economic development, people start to desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and cars to drive. And at the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, which they reach by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

One solution is to simply open our borders, to allow more of the world’s desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered the earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious -- that the opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in a third world country. And if you are rich or middle class American, there are benefits from immigrants – cheaper labor and better bottom-lines on stock dividends (as large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, and drastically cut salaries and benefits for their employees). But Cafaro notes that those economic benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for the poorest Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live reasonably comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.

The governor of Texas has warned that he could reimpose a lockdown on the state if coronavirus prevention measures were not heeded, as states across the U.S. battled to get the pandemic under control.

Friday brought 63,900 new cases nationwide - a new record, according to data from Johns Hopkins University analyzed by CNN.

Bioethicist Dr Zeke Emanuel said up to 250,000 Americans could die directly from the coronavirus by the end of the year.

A Texas pastor has apologized for failing to keep people socially distanced at his evangelical church, after he and dozens of congregants reportedly tested positive for COVID-19.

Calvary Chapel of San Antonio has held multiple indoor, in-person services since it reopened in early May, right after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) let the state’s stay-at-home order expire. As hospitalizations and positivity rates surged in Texas over the past few weeks, members of the church began testing positive for the novel coronavirus.

The church has at least 50 cases of the novel coronavirus, lead pastor Ron Arbaugh told ?NBC-affiliate WOAI-TV on Saturday. Most of the positive cases are staff members ? including Arbaugh, his wife, at least one other main pastor, and children’s ministry staff. The majority of impacted individuals have reported mild symptoms, the pastor said.

Oprah Winfrey has warned African Americans to take the coronavirus outbreak seriously because it is 'ravaging our community' and 'taking us out'.

The TV mogul said the coronavirus outbreak continued to have a devastating impact on black communities across the United States but that people weren't getting the message about the risk of asymptomatic carriers.

Speaking to CBS This Morning on Tuesday, Winfrey said it was important for black people to understand that pre-existing conditions including diabetes and asthma put them at greater risk if they contracted the virus.

She also voiced concerns for her own health, saying she was staying indoors because she suffered from pneumonia last year and that her 'lungs never really fully cleared'.

In a televised address, Duterte said it was vital everyone cooperates and follows home quarantine measures, as authorities try to slow the coronavirus contagion and spare the country's fragile health system from being overwhelmed.

The Philippines has recorded 96 coronavirus deaths and 2,311 confirmed cases, all but three in the past three weeks, with infections now being reported in the hundreds every day.

"It is getting worse. So once again I'm telling you the seriousness of the problem and that you must listen," Duterte said late on Wednesday.

"My orders to the police and military ... if there is trouble and there's an occasion that they fight back and your lives are in danger, shoot them dead."

"Is that understood? Dead. Instead of causing trouble, I will bury you."

The woman from Illinois wrote to the Santa Rosa’s Press Gazette’s ‘Dear Abby’ column to explain her dilemma.

She said she had previously been in an abusive relationship, but broke it off 14 years ago and stayed single to raise her “small son to adulthood”.

She finally found someone she had “strong feelings” for, and who felt the same about her, around seven months ago.

The woman wrote: “My feelings for my boyfriend are strong, and it’s mutual. He is giving, kind, caring, hardworking and protective. We are very much in love.

The news last week that NBA player Rudy Gobert, a Frenchman of Caribbean heritage, had tested positive for the coronavirus shattered a myth that some of the world's more conspiracy-minded had circulated online through jokes, news stories and social media posts.

Black people are not, in fact, immune to the coronavirus.

On Tuesday, the Afro-British actor Idris Elba, who lives part time in the United States and tested positive for COVID-19 this week, posted on social media about his early lack of symptoms and subsequent changes, how he managed to be tested, the dangers of the disease — and the myth of black immunity.

Variations on the immunity myth — claims that black worshipers can't be infected at church where a pastor refused to cancel in-person services and false assertions that there are zero COVID-19 infections in Africa to name a few — remain on the internet along with other fantastical ideas. The myth of group immunity may, public health, disease control and bioethicists say, provide some people with a bit of levity or sense of control in a seemingly dire time. But the risk of false information circulating in any form far outweighs the value of a few chuckles or nerve-calming denial.

The ABC’s Sarah Ferguson has taken us into a place where most Christians have not wanted to go – up close and very personal with pedophile Christian leaders in her series Revelation on the ABC. The series focuses in scarifying detail on abuse by pedophile Catholic Priests.

Chrissie Foster, who has seen extreme family tragedy from clergy pedophilia, tells Eternity her response to Revelation: “If you have a child in the Catholic system you will learn that your child is worthless to the Catholic priesthood.

“If you have had doubt about the guilt of Catholic clergy over child sexual assault, you will learn that the hierarchy do nothing to stop child sexual assault after complaints.

“Oral rape of children …

“You will learn that clergy live a public life as a holy man and in private a life as a crime figure.

“You may have the Christian values they preach, but they don’t.

“Learn. Protect your children from clergy.”