Nearly 40 years after first striking fear with a painful, grotesque set of symptoms, the Ebola virus has now killed at least 88 people in the West African countries of Guinea and Liberia.  And the worry is: It could get a lot worse. It is a terrifying virus, highly infectious, quick to kill, with no vaccine and no cure. Doctors in Guinea are dealing with the most aggressive strain. Only one out of ten victims survives. MORE

Thousands of Chinese Christians have mounted an extraordinary, round-the-clock defence of a church in a city known as the ‘Jerusalem of the East’ after Communist Party officials threatened to bulldoze their place of worship. In an episode that underlines the fierce and long-standing friction between China’s officially atheist Communist Party and its rapidly growing Christian congregation, Bible-carrying believers this week flocked to the Sanjiang church in Wenzhou hoping to protect it from the bulldozers. MORE

Earthquakes rattled residents in Oklahoma on Saturday, the latest in a series that have put the state on track for record quake activity this year, which some seismologists say may be tied to oil and gas exploration. MORE

Diabolical Illuminate commercial visualizing the pleasures of eating and drinking the apple from the tree of good & evil. Don’t mind the snakes. MORE

Some of the people working in the Obama administration and in the White House are trying to “completely secularize our military” and are “hostile to Christians,” to the point that they“are anti-Christ in what they say and in what they do,” said Christian evangelist Franklin Graham, the son of world-renowned preacher Rev. Billy Graham. MORE

In his Kremlin defense of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin, even before he began listing the battles where Russian blood had been shed on Crimean soil, spoke of an older deeper bond. Crimea, said Putin, “is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptized. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.”

Russia is a Christian country, Putin was saying. MORE

Gee I wish I kept a record of all of the fines the U.S. has collected in the last four years. Maybe enough to help pay for Obama care. Ha.

The U.S. government on Thursday reached a $5.15 billion settlement with Anadarko Petroleum Corp., the largest ever for environmental contamination, to settle claims related to the cleanup of thousands of sites tainted with hazardous chemicals for decades. MORE

The unprecedented double canonisation event will be produced in 3D by the Vatican TV Center (CTV) in a partnership with Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Italia, BSkyB and Sky Deutschland payboxes, and Sony. The ceremony will also be beamed into 3D movie theatres across Europe and in North and South America, in what is being touted as the first convergence of HD, 3D and 4K technologies for such a high-profile multimedia 3D event. MORE  VIDEO: MORE

This weekend, The Accident gets hitched. The Accident is my term of endearment for my baby sister Katie, who arrived, unexpectedly, 11½ years after me and seven years after my brother. She is scheduled to exchange vows Saturday afternoon in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley with her longtime boyfriend, Matt, in a big family wedding that (my mother would like you to know) is costing a fortune. MORE

Millions of vulnerable people in southern England and Wales were advised to stay indoors as unusually high levels of air pollution smothered London and other cities, just weeks after heavy pollution led to restrictions on car use and the offer of free public transport in Brussels and Paris. Prof Frank Kelly of King’s College London said tiny particles of pollution could cause problems for some people – such as those with asthma – and contribute to longer-term problems for others. MORE

Are bison and other animals fleeing Yellowstone National Park in record numbers because they sense an impending eruption of the park’s supervolcano Yellowstone Caldera? That’s the theory being tossed around by a number of bloggers who cite recent seismic activity, including a magnitude 4.8 quake that rattled the park near the Wyoming-Montanta border on Monday, just days after a magnitude 5.1 temblor was felt by an estimated 17 million people over a large swath of Southern California. MORE

It’s the Real Inconvenient Truth—right now the world is getting colder. And it’s likely to get even colder for the next 20 years—before a new, stronger cycle of sunspots begins, as they have for eons. They are statistically very, VERY accurate. MORE