Christians are celebrating Holy Week with processions and reenactments across the globe.
From
To
A fire destroyed the main meditation hall at Tassajara Mountain Zen Center in Central California, as monks neared the end of a long retreat. Last week's fire burned down the wooden building and damaged a nearby library. No one was injured. Staff members used hoses and buckets to slow the flame, limiting the damage to just the one structure. Volunteer firefighters arrived an hour after the fire broke out. A center administrator said several sacred items, including a 2,000-year-old Buddha statue, may have been destroyed. However, the extent of the damages won't be known until they sift through the rubble. Leaders say the loss feels painful, but it also reinforces Buddhism’s teaching on impermanence.
AP Wire
President Donald Trump has expressed frustration with allies who have been unwilling to help the U.S. war effort, telling them to “go get your own oil” as the conflict with Iran and its closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent average U.S. gas prices past $4 a gallon. He made the comments on social media after U.S. strikes hit a city that is home to one of Iran’s main nuclear sites. Tehran meanwhile attacked a fully loaded Kuwaiti oil tanker in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday. The attacks showed the intensity of the war more than a month after the U.S. and Israel launched their first strikes. The conflict has left more than 3,000 dead.
Texas megachurch pastor Robert Morris is free after 6 months in an Oklahoma jail for child sex abuse
The founder of a Texas megachurch who resigned after pleading guilty to sexually abusing an Oklahoma woman in the 1980s has been released from an Oklahoma jail. Osage County officials say 64-year-old Robert Preston Morris was released early Tuesday. He served six months after pleading guilty last year to five counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child. Under the agreement, he received a 10-year suspended sentence and must register as a sex offender. He also was ordered to pay his incarceration costs and restitution to the victim. Prosecutors say the abuse began in 1982 when the victim was 12 and Morris was a traveling evangelist staying in Hominy, Oklahoma.
A foreign journalist has been kidnapped in Iraq, Iraq's interior ministry says.
AP Wire
The Supreme Court has ruled against a law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ kids in Colorado, one of about two dozen states that banned the discredited practice. The high court majority sided Tuesday with a Christian counselor who argues the law banning talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed the law raises free speech concerns and sent it back to a lower court to decide if it meets a legal standard few laws pass. President Donald Trump’s Republican administration supported the counselor. Colorado said the measure simply bars a practice of using therapy to try to “convert” LGBTQ+ people to heterosexuality, a practice that’s been scientifically discredited and linked to serious harm.
Supporters say Iran’s imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi may have suffered a heart attack.
Supreme Court rules against Colorado ban on ‘conversion therapy’ for LGBTQ kids.
Vice President JD Vance has a new book about his religious faith and adult conversion to Catholicism. HarperCollins Publishers tells The Associated Press the book is called “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith” and comes out June 16. Vance says the book explains how he lost his faith and regained it. Vance has said he evolved from Christianity to atheism to Catholicism, linking the change to finding purpose. The publisher says Vance wrote the book himself starting in 2019 and included material on his time in politics. The “Hillbilly Elegy” author was elected to the Senate as a Republican from Ohio in 2022 and became Donald Trump's running mate two years later.
Trump says nations upset by high fuel prices should ‘go get your own oil’ as Iran has chokehold on Strait of Hormuz.