Chris Hyde from the Timaru Herald received a response to an OIA request to CYF this week. There was a recent case where a man was convicted for child abuse of CYF kids in Timaru, and he was used by CYF as an EFT practitioner.

A young woman died this week, while she was trying to raise $70k to fund and alternative cancer treatment at the Brio Clinic in Thailand. Amanda Ferreira also died last month from cancer. She had been to the Brio clinic once, and had been raising money to have further treatment there. Common treatments are heat therapy, ultrasound and pH transformation (probably alkaline).

There have been multiple sightings of UFOs in Christchurch this week, prompted by footage recorded by Oisin Lavelle. The footage shows a coloured blob moving erratically.

Bobby brown has spoken out about having sex with a ghost!

There is now a second panel that has been convened to review Christchurch Council's "Tonkin Taylor" coastal erosion report. The panel has been instructed to:

Maureen is the newest member of parliament, a National Party MP who seems to have a few pseudoscientific beliefs.

Chris Savage, an ex police officer from Australia, has a long history of being outright dangerous. He's anti-vaccine, and claims to be able to treat autism and cancer with magnesium (chloride) and DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) infusions. He's currently in New Zealand, and has been treating people while claiming he's a doctor.

The most plausible benefits probably occur from the mixture fermenting, producing heat. It's pretty unlikely that anything else in the spa is helping your body.

An image of dozens of dead kiwis was recently used by an anti 1080 Facebook activist group, New Zealand's Not Clean Green, to show that the poison is harming local wildlife.

Valerie Todd, an osteopath, has been found guilty by the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal of performing acupuncture on three patients in Nelson in 2014 without the required qualifications, and will likely be fined $1,500 and a portion of the trial costs.

Family first have confused correlation and causation in a recent report, and stated that unmarried couples are a major cause of child poverty.

Rush Limbaugh, US radio talk show host, has used a conversation about Harambe the gorilla to argue that evolution does not work.

Family First may be de-registered as a charity soon. They have been sent a notice of de-registration from Charities Services, but plan to fight it in court. They have previously defended against an attempt to be de-registered last year.

Mark Hanna and I wrote a letter to the New Zealand Medical Journal about research we had completed showing that the majority of chiropractors break the Chiropractic Board policy on advertising. The policy states:

The Health Minister (Jonathan Coleman) and Associate Health Minister (Peter Dunne) are proposing to move the decision about water fluoridation out of the hands of local councils, and giving the responsibility to DHBs.

The NZ Herald published a list of the top 5 luckiest stores, and went so far as to claim that your chances of winning the lottery would increase if you visit one of these stores!

A group of 9 skeptics visited the Mind Body Spirit fair in Taita, Wellington yesterday. We had a good time, and saw lots of weird and wonderful things on offer.

An Australian woman with a newborn has passed whooping cough onto her daughter, and now wishes she'd taken the vaccine she was offered:

An article on Stuff makes a lot of claims about these herbs and spices, but makes sure to qualify their claims with phrases such as:

A Christian blogger has warned that mandalas in adult colouring in books could be dangerous. She suggests that the magical new age claims made about mandalas are true, that they have the ability to heal if you meditate on them and that a good way to do this is to colour them in. Of course, as these magical claims are not Christian, they must be bad and Christians should stay away from them.

The Mandela Effect is where people have false memories of past events, and decide that there's been a jump to an alternative universe where history is different.

Christchurch council has voted 12-1 to look into ceasing use of glyphosate to kill weeds. The decision seems to have been made based on a recent International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) report which labels glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic". Many other products come under a similar classification, such as coffee, alcohol and bacon. The important question isn't "is it carcinogenic?", but "how carcinogenic is it?". (Paracelsus)

On Thursday I went to Cafe Scientifique, a regular meeting in Wellington where talks are given about a scientific topic.

After the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster successfully applied for the ability to register marriage celebrants last year, their first celebrant has now been approved. Karen Martyn is willing to travel to anywhere in the country to perform a pastafarian wedding ceremony.

A new trend started recently, when IV "hydration" clinics opened in Australia late last year, called iv.me and the Hangover Clinic. The clinics offer customers a range of treatments, consisting of IV drips with various mixes of saline, vitamins, painkillers and oxygen.

Submissions are closing next week for the Natural Health and Supplementary Products bill, which seeks to regulate alternative medicine. Although there are several issues, such as the use of "historical evidence" being allowed, the bill in general is positive. People are encouraged to read the bill and make a submission.

Jacqueline Fox, who died last year, had used Johnson & Johnson's talcum powder for 35 years on her genitals.

Last year professor Paul Glasziou from Bond University in Australia headed up a team that wrote a systematic review of systematic reviews on homeopathy as part of a report for Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

Yet another sea monster has been found, this time in Swansea, NSW, Australia. Ethan Tipper posted the photo on Facebook, asking "What the f*** is this?".

Antonin Scalia, a conservative Supreme Court judge in the US, died this week at age 79. Scalia took some strange legal views in his time, such as this one on evolution:

Shane Warne is currently appearing on Australia's version of I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here!. He announced on the show that he thinks aliens created the pyramids in Egypt, and that they also engineered humans:

In the United States, the Texas board of education is very important because the state is so large. This means that the board has a large sway over which textbooks are used nationwide in schools. Historically Texas has been a battleground for creationism, with efforts to get as many fundamentalist Christians onto the board of education as possible.

Hang bags of water around to keep flies away. Coins or bits of tin foil can be used inside the bags.

A couple of stories about fast food that set off my skeptical alarm bells this week.

The Whakatane council voted to remove fluoride from its water supply a couple of weeks ago, and reversed the decision this week.

David Icke was last in NZ in 2011. He'll talk in Auckland about his new book (surprise, surprise!), lizards, the illuminati and many other nonsense subjects.

There is a one second shaky video of a Yeti, along with a higher resolution picture.

Research is coming to light that antioxidants in food and drinks are not useful to aid health, and may actually be damaging to us.

(Although we all know that fast food is not generally a great nutritional choice, there's a lot of nonsense out there about how bad fast food is. The most pernicious is about how fast food doesn't rot, and people have shown this by keeping McDonalds burgers for years, with only minimal breakdown of the food. Of course, it's been shown that in the same conditions where McDonalds burgers don't rot, organic home-made burgers don't rot either)

"The prime origin and cause of cancerous tissue is the over-acidification of the tissues then the blood due to lifestyle and dietary choices. A cancerous tissue begins with our choices of what we eat, what we drink, what we think and how we live. Cancer is a liquid and this liquid is a toxic acidic waste product of metabolism or energy consumption."

Matthew Mills believes that the Sandy Hook school massacre in the US didn't happen. Unfortunately he's taken his belief to an extreme, publicly harassing the sister of one of the victims, a school teacher called Victoria Soto. Victoria has been hailed as a hero for her efforts to protect the children under her care, and lost her life in the process. Matthew believes that Victoria never existed, and has been harassing her sister in an effort to get her to admit this.

I went to see Creation Ministries International speaker Jonathan Sarfati give a couple of talks in Wellington last week. Jonathan was brought up in New Zealand, and was once the national chess champion.

Someone has put Mr Trump forward for this year's Nobel Peace Prize. Supporters said in the submission that Mr. Trump deserved the prize for:

The Wellington Astrology centre, a drop-in office in central Wellington, is struggling to make ends meet and has turned to Pledge Me to raise funds. It's been running since 2011, but now needs $3,000 to cover the next 3 months of bills.

Rod Parsley of the World Harvest church isn't relying on his healing abilities to treat his throat cancer but is seeking actual medical treatments.

Up to 80 kids - 1 in 4 - at Brunswick North West Primary School in Melbourne have contracted chicken pox. The school is tolerant or even welcoming of parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids. Newsletters have reiterated this view:

An osteopath in Christchurch has been disciplined for treating a patient's toothache by touching her breast.

A Bronx priest stole more than $1M from two NYC churches, and used the cash on a wild S&M romance with his beefy boyfriend

Former accountant turned psychic took $250 thousand from an elderly couple in a rest home who had been friends with him for 30 years. The money was taken over a period of 12 years.

Australian Anti-vaccination activist's 11 week old daughter hospitalised for whooping cough, which kills 1 in 200 children who pick up the infection.