RIVERSIDE, CA — A pastor is accused of sexually abusing two young boys in Riverside over several years, and detectives believe there may be others who have yet to come forward, according to police.

Investigators identified the suspect Thursday as Juan Barrios, 51, of Riverside, who worked as a pastor at Iglesia de Dios Israelita in Fullerton.

Police said a young man contacted authorities in May to report a pattern of sexual abuse that began when he was 9 and lasted into his mid-teens. His younger brother came forward with similar claims, alleging the crimes took place between 2009 and 2015 while their family lived at Barrios’ Riverside home, according to police.

The allegations led to an investigation by Riverside’s Sexual Assault – Child Abuse (SACA) unit, and detectives arrested Barrios on Sept. 8. Investigators said he was booked into the Robert Presley Detention Center on suspicion of multiple sex crimes and released on $500,000 bail.

Citing the nature of the allegations, detectives said they believed more victims could be involved and encouraged anyone with information related to Barrios to contact police at 951-353-7949 or 951-353-7133.

According to jail records, his next court hearing is scheduled for Oct. 21.

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First lady Jill Biden met Wednesday with victims of a Christmas parade crash in suburban Milwaukee where six people were killed and dozens were injured after an SUV plowed through the crowd.

Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff visited Children’s Wisconsin hospital in Milwaukee, where they thanked the frontline health care workers who treated victims of the parade crash in Waukesha. They were joined by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy.

“Our nation is so grateful for you. We have not forgotten about you. We will not forget about you. And you will remain in our minds and our hearts as you continue to process, to heal and to grieve,” Murthy said.

Biden met privately with two injured children and their families at the hospital, the Journal Sentinel reported.

She also stressed the importance of the COVID-19 vaccine, urging parents to get their children vaccinated.

Biden, Emhoff and Murthy then traveled to Waukesha, where Biden placed a bouquet of flowers at a memorial for the crash victims at Veterans Park. They planned to also meet with families of the victims and first responders.

Darrell Brooks Jr. is accused of driving his vehicle into the parade in Waukesha on Nov. 21. Witnesses said he was swerving and appeared to be intentionally trying to hit people.

Brooks’ attorneys have said their client is presumed innocent until “the government proves its allegations beyond a reasonable doubt.”

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California is poised to approve reparations of up to $25,000 to some of the thousands of people — some as young as 13 — who were sterilized decades ago because the government deemed them unfit to have children.

The payments will make California at least the third state — following Virginia and North Carolina — to compensate victims of the so-called eugenics movement that peaked in the 1930s. Supporters of the movement believed sterilizing people with mental illnesses, physical disabilities and other traits they deemed undesirable would improve the human race.

While California sterilized more than 20,000 people before its law was repealed in 1979, only a few hundred are still alive. The state has set aside $7.5 million for the reparations program, part of its $262.6 billion operating budget that is awaiting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature.

California’s proposal is unique because it also would pay women the state coerced to get sterilized while they were in prison, some as recently as 2010. First exposed by the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2013, a subsequent audit found California sterilized 144 women between 2005 and 2013 with little or no evidence that officials counseled them or offered alternative treatment.

While all of the women signed consent forms, officials in 39 cases did not do everything that was legally required to obtain their permission.

“We must address and face our horrific history,” said Lorena Garcia Zermeño, policy and communications coordinator for the advocacy group California Latinas for Reproductive Justice. “This isn’t something that just happened in the past.”

California’s forced sterilization program started in 1909, following similar laws in Indiana and Washington. It was by far the largest program, accounting for about a third of everyone sterilized in the United States under those laws.

California’s law was so prominent that it inspired similar practices in Nazi Germany, according to Paul Lombardo, a law professor at Georgia State University and an expert on the eugenics movement.

“The promise of eugenics at the very earliest is: ‘We could do away with all the state institutions — prisons, hospitals, asylums, orphanages,’” Lombardo said. “People who were in them just wouldn’t be born after awhile if you sterilized all of their parents.”

In California, victims include Mary Franco, who was sterilized in 1934 when she was just 13. Paperwork described her as “feeble minded” because of “sexual deviance,” according to her niece, Stacy Cordova, who has researched her case.

Cordova said Franco actually was molested by a neighbor. She said her family put Franco in an institution to protect the family’s reputation.

Cordova said her late aunt loved children and wanted to have a family. She married briefly when she was about 17, but Cordova said the marriage was annulled when the man discovered Franco couldn’t have children. She lived a lonely life in a Mexican culture that revered big families, Cordova said.

“I don’t know if it is justice. Money doesn’t pay for what happened to them. But it’s great to know that this is being recognized,” said Cordova, who has advocated for the state to pay survivors. “For me, this is not about the money. This is about the memory.”

Relatives like Cordova aren’t eligible for the payments, only direct victims are.

Sterilizations in California prisons appear to date to 1999, when the state changed its policy for unknown reasons to include a sterilization procedure known as “tubal ligation” as part of inmates’ medical care. Over the next decade, women reported they were coerced into this procedure, with some not fully understanding the ramifications.

A state law passed in 2014 bans sterilizations for the purpose of birth control at state prisons and local jails. The law permits sterilizations that are “medically necessary,” such as removing cancer, and requires facilities to report each year how many people were sterilized and for what reason.

Questionable sterilizations also occurred in facilities run by local governments. In 2018, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors apologized after more than 200 women were sterilized at the Los Angeles-USC Medical Center between 1968 and 1974.

Those people are not eligible for reparations under California’s program. But advocates say they hope to include them in the future.

“It’s only the beginning,” said state Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, a Democrat from Los Angeles who has been advocating for reparations. “I can’t imagine the trauma, the depression, the stress of being incarcerated, being rehabilitated and trying to start your life again in society, wanting to start a family, only to find out that that choice was taken away from you.”

Of the people California sterilized under its old eugenics law, just a few hundred are still alive, according to research conducted by the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab. Including the inmates who were sterilized most recently, advocates estimate more than 600 people would be eligible for reparations.

But finding them will be difficult, with advocates predicting only about 25% of eligible people will ultimately apply for reparations and be paid.

California’s Victim Compensation Board will run the program, with $2 million used to find victims by advertising and poring through state records. The state also set aside $1 million for plaques to honor the victims, leaving $4.5 million for reparations.

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Like his two most immediate predecessors, President Donald Trump marked the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in a speech at the Pentagon and, like them, still unable to end America’s longest war, in Afghanistan.

Trump’s 9/11 speech on Wednesday came just five days after he called off U.S. talks with the Taliban, abruptly ending nearly a year of hopeful negotiations by a State Department envoy who said he was on the “threshold” of a peace agreement aimed at ending the conflict.

It has been 18 years since al-Qaida hijackers commandeered four U.S. commercial airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the largest attack on American soil.

Like Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Trump remembered the victims, first responders and U.S. troops who have battled in Afghanistan, where the Taliban hosted al-Qaida leaders as they plotted 9/11.

“For the families who join us, this is your anniversary of personal and permanent loss,” Trump said. “It’s the day that has replayed in your memory a thousand times over. The last kiss. The last phone call. The last time hearing those precious words, ‘I love you.’”

“Then the attack, the anguish of knowing your family member had boarded one of these flights or was working at the World Trade Center or serving right here at the Pentagon,” he said. “You waited. You prayed. You answered that most dreaded call, and your life changed forever.”

Trump said he went to the scene of the downed twin towers and saw the first responders working.

“I went down to ground zero with men who worked for me to try to help in any little way that we could,” Trump said. “We were not alone. So many others were scattered around trying to do the same. They were all trying to help.”

Some of Trump’s statements about his 9/11 experiences cannot be verified, including claims that he sent construction crews to help clear the site, that he had “hundreds” of friends die at ground zero and that he witnessed television coverage of Muslims in the U.S. cheering the destruction.

The moment of silence at the Pentagon is traditionally observed at 9:37 a.m., the time when a plane was flown into the building. But this year, the anniversary was observed 10 minutes late, at 9:47 a.m., with Trump running behind schedule.

In his speech, he had tough words for the Taliban following the end of peace talks.

“If anyone dares to strike our land, we will respond with the full measure of American power and the iron will of the American spirit,” Trump said.

“If, for any reason, they come back to our country, we will go wherever they are and use power the likes of which the United States has never used before, and I’m not even talking about nuclear power,” Trump said without elaborating on what he meant.

Despite Trump’s verbal threats, his envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been sitting across the table from Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar, for months discussing a U.S. troop withdrawal and Taliban guarantees to keep Afghanistan from again becoming a launch pad for global terror attacks.

Those talks came to an abrupt halt last weekend when Trump tweeted that he had canceled a proposed meeting with the Taliban and members of the Afghan government at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.

Many Afghans fear his canceling the talks will mean more carnage as the U.S. and Taliban, as well as Afghan forces, step up their offensives and civilians die in the crossfire.

Trump said he canceled the talks after the Taliban detonated a car bomb on Sept. 5 and killed two troops — one American and one Romanian — and 10 civilians in a busy diplomatic area near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

Trump’s continued reference to ending the talks after one American service member was killed has upset many Afghans, who witness near-daily attacks.

As America mourned 9/11, weary Afghans are watching their own toll from the aftermath continue to rise exponentially. The Taliban and U.S. and Afghan forces are all to blame.

For the first time, more Afghan civilians have been killed by international and Afghan forces than by the Taliban and other insurgents, the United Nations said of the first three months of this year, with thousands more wounded by insurgent attacks.

Several hours after Trump left the Pentagon memorial, Bush, who was president during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, visited for a separate, private wreath-laying. Bush was joined by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was in his Pentagon office when the plane hit the building.

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