The tea tasted bitter and earthy, but Lorenzo Gonzales drank it anyway. On that frigid night in remote Utah, he was hoping for a life-changing experience, which is how he found himself inside a tent with two dozen others waiting for the psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca to kick in.
Soon, the gentle sounds of a guitar were drowned out by people vomiting—a common downside of the drug. Some gagged; several threw up in buckets next to them.
Mr. Gonzales started howling, sobbing, laughing and repeatedly babbling “wah, wah” like a child. Facilitators from Hummingbird Church placed him face down on the grass, calming him momentarily before he started laughing and crawling on all fours.
Guatemala, Nicaragua and Cuba reached all-time lows on Transparency International’s corruption index released earlier this week, due to increased organized crime by public institutions, co-optation by political and economic elites and increased human rights abuses.
“Weak governments fail to stop criminal networks, social conflict, and violence, and some exacerbate threats to human rights by concentrating power in the name of tackling insecurity” said Delia Ferreira Rubio, head of Transparency International, a Berlin-based anti-corruption group.
Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index ranks countries by their perceived levels of public sector corruption on a scale of zero (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). The average for the Americas stands at 43.
The study of America’s place in the world could start with a quote from John F. Kennedy or Richard Nixon. It could start by dissecting Ronald Reagan’s farewell presidential address or Barack Obama’s university commencement speech in Boston. But there is a better place to begin—with Perry Miller, a mid-century scholar of history and literature…
After dropping out of a Chicago university, Miller traveled the world until he made his way to Africa. It was there, unloading barrels of American oil, that he claims to have had an epiphany, the National Endowment for the Humanities wrote.
While thinking of great civilizations that had come and gone over the centuries, Miller later recounted in a typical scholarly way: “It was given to me, equally disconsolate on the edge of a jungle of central Africa, to have thrust upon me the mission of expounding what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States.”
Subscribe to the Real Truth for FREE news and analysis.
Subscribe NowAmong the more ambitious hopes for Pope Francis’ visit to South Sudan this week is that it will give a jolt to a peace process aimed at ending a decade of conflict that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
North Korea said on Thursday that drills by the United States and its allies have reached an “extreme red-line” and threaten to turn the peninsula into a “huge war arsenal and a more critical war zone.”
Russia’s refusal to allow on-the-ground inspections to resume is endangering the New START nuclear treaty and U.S.-Russian arms control overall, the Biden administration charged on Tuesday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin put his country’s thousands of nuclear warheads into “special combat readiness” as a part of his strategy when invading Ukraine in February. The entire world went on high alert.
Thousands of schools in the UK closed some or all of their classrooms, train services were paralyzed and delays were expected at airports on the biggest day of industrial action Britain has seen in more than a decade, as unions stepped up pressure on the government Wednesday to provide better pay amid a cost-of-living crisis.
Two years after Myanmar’s generals ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government, thousands of people have died in civil conflict and many more have been forced from their homes in a dire humanitarian crisis.
Growing numbers of people in Asia lack enough to eat as food insecurity rises with higher prices and worsening poverty, according to a report released Tuesday by the Food and Agricultural Organization and other United Nations agencies.
Everyone wants to know what the future holds. Most have no idea. So many are confused, not knowing where to turn for answers to the great questions about the future!
Florida manatees, the gentle sea mammals known as “sea cows,” are dying in Florida at an alarming rate, mostly of starvation as their main staple of sea grass disappears in the state’s Panhandle region, according to experts.
Everyone loves positive news stories. A recent one involved a man who got caught in a dramatic car wreck over a bridge on Assawoman Bay in Maryland. “The accident sent eight people to the hospital and left a pickup truck dangling precariously over the guardrail,” the Good News Network reported.
Both evolutionists and religionists agree that there is something about mankind that makes us different from animals. Each group offers explanations, certain the other side is wrong.
Half of the mass attacks in the United States from 2016 to 2020 were sparked by personal, domestic or workplace disputes, according to a new U.S. Secret Service report that aims to prevent violence by identifying warning signs.
Atomic scientists set the “Doomsday Clock” closer to midnight than ever before on Tuesday, saying threats of nuclear war, disease and climate volatility have been exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, putting humanity at greater risk of annihilation.
In the wake of the worst massacre in Los Angeles County history, the California governor was meeting gunshot victims in the hospital when he was pulled away and briefed on a mass shooting at the other end of the state.
Light pollution caused by the incessant nighttime glow of electric lights appears to be intensifying, according to research using observations from tens of thousands of people at various locations around the world.
Two years after Azerbaijan and Armenia ended a war that killed about 6,800 soldiers and displaced around 90,000 civilians, tensions between the countries are again high in a dispute over a nearly four-mile road known as the Lachin Corridor.