Transform your life

VICTORIA, British Columbia — Two days before he was scheduled to die, John Shields roused in his hospice bed with an unusual idea. He wanted to organize an Irish wake for himself. It would be old-fashioned with music and booze, except for one notable detail — he would be present. The party should take up a big section of Swiss Chalet, a family-style chain restaurant on the road out of town. Mr. Shields wanted his last supper to be one he so often enjoyed on Friday nights when he was a young Catholic priest — rotisserie chicken legs with gravy. Then, his family would take him home and he would die there in the morning, preferably in the garden. It was his favorite spot, rocky and wild. Flowering native shrubs pressed in from all sides and a stone Buddha and birdbath peeked out from among the ferns and boulders. Before he got sick, Mr. Shields liked to sit in his old Adirondack chair and watch the bald eagles train their juveniles to soar overhead. He meditated there twice a day, … [Read more...] about At His Own Wake, Celebrating Life and the Gift of Death

Even though people change and grow from one moment to the next, sometimes this growth happens in leaps. Many people can pinpoint a transformative moment or interaction that profoundly shaped their perspective and trajectory. For some, that thing their mentor or a parent said stuck with them throughout the years. Others might point to the one thing they read in a book or saw in a movie. That pivotal moment came during a conversation with Dr. A. L. Blue , renowned entrepreneur, wealth creation expert, minister, and CEO of Bluewealth solutions consolidated LLC. It was a simple statement by a successful man that changed his life. “I had the privilege of talking with S. Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, a year before he passed away. I was in his office with my grandfather, a big-time bishop in the church “Bishop Milton Perry,” Dr. Blue recalls. “And we were talking about the book he wrote: wealth, is it worth it?, and he made a powerful statement to me I teach … [Read more...] about The Statement About Wealth Creation that Changed Dr. A. L. Blue’s Life

MIAMI — Eduardo Padrón left his hometown, Marianao, a hard-scrabble municipality in Havana, with nothing but the clothes he was wearing. He was 16, the son of a marketing director for a pharmaceutical company who was with his younger brother on a night flight to Miami. It was 1961. He and his brother, Ernesto, nearly 13, had only learned they were leaving the day before. Their parents, desperate to get the boys out of Cuba, had planned their departure for months but kept it secret for fear the Castro government would find out and not allow them to leave. “It was a nightmare," Padrón recalls. "I cried all night. I thought, what’s going to happen to me? I don’t know English. I don’t know anybody.” He had no time to say goodbye to his friends or relatives. But his parents promised that they would all be reunited soon and that someone would welcome the boys at the Miami airport. Nothing went as expected, and no one was waiting for them. But a woman named Rosa, who had been … [Read more...] about Eduardo Padrón transformed a college and a city. Now he’s ready for his next act.

The Orphan horror movies , about an adopted Eastern European girl who turns out to be a murderous adult in disguise, are nonsensical claptrap. The Curious Case of Natalia Grace puts forward the theory that may have been realistic. That suggestion is the astonishing hook of ID’s six-part, three-night docuseries event (starting May 29), whose tale concerns an Indiana couple who brought a young child into their home, only to suspect that she was a duplicitous twentysomething sociopath determined to kill them. The Curious Case of Natalia Grace ’s introductory montage—a routine docuseries convention in which the juiciest elements of the forthcoming story are teased—sets some sort of record for eye-opening details and quotes, and the ensuing tale doesn’t disappoint when it comes to boggling the mind. The craziness began on April 26, 2010, when Michael and Kristine Barnett adopted a daughter to join a clan that already consisted of three biological sons: … [Read more...] about ‘The Orphan’ Comes to Life in This Horrifying True Story

In the 1997 movie “Contact,” Jodie Foster plays an astronomer, Ellie Arroway, who detects an alien radio signal from outer space. Eventually the fictional Dr. Arroway goes on a trip through hyperspace to commune with an alien presence appearing in the form of her dead father. Now it is your turn to be Ms. Foster. In an act that is one part interplanetary performance art and one part dress rehearsal for an event that astronomers hope will one day occur, a coded radio message from Mars will ping radio telescopes on Earth on Wednesday. But it will only be a test. The receipt of this signal is intended to trigger a worldwide game of decrypting and decoding, according to astronomers at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., which organized the event and is devoted to the search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, mainly in the form of interstellar radio signals. Anybody can follow along on A Sign in Space, a website that will host comments, guesses and weekly … [Read more...] about This Is Not an Extraterrestrial Signal. This Is Just a Test.

CARTAGENA, Colombia — For a champion of peace, Leyner Palacios faces a lot death threats. The latest menacing message came in February, when Mr. Palacios, 47, was warned he had 12 hours to leave the region where he was born on Colombia’s Pacific Coast, and to “never come back.” The last time he had received a similar warning, in March 2020, one of his bodyguards was killed. So Mr. Palacios, who served on Colombia’s Truth Commission, announced on Twitter he was going into hiding for a while. “I do not want them to see my coffin full of my unjustly murdered body,” he wrote. “I have understood that the threat is the door to the cemetery.” The 11-member commission spent four years investigating every aspect of Colombia’s conflict, which was fought between government forces, left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups from 1958 to 2016. The commission’s final report , issued last June, determined that 450,000 people had died in the fighting — twice earlier … [Read more...] about Colombia’s Peace-Whisperer Makes Plenty of Enemies