Man Leaves Hate Group, Near-Death Experiences Teaches Father How to Say 'I Love You', Gut Microbes Dispel Forever Chemicals
Inspiring News Articles
August 15, 2025

Tony McAleer was just 16 years old when he ... became active in the White Aryan Resistance, where he became a leader. But 15 years later, he left that life behind and embarked on a path of healing. He's since founded a non-profit, Life After Hate, which helps other people leaving white supremacy groups, written a book called The Cure For Hate, and starred in a documentary about his journey. "When I left the movement, I still had the beliefs intact," [said McAleer]. "It's not just the ideas in someone's head, it was my whole identity. It was who I hung out with, the videos I watched, the music I listened to. It's challenging to get someone to admit that what they believe is wrong. I left the movement behind, but I was still a jerk. I still had all of the wounds that were spilling out all over everywhere. I used humour, sarcasm, putting people down, I could verbally destroy people without any violence. I was still a jerk because I hadn't dealt with the source of my anger and hatred, the source of my self-loathing." It wasn't till I met a counsellor — who was Jewish — in 2005. I went through about 1,000 hours of ... counselling and really got to the root of who I was. The more he connected me to my humanity, the more I could recognize the humanity in others. And the more I could connect to the humanity in others, the more I could recognize the humanity in myself. It's very important that we learn to call out behaviours, we call out ideology, call out the activity, but we need to call the human being in.

For most of my life, I saw my father as the ultimate provider; he worked long hours as a doctor and took pride in that he never missed a day of work. While we knew he loved us, he would rarely, if ever, say the words "I love you." But after an aneurysm, a helicopter ride to the hospital, and hours of surgery gave him a new perspective on life, I've noticed a change in him. His chances of survival were slim — at least that's what I assumed it meant when my brother, who's also a doctor, said: "This doesn't look good." He said: "I'm sorry. It's really hard to watch people you love when they are in pain." These words — from my father who showed little emotion and rarely said "I love you" — felt surreal. I wondered how he could be so selfless, worrying about others while he was in great pain. At that moment, I felt a deep affection for him. In the past, he was quick to state his opinion on any given topic; now I see him listening more, thinking before he shares his perspective. When I talk to him on the phone, his voice is softer, and before we hang up, he says, "I love you." Witnessing my father become more open has reminded me that I still have room to grow. I believe that my father and I both learned something that day. He learned to say "I love you," and I learned that even when people present themselves as impervious, it doesn't mean they're not feeling emotions. We all just have different ways of expressing them.

A former 'true atheist' has come forward to tell his story of the dramatic near-death experience that made him a believer and left him with a 'deep sense of love.' Jose Hernandez, from Canada, said his journey to the other side began with a brutal accident as an electrical engineer tending to roadside power lines. When his colleague crashed their utility truck on January 6, 2000, the then 46-year-old Hernandez was left with multiple broken ribs preventing him from breathing as emergency medical technicians raced him to intensive care. Despite his disbelief in the afterlife, Hernandez said that he spent those moments of deep physical pain seeking help from a higher power. Hernandez said his consciousness was soon transported through a dark otherworldly portal that led to a mysterious transitional realm of living light and color. He spent three minutes clinically dead, came back but fell back into the same state for another two minutes, which he said felt like hours as he watched his lifeless body in the hospital. [A] spirit-like figure [offered] him words of comfort as he transitioned to 'the other side.' 'I heard the voice next to me say 'Think of the your body as a car, and that car has like five million miles on it, and there's nothing we can do to fix it anymore. So you have to now say goodbye to your body,'' he remembered. This realm allowed him to reconcile with his deceased father. 'It was even more amazing because me and my father had a very hard relationship,' Hernandez noted. 'We had a lot of clashes and I don't ever remember saying to my father in life, 'I love you,' or he to me.' But all that changed when they met again in this realm. When I met my dad on the other side,' he told the podcast, 'I realized sometimes we may not be able to say something here, [but] we're gonna be able to say it somewhere else.'

Certain kinds of gut microbes absorb toxic Pfas “forever chemicals” and help expel them from the body via feces, new first-of-its-kind University of Cambridge research shows. The findings are welcome news as the only options that exist for reducing the level of dangerous Pfas compounds from the body are bloodletting and a cholesterol drug that induces unpleasant side effects. The microbes were found to remove up to 75% of some Pfas from the gut of mice. Several of the study’s authors plan to develop probiotic dietary supplements that boost levels of helpful microbes in the human gut, which would likely reduce Pfas levels. “If this could be used in humans to create probiotics that can help remove Pfas from the body then this would be a nicer solution in that it wouldn’t have so many side effects,” said Anna Lindell, Cambridge doctoral student and a co-author of the study. Pfas are a class of about 15,000 compounds most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant. They have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems. They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down in the environment. The microbes [in the study] largely addressed “long-chain” Pfas, which are larger compounds and more dangerous than smaller “short chains” because they stay in the body longer.

Regenerative agriculture offers a way to move beyond what I call the ‘dead Earth assumption’ – this mechanistic belief that the Earth is made up of lifeless raw materials meant for extraction. Because that’s the foundation of industrial agriculture: all it cares about is how many tons of food it produces, with no regard for soil health, biodiversity or the wellbeing of farmers. Regenerative agriculture, on the other hand, shows us the opposite. It means collaborating with nature and recognizing that we are all living organisms on a living Earth. That is what farming should be about: regenerating the potential of the living soil, the living seeds, the living water, the living insects, and the entire web of life. By embracing this potential, we can also transform the way we relate to nature. Because regeneration writes its own poetry – it brings the Earth back to life again in our minds and, in doing so, our relationship with the Earth is being regenerated as well. Some people say: ‘You’re naive, because companies will always win.’ But I don’t think that companies will win, and I will give you a reason why. The first corporation ever created was the East India Company in 1600, but after the revolt of the peasants in 1857, they shut down in 1858. So the first corporation that was created to rule the world, was shut down by peasants. In today’s world, meaningful change can happen too, when we unite. It all comes down to nurturing the living soil and the living seed.

On July 14, 48 students walked through the doors of the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville, Ark. to become its inaugural class. Named after its founder—the world’s richest woman and an heir to the Walmart fortune—the school will train students over the next four years in a radically different way from the method most traditional medical schools use. And that’s the point. Instead of drilling young physicians to chase symptom after symptom and perform test after test, Alice Walton wants her school’s graduates to keep patients healthy by practicing something that most doctors today don’t prioritize: preventive medicine and whole-health principles, which involve caring for (and not just treating) the entire person and all of the factors—from their mental health to their living conditions and lifestyle choices—that contribute to wellbeing. Visually, the school lives up to its acronym: AWSOM. The building, with soaring glass walls, is located on Walton family property and includes not just a wellness studio and gym, but a rooftop park, healing gardens where students can study, growing gardens for producing healthy foods, and a reflection pond. Walton is covering tuition for the first five graduating classes. They will get all the science and disease knowledge they need to manage the ‘sick-care’ side of things,” Walton says. But “I wanted to create a school that really gives doctors the ability to focus on how to keep their patients healthy.”

The waiting room in the basement of Boston Medical Center looks like any other. But when patients here are called in ... they’re welcomed into the Preventive Food Pantry. Over the next few minutes, staff members tailor a grocery cart to each patient’s needs. Someone with a renal condition won’t get foods high in potassium, like oranges or potatoes. If they’re diabetic, they’ll get whole-grain pasta and brown rice. And everyone leaves with vegetables, fruit and other fresh ingredients. The pantry opened in 2001 after doctors raised the alarm that many of their patients reported not having enough food for their families. Setting up on hospital premises, the pantry was an early pioneer in incorporating access to nutritious food directly into the medical system. The pantry was initially expected to serve 500 people a month. Today, it serves more than 6,200. Addressing hunger isn’t just a question of quantity of food, but also quality. Healthy produce, fresh meat and dairy products tend to be more expensive, so for families trying to stretch their dollar, those foods are harder to afford. Faced with high costs of treating conditions linked to food insecurity, medical systems, health insurers and government programs have become more interested in ways to support nutrition access. A [Greater Boston Food Bank] survey found that among people who were screened for food insecurity in a medical setting, 87 percent followed up on recommended resources.

The service dog named Tommy had been with Hank Ford since he was a pup, and he knew his owner was at risk. He started nudging Hank with his nose, then pawing at him, and jumping on his body. Hank figured the dog needed to go outside a little earlier than normal. But when Hank stood up, he was light-headed and woozy, starting to sense that something was wrong too. 54-year-old Hank kept feeling worse. He decided to check his vital signs with a blood pressure cuff and was startled by the results. His pulse was a staggering 171 beats per minute. The military veteran who had served for more than 20 years, called his local veterans hospital, but they thought his vital readings were obviously wrong. Hank ... drove himself to the hospital, and the diagnosis arrived a few minutes later. “They were freaking out about it,” Hank recalled, when doctors confirmed his vital signs. “Something about the way he woke me up: He hasn’t done it before and he hasn’t done it since,” Hank told GNN. “Doctors said, more than likely, it would have been a stroke and it would have been a (big) one.” When he left the military ... Hank reached out to the Wounded Warrior Project for a service dog. That organization helped connect him with Dogs Inc, a nonprofit that provides guide dogs, service dogs, and therapy dogs, free of charge, to people in need. Not long afterward, Hank and Tommy were united. Hank received a new best friend and a new path forward. When Hank’s heart was on the verge of a potentially-fatal malfunction ... his wife brought the dog in to see him. Tommy crawled right up onto Hank’s bed and laid across his body. The dog stayed there for hours, just inches away from the beating heart of the man he had helped to heal years ago. It’s no surprise that he was the crucial first responder and hero when Hank’s heart spun wildly out of rhythm.

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