Y I K E S

Dr.Eben Alexander a Harvard neurosurgeon almost died in 2008 when a mengingitis attacked his brain. His entire neocortex, the part that gives rise to consciousness, memory and thought shut down. He went into a week long coma. Only the primitive sections of his brain were working.

In his words: 

“My first memories from when I was deep inside: I had no language, all my earthly memories were gone,” he said. “I had no body awareness at all. I was just a speck of awareness in kind of a dark, murky environment, in roots or vessels or something. And I seemed to be there for a very long time – I would say years.

“I was rescued by this beautiful, spinning, white light that had a melody, an incredibly beautiful melody with it that opened up into a bright valley,” he added, “an extremely verdant valley with blossoming flowers and a just incredible, rich, ultra-real world of indescribable complexity.”

Alexander said there was a young woman who soared across time and space with him on a butterfly wing and gave him a message to take back from Heaven.

“She looked at me, and this was with no words, but the concepts came straight into mind: You are love; you are cherished; there’s nothing you have to fear; there’s nothing you can do wrong,” he said.

God was there as a vast presence of love, Alexander said, and Alexander understood God through an orb of brilliant light.

“It was all of eternity and all of conscious existence,” he said. “But it was this brilliant orb of light that was almost as necessary as a translator to bring in that message from the divine and the incredible.”

Learn the name of Adam Capay. He is the living symbol of everything that is wrong with Canada’s prisons, its justice system and its treatment of indigenous people.

Mr. Capay, 23, has been held in solitary confinement in an Ontario provincial prison for four years. He is housed alone in a basement, at the end of a long corridor, in a cell sheathed in plexiglass. The lights are on 24 hours a day.

Mr. Capay has no idea if it is day or night. When Renu Mandhane, chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, visited him this month, she said he appeared to have memory and speech problems brought on by his prison conditions.

The only thing Ontario prison officials haven’t done to this poor man is shackle him upside down on a dungeon wall. But they may as well have. Mr. Capay is arguably being tortured by the state. The sensory deprivation caused by constant light is an acknowledged torture technique, and the United Nations says that holding a person for more than 15 days in solitary is in itself a form of torture.

But there is more. Mr. Capay is legally innocent. He was charged with first-degree murder in 2012 after the death of a fellow inmate in a Thunder Bay prison where Mr. Capay was being held on minor charges. Four years later, he has still not been to trial.

The Supreme Court of Canada says that any delay between the laying of charges and the completion of trial longer than 30 months is a violation of an accused person’s Charter right to be tried within a reasonable time.

Mr. Capay has been held without trial for 52 months. And he has been in solitary confinement 100 times longer than the 15-day maximum the UN considers to be the threshold for torture.

This young, native Canadian man’s human rights have been stolen from him. And he would still be forgotten in a prison basement, were it not for a brave prison guard who brought his plight to the attention of Ontario’s chief human rights commissioner.

Topshop blatantly ripped off another indie artist because the artist can’t afford to sue them

Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed, who is known for his melting-rugs motifs, is claiming that Topman is stocking merchandise that rips off one of his pieces. The T-shirt in question seems directly “inspired” by… (Read More)