A newly released CIA document reveals a chilling blueprint to manipulate minds through covert drugging experiments. The report, added to the CIA's reading room in 2025, details the government's once top-secret Project Artichoke that ran from 1951 to 1956, focusing on behavior control, interrogation techniques and psychological manipulation. The seven-page document, titled 'Special Research for Artichoke,' with an attachment labeled 'Suggested Fields for Special Research Relative Artichoke,' outlines proposals to develop chemicals capable of altering human behavior. It discusses drugs designed for both immediate effects, like truth serums and long-term influence, potentially administered through food, water, alcohol or cigarettes. Researchers also suggested that such substances could be disguised in medical treatments such as vaccinations or injections. The CIA was also looking into methods beyond chemicals, listing hypnosis, sensory deprivation, gases and other psychological methods for interrogation and behavioral control. Artichoke served as a precursor to the CIA's MKUltra program, which later broadened mind-altering experiments on a larger scale. The researchers involved in the secret program emphasized that long-term compounds should be capable of producing 'an agitating effect (producing anxiety, nervousness, tension, etc.) or a depressing effect (creating a feeling of despondency, hopelessness, lethargy, etc.).'

GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna told Joe Rogan she has viewed evidence of interdimensional beings on Earth. Luna, who leads a task force for the declassification of federal secrets ... joined Rogan on his eponymous podcast. While not viewing portals or UAPs herself, Luna said she had seen photographic evidence, historical evidence and spoken to Air Force pilots who alleged the Air Force was covering up UAP sightings. “There's definitely something that ... we don't know how to explain currently,” Luna told Rogan. Luna added she believes there are interdimensional beings that “can operate through the timespaces that we currently have.” She also believes that the U.S. has reverse-engineered technology to replicate crafts made by those who are not mankind. “Without getting into classified conversations, there have been incidences where I believe very credible people have reported that there have been movements outside of time and space,” Luna said. “Based on the photos that I've seen, I'm very confident that there's things out there that have not been created by mankind.” The congresswoman critiqued the intelligence community for gatekeeping information relating to UAPs. “We know the U.S. government has not exactly been clean in a lot of what they've done with the American people, specifically to the topic of UFOs.” Luna added there is a “protective complex” from authorities, who believe the American people may not be able to handle the realities of the truth.

Helen McCaw, who served as a senior analyst in financial security at The Bank of England, sent a message to the bank with a significant alien warning. The short of it? McCaw wrote to Andrew Bailey, the bank's governor, urging him to prepare for the possibility that the United States, specifically the White House, may confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life. McCaw's overarching concern includes her belief that if the White House were to declare this, it would significantly impact the markets and could ignite bank collapses. She cited the United States appearing to be "partway through a multi-year process to declassify and disclose information" regarding alien life forms. "The United States government appears to be partway through a multi-year process to declassify and disclose information on the existence of a technologically advanced non-human intelligence responsible for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs)," she claimed. The longtime Bank of England employee expanded on the topic, discussing the possibility of a "power or intelligence greater than any government," referencing the "unknown intentions" that would come with it. McCaw added to her belief that the government's leadership and central banks may not be "properly briefed" on the topic of aliens or other life forms. McCaw also mentioned the chance of a "collapse in confidence," assuming people feel uncertain about the market and how to it.

[At] a news conference Tuesday on unidentified anomalous phenomena ... witnesses spoke about a 1996 UFO crash in Varginha, Brazil. Witnesses reported a cigar-shaped object in distress that crashed into a field. Three young women reportedly encountered a nonhuman entity, and there are reports that other entities were recovered, some dead and one possibly still living. The first witness to speak was Carlos, a Brazilian man who says he witnessed the crash of a nonterrestrial craft in January of 1996. He described half the craft being intact, with debris from the rest scattered around and a smell of ammonia and rotten eggs. Carlos said Army vehicles arrived shortly after. The soldiers ordered him to leave at gunpoint. Liliane Silva described encountering a living entity described as a being while taking a shortcut home from work. She described a short creature with red eyes that was brown and looked as if it was covered in oil, with veins from its neck to its arms, and said she felt like the world was being stopped when she looked at it. Silva said she had the sensation that the creature was suffering and needed help. She and the women she was with ran toward her house in fear. Katia Xavier, another one of those women, said she felt fear when encountering the creature, which she said had oily skin, a big head, three fingers on its hand and a big foot. She said she was going to help, but was pulled away by Silva.

The truth is out there — and late President George H.W. Bush apparently knew it — telling a federal official that an alien made contact with humans at a secretive New Mexico air base in 1964. Eric Davis, an astrophysicist who was a scientific advisor on the since-disbanded Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program ... claimed that Bush confirmed to him in a private conversation details of contact between the military and an alien creature at Holloman Air Force Base in Otero County. Bush told him that three spaceships were seen approaching the base and that an interstellar being emerged from one ship and had a face-to-face encounter with military and CIA officials, Davis said during an interview in “The Age of Disclosure,” a documentary. “One of them landed on the tarmac and a non-human entity deboarded the craft that landed and interacted with uniformed Air Force and civilian CIA personnel,” Davis claimed. “And when [Bush] asked for more details he was told that he did not have a need-to-know,” he relayed. Davis claims in the film that alien bodies were recovered in Russia in 1988, pulled from the wreckage of a large tic-tac shaped UAP, or unidentified anomalous phenomena. Hal Puthoff, a former AATIP member, quantum physicist and longtime disclosure advocate, claimed there were several different types of ETs. “The bodies recovered are not all the same type,” Puthoff said in the documentary, though he declined to detail them.

President Trump on Thursday suggested the federal government will soon share the information it has about extraterrestrials, UFOs and unidentified anomalous phenomena, the broader category of unexplained objects known as UAPs. In a brief post on Truth Social, Trump said he'll direct the Pentagon and other departments to begin the process of “identifying and releasing” government files related to these topics. “Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters. GOD BLESS AMERICA!” he wrote. Earlier Thursday, Trump refused to say whether he's seen evidence that aliens had visited Earth. The president was asked directly about “nonhuman visitors” while talking to reporters aboard Air Force One. Trump said that former President Barack Obama shared classified information by recently suggesting that aliens are real. Obama, who made the statement in an interview, later clarified that his comments about aliens being real refer to a belief that, given the size of the universe, it is statistically unlikely we are the only life to exist.

Sarah wasn't expecting to experience paralysis at 7 am on a weekday during a meditation at her home. But in August, while listening to “The Gateway Tapes”—a set of guided meditations intended to help people reach new planes of consciousness—she says her limbs froze. Sarah ... says the tapes—which she had been listening to on and off for months—took her on a roller-coaster journey of out-of-body experiences. “I was in and out of time and space,” she says. Developed by radio broadcasting executive Robert Monroe, the Gateway Process claims to be “a voyage of self-discovery” that can help people go “farther, deeper and faster into different dimensions of consciousness.” Monroe founded the Monroe Institute in 1971. The facility claims to help coax people out of their bodies via in-person and virtual retreats, and even Spotify playlists, by way of self-hypnosis style exercises powered by “binaural beats”—sounds attuned to different frequencies which play in each headphone ear. In the early 1980s ... the CIA and the Department of Defense sent US Army lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell to the institute to ascertain its suitability as a defense contractor. McDonnell gave the organization and its unusual curriculum his approval in a 1983 report which has since been declassified. “There is a sound and rational basis,” McDonnell writes, “in terms of physical science parameters for considering Gateway to be plausible in terms of its essential objectives.”

New York City's public hospital system is paying millions to Palantir, the controversial ICE and military contractor. Since 2023, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has paid Palantir nearly $4 million to improve its ability to track down payment for the services provided at its hospitals and medical clinics. Palantir, a data analysis firm that's now a Wall Street giant thanks to its lucrative work with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community, deploys its software to make more efficient the billing of Medicaid and other public benefits. That includes automated scanning of patient health notes to “increase charges captured from missed opportunities,” contract materials reviewed by The Intercept show. It's Palantir's work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is drawing the most protest today. The company provides a variety of services to help the federal government find and deport immigrants. ICE's Palantir-furnished case management software, for example, “plays a critical role in supporting the daily operations of ICE, ensuring critical mission success,” according to federal contracting documents. Palantir's contract with New York's public health care system allows the company to work with patients' protected health information, or PHI. With permission from New York City Health and Hospitals, Palantir can “de-identify PHI and utilize de-identified PHI for purposes other than research,” the contract states.

When Sean Tevlin discovered The Group School (TGS) in the 1970s, he found “a much needed safe space.” A struggling teen who had dropped out of public school and battled math anxiety, he arrived at the converted industrial garage on Franklin Street in Cambridge, MA with little self-confidence after a learning disability diagnosis. But at TGS, teachers engaged with him, patiently tutored him and rekindled his love of reading. “It opened me up mentally and emotionally,” Tevlin reflects decades later. TGS, known simply as “The Group” to its students, was unlike any public or private school. Between 1971 and 1982, more than 600 students like Tevlin graduated from this freewheeling schooling experiment, which combined radical democracy, intensive arts programming and a philosophy that embraced students' working-class background. The students embraced it: A school free of tuition, grading systems and hierarchy, driven instead by community meetings and collective governance. The Math Survival Skills pamphlet, designed for students who believed they “couldn't do math,” ... lays out the central principle that embodies the school spirit: “The essential thrust of The Group School approach is the empowerment of the learners. We attempt to begin with and build on the strengths and skills of the students, to help them learn new skills and develop competency in areas in which they feel inadequate or insecure, to counteract the traditional ideology that leads them to turn their anger and despair inward and to blame themselves.” Special ed teacher Rosalie Fay Barnes recently showed the website and parts of the 1971 documentary to her students at Berkeley High in Berkeley, California. She was surprised at the enthusiastic reactions. “Numerous students said, 'Let's do this!' i.e., let's start our own school.” When she asked what students needed, she was startled to hear their responses. “Some students wanted more work, more writing, more reading. Many of my students asked me for more.” Since showing the video, “the main thing that shifted is our relationship. I no longer feel like the enforcer of the rules, but the facilitator of a learning journey.”

Just type a keyword into a search engine, and you'll get thousands of answers in the blink of an eye, with little sense of who is behind them or what their intentions are. The challenge of modern life, then, is to navigate through these choices while filtering out misleading information, which has risen exponentially. A new Finnish curriculum was launched in 2016 with an element called “multiliteracy,” which involved making sure children could competently navigate online media and social platforms. We realized quite quickly that fact-checking concepts and methods could be adapted to the school environment to support the new curriculum. The teachers building the curriculum boiled down complex fact-checking methods into three fundamental questions: Who's behind the information? What's the evidence? What do other sources say? These questions are folded throughout the curriculum, across subjects, and there is continuity from year to year. In addition, Finland's education system reflects deep cultural values. In early childhood education, pupils spend nearly half of the day outdoors, in the school yard or in the nearby forest, exploring and having fun. According to the Finnish national curriculum for early childhood education, children have the right to play, to learn through play, to enjoy what they learn, and to build a sense of themselves, their identity, and the world according to their own starting points.

Wooden boats set out from houseboats and island homes carrying children dressed in school uniforms, their backpacks tucked between oars and lunch pails. Their destination: Kashmir's floating schools — classrooms anchored on the lake in this Himalayan region of the Indian subcontinent that has been claimed by both India and Pakistan, and scarred by decades of conflict. For the children of these watery hamlets, reaching school has never been simple. There are no roads connecting their homes to the nearest city, Srinagar, just narrow canals, shifting water levels and the long paddle to land. In the early light, children like 11-year-old Mahira begin their school day with a boat ride that lasts nearly 40 minutes. At one of the floating schools currently in operation, plans are underway to add a computer corner, powered by solar panels, so children here can learn digital skills too. For the students, these schools are not just classrooms but spaces of belonging. And despite minimal funds, teachers on the lake say these schools have improved attendance and engagement — especially for girls. Mahira says her favorite subject is English because “it feels like opening another world.” Her younger brother prefers science, especially when it helps him understand the fish and plants of the lake. The first floating school appeared in 2020, when the pandemic closed classrooms across the valley and families on Dal Lake decided to act. They cleared space on floating land, set up benches and a blackboard, and began teaching.

Kolle 37 is not your usual kind of kids' recreation space. This 4,000-square-meter, anarchic adventure playground in the heart of Berlin's central Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood is like the love child of a Wes Anderson set designer and a steampunk doorman at the city's infamous Berghain nightclub. Also known as the Adventurous Construction Playground Kolle 37, this unconventional educational space allows children to build — or, indeed, destroy — structures as they see fit. (Parents can enter only one day a week, on Saturdays.) Kolle 37, which started in 1990, is open to children between the ages of six and 16, and offers a rare space for unaccompanied play and so-called “free-range parenting” — moms and dads are asked to give a cell phone number and leave the site promptly. The playground, which receives funding from Berlin government authorities, also offers practical courses such as pottery, blacksmithery, archery and handicrafts, and has a space for music practice. Weekly meetings are held among the kids to discuss rules and problems, with a system of cards used for behavioral issues. Yellows serve as warnings and reds mean a child must leave for the day, for example if they hurt someone or stole something. “They run everything,” says [social workert Marcus] Schmidt. “If the government or officials visit, the kids give the tour. There's an equal relationship between children and adults here. This is a really, really special place.”

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