The extraordinary true story of a Malawian teenager who transformed his village by building electric windmills out of junk is the subject of a new book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

His against-all-odds achievements in 2007 are all the more remarkable considering he was forced to quit school aged 14 because his family could no longer afford the $80-a-year fees.

When he returned to his parents' small plot of farmland in the central Malawian village of Masitala, his future seemed limited. But he educated himself at the local library and worked on his dream of bringing electricity and running water to his village.

Since then, self-taught William Kamkwamba (click to see his blog) has become a hero to climate change campaigners like Al Gore and business leaders the world over.

(Continue reading the story at BBC)

(Update: November 24, 2009) Our website is secure once again, after Friday's hacking incident. We are updating the Forum, where the infiltration occurred, and it should be ready with new software in a day or two. The old forum posts will be imported into the new Forum! Thanks to the dozens of readers who alerted me to the attack. Original notice continues below:

As many of you have noticed, thanks to a Google firewall setup to warn people about malicious code on the Good News Network, the site was hacked for the first time in 13 years.

I finally got some help on this today (Sunday) and an old friend was able to disable the Forum where he found the malware code.

He is a very smart developer and he said that the site is secure now.

The Google warning is still up, I've been trying to jump through the hoops they set up to restore the site to good graces, but it's slow moving.

I just wanted to post something about this ON the site (not very visible I'm afraid, as it is in the Editor's Blog, at the bottom of the front page, but I'm doing the best I can here.

How this code affected me was, it tried to download a file to my computer, and since I had no idea what it was, I simply clicked CANCEL about three times when the pop-up window asked for access. So I hope the only way anyone could have been affected by this was to Download the malicious file coming from either go-lawschool.com/, or darkblog.org/. 

That's all for now. I will add some news stories while I wait for my webmaster to get my urgent emails screaming for help with the Google warning page and Forum problem... (We only communicate virtually so cannot call him.)