This young man literally has his best friend’s back.
For the past three years, Xie Xu, 18, has carried his best friend Zhang Chi, 19, to school every single morning and throughout the day as they travel to classes together. Zhang has muscular dystrophy, a disorder that weakens the muscles over time.
Xie, who is 5’7, has offered his back to Zhang nearly a dozen times daily throughout the school year. The task is entirely a volunteer job, like bringing him all of his meals. But Xie loves it. The partnership extended into their schoolwork, as both of these young men are the top students in their class.
“The story of the two students is so inspiring and touching. They aren’t family, but [Xie] has been doing this for three years. He’s the most beautiful student,” said Guo Chunxi, the vice headmaster of Daxu High School told local media. “He also exerts positive influence on other students, who readily help Zhang. With their assistance, Zhang has never missed out on one single class.”
A 60-year-old homeless woman named Smokie has been sleeping outside in the dirt a few doors down from a man named Elvis Summers.
Most mornings, she stops by Elvis’s Los Angeles apartment and asks if he has any recyclables for her. Through these conversation, they struck up a friendship.
One morning, Elvis saw a news article about a man in Oakland who has been making tiny houses out of discarded material. He was inspired to put off paying a few bills so he could buy the lumber and hardware to make Smokie a brand new shelter. It took him five days to build, and now, for the first time in ten years, Smokie has a place to hang the sign, ‘Home Sweet Home.’
“I had nowhere to really build it, so I just built it in the street outside of my apartment,” he told Good News Network. “The local LAPD cops have been super cool, and have told me they support it–as long as we move it to a different spot every 72 hours.”
He made this nifty time-lapse video showing how he did it. The materials, including two locks on the front door and sturdy wheels for moving it around, cost him about $500.
“I’ve met so many homeless people, good people,” Elvis said in an email. “Since I built Smokie’s, I’ve had several people ask me to make them a tiny home and it’s turned into much more than just the one house I wanted to build.”
Although he runs an online retail store that sells EDM apparel, he decided to launch an ambitious project to fund more shelters. He plans to get lighter and cheaper materials—without sacrificing the strength of the house—for the next round. Rick Sassen, branch manager at supply company Allied Building kindly donated the roof shingles and cedar siding for Smokie’s house, final items Elvis couldn’t afford on his own. Sassen has promised to work out a deal on future building materials for the same cause.
Thus, the spikey-haired do-gooder has launched “Mythpla” (My Tiny House Project LA) with a crowdfunding campaign for those who want to help, on GoFundMe.
“I’d like to offer purpose to these people in need and hire them to build the houses with me. I’ve even set an appointment with LA’s Mayor Eric Garcetti to try and get his help,” said Elvis. “The city owns or controls many otzyvycasino properties which are just sitting collecting dust and could be used, even temporarily, to help save lives.”
Because Summers qualifies for a free phone through the free phone program, he’s given his device to Smokie and helps her keep it charged. She has been using it to contact her family.
“Now if I could just get her to stop using the radio on the phone so much, it wouldn’t always be dead and need charging so often,” he said laughing.
Three male Amur tiger cubs were born at the Columbus Zoo on April 21, weighing just 2.5 lbs. each.
The cubs are being hand reared after the female failed to show maternal care and nurse them. But the cubs are “thriving” in the Animal Health Center’s incubator.
“We are always cautiously optimistic about the survival of fragile newborns,” said President and CEO Tom Stalf. “But the cubs seem to be thriving under the 24-hour care provided by our animal specialists and veterinarians.”
These are the first cubs for ten-year-old female, Irisa, although the Zoo team and the Tiger Species Survival Plan had hoped for years she would reproduce and pass on her valuable genes. This is the third litter sired by eleven-year-old, Foli, since 2012.
With the addition of the three cubs there are currently 10 Amur tigers at the Columbus Zoo including four cubs born in 2013 and their mother, Mara.
Amur tigers, also historically referred to as Siberian tigers, are critically endangered, with fewer than 400 individuals believed to exist in the forests of the Russian Far East.
Currently there are fewer than 150 Amur tigers in 50 certified zoos in North America. These tigers are considered pedigreed since they have a known ancestry and breeding recommendations to maintain genetic diversity are managed by a studbook.
The motto of the United Negro College Fund is: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but a wonderful thing to invest in.”
Top celebrities in the entertainment industry got together and did just that, donated more than $500,000 for college scholarships at the 36th annual UNCF An Evening of Stars, which airs Sunday night on BET Networks.
Usher, Toni Braxton, Pharrell Williams and Kevin Hart, were among those donating, along with companies like McDonald’s, Wells Fargo, Buick and Disney.
“We’re here to help alleviate the burden off their shoulders,” Anthony Anderson told the AP. “Students won’t have to worry about their next meal, or pay for next semester or housing. The only thing they have to do is open a book and study.”
Don't miss Anthony Anderson return for the 3rd year as host of the 36th annual " UNCF An Evening of Stars," airing Sunday, April 26 at 10p/9c on BET! Check out this clip:
A Western Australia farming family rescued a baby kangaroo whose mother was killed in a car accident. Since then, the young joey, named Dusty, is finding life on the farm very much to his liking.
“He lives on the back patio,” Ashley Stewart told ABC Rural. “We’ve actually had to go and buy a third dog bed for him to sleep in because he used to pinch one of the beds from the dogs.”
From the instant Mr. Steward brought home the orphan two years ago, the family’s golden retriever and border collie have loved “their kangaroo”.
This pair of 7-year-olds, Kollin Cox and Ryan Branson, are best friends. When one of them lost everything in a fire, the other one asked his mother to help him make a video and post it on Facebook.
Since then, the St. Louis television stations have run news stories about the friendship that helped raise $11,000 to replace toys, beds and clothes for the young boy and his mother Sonya, proving that the destructive blaze was no match for this pair of elementary school BFFs.
(WATCH the video below from Nightly News or READ the story from KTVI-TV) – Photo via GoFundMe page
SHARE the story with links below…Story tip from carilyn
A start-up plans to help solve the world’s climate problems by using drones to plant forests of seedlings.
“We are going to counter industrial scale deforestation using industrial scale reforestation,” says Lauren Fletcher, the founder of BioCarbon Engineering.
The environmental engineer who worked 20 years with NASA wants to use drone technology to plant up to one billion trees a year, without having to plant each one by hand.
Drones will fly two or three meters above the ground and fire out pods containing pre-germinated seeds that are covered in a nutritious hydrogel.
The company’s CEO, who might be called ‘Johnny Apple Drone’, thinks it should be possible to plant up to 36,000 trees a day, and at around 15% of the cost of traditional methods. And they aren’t just looking to create plantations of trees, but full ecosystems.
“Together with tree seeds, we hope to seed in other species including micro-organisms and fungi to improve the soil quality and ensure long-term sustainability of our efforts.”
Gaurang Damani was so tired of the dirt and stench in a Mumbai train station that he regularly wrote letters to the Central Railway to complain. Finally, the company offered the option to Damani and his non-profit organization to adopt the station and clean it up themselves.
The NGO, Karmayogi Pratisthan, gathered nearby residents and volunteers from colleges, elementary schools, garden and sport clubs to transform King’s Circle station. Beginning in late December, the beautification took 4 months.
Now, the walls of the station have been brightly painted with social messages and inspiring murals, countless bags of trash rotting on the premises were replaced with trash bins, walkways and floors were scrubbed, and even flowers and trees were planted.
Women and students who loathed getting on and off at the station now can use it comfortably. New street lamps now make it safer at night and the foul smell has gone away. Sweepers take turns regularly maintaining the appearance and new signage encourages cleanliness.
“The decrease in littering and spitting means that I have made a difference,” Damani told Mid-Day news. “I have invested my own money and there is also money coming through donations. The fact that my NGO has adopted the station (means) people are helping to keep the station clean as well as to beautify it.”
After eleven days of being inexplicably paralyzed from the waist down, a sudden recovery brought Bailey Murrill back on her feet again. The video below shows Bailey surprising her favorite nurse with the miracle.
Bailey rolls down the hallway in a wheelchair toward the nurse, pretending still to be immobile. The nurse reaches out for a hug when all of a sudden, Bailey stands up to meet her embrace.
“Yes!” screams the nurse. “Thank you Lord, yes!”
And Bailey’s mother recorded the whole thing for us to see…
A lot of fancy threads get left behind at the dry cleaners, but they were put to good use this week, after a group of Korean-American dry cleaners donated 2,000 pieces of unclaimed clothing to New York City’s most needy.
80 boxes of coats, suits, shirts and pants were collected by the Korean Dry Cleaners Association of New York. They spent six months gathering the items from launderers across the city as part of their “Clothes of Love” program.
It has become an annual tradition for the group, which has, over the past 30 years, donate tens of thousands of clothing items to homeless shelters across the city through New York’s Department of Homeless Services.
A study of 96,000 children shows that the chances of a child developing autism is the same whether they receive the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine or not.
The study looked at insurance claims for children born between 2001 and 2007. It found 0.7% of unvaccinated children developed Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) while 0.5% of children who were vaccinated did. Dr. Bryan King, program director of the Autism Center at Seattle Children’s Hospital, said the numbers show “the risk of ASD recurrence in families does not differ between vaccinated and unvaccinated children.”
A 1998 study published in the journal Lancet that linked autism to the vaccine has been debunked and withdrawn by the publication. Every study since has shown no link between the two.
The latest study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and funded by The National institute of Mental Health, looked specifically at a high risk group of children — those who had an older sibling with autism — and still found no link between ASD and the MMR vaccine.
“These findings indicate no harmful association between MMR vaccine receipt and ASD even among children already at higher risk for ASD,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Happy Birthday wishes, and a collective Mazel Tov, to Barbra Streisand, who turns 73 on Friday.
The rare EGOT winner – someone who has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony – began her week donning a beret at the “Women In The World” summit where she spoke about the importance of being valued.
Known as an “unconventional” beauty who refused to alter her image for Hollywood, Babs is a hero to many fans. But she simply calls herself an “actress who sings.”
Born Barbara Joan Streisand in Brooklyn in 1942, she got her big break at age 20 in the Broadway show, I Can Get It For You Wholesale, before staring on stage– and screen– in Funny Girl. She is best known as a mega-selling vocalist and for other roles inA Star Is Born and The Way We Were. With the release of Yentl in 1983, Streisand established herself as one of the film industry’s most notable figures by becoming the first woman to write, produce, direct and act in a major film.
Streisand posted on Facebook today that she was taken to a pre-birthday dinner by husband James Brolin and friends where she enjoyed all her “childhood comfort foods” at the Ralph Lauren Polo Bar in New York.
SHARE the Birthday Wishes Below / Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Want another reason to love his Royal Highness the young red-haired Prince of Wales?
Prince Harry unleashed some laughs last week playing a game of wheelchair Australian football with wounded members of the Soldier Recovery Center during his month-long tour with the Australian Army. During his stay, Prince Harry, or Captain Harry Wales, as he’s known in the British Army, worked and lived among the soldiers of the 1st Brigade and other units, but is now headed for retirement, finishing his last tour ‘down under’.
Committed to charitable causes, particularly injured service members, Prince Harry spearheaded the Invictus Games last year, a sporting tournament for wounded veterans from 13 nations. He also is involved in AIDS charities and research, much like his late mother, Princess Diana.
He is fourth in line for the throne, but Prince Harry is first in the hearts of his fellow Afghan veterans.
(WATCH the wheelchair football videos below)
Photo by: CPL Oliver Carter, Australian Defense Force via Facebook
The class of 2015 can look forward to more money in their first paychecks and more job openings than last year’s graduates saw. Multiple surveys paint a better picture for this year’s crop of graduates in terms of both starting pay and demand for workers.
At least 26% of employers in a CareerBuilder survey say they will pay new college grads at least $50,000 their first year out of school. Engineering and computer science degrees lead the pack with each expected to draw a starting salary above $60,000 in a survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). The survey indicates that a graduate with a bachelors degree in petroleum engineering will earn the most straight out of school — $80,600 on average.
That kind of demand is showing up in other disciplines as more recruiters show up on college campuses around the country this spring.
”I’m seeing a lot more competition,” Dan Black, EY’s U.S. recruiting leader, told the AP. EY (the accounting giant formerly known as Ernst & Young) plans to hire 9,000 college graduates this year.
Overall, companies are expected to increase their hiring of college grads by 16% this year over last year based on a survey last fall by Michigan State University’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute, according to AP.
“Even arts and humanities are making a comeback,” Institute Director Philip Gardner told AP.
And even though humanities degrees are at the lowest end of the average pay scale in the NACE survey, the average starting pay for a graduate is still $45,042 a year — $2,000 more than the average compensation for all workers in the U.S. just two years ago.
When a man rolled off the platform and onto the train tracks yesterday around 1:00pm, one man jumped right in after him, and another soon followed.
When the man, who was believed to have fallen asleep in his motorized wheelchair, went onto the tracks, many people ran over to look, but only one, Dr. David Silverberg, jumped in after him.
“I just kind of took a quick look to see if the train was coming. I’ve got a nine-year-old so I didn’t want to get killed and leave her without a father,” Dr. Silverberg told the CBC.
When he called out to another man for help, that man jumped down right away.
Between the two of them, they were able to hoist him and his wheelchair out, and then get themselves “the heck off.”
Dr. Silverberg said he was just “doing what he had to do.”
We disagree—in this situation, nobody ever really knows what to do as the seconds tick by.
In a match made in dog heaven, a toddler without feet gets a new puppy who is missing a paw.
Sapphyre Johnson, a three-year-old who lost her feet at age one, was given the gift of a cuddly nine-week-old German shephard named Lieutenant Dan. The canine, named after the amputee soldier in the movie Forrest Gump, was brought to her on Monday by devoted breeder Karen Riddle of Greenville, South Carolina.
After other breeders suggested the dog be euthanized, Riddle made it her personal mission to search for a special needs child or a wounded veteran to place him with.
She knew in her heart that the doggy deserved an owner with whom he could share a unique bond, and Shriner’s Hospitals For Children helped her find the perfect match.
“A lot of kids don’t see other children or animals that have issues like they have,” the little girl’s father Matthew Johnson told The Greenville News.
Shriners’s specialist Elaine Hardin said that Sapphyre fell in love with the dog right away just based on his picture.
“The first time I showed her a picture of the dog, she looked at it for a moment, and she said, ‘That’s my puppy. He’s just like me,’” Hardin said.
As an added plus, the hospital has offered to make a prosthetic foot for Lieutenant Dan when he’s large enough, the same way that they made two for Sapphyre.
The two youngsters are currently cavorting in Tennessee enjoying their perfect match.
(WATCH the short video, or READ the story from the Greenville News)
Just like that, a $360,000 burden was lifted from Tim Ward’s shoulders following a year of tragedy.
When Ward lost both his wife and his house during a mudslide near Oso, Washington last year, his only comfort was a reunion with his faithful dog, Blue, who lost a leg after being trapped for three days under a tree.
Last week, things got a bit more comfortable after an anonymous donor sealed a deal to pay off of his entire mortgage. Ward was working with Chase’s “special-cases unit” to negotiate a settlement of his loan when the mysterious benefactor swooped in to help.
“He said, ‘How much is the mortgage?’ and said he wanted to pay it off,” said Darcy Donohoe-Wilmot, a spokesperson for Chase Bank, where the donor does business.
Now, Ward is free to focus on his grief-support meetings, and training Blue to be a service dog, after it was noticed that the pup was a huge help to others in the group.
You’ve got to spend money to make money and a generous CEO is making a lot more money a week after he invested in his employees. The company, Gravity Payments, has been flooded with new business since CEO Dan Price announced he’d raise every one of his employee’s pay to $70,000 a year — and slashed his own annual pay from $1 million to the same $70,000.
“I’m actually shocked by the reaction from businesses,” Price told CNN Money. “It has me on cloud nine.”
Price says the credit card transaction processing company he founded has recorded the best week for acquiring new clients in the 11 years since he founded it. He says dozens of new clients have signed on with the company and he’s thinking about expanding his staff to 120 people.
Good News Network reported last week Price announced he was raising the pay of 70 of his workers after reading a study on how having extra money made a difference in the lives of people earning under $70,000 a year. The raise doubled the salaries of 30 workers.
And more people want to work for his company. Gravity Payments received 3,500 job applications in the past week for two open positions — roughly five times what they usually get for an opening.
It was a foggy night with low visibility when Mendocino County Sheriff Deputies came across an unexpected highway wanderer at 1:00am Sunday.
The lost sea lion pup had walked a quarter-mile from the ocean near Fort Bragg, California, so was happy to see a couple friendly faces.
Deputies contacted the Marine Mammal Center after discovering an orange tag attached to the 20lb pup’s front flipper. The staff said they had previously rehabilitated the animal and he had become quite used to people. This was no shock to the deputies, since the little fella had been vying for their affection.
Is old-fashioned storytelling and merriment a thing of the past?
Nay! The fantasy lives, and it’s eco-friendly.
Inspired by the writings of J.R.R. Tolkein, ancient mythology and Victorian romanticism, The Travelers of Elsewhere circus troupe will be enchanting Scottish audiences this summer by performing in forests across the country–and sleeping under the stars while they do it.
The small group will travel to local woodlands in a horse drawn carriage to perform in green spaces within walking distance of towns. Promoting love of the environment and sustainable lifestyles, the caravan will entertain with a mix of interactive theater, improvisation and storytelling in the midst of their encampment.
Their juggling and puppet shows prove that entertainment doesn’t have to involve a whole bunch of Hollywood technology. But they do need horses and a second cart, so they are crowd-funding their tour.
Kenn Musso, the Director and Cofounder of Elsewhere Events believes that a more sustainable society will be better equipped to find creative solutions for problems, and hopes to inspire children to look toward nature for solutions and fun.
If you’re able to catch the performance, please let us know if the Hobbit drives a Prius.
(WATCH their enchanting video below) – Story tip from Antti Jalkanen
