Porthcawl residents have honored the sacrifice of the soldiers who died fighting for their country in World War I by getting thousands of Flanders poppies planted on the town’s roundabouts.
The poppies are blooming in the Welsh seaside town as it prepares to mark the centenary of the start of World War I.
The flaming red Flanders poppies are an internationally recognized symbol of remembrance because they bloomed on the battlefields of Belgium and France during the 1914-18 war.
If you’re feeling stressed these days, the news media may be partly to blame, suggests a national survey conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.
The survey of more than 2,500 Americans found that about 1 in 4 said they had experienced a “great deal” of stress in the previous month. And these stressed-out people said one of the biggest contributors to their day-to-day stress was watching, reading or listening to the news.
The ARK project gave a shopping spree to two children whose family was stuck in Iowa for weeks at a hospital while their ill baby was being treated.
Thanks to a $10,000 grant from Kind Snacks, five friends are hitting the streets this summer, spreading acts of random kindness to strangers around the country through a nonprofit organization called ARK Project Now.
They’ve traveled 6,000 miles in an RV, left care packages for homeless people, bought coffee for strangers, and cooked dinner for families visiting sick relatives.
A news tip called into KATU-TV in Portland, Oregon brought to light a story of kindness and generosity by a local police officer.
Officer Carlos Ibarra says he deals with a lot of homeless people who could use help, but usually it is just a husband and wife and a kid or two at the most. This dad and seven kids were living in a van.
When none of the local shelters answered their phones on the weekend, he put them up in a hotel and paid the $70 fee from his own pocket. He went and got them a box of food too.
The British royal family released official photos to celebrate Prince George’s first birthday, today, July 22. He is now walking and visiting museums, seen here enjoying the Sensational Butterflies exhibit at the Natural History Museum.
A family gathering will be held at William and Kate’s home with the Queen expected to attend along with Prince Harry and the Middleton family.
Click below to see the photo gallery enlarged.
Presented with a stuffed wombat. (Auspic/Commonwealth of Australia, CC license)
Walking at one, visiting butterfly exhibit (Official birthday photo)
A 5-year-old Massachusetts boy battling cancer said all he wants for his upcoming birthday is a box of birthday cards.
Danny Nickerson, of Foxboro, Massachusetts, will turn six on July 25. He was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor this past October — one of the most chemotherapy-resistant cancers.
The boy gets lonely from time to time because he stopped going to kindergarten, so friends began a campaign to send cards for his birthday on July 25.
“He always loves getting cards with his name written on them,” said his mom. “I gave him to key to the P.O. box, and he was so excited when he opened it.”
Send letters or cards to this Lego and Super Mario lover herre:
Lilica was abandoned at a junkyard in San Carlos, Brazil. Instead of becoming heartless and homeless, the dog became beloved by the resident woman and her children, who responded to Lilica’s positive attitude, and willingness to risk her life for other animals.
After she bore eight pups (which were later adopted), Lilica began to search for food at night, walking four miles each way. She found a caring, compassionate school teacher who became accustomed to feeding the dog every night outside her home.
The woman, who feels she has made a special pact with the dog, always ties up the bag of food after Lilica is finished, so she can carry the food back across busy roads, to provide for the other animals in the poor neighborhood.
Everyone can agree that Miss Idaho is beautiful when she takes a stroll down the pageant runway for the swimsuit competition — even with an insulin pump attached to her bikini bottom. Wearing that in public has made her a social media star and role model for children.
Since posting the photo of her courageous walk on social media last week, insulin pumps and diabetes devices are now a symbol of community. Sandison has become a new Type 1 hero, with the hashtag #showmeyourpump spurring people to share photos showing off their diabetes devices.
KevW tweeted a photo of his adolescent daughter displaying a hot pink pump, and calling Sierra “a great role model.”
Conservationists have achieved success in their three-year effort to re-introduce Mexican gray wolves to a habitat where it disappeared three decades ago. Mexican officials have reported that the first known litter of Mexican gray wolves has been born in the wild. According to Mexico’s National Commission for Natural Protected Areas, a team of researchers spotted the wolf pups in the western Sierra Madre Mountains in June.
“This first litter represents an important step in the recovery program, because these will be individuals that have never had contact with human beings, as wolves bred in captivity inevitably do”, said the commission in a statement.
Cruz Riojas came from a troubled home: He was reportedly beaten by his stepfather, lived in a decrepit one-room lean-to with six other family members, and wore the same clothes to school every day.
His anger flared up in classrooms where he was known as a “holy terror.” Teachers loathed him.
Linda Hooper, a teacher who first encountered Cruz in the early ’80s, when he was 12 years old, came to love him.
He began coming for visits at her home, and eventually stayed.
A resident spotted a car that had suddenly started rolling downhill towards a busy rush hour street in Bradford, England. She yelled to a gardener who chased down the vehicle and steered it into a lamp post through the open window before it reached a busy road.
“It was also lucky I’d turned the hedge cutter off as it came rolling down hill,” said David Robson, 48, who had been pruning shrubs in Heaton and wouldn’t have heard the call of alarm.
Two seventh-graders at Chicago Jewish Day School, Marc Luban and Ariana Handelman, wanted their B’nai Mitzvahs to stand out — but not for the opulent festivities that some have planned for them, featuring celebrities like Beyonce, 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg.
Instead of a huge bash, the 12-year-olds’ ventures into Jewish adulthood will be marked by designing and building a playground for the public.
Through Thursday afternoon, more than $18,000 had been donated to the cause.
A fast-acting 3-year-old came to an elderly man’s rescue in Tennessee after he spotted the man trapped inside a hot car as temperatures inside the vehicle reached over 120 degrees.
While waiting for his wife to come back from an event at the Vestal Baptist Church in Knoxville last Saturday, Bob King, 68, found himself trapped in his car after the doors automatically locked.
When the toddler, Keith Williams, tried to tell a nearby adult, he was ignored in the beginning. But he kept repeating, “Locked, locked,” and “hot, hot”, until he finally persuaded the man to follow the boy to the parking lot.
Stepping on the sacred land of Timbavati, the ancestral land of White Lions, is an experience that cannot but leave a mark on you. These are not albino lions but a genetic rarity unique to this one region on earth, In the middle of the South African wilderness you begin to take in nature in a different way. Led by its founder, Linda Tucker (the author of Mystery of the White Lions and Saving the White Lions), the Global White Lion Protection Trust extends over an area of 2,200 acres with programs for various groups of people who hear the call to meet these majestic animals.
Our first encounter was with Matsieng, which means the Great Star Hunter in an ancient local South African language. He walked past our open-topped vehicle, and gave us a look that hardly showed any interest at all. He was busy looking for his mate, Tswalu, the lioness that managed to open all our hearts.
Timbavati originally means “the place where star lions descended on the Earth.” The feelings of love and respect that are nearly tangible permeate every single cell of this place. It is impossible not to feel that energy even if you are not a highly sensitive being. People and nature living in harmony.
The Guardian of the White Lions.
“A representative of the lions is sitting here with us.” These were Linda’s first words introducing our circle that evening, and she pointed at one of the chairs in the circle, which was made exclusively for the lions. “We are equal, therefore it is only right that they speak for themselves,” she explained. It doesn’t happen every day that one feels so much respect that it can be felt in the air at a precise moment. The spirit of the lions was there in all its might. Linda is a charismatic woman radiating the energy of a lioness and a “Guardian of the White Lions,” who has the important role of bringing the white lions back to their free homeland.
Linda’s story is being considered for a Hollywood movie. She was pursuing a successful career in marketing and the fashion industry in London but one night when she was back home in her homeland of Timbavati she met her destiny. That night she was at a birthday party with friends when all of a sudden they heard a lioness roar in the wild. They knew a lioness was to give birth soon and it had also been predicted that the cub might be a white lion, therefore they climbed into an open-topped vehicle and headed for the wild all excited in that dark night. They did track down the roaring lioness. “We were reckless. We didn’t realize we were invading her space, showing no respect whatsoever. We managed to enrage all the lions, of course,” Linda continued. In the middle of the night, they found themselves at the mercy of their destiny, encircled by 24 lions. When they tried to retreat, the vehicle hit a tree trunk and the axle broke, and they couldn’t restart the car. Linda says it is hard to describe the fear you feel in such a moment. When they accepted the fact they were at the very end of their lives, a female figure with a baby in her arms and two youngsters following her appeared like shadows out of the bush. Together they just walked through the circle formed by the lions, which calmed down completely and even laid down upon their arrival. The woman climbed into their car without saying a word. Hand in hand with one of the youngsters, Linda’s friend walked through the lion circle to the first village, and came back in another car, which took them to safety. The woman disappeared again into the darkness.
Linda returned to London but couldn’t find peace after this experience. And indeed, a white cub was born that night. Three years later she returned to Timbavati to look for that mysterious woman, and she found her. In the nearby village she was known as the Lion Queen of Timbavati, a representative of the shamans who knew how to communicate with lions. Maria Khosa had already been expecting Linda. That’s how Linda’s training and path began – the path she is still walking today. The Global White Lion Protection Trust is her mission and her life. There are seven white lions (of ten lions altogether) roaring freely on their homeland now. The first white lion Linda rescued from captivity and reintroduced to its free homeland was Marah, a lioness (the name means “the mother of the Sun God”). “The birth of Marah had been predicted by prophecies of African shamans,” Linda kept adding pieces to the story. Marah, who was regarded by the African Elders as the most sacred animal on African continent was born on Christmas Day in the South African province of Bethlehem. Symbolic? Indeed. And so very real. Marah and her 3 cubs were successfully returned from captivity into free roaming nature by Linda Tucker and Jason Turner, Linda’s partner and a lion ecologist. Since, Marah’s lineage has been born free and wild in their natural endemic environment. At the same time, Linda and Jason are striving to protect all lions from the African industry of breeding lions in captivity to meet the demands of pleasure hunting, which is still legal in Africa and serves as entertainment for the rich, but, since it is a big money industry, it also provides a source of income for the locals.
White Lions – Star Creatures.
Our opening circle made us realize that we had landed in a very special place. That immense vastness, those peculiar sounds, the fact that we were in the very centre of the animal kingdom right under the vault of the Milky Way, and so much more. “The white lions have a particular mystique about them,” says Linda. “Timbavati is their endemic and only homeland on Earth, and all the legends describe them as star creatures. The native ancestors were convinced that they are children of the Sun God, and legends say that they came down to Earth to help save humanity at a time of crisis.” There is no doubt that this time is right now. “Scientifically, the lions are at the tip of the tip of the ecosystem, at the top of the life pyramid of our planet,” explained Linda. The problem is that by eliminating the top of the pyramid, the entire ecosystem collapses. “If the white lions disappear, the Earth will lose its balance completely, and this is something that we, humans, cannot survive,” is her very straightforward message. “Our task is to help restore the natural balance, which also means to restore the natural balance within us, human beings, within ourselves,” continued Linda. And she said, “Let’s just take a look at the lion as a symbol. It represents power, dignity, leadership, courage, and heart. When we, people, are our best, we are exactly like that: lion-hearted.”
Love and Respect.
“There are really only two rules in nature, love and respect,” Linda taught us. “If you follow these two rules, nature will show you love and respect in return.” And nature showed us immediately how very true all this is. There is no time to be absent here. Nature teaches you to be wide awake. Meeting with the royal pride of white lions: the lion Mandla, the lioness Zihra, and their daughter Nebu, was a powerful experience. When you enter their space, you have to show respect. You have to know the boundaries. You have to be patient. You have to open your heart. And these are exactly the values lacking in day-to-day communication in our society. “Communicating with animals teaches us unconditional love,” says Wynter Worsthorne, a renowned animal communicator and one of Linda’s close colleagues at the WLT and in communicating with the lions. “There are no filters in this communication as it can only flow directly from heart to heart. If there is fear, insincerity, or a hidden purpose that differs from the one we try to express, the animals sense this immediately. Therefore, no one can hide here,” we learnt from Wynter during the drive. Nevertheless it was pretty clear that such communication first makes you face all your fears.
Zihra and Nebu were lying in the bushes in the late afternoon. To have a better view of them, we moved a little closer. We may have got a little too close, which was soon confirmed by Nebu, who arose, came up to our vehicle, and marked her territory right in front of us. After that she walked in a circle around us, and her crystal blue eyes made us freeze on the spot. All of a sudden I felt a strange feeling down my spine, as if it had been brushed by a wave of light and straightened out. And suddenly the energy in the car rose. We sat there in silence, each of us on her own and … together with them, with the two white lionesses. Zihra joined Nebu when she was circling around us. After that, they both lay down behind our car. While feeling this particular energy I found myself in a peculiar, enraptured state that made me hear Nebu’s voice very clearly. It was her message to me. At first I thought I was just imagining it, of course, but the voice spoke again and the message was the same. I accepted the fact that one cannot question nature, and that the invisible is as much a part of nature as are the trees, the grass, or the stones. This new insight opened a new dimension in my perception of life. The feeling of connectedness with these beings is beyond description. It makes you feel at home, and there is no fear even though we had also experienced fear at a certain point while living this experience. There was just enormous respect and a fully open heart; the comprehension that we are brothers and sisters; that we are all created from the stars and the soil; that it is time to restore the missing connection to nature; the insight that the way we treat nature is actually the way we treat ourselves. Whatever we do to nature, we do to ourselves. Nature does not have to prove anything to us, as we are used to relating to ourselves and to others nowadays. Nature teaches us to listen to it because it gives us all the answers if we just show enough patience and respect. “In order to save humanity, we have to restore our connection to nature because nature is the source of life, together with its plants, water, soil, and animals. And we can achieve this by reawakening love and respect,” confirmed Linda, as well.
That evening we were greeted not only by Zihra and Nebu, but also by the king himself, by Mandla. And in the days that followed we met the rest of the lions as well. Every single experience was a special one, and as far as I am concerned there is no longer any doubt: white lions are special creatures. The mystery surrounding them is real. They are leaders, bright examples of brave-heartedness, which entails courage, heart-centeredness, ethics, spiritual maturity, harmony with nature, and balance, the harmony of coexistence on this planet where all things are connected and every single piece has a meaning and a purpose. They are the leaders of a new era, and the values they teach us can save our world.
The Message of the White Lions for Humanity
“The white lions, born in captivity all around the world, have the role of ambassadors since they, simply by their presence, expand our consciousness and call people to finally wake up and re-establish their contact with the nature,” explained Linda. “I believe that this is the turning point year, that humanity will start giving back to nature, and not only take from it.” When we manage to make this shift (and the shift always begins within ourselves), natural order can be restored again, and our lives will acquire a completely different quality. Each one of us can make a difference. “If you doubt that you can make a difference that is just not good enough. This means you are failing yourself and failing nature. This is ego,” said Linda, and I can only agree with her. “Let go of your doubts and look deep into your heart. You’ll realise you are here for a purpose, and that’s what the white lions are activating in all of us,” she added. “Just watch what’s going to happen when we start living our purpose.” The white lions are pure starlight, pure sunlight that activates courage to stand up and follow our heart. Linda says they are ready to give unconditionally in the belief that we will stand up and activate our purpose and live a meaningful life. I believe that we are on the right path and that we can do it.
Written by Andreja Cepuš (All photos by WhiteLions.org)
For more information, visit the Global White Lion Protection Trust at whitelions.org.
When Kansas City, Missouri, Police Officer Todd Templeton’s police cruiser arrived on the scene where three kids were playing basketball in a local neighborhood, the group had no idea that someone with a cell phone camera would capture what happened next.
Templeton told the KMBC-TV he wants introduce local kids to good interactions with police instead of bad ones.
The three-on-three hoops session that follows proves that not all videos involving cops go viral in anger.
“Great news story,” said Jeffery Scharn, who submitted the link to the Good News Network.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel promised 750 million euros ($1 billion) to the United Nations Green Climate Fund, the first major pledge it has received.
The fund is designed to channel climate aid from industrialized countries to poor nations that need projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect against the effects of climate change.
Until now, the fund only had seed capital to help set itself up.
Amelia Rose Earhart, 31, isn’t related to the female pilot who disappeared more than seven decades ago, but she was given the famous name at birth and has always wanted to complete the journey around the world.
She set off on her global voyage June 26 from the same Oakland Airport as her hero did, and landed there Saturday as the youngest woman to circumnavigate the globe in a single-engine plane.
The Denver resident, and former traffic and weather reporter, runs a nonprofit, the Fly With Amelia Foundation, which sends girls 16 to 18 to flight school. She hopes her story and around-the-world flight will inspire girls to fly.
(WATCH the NBC video below, or READ the story from InsideBayArea)
To honor his wife for their 61st anniversary, Bob Phillips sent a letter to a North Carolina newspaper, proclaiming that he would never see a bride more beautiful than her.
Gail says it’s hard to live up to the bar, but her romantic husband has put her on a pedestal since their wedding day in 1953.
The Charlotte Observer printed the letter, and posted it online, where it has been widely admired on social media.
Dear Gail,
I look at newspaper pictures of new brides every Sunday. I’m searching. I want to see if there is now or ever will be another bride as lovely as you. Been doing that since June 27, 1953.
Actually, I already know the answer. There is not – and never will be to me – your equal in loveliness. On our wedding day you were the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The delightful truth is that you still are.
Happy anniversary, sweetheart. You’ve made me and you keep me the happiest and most grateful husband any bride could ever know. I’d gladly welcome another 61 years of marriage with you. Beyond that I pray we will spend eternity together.
All my love, Bob
(WATCH an interview with the couple, from WBTV, below) – Story tip from Katherine
A deaf 13 year-old boy was asleep and alone in his Indianapolis home when a fire broke out. His pit bull repeatedly licked his face until he reluctantly woke up and was able to escape unharmed along with Ace, now hailed as a hero.
