A Rockford, Illinois man who always thought his first-born child died at birth found out his daughter was alive after she realized she had been adopted and found records revealing her real father’s name.
“It’s a Godsend,” said the man, whose wife had deceived him because they had separated before the birth.
“China will spend $275 billion to tackle air pollution over the next five years, highlighting how the issue has become a priority for the leadership.
The amount is more than the total economic output of Hong Kong last year.”
(READ the AP story here)
If you depended on the evening news or pop culture to paint a picture of young Blacks, you would probably think that the majority of these youngsters were only ambitious about sports and music – or caught up in crime and gangs.
Beyond Jay-Z, Beyonce and LeBron James, there are a multitude of African-American youth who are achieving honors in science, math, classical music and chess. Some are preparing to change the world.
For the third time in a week a generous customer at a coffee chain in Canada has handed over around $900 to pay for beverages — and this time some food — in an identical gesture of goodwill.
Tim Hortons says it wasn’t involved in the copycat donations, first in Edmonton and Calgary earlier this week, and in Ottawa on Thursday.
“According to the store manager… the donation (was) given by an unnamed worker for OC Transpo,” reported the CBC.
(WATCH the video below or READ the story from the CBC)
Sam Simon is facing down his terminal cancer diagnosis by spending his vast fortune (how much? “I don’t know”) on animal welfare and feeding the hungry: “I get pleasure from it. I love it.”
His contributions include founding the Malibu-based Sam Simon Foundation (worth nearly $23 million as of 2011) which supports the hungry with vegan food and rescues stray dogs.
They say that laughter is the best medicine. The Up, an organization that brings joy to humanity is proving this to be true.
Nikki Jackman, the founder of The Up explains how it all got started, “I started the UP in 2003,” she says, “After choosing to use my talents for greater purpose, I researched laughter therapy and hospital clowning. I saw the gap there was to bring extra emotional care to sick and traumatized children and so The UP was born”.
(READ the full story in the Nanima.co.za)
35-year-old Jen Bulik received some bad news about lung cancer and wanted to get married before time ran out. As often is the case, out of bad news comes extraordinary stories of kindness. This one was delivered by a wedding planner moved to donate a $50,000 wedding to the beautiful couple whom she only heard about through a Facebook post.
“It was my goal for them not to pay a dime,” said Erica Ota, who was impressed by Jen’s positive writings on her blog. “I thought to myself these people have already suffered enough, why not be able to give them a gift? A wonderful gift that they, and their families will never be able to forget.”
It all comes together – with only two weeks of planning — this Saturday in San Francisco.
(WATCH the video or READ Garvin Thomas’s story at NBC)
For the second time in Alberta this week, a man has walked into Tim Hortons and slapped down cash for the equivalent of 500 large coffees for other customers.
First it was in Edmonton on Monday, and Wednesday it was in Calgary at a Tim Hortons in the city’s northwest.
The mystery donor gave the store almost $900 to hand out free coffees to those behind him in line.
(WATCH the video below and READ the story from the CBC)
A medical application for handheld Apple devices is helping people with speech disabilities carry out their everyday errands by communicating with a few easy clicks of the screen.
Developed by Toronto-based technology company My Voice Inc., TalkRocket Go has helped over 10,000 people worldwide who have recently suffered a stroke.
An Irish-American billionaire who kept his philanthropy secret for 15 years has given away $7.5 billion – and plans for it all to go to charity before his dies.
Chuck Feeney, 82, wears a $15 Casio watch, often travels in coach, does not own a car, is a self-confessed ‘shabby dresser’ and sensibly made his children work their way through college.
“I believe strongly in ‘giving while living,'” said Feeney in 2012. “I see little reason to delay giving when so much good can be achieved through supporting worthwhile causes today.”
He has given away 99 percent of his fortune to health, science, education and civil rights causes around the world through his Atlantic Philanthropies foundation.
In 1984, Atlantic Philanthropies received all of the Feeney interests in Duty Free Shoppers and operated anonymously for its first 15 years. Some of his biggest contributions went to rebuilding Vietnam’s health care infrastructure after the war, building the Republic of Ireland’s university system, and biomedical and cancer research.
In his biography,The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune Without Anyone Knowing
(READ more in the Daily Mail)
Chess is not easy, but almost anyone can benefit from the complex game because it teaches strategy, confidence, and also how to accept failure.
So says Orrin Hudson, a 50-year-old Stone Mountain chess champion who has devoted his life — and life savings — to teaching the ancient game to modern kids to instill in them a never-say-die attitude.
“Every disappointment is a blessing,” says Hudson. “Life is a conspiracy to help you win.”
(READ the story from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Friends of a young man who recently underwent a bone marrow transplant for a serious blood disorder created a flash mob outside his hospital window to lift his spirits.
He is being quarantined and can’t leave the room or have visitors, so his friends came as close as they could — and wore their dancing shoes.
“It’s just really amazing,” said Brandon, whose transplant has started to work.
(WATCH the video below from KMBC)
A special guest at a Sacramento baseball game made the first pitch into a homecoming for a local soldier and his children.
Ten-year-old Deven Hereth took to the field to throw out the first pitch to a catcher wearing a mask.
That catcher was his dad, Jim Hereth, who recently returned from Afghanistan.
Jessica Kruger’s gorgeous face became the favorite in online voting for a campaign to find the new spokesperson for a perfume company.
The 21-year-old quadriplegic sees the modeling contract as an opportunity to educate the public.
She entered the “Something Sweet” campaign by the Lise Watier company upon the urging of a friend “just for fun”, but decided that the voting could help change the world’s perception of beauty.
“Jessica will make a world of difference as a role model for women seeking to triumph over tragedy through determination and perseverance,” said Kruger’s mother, Mary in a press release. “Jessica’s will to engage in helping herself persevere with rehabilitation without going into an electric chair helped her greatly to go from having no hand movement to having full use of both hands.”
Now a student at Simon Fraser University, she fell from a ladder when she was 15 and lost all use of her legs. A lifelong athlete, she went on to become the only female to play on a B.C. wheelchair rugby team.
(WATCH the inspiring video below)
Flo Meiler is 79 years old. She’s a grandmother to five, great-grandmother to two. She’s also a pole-vaulting, hurdle-jumping track and field star.
Her fitness as a senior has filled a whole chapter in the record books, with Flo setting 15 world records for women over the age of 75 in a wide range of events — from the pole vault to the discus, from the 100-meter relay to the 200-meter hurdles.
It’s no surprise that those who tend to see a rose’s blooms before its thorns are also better at handling stress. But science has never been able to reliably associate optimism with individuals’ biological stress response – until now.
New research from Concordia University’s Department of Psychology is deepening the understanding of how optimists and pessimists each handle stress by comparing them not to each other but to themselves. Results show that indeed the “stress hormone” cortisol tends to be more stable in those with more positive personalities.
Participants were asked to report on the level of stress they perceived in their day-to-day lives, and self-identify along a continuum as optimists or pessimists. Each person’s stress levels were then measured against their own average. Measuring the stress levels against participants’ own average provided a real-world picture of how individuals handle stress because individuals can become accustomed to the typical amount of stress in their lives.
Joelle Jobin, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology who co-authored the study with her supervisor Carsten Wrosch and Michael Scheier from Carnegie Mellon University, says “for some people, going to the grocery store on a Saturday morning can be very stressful, so that’s why we asked people how often they felt stressed or overwhelmed during the day and compared people to their own averages, then analyzed their responses by looking at the stress levels over many days.”
She also notes that pessimists tended to have a higher stress baseline than optimists, but also had trouble regulating their system when they go through particularly stressful situations. “On days where they experience higher than average stress, that’s when we see that the pessimists’ stress response is much elevated, and they have trouble bringing their cortisol levels back down. Optimists, by contrast, were protected in these circumstances,” says Jobin.
(Source: Concordia University) Photo credit: Helga Weber / Foter / CC
A high school student getting a perfect score on the SAT has happened before. But one East Bay student who recently did just that just graduated from middle school. It’s hard to find something 14-year-old Varun Jain can’t do.
“He is a very good human being… I want him to make a difference in the world,” his mother Vinita Jain said.
After Annette Fredskov was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and perhaps wanting to create an unbreakable bond with her own body to ward off the expected degeneration of nerve cells, she began an incredible streak of marathon running that has landed her in the media worldwide.
At 41, the Danish woman ran 26.2 miles every single day for the last year, and a double marathon on day #365. She crossed the finish line on July 14 in her hometown south of Copenhagen with friends and supporters cheering — and said she would like to keep running tomorrow, thank you very much.
American treasure hunters hit it big when they retrieved 60 tons of silver from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean this month.
Tampa, Fla.-based Odyssey Marine Exploration led the quest to find the underwater treasure, which sank in 1941 when the SS Gairsoppa — a British steamship that was secretly carrying silver from India to Great Britain to fund the war effort — was hit by a German U-boat torpedo.
(WATCH the NBC video below, or READ the full story from WSMV)
For the first time in 50 years two Persian leopard cubs have been born in a Russian national park in a major effort to reintroduce the endangered species back to the wild.
The endangered cats will be released into the wild after learning surviving skills at the Persian Leopard Breeding and Rehabilitation Centre and will start a new population of the leopards in the Caucasus Mountains.
