From Google to YouTube, Twitter to Netflix, companies tried to bait the public into falling for a prank on April 1.
Google always takes April Fools Day pretty seriously, and cats are usually involved. But this year Google poked fun of its Glass Project launching “Google Nose” for cataloguing smells.
YouTube produced a message that it had decided to shut down its website and delete all the videos.
Kevin and Abby met as teenagers, performing together in the Summer Stage Shooting Stars. After college, they both returned as co-directors of the group.
What better way for Kevin to propose to Abby than with the Shooting Stars singing and dancing them into their engagement?
The Milwaukee Hmong women’s giving circle boasts an inspiring story of how it began and impressive progress over the course of its two years.
The circle grew out of an incident when a Hmong woman was killed by her estranged husband and there was no one to bury her. A group of Hmong women pooled their resources to pay for the woman’s burial.
From that experience and the realization that other women might face the same situation, the women decided to form a giving circle.
It has so far raised $15,000 to donate as grants to support women from this Asian ethnic minority.
A homeless woman in Calgary, who was living in a shelter, didn’t thing twice about turning in a purse she found containing $10,000 in cash.
The couple were so moved by such honesty that they rewarded her with $500. But also a fund was set up at a local bank that has received so many small donations from across Canada that the woman was able to move into a new apartment.
“It is really starting to feel like home. I am just so thankful to the people that donated money on my behalf.”
The recovering drug addict with a long rap sheet who had just sat down on the bench in a Philadelphia train station often wondered if he was a good person, and perhaps never considered that anyone thought he was a hero to anybody.
But there was no self-doubt when Christopher Knafelc’s instincts kicked in Thursday and he leaped onto the tracks to help a complete stranger he’d just seen flail and fall off the platform.
Three long-time chums who made a pact to split the pot if one of them ever won the lottery got their payday last week, Georgia Lottery officials announced on Thursday.
“I was just as tickled for them as I was for myself,” Kenneth Wilson told NBC News. “We just had a verbal agreement and I felt like that had to be honored.”
To make a good story even better, one of the friends had cracked open a fortune cookie on that day in early March when Wilson bought the ticket. His fortune? “You’re going to win the lottery.”
(READ the story from NBC News)
Simon Berry is piggybacking on Coca-Cola’s distribution system to bring life-saving medicine to the places that need it most.
You can buy a Coke pretty much anywhere on Earth. Thanks to a vast network of local suppliers, Coca-Cola has almost completely solved distribution, getting its product into every nook and cranny where commerce reaches.
There are places in the world where it’s easier to get a Coke than clean water. In the 1980s, Berry was an aid worker in Zambia, and when he looked at Coke’s success, he saw an opportunity.
When you’re in the cockpit on final approach and suddenly have to abort your landing and try again, it’s called a “go-around.” It can be a little scary at first, but with a little planning and some patience, it is painless. The same is true for your career after age 50. You’re all set to glide into retirement when from out of nowhere, you’re forced to change course professionally. I know the feeling better than most people because it happened to me.
Ever since childhood, I’ve been fascinated with airplanes. I was lucky enough to make flying my career as a private jet captain for nearly 30 years. My career took me to more than 40 countries on five continents, and I loved every minute of it. Then, I began to experience intense pain that made sitting for long periods of time impossible, and I soon started having serious health problems that threatened both my pilot status and my life.
Employers around the world are more optimistic about business growth and think more money will be spent on talent development this year. That’s according to a Right Management survey of more than 2,000 senior human resource executives in 14 countries from government, non-private and private companies.
In the United States, the number of job openings spiked again in March according to the online job database SimplyHired.com.
The day before Good Friday, Pope Francis continued what has been a ritual for him, but something no other papal leader before has done. He disregarded church tradition and washed the feet of two girls — a Serbian Muslim and an Italian Catholic — along with ten other young inmates at a nearby juvenile detention center.
While his predecessors washed and kissed the feet of priests in famous basilicas, Francis chose to kneel down before young offenders at the Casal del Marmo Penitentiary Institute for Minors, including two young women – the first time a pope included females in the Easter rite.
Residential construction, remodeling, moving, gardening and furniture buying add up to about 20 percent of the country’s gross domestic product — which is why the upward momentum in housing, which continues to gain steam, is such a powerful boost to the economy.
But it’s not just that. By year end, U.S. homes will collectively be worth $3 trillion more than they were at the bottom of the market. “And that will provide a significant boost in consumer spending” — $100 billion in extra spending this year, to be exact, says one expert.
Saudi Arabia is to license women’s sports clubs for the first time, al-Watan daily reported, in a major step for an ultra-religious country where clerics have warned against female exercise.
Last year the conservative Islamic kingdom, where women must have permission from a male relative to take many big decisions, sent women athletes to the Olympics for the first time after pressure from international rights groups.
Pakistan’s top female squash player used to have to pretend she was a boy. When Maria Toorpakai’s secret was finally revealed she had to choose between the sport she loved and her family’s safety.
Former world champion Jonathon Power received a letter from the athlete and decided to visit to learn who this passionate girl was.
He ended up rescuing her, calling her the “Rocky” of the squash world. With her father’s blessing, he brought her to Canada to train, and make her a professional champion.
Tawanda Jones is using dance to empower the youth of Camden, New Jersey, one of the poorest cities in the country.
Through Jones’ precision drill team program, more than 4,000 children have learned discipline, respect, and community service — and all of them have graduated high school.
When Ben, a mixed German shepherd, was separated from the love of his life, he showed there was no distance too far that would prevent him from reuniting with her.
After he was adopted from the Indiana Humane Society, Ben went on a 10-mile trek in the middle of winter to find his way back to Jade, a 1-year-old mixed German shepherd.
A San Diego woman first formed a bond with a Chinese goose at Miramar Lake 20 years ago. After a 10-year break, she went back to the lake to see if he was still there.
She named him Blanco. As soon as she pulled up in the car she recognized him. She got out and said, “Blanco?”
“His telescoping neck shot up in the air and it was like I never stopped seeing him.”
When most people think about protein, they think of meat, eggs, cheese and Greek yogurt. But every whole food contains protein, says vegan writer Alisa Rutherford-Fortunati.
From your morning banana to your evening salad, finding plants packed with protein is easy to do.
Plant-based foods are also cholesterol-free, mostly high in fiber, and alkalizing to the body rather than acidic. This helps increase oxygen and protect calcium.
Baxter Holmes, a Boston Globe sports reporter, tweeted a photo after last night’s Celtics game that will tug at your heart strings (and perhaps encourage a little more gratitude for your own heart).
After Jeff Green scored the winning basket with a fraction of a second left in the game, he went over to hug the doctor who performed heart surgery on him just one year earlier.
Green said of his perfectly executed play, “That was for him.”
(READ the story in the Boston Globe)
Thanks to Carole Sargent for submitting the link!
After she declined to play and all her coworkers won a million dollars in the Powerball Jackpot, the administrative assistant of a real estate company, who was hired just three weeks ago, found out why the group calls itself a “family”.
None of them hesitated to share a portion of their $83,000 net winnings with ‘the new girl’.
Having not yet reached her first payday the coworker felt she had to opt-out of the pool. That’s when the lottery coordinator of the office in Plantation, Florida said, “You know, if you don’t play we are going to win.”
(WATCH the video below or READ the story from WHAS)
It had been a normal Sunday night for Dawn Ward, a waitress at the Olive Garden restaurant in Lubbock, Texas.
Then, a married couple were seated and Ward thought they deserved ultra-generous care.
“They said they had a special event happening and they wanted to spend it here at Olive Garden,” Ward said. “And so I inquired what it was and they said that he was going to be deployed the next morning.”
