A baby, born with the AIDS virus, appears to have been cured scientists announced Sunday, describing the case of a child from Mississippi, who’s now 2½ and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.
If the child remains free of HIV, it would mark only the world’s second reported cure. Specialists say the finding offers exciting clues for how to eliminate HIV infection in children.
With the threat of sanctions against her country looming, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra today pledged to end ivory trade in Thailand, seizing a key opportunity to stem global wildlife trafficking.
It was the first time the Thai government has said publicly that it would take steps to end ivory trade and came at the opening of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES).
Now people can enjoy a delicious meal cooked with love and care without having to prepare it.
Mealku is a combination of multi-family picnic potluck, takeout delivery service, and credit rewards program. It is a food-sharing cooperative aimed at getting to know your neighbors, increasing access to nutritious meals and reducing food waste.
The idea to share extra food with others was launched in New York last July and is spreading to other cities now.
(WATCH the video below or READ the story from NBC News)
Manufacturing grew in February at the fastest pace in 20 months. Busier factories and growing optimism among consumers could help the U.S. economy withstand the drag from government spending cuts and tax increases this year.
The two reports follow other data that show strength in job growth and the housing market.
Math. The very word conjures painful memories: long division . . . Square roots. Take that unpopular academic subject, a dedicated visionary, and $23 three million, and what have you got?
Glen Whitney’s Museum of Mathematics (MoMath for short) which opened December in New York City.
He is trying to change the way we think about one of our least favorite subjects.
Tim Harris, owner of Tim’s Place, is the country’s only restaurant owner with Down’s Syndrome, and the joy he gets from serving people good food carries over into his diner’s most famous export: hugs.
He even has a hug counter on the wall advertising the World’s Friendliest Restaurant and recently boasting, “Over 31,814 Hugs Given.”
Since Tim was 14 he has wanted to own a restaurant and his parents gave him the money to live his dream – managing a real diner.
(WATCH the video from CNN below)
Tim Harris, owner of Tim’s Place, is perhaps the country’s only restaurant owner with Down’s Syndrome, and the joy he gets from serving people good food carries over into his diner’s most famous export: hugs.
He even has a hug counter on the wall advertising the World’s Friendliest Restaurant and recently boasting, “Over 31,814 Hugs Given.”
Since Tim was 14 he has wanted to own a restaurant and his parents gave him the money to live his dream – managing a real diner.
These athletic daredevils were chosen as best on YouTube to represent this year’s Amazing People collection.
From jumping with skateboards, bikes and snowmobiles to doing flips over cars before scoring a basket, they all tested themselves — and emerged victorious. Don’t try this at home.
In some African countries, a lack of reliable electricity is to blame for hundreds of deaths each year during childbirth.
Dr. Laura Stachel witnessed this tragic truth during a trip to Nigeria five years ago and with the help of her husband, a solar energy educator, did something about it.
They are now delivering a solution: solar energy in a suitcase.
“It’s a hard life, let me tell you,” says 89-year-old Ed Bray. “You ain’t never lived hard until you go through what I’ve been through.”
Bray served in World War II. He was at Normandy on D-Day and has two Purple Hearts.
Today, the soldier in him still refuses to surrender.
“I want to read one book,” he says. “I don’t care if it’s about Mickey Mouse. I want to read one book before I die.”
Recently, he got to do just that — a moral takeaway for anyone who thinks they’re too old to do something.
(WATCH the beautiful video below or READ the story from CBS’s Steve Hartman)
To increase the city’s dismal recycling rates, Houston’s government is trying something else: One Bin for All. It will collect all trash together in one bin and then convert it to biofuel.
Instead of trying to overhaul local culture and regulation, the city is working on an ambitious plan to build the first total material resource recovery facility in the U.S.–an innovation that would allow residents to toss all their trash into a single bin, let technology do all the sorting, and emerge in the end with usable products.
For his 11th birthday, Sam isn’t begging for the latest video game or Lego set.
Instead, the kindhearted Massachusetts boy decided to continue his personal tradition of forgoing birthday gifts in favor of what he prefers — that his family and friends make donations to the New England Saint Bernard Rescue.
That’s where his family found his pal Lady Jane 7 years ago.
The story of how Danny and I were married last July in a Manhattan courtroom, with our son, Kevin, beside us, began 12 years earlier, in a dark, damp subway station.
Danny called me that day, frantic. “I found a baby!” he shouted. “I called 911, but I don’t think they believed me. No one’s coming. I don’t want to leave the baby alone. Get down here and flag down a police car or something.”
What neither of us knew, or could have predicted, was that Danny had not just saved an abandoned infant; he had found our son.
(READ the story in the New York Times)
A Congressional resolution has been introduced in the US House of Representatives to recognize a Pakistani doctor, who helped CIA trace Osama bin Laden, as an American hero.
Dr Shakil Afridi was arrested by Pakistan government three weeks after Laden was killed in the US raid for helping to access the al-Qaeda leader’s compound in Abbottabad.
For the few Latino students living in Lincoln, Nebraska in the 1960’s, the school’s expectations were low.
The high school counselor told Linda Hernandez and her sister not to worry about taking the SAT or ACT tests “because we were Hispanic women, [and] all we would do is have babies,” Linda told StoryCorps.
“So we went home and we told our parents, and my mother went in the back room and cried,” Linda says. “And then that’s when my brother said, ‘Uh-uhn, it ain’t happening.’
Former surgeon general C. Everett Koop died Monday in New Hampshire at age 96. Koop is justly renowned for his role in the tobacco wars of the 1990s. His repeated warnings that tobacco use was deadly and increasing among children anchored a series of famous congressional hearings that led to warning labels, bans on Joe Camel-type advertising and regulation of tobacco.
But Koop was also a pivotal figure, and probably saved just as many lives, because he broke a deadlock in the Republican Party that had stopped Congress from addressing the rampaging AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
(READ the story in the Washington Post)
Longtime Good News Network viewers will not be overly-amazed by the dramatic helicopter rescue of a deer trapped on thin ice in the middle of a frozen Canadian harbor.
Ian Waugh spotted the doe and fawn struggling out on the ice and notified the Department of Natural Resources. He said the doe struggled for hours, trying to stand up on the slippery ice but she kept falling.
A few hours later, Waugh spotted a DNR helicopter near the mother and the alarmed fawn ran to shore as the chopper descended. He was amazed by what happened next and captured it on camera.
The solution described as “brilliant” in the CTV report was identical to the one used in two other ice rescues — in 2007 and in 2010 when an Oklahoma TV news chopper pilot saved a doe and a calf from icy peril three years apart.
Watch those here.
(WATCH the latest video below)
Longtime Good News Network viewers will not be overly-amazed by the dramatic helicopter rescue of a deer trapped on thin ice in the middle of a frozen Canadian harbor.
Ian Waugh spotted the doe and fawn struggling out on the ice and notified the Department of Natural Resources. He said the doe struggled for hours, trying to stand up on the slippery ice but she kept falling.
A few hours later, Waugh spotted a DNR helicopter near the mother and the alarmed fawn ran to shore as the chopper descended. He was amazed by what happened next and captured it on camera.
Tom Wargo’s life changed when he saw an elderly woman sharing her only daily hot meal with a cat.
“That cat was her only friend, giving her reason to get up in the morning and giving her a reason to live,” Wargo said. She couldn’t afford pet food, so Wargo dd something about it.
The world’s third largest paper company, Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), announced earlier this month an immediate end to all natural forest clearing in its supply chains in Indonesia.
The company’s pledge to stop making paper from the pulped remains of some of the last virgin rainforests, along with its improved transparency, will help protect endangered Sumatran tigers and orangutans and also the region’s indigenous peoples, many of whom depend on forest resources for their livelihoods. Most importantly, the move responds to the threat of climate change because it protects forested peatlands that store massive amounts of greenhouse gases.
APP’s announcement, the result of 12 months of on-the-ground field work by the non-profit group, Tropical Forest Trust (TFT), and lengthy negotiations between Greenpeace and APP’s management, could set a serious precedent for the rest of the industry.
Scott Poynton, the executive director of TFT, says the agreement globally represents a possible tipping point for using the influence of advocacy groups such as Greenpeace to affect the role of the private sector. The key is to hammer out a strategy for how industry can do the right thing while surviving economically.
APP’s commitments show other producers worldwide—whether they sell pulp and paper, palm oil, soy, or beef—that it is possible to run a business without destroying humanity’s habitat.”
In today’s announcement, APP outlined a set of policies—part of its agreement with TFT— that will end its role in the practice of destroying forests to make room for tree plantations. The company also pledged to respect the rights of forest-dwelling communities and bring all third-party suppliers into line with its sustainability efforts. The new policies, which went into effect February 1, apply to all of the company’s operations around the world, its suppliers in Indonesia as well as its paper mills abroad, including those in China.
TFT has a proven track record of designing deforestation-free supply chains for companies worldwide—from a timber company in the Republic of Congo to a shoe retailer in the European Union. Most notably, TFT has shaped “no deforestation” policies for the food powerhouse Nestlé and the world’s second-largest palm oil producer, Golden Agri-Resources—in 2011, TFT successfully helped GAR launch a Forest Conservation Policy. TFT is now using this same model in working with APP to change the way it supplies its mills with fiber—the building block of the company’s internationally-produced and distributed paper products. Half of TFT’s 100-member team is based in Indonesia, where they work directly with suppliers feeding into global supply chains.
“With little hope that world’s governments will ever agree on a climate change treaty, companies have a huge role to play in reducing emissions, and deforestation has always been a primary target,” says Poynton. “We will closely support and monitor APP to make sure its contribution is realized.”
(More information from the Guardian and TFT)
