For many Americans, the lasting legacy of Dick Clark will be his role as a stroke survivor determined to live a normal life
Clark died of a heart attack Wednesday at age 82. He had suffered a debilitating stroke in 2004 and had to learn to walk and talk again — often with difficulty.
But Clark didn’t give in to the symptoms of that stroke, which included slurred, slowed speech and partial paralysis. It was assumed that Clark would have to step down from his iconic “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” duties, but he came back in 2005 co-hosting with Ryan Seacrest.
A painting – nearly five centuries old and worth millions – that was taken by the Nazis in World War II has been returned to the heirs of its original Jewish owner by U.S. officials.
“Christ Carrying the Cross Dragged By A Rascal” by Italian artist Girolamo de’ Romani was one of 70 items plundered from the collection of Frederico Gentili di Giuseppe, an Italian Jew who had lived in Paris, according to the Reuters article, here.
Also in the news recently, a touching story about a girl who survived the Holocaust and the surprising kindness of her childhood neighbors.
The former neighbor of the Dutch Holocaust survivor traveled to the United States to hand-deliver two sets of china, dishes that her family left behind before they fled to Switzerland. The family instead was led to Auschwitz where the girl’s brothers and parents were killed in a Nazi death camp. Last week, the now-elderly woman celebrated the heirloom’s return serving dinner with the bowls and plates.
A painting – nearly five centuries old and worth millions – that was taken by the Nazis in World War II has been returned to the heirs of its original Jewish owner by U.S. officials.
“Christ Carrying the Cross Dragged By A Rascal” by Italian artist Girolamo de’ Romani was one of 70 items plundered from the collection of Frederico Gentili di Giuseppe, an Italian Jew who had lived in Paris, according to the Reuters article, here.
Also in the news recently, a touching story about a girl who survived the Holocaust and the surprising kindness of her childhood neighbors.
“Scientists have long known that people who are chronically angry, anxious or depressed have a higher risk of heart attacks,” says an AP report. Now, more studies are confirming positive psychology as a way to cut those risks.
A recent Harvard review of dozens of studies concludes that being upbeat and optimistic does seem to help to protect against heart disease.
Rather than focusing only on how to lessen heart risks, “it might also be useful to focus on how we might bolster the positive side of things,” said lead researcher Julia Boehm of the Harvard School of Public Health.
A dramatic breakthrough in breast cancer research will lead to a revolution in the way the disease will be diagnosed and treated in years to come, leading cancer specialists said yesterday.
Researchers have discovered that breast cancer is not a single disease with a limited number of treatments. Instead, there are ten different unique genetic fingerprints, with a wide variety of potential therapies that can be tailored to individual patients.
Tornado survivors in Woodward, Okla., are proving that even in the midst of devastation, treasures can be found and hope can be restored.
Over the weekend, disasterous tornados tore through the Midwest, killing six. One family barely got away before their house was completely destroyed. Mom had been watching TV with her wedding ring on the table.
But amid the rubble, Emilee Neagle’s wedding ring was located the next day after a painstaking search by friends who dug through the debris with a metal detector for eight hours.
Tornado survivors in Woodward, Okla., are proving that even in the midst of devastation, treasures can be found and hope can be restored.
Over the weekend, disasterous tornados tore through the Midwest, killing six. One family barely got away before their house was completely destroyed. Mom had been watching TV with her wedding ring on the table.
Emperor penguins in Antarctica are far more plentiful than previously thought, a study that used extremely high-resolution imagery snapped by satellites has revealed.
“It surprised us that we approximately doubled the population estimate,” said a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of a paper published Friday in the journal PLoS One.
Six-year-old Drew Cox’s father was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer three months ago. Since then, this sweet Texas boy has been selling lemonade to help his father with medical bills.
When word spread about the boy, crowds from the surrounding area showed up on Saturday giving donations, mingling with neighbors and sipping lemonade.
Thanks to a short film, a 9-year-old boy, who built an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad’s used auto parts store, was treated to the best day of his life when dozens of people surprised him with a flashmob to play his games. The imaginative boy entrepreneur, Caine Monroy, became an internet sensation when the video, called Caine’s Arcade, went viral (with 2.1 million views to date).
By the time the filmmaker, Nirvan Mullick, stumbled upon the boy’s homemade arcade, Caine had spent countless weekends building the many games from cardboard boxes piled in the back of the shop.
In this amazing video an unresponsive nursing home patient reacts to hearing music that he loved from his era. Previously hunched over, his eyes widen, his whole being “quickens”. He recalls who he is and how his favorite songs were sung.
The nursing home music program hopes to transform the lives of residents — especially those experiencing dementia — by giving them iPods full of their favorite music.
The clip below is part of a documentary called Alive Inside, which follows social worker Dan Cohen as he creates personalized iPod playlists for people in elder care facilities, hoping to reconnect them with the music they love, reports NPR News.
Cohen says the YouTube video of Henry is a great example of the link between music and memory. Cohen says his goal is “to make access to personalized music the standard of care at nursing facilities.”
Alive Inside screens April 18, 20 and 21 at the Rubin Museum in New York City.
You can learn more, and see additional clips from the film, at the Music & Memory website: www.musicandmemory.org.
Space shuttle Discovery soared around the Washington Monument and the White House in a salute to the nation’s capital Tuesday before landing for the last time near its new museum home.
The world’s most traveled spaceship took off at daybreak from Cape Canaveral, Fla., bolted to the top of its modified 747 jumbo jet for the trip.
Three hours later, the pair took a few spins around Washington — where normally no planes are allowed to fly — at an altitude of just 1,500-feet, before the retired shuttle was grounded for good.
It was the talk of the town all afternoon as workers throughout the city rushed to rooftops and tourists trained their cameras on the sky. Car accidents were reported as drivers craned to see the sight.
The duo touched down at Dulles Airport in northern Virginia. The Discovery will be towed a few miles away to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum annex, where its genius as a reusable rocket will be on display beginning Friday.
The volcanoes of Iceland could soon be pumping low-carbon electricity into the UK under government-backed plans for thousands of miles of cables across the ocean floor, taking advantage of abundant geothermal energy there.
The web of sea-floor cables – called interconnectors – planned for the next decade would link the UK to a Europe-wide supergrid. The supergrid would combine the wind and wave power of northern Europe with solar projects such as Desertec in southern Europe and north Africa to deliver reliable, clean energy to meet climate change targets and reduce dependence on fossil fuel imports.
One of the world’s biggest glacier regions has so far resisted global warming that has ravaged mountain ice elsewhere, scientists reported on Sunday.
The glaciers on the Karakoram range in the western Himalayas, which had been previously hard to track, straddle parts of China, Pakistan and India, and include K2, Earth’s second-highest mountain.
Thanks to a short film, a 9-year-old boy, who built an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad’s used auto parts store, was treated to the best day of his life when dozens of people surprised him with a flashmob to play his games. The imaginative boy entrepreneur, Caine Monroy, became an internet sensation when the video, called Caine’s Arcade, went viral (with 2.1 million views to date).
By the time the filmmaker, Nirvan Mullick, stumbled upon the boy’s homemade arcade, Caine had spent countless weekends building the many games from cardboard boxes piled in the back of the shop.
As Nirvan tells it: Caine dreamed of the day he would have lots of customers visit his arcade, and he spent months preparing everything, perfecting the game design, making displays for the prizes, designing elaborate security systems, and hand labeling paper-lunch-gift-bags. However, his dad’s autoparts store (located in an industrial part of East LA) gets almost zero foot traffic, so Caine’s chances of getting a customer were very small, and the few walk in customers that came through were always in too much of a hurry to get their auto part to play Caine’s Arcade. But Caine never gave up.
”I asked Caine how it worked,” Nirvan wrote on the film’s website. “He told me that for one dollar I could get two turns, or for $2 I could get a Fun Pass with 500 turns. I got the Fun Pass.”
Nirvan decided to get all his friends to come and visit Caine’s Arcade all at one time — a flashmob to thrill the boy who had invested so much enthusiasm and hope.
Below is the short film that documents the collaboration between all his friends who chipped in, and the online community at Reddit who got behind the idea of helping to make Caine’s day.
The online support didn’t stop there, however. Someone suggested Caine’s fans might want to donate to a college fund for the creative boy. They have already raised $168,000 through a Paypal account. Now, the donations are being matched by the Goldhirsh Foundation dollar-for-dollar (up to $250K) to help create a Caines Arcade Foundation – which will help find, foster, and fund creativity and entrepreneurship in young kids. (Donate on CainesArcade.com.)
Another update to the story, since I added this video to the Good News Network: TMZ reported that the youngster had been given a real pinball machine by the owners of Pins and Needles, a pinball club in Los Angeles that was going out of business. They invited him and his dad to come play games at the club, and watched to see which one he was attracted to.
Even though Caine had never played pinball before, he was a natural. He liked the cowboys and indians fame called Big Brave, an electro-mechanical machine from the mid 1970s that she had purchased for $100.
If you are in the L.A. area you can go visit Caine’s Arcade. See the hours/directions on Nirvan’s website.
The Dalai Lama brought his message of peace and compassion — and his trademark humor — to Hawaii, celebrating the coming together of two native cultures. Similar to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the indigenous culture of Hawaii has its own inherent spirituality.
“He calls it compassion. We call it Aloha,” said one participant at the events.
The Dalai Lama’s visit marks the launch of a new initiative entitled Pillars of Peace Hawai’i with the goal of “building peace on a foundation of Aloha”.
Pillars of Peace and the visit of His Holiness is sponsored by Hawaiian residents Pam Omidyar and her husband Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. In 2009, the Omidyars gave the Hawaii Community Foundation $50 million, believed to be the largest single gift from a living donor in the state’s history. The investment established the Omidyar ‘Ohana Fund, which, among other philanthropic efforts, aims to bring global peace leaders to Hawai’i to exchange ideas about the many forms of peace that exist at home on the islands and around the world.
In the Dalai Lama’s only public appearance during the two whirlwind days of events, the topic for his talk to 9,000 high school and college students was “Advancing Peace Through the Power of Aloha.”
He admitted that at first, the word “aloha” didn’t have meaning. “It was just the sound, ‘aloha, aloha.’ But now I learned the deeper meaning of aloha,” he said.
He shared his views on the importance of educating their hearts and nurturing their compassionate natures. Students later talked about the ways they intend to practice peace and spread compassion in their own lives.
Watch the videos from the events below, from Pillars of Peace.
The Dalai Lama brought his message of peace and compassion — and his trademark humor — to Hawaii, celebrating the coming together of two native cultures. Similar to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the indigenous culture of Hawaii has its own inherent spirituality.
“He calls it compassion. We call it Aloha,” said one participant at the events.
The Dalai Lama’s visit marks the launch of a new initiative entitled Pillars of Peace Hawai’i with the goal of “building peace on a foundation of Aloha”.
Brain science is being used in planning school lessons for 200 students in kindergarten through third grade at the one progressive private school in New York.
The school has become a kind of national laboratory for integrating cognitive neuroscience and cutting-edge educational theory into curriculum, professional development and school design.
“Young children at the Blue School learn about what has been called ‘the amygdala hijack’ — what happens to their brains when they flip out. Teachers try to get children into a ‘toward state,’ in which they are open to new ideas. Periods of reflection are built into the day for students and teachers alike, because reflection helps executive function — the ability to process information in an orderly way, focus on tasks and exhibit self-control.”
A heartbroken 5-year-old girl suffering from cerebral palsy couldn’t stop smiling on Thursday after her dog stolen two weeks ago was returned to her doorstep overnight.
“She went right to Andrea’s bed, put her paw up on the bed, and sat there and was trying to wait for her to wake up,” said Andrea’s mother, who believes pressure from the Kansas media and the Reno County Sheriff’s Department led whoever stole the dog to have a change of heart.
For many Americans, the lasting legacy of Dick Clark will be his role as a stroke survivor determined to live a normal life
Another update to the story, since I added this video to the Good News Network: TMZ reported that the youngster had been given a real pinball machine by the owners of Pins and Needles, a pinball club in Los Angeles that was going out of business. They invited him and his dad to come play games at the club, and watched to see which one he was attracted to.
In the Dalai Lama’s only public appearance during the two whirlwind days of events, the topic for his talk to 9,000 high school and college students was “Advancing Peace Through the Power of Aloha.”
