Today, Washington, DC celebrates the first day of Spring and the opening of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival, commemorating the 100th anniversary of a gift of cherry trees that symbolized the enduring friendship between the United States and Japan.
Each year, the National Cherry Blossom Festival honors the 1912 gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo to the city of Washington, DC. More than a million people visit the U.S. capital during the blooming period to admire the blanket of pink blossoms gracing the trees planted alongside the Jefferson Memorial and National Mall.
Today, Washington, DC celebrates the first day of Spring and the opening of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival, commemorating the 100th anniversary of a gift of cherry trees that symbolized the enduring friendship between the United States and Japan.
Each year, the National Cherry Blossom Festival honors the 1912 gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo to the city of Washington, DC. More than a million people visit the U.S. capital during the blooming period to admire the blanket of pink blossoms gracing the trees planted alongside the Jefferson Memorial and National Mall.
With his mother currently living in a shelter, he is carrying more weight on his shoulders than most Penn State University students. He is the first member of his family to go to college and the Harlem native, Joshua Johnson, helps pay for the expensive classes with donations he receives while tap dancing in the New York City subways every weekend.
“You have to figure out a way for the whole family to come up,” Johnson told The New York Times. “That’s what I’m working towards, to make things better for my younger brother and my mom.”
With his mother currently living in a shelter, he is carrying more weight on his shoulders than most Penn State University students. He is the first member of his family to go to college and the Harlem native, Joshua Johnson, helps pay for the expensive classes with donations he receives while tap dancing in the New York City subways every weekend.
“You have to figure out a way for the whole family to come up,” Johnson told The New York Times. “That’s what I’m working towards, to make things better for my younger brother and my mom.”
The talented dancer travels home from Pennsylvania by bus each weekend and heads down to the No. 2 and No. 3 lines between 96th Street and Times Square, calling it “The Tap Express”.
Impressed by the passion and persistence of the communications and marketing major, Ellen DeGeneres invited the performer to dance on her TV talk show last week. But that’s not all she had scheduled for the tapper.
Ellen lightened the 20-year-old’s burden substantially when she suddenly presented him a giant check for $35,000 paid for by the social education platform, Chegg.
That was enough to make him dance for joy, but Ellen also threw in a pair of top-of-the-line tap shoes to help him continue doing what he loves, making people happy in New York City.
An online call for peace started by an Israeli couple is bypassing the official realms of government and targeting the hearts of Iranian people via the internet. Both Israelis and Iranians have responded over the weekend, posting photos with messages of love for the citizens of their Mideast foes.
Ronny Edry and his wife Michal Tamir uploaded pink and green posters to Facebook last week depicting images of themselves with their children alongside the words, “Iranians, we will never bomb your country… We love you.”
An online call for peace started by an Israeli couple is bypassing the official realms of government and targeting the hearts of Iranian people via the internet. Both Israelis and Iranians have responded over the weekend, posting photos with messages of love for the citizens of their Mideast foes.
Ronny Edry and his wife Michal Tamir uploaded pink and green posters to Facebook last week depicting images of themselves with their children alongside the words, “Iranians, we will never bomb your country… We love you.”
Looking for happiness? Now there’s a map for that.
Mobile web app Happstr lets users mark the locations at which they’re happy on a map and browse for happy spots left by others nearby.
It was built last week during a mobile hackathon called The Startup Bus. The team of six entrepreneurs completed the project en route to South by Southwest.
Kids with one type of leukemia are living longer than they used to, most likely thanks to new drug combinations that mean fewer patients are relapsing after a first round of treatment.
In a study including more than 20,000 children, patients’ chances of surviving at least five years after their diagnosis increased from 84 percent in the early 1990s to over 90 percent a decade later.
While many drivers are paying up to $4.00 per gallon of gasoline across America, Volt owners and others with EV’s are finding more charging stations open for business.
On Friday, following a trail blazed by Indians and pioneers in covered wagons, electric car drivers hit the road to inaugurate the first major section of a West Coast ‘Electric Highway’ dotted with stations where they can charge up in 20 minutes.
The stations go from the California border north to the Oregon city of Cottage Grove and are located at gas stations, restaurants and motels just off the nation’s second-busiest interstate.
A UCSD grad student has traded in his lab coat for an apron and sunglasses, disguising his identity and keeping his new cookie service a secret, to avoid criticism from friends and family.
Now, the passionate cookie-maker is seeing his dream pay off and the “secret cookie service” is not so secret anymore.
The young man known as “Agent Snickerdoodle” delivers his famous cookies to hungry UCSD students who simply text or call him requesting a delivery.
A UCSD grad student has traded in his lab coat for an apron and sunglasses, disguising his identity and keeping his new cookie service a secret, to avoid criticism from friends and family.
Now, the passionate cookie-maker is seeing his dream pay off and the “secret cookie service” is not so secret anymore.
The young man known as “Agent Snickerdoodle” delivers his famous cookies to hungry UCSD students who simply text or call him requesting a delivery.
Everyone has a skill. Now retirees and other talented individuals in London are invited to share their passions by joining “The Amazings”, a new social enterprise that helps people with skills to teach others by way of group classes and activities.
The website explains, “We handle the advertising and payments – all the Amazing has to do is decide when they want to run their experience, turn up, be amazing, and then collect the cash.”
Upcoming scheduled classes include “Introduction to Crochet,” “Steel Pan Drumming” and “Cooking Hungarian Food”.
The website, run by a trio of young entrepreneurs, offers gift vouchers for classes, which start at just £10. They see it as a way for people to make a bit of extra cash, and in the process enrich the lives of others.
“She gave great advice,” one pupil said of the teacher in her “Alterations Workshop” in February. “In the process we also transformed three items of clothing.”
Co-founder Katie Harris told the website HowToHome, “We initially were just going to work with the retired but when we started doing the on-street research what we found was a variety of amazing people who wanted to share their skills.”
Katie says it’s all about community, and there are more ideas planned for branching out. “The thing is we want it to be a real social thing, and we’re going to try running a social evening for the current Amazings, where we meet in a different pub each time – the Amazings can come together, people that might want to go on the course can come and chat to the Amazings, new Amazings can come and learn about the experience of other Amazings.”
Interested Londoners should check the website often for more classes in foraging, dancing, Thai Chi and more, at TheAmazings.org.
A large scale study in Britain suggests eight-year-olds who were fed on demand as infants had higher IQs — and did better in school — than did children who were fed on a schedule.
Researchers from Essex and Oxford Universities looked at more than 10,000 children born in the Bristol area in the early 1990s and studied their performance at ages five, seven, 11 and 14.
The study takes into account background factors such as a parent’s education, family income, the child’s sex and age, maternal health and parenting styles.
The number of beekeepers in New York City has quadrupled since the ban on keeping bees was lifted two years ago, figures show. Hives are now on skyscraper rooftops, in community gardens, and school backyards across the five boroughs.
Locally produced food growers pushed hard for the ban to be overturned.
The herbal remedy for toothache, used for centuries by an indigenous tribe in the Amazon is being turned into a commercial treatment for dental pain, thanks to an anthropologist’s chance wisdom tooth problem.
A researcher from Cambridge University living among a remote Peruvian tribe suddenly experienced “excruciating pain” and was given a piece of the rare Acmella oleracea plant, which completely eliminated her symptoms.
Through a Cambridge commercialization arm, two clinical trials have been very successful in the pursuit of a commercial gel that could replace dental injections and cure tooth aches, among other applications.
The herbal remedy for toothache, used for centuries by an indigenous tribe in the Amazon is being turned into a commercial treatment for dental pain, thanks to an anthropologist’s chance wisdom tooth problem.
A researcher from Cambridge University living among a remote Peruvian tribe suddenly experienced “excruciating pain” and was given a piece of the rare Acmella oleracea plant, which completely eliminated her symptoms.
Through a Cambridge commercialization arm, two clinical trials have been very successful in the pursuit of a commercial gel that could replace dental injections and cure tooth aches, among other applications.
Franky Carrillo spent 20 years behind bars for a murder he did not commit. Now he is free, thanks to a lawyer who took his case pro-bono, giving up weekends, summers and vacations to prove Carrillo’s innocence.
The California public defender, Ellen Eggers, was convinced of Carrillo’s innocence after meeting him just once, and not just because his earnestness and manners.
The last West African giraffe population living in the wilds of southwestern Niger is making a comeback with numbers reaching 310 last year, up from a count of 50 in 1996, the environment ministry said.
The ‘giraffa camelopardalis peralta’, distinguished by its light-coloured spots and found only in the Sahel region south of the Sahara, was nearly extinct when a campaign was launched to protect it from poachers — supported by the African Wildlife Foundation.
Every day in the past 8 years, more than 100 US soldiers passed through the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport on their way home for two weeks of rest and recuperation. Each soldier was greeted with applause and hearty handshakes from volunteer “greeters” who traveled to the airport just to show their thanks.
On Wednesday, more than a thousand greeters delivered a thunderous welcome, along with flowers and high-fives, to the 230 troops aboard the final arriving military charter that will use DFW airport, ending the unique Texas “Welcome Home A Hero” program
(Watch the video below)
As military troop reductions continue overseas, the United States Army is ending its charter flights to DFW, consolidating the fewer flights instead to Atlanta-Hartsfield Jackson International Airport. Following the final arrival Wednesday, the U.S. Army and the Airport paid tribute to the volunteers who turned their affectionate welcome into a nationally recognized community service project that lasted eight years.
“You, the Welcome Home A Hero volunteers made it your individual, personal, mission to extend a warm welcome to our military troops coming home through DFW,” said Jim Crites, DFW executive vice president for operations. “You were able to see in the eyes of those who served, someone who knew they were appreciated and loved. This was and is priceless.”
Sal Giunta, a retired U.S. Army Staff Sergeant who became the first Congressional Medal of Honor recipient in forty years, told the crowd about his personal experiences coming through DFW Airport on two different occasions.
“I felt like a true hero walking through those doors,” said Giunta. “I felt that way because of the amount of support. People don’t just give up their jobs in the middle of the day to shake anyone’s hand, cheer for them and bake cookies and take time out of their busy lives. Here at this airport, this group of people, they do that every single day.”
The “Welcome Home a Hero” program has been nationally recognized as a model for civic participation and grew into one of the largest public service projects in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Volunteers greeted over 460,000 inbound soldiers transiting through DFW on their way home from active duty in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Hundreds of local organizations and more than 10,000 individual volunteers have greeted about 2,700 incoming flights during the life of the program. (See more of the photos from the group’s Facebook page, here)
(WATCH the NBC tribute video below, from Nightly News)
Every day in the past 8 years, more than 100 US soldiers passed through the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport on their way home for two weeks of rest and recuperation. Each soldier was greeted with applause and hearty handshakes from volunteer “greeters” who traveled to the airport just to show their thanks.
On Wednesday, more than a thousand greeters delivered a thunderous welcome, along with flowers and high-fives, to the 230 troops aboard the final arriving military charter that will use DFW airport, ending the unique Texas “Welcome Home A Hero” program
Today, Washington, DC celebrates the first day of Spring and the opening of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival, commemorating the 100th anniversary of a gift of cherry trees that symbolized the enduring friendship between the United States and Japan.
cheer for them and bake cookies and take time out of their busy lives. Here at this airport, this group of people, they do that every single day.”