Vanessa Cantu considers herself an incredibly optimistic person. When she was a freshman in high school she was involved in a serious car accident. Her seat belt didn’t work and without its support her spine broke and she suffered severe, internal injuries. She was kept in an induced coma for weeks. When she woke up she wanted to know why she couldn’t feel her legs.
Treated to a hero’s welcome, Turkey’s prime minister met Syrian refugees Sunday for the first time since his country opened its doors to tens of thousands of Syrians fleeing their government’s crackdown on a popular uprising.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to defend the rights of the Syrian people, saying they were close to achieving success. He was greeted by joyous Syrians at the largest refugee camp near the border.
As Sudan and South Sudan sink into full-scale conflict and hostile rhetoric nine months after the country split in two, people from both sides of the border are tweeting a very different message, one of peace, solidarity and frustration with their leaders.
These voices are galvanized around the hashtag ‘#NewSudans’ and includes Tweets like, “I’m not Arab, I’m not African, I’m not Afro-Arab, and I don’t belong to any tribe, I’m just Sudanese. I’m not from Khartoum, nor from Omdurman, I’m from Sudan.”
When Costas went on safari in the late 90s, he knew he’d arrived in the land of his dreams.
But he began to see how unjust it was for him and his European guests to have all the comforts of home — fresh water, baths, as much food as they could eat — when the villagers had to get their water from the same pool their animals drank from, when they could die of malaria because they didn’t possess the pennies needed to buy preventive medicines.
So he stayed on in Tanzania and created an eco-friendly lodge, using the proceeds to help the locals.
After surviving a year and a half of homelessness in the early 1980s, Lucinda Yates moved back to Portland and started putting her life back together by waitressing.
But her true breakthrough came in August 1988, when she noticed some colorful mat boards in a frame shop’s trash can. She pulled the discarded boards out of the garbage and started cutting them into elementary shapes, eventually creating a pin that looked like a house. Yates sold the pins to a local homeless shelter for $6, which in turn sold the pins for $10 to raise funds.
To date, Designs by Lucinda has sold more than 5 million pins, raising more than $25 million for thousands of nonprofits in the U.S. and globally.
(READ the story in the Huffington Post)
A girls’ school in Saudi Arabia has defied a religious ban on female sports by erecting basketball hoops and letting pupils play at break-time, the daily al-Watan reported on Wednesday.
The school in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province has now become the first state-run girls school openly to encourage sports, Watan reported, quoting a supervisor as saying it would expend pupils’ energy “in a positive way.”
Three months after releasing captive-bred frogs belonging to a critically endangered species, conservationists reported they are surviving well in their new home on the island of Montserrat.
In 2002, after a fatal fungal disease left only two uninfected populations remaining there, a partnership of conservation groups set out on an emergency rescue mission to airlift 50 of the frogs from the island, who were then bred in captivity and prepared for reintroduction to their homeland.
A gray whale that had been tangled in a fishing net for more than three weeks as it swam up the California coast was finally disentangled Thursday by a fishing boat crew out of Bodega Bay.
The elusive whale, nicknamed June, had been on the run and out of sight for two weeks when she swam near Mark Anello and his two-person crew as they were setting crab traps off the Sonoma coast.
(WATCH the video or read the story from CBS-San Francisco)
Billionaire David Koch has donated $35 million to the National Museum of Natural History for the renovation of the Smithsonian Institute’s most popular exhibit.
The gift, which was announced by the Smithsonian Institution on Thursday, will go to a new dinosaur hall, which has been high on the list of needed renovations at the museum.
In Laguna, Brazil, the local fishermen rely on dolphins to help them with their yearly fish catch.
Scientists had known that dolphins work together to herd groups of mullet, a fish that’s an important source of food for local fishermen.
Then the dolphins signal with specialized head or tail slaps when and where the fishermen should throw their nets.
Vogue magazine, perhaps the world’s top arbiter of style, is making a statement about its own models: Too young and too thin is no longer in.
The 19 editors of Vogue magazines around the world made a pact to project the image of healthy models, according to a Conde Nast International announcement Thursday.
Two years ago, Regan Kerr turned her small collection of pop tabs from the top of soda cans into an endeavor involving family and friends that culminated at her prom Saturday night.
The Aurora, Colorado teen hand-made a dress that took 5,114 pop tabs and five solid months of sewing.
The result is an amazing tailored silver frock with flared skirt and colored pop-top trim.
(WATCH the video below or Read the story from WTSP-TV)
Two years ago, Regan Kerr turned her small collection of pop tabs from the top of soda cans into an endeavor involving family and friends that culminated at her prom Saturday night.
The Aurora, Colorado teen hand-made a dress that took 5,114 pop tabs and five solid months of sewing.
The result is an amazing tailored silver frock with flared skirt and colored pop-top trim.
A battle between a class of fourth graders and a major movie studio would seem an unequal fight. But new Internet tools are allowing very ordinary people to defeat powerful corporate and political interests— by threatening the titans with online petitions that sometimes gather hundred of thousands of signatures.
A battle between a class of fourth graders and a major movie studio would seem an unequal fight. But new Internet tools are allowing very ordinary people to defeat powerful corporate and political interests— by threatening the titans with online petitions that sometimes gather hundred of thousands of signatures.
In the case of the fourth-grade class, they used the popular activism website Change.org to start a petition that demanded change— and got it.
Funny man Ben Aaron, a TV reporter and all-around nice guy at NBC’s LXTV San Diego, shows us a new fitness craze he has developed that he calls DANCE WALKING.
Ben’s Dance Walking concept is taking off.
“Schools are showing the Dance Walk video to their students,” he posted on his Facebook page. “They’re playing music through the loud speakers in the hallways so everyone can dance walk to their next class.”
Sometimes change happens in the most unlikely ways, fostered by the most unlikely of people. In the last few years, while Israel’s relationship with the Arab and Muslim world has drastically deteriorated, an Israeli heavy metal band has been uniting thousands of Jews and Muslims across the Middle East.
Orphaned Land, Israel’s biggest heavy metal band, is credited both with pioneering the genre of Middle Eastern metal and garnering thousands of fans in Muslim-majority and Arab countries, including Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, despite the fact that their music is banned in many of those countries.
Sometimes change happens in the most unlikely ways, fostered by the most unlikely of people. In the last few years, while Israel’s relationship with the Arab and Muslim world has drastically deteriorated, an Israeli heavy metal band has been uniting thousands of Jews and Muslims across the Middle East.
Orphaned Land, Israel’s biggest heavy metal band, is credited both with pioneering the genre of Middle Eastern metal and garnering thousands of fans in Muslim-majority and Arab countries, including Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, despite the fact that their music is banned in many of those countries.
Seven hundred million pigs produce a lot of manure.
China’s love of pork presents a mountain of a problem for the environment, but an Australian company believes it has part of the answer.
Why not turn the pig poo into power?
The economy of Iceland is growing at a clip that has surprised many people. A number of carefully planned steps has brought its fiscal deficit of more than 10 percent back to a near balance.
An export and tourism boom, growing consumer confidence, progressive taxes, as well as a phasing-in of austerity measures were also key to getting the country back on track.
