Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa agreed with city unions on ways to save $400 million over the next four years to help close budget deficits, calling it a demonstration that collective bargaining can work.
The plan, which must still be ratified, calls for union workers to pay as much as 4 percent of their salary toward retirement health-care coverage. It would also freeze pay increases.
United States veterans struggling with homelessness, alcoholism, or post-traumatic stress and dogs who were on “death row” in shelters because they were considered unadoptable have found comfort in one another.
Both were struggling to find their way in a society that couldn’t find a place for them. But through Operation Heroes And Hounds, they have each other.
Visitors to the Cincinnati Zoo are marveling at the sight: Nearly four acres of solar panels over a vast span of concrete parking lot.
Billed as one of the largest public urban solar displays in the country, the $11 million solar canopy will do more than help control the zoo’s $700,000 annual electric bill when it’s turned on next month.
A hiring surge led by California’s hallmark industries — high tech, movies and tourism — generated nearly 100,000 net new jobs in February and offered the strongest sign yet that the state economy is on the mend.
The 96,500-job jump was the biggest monthly increase since the current record system began in 1990, state officials said. California had added a paltry 700 jobs in January.
Teachers at Chicago’s Gary Comer College Prep surprised their students this week performing a flash mob performance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.
The South Side school principal James Troupis says his team didn’t come up with the idea—they borrowed the idea from suburban Palatine High School, which staged one last December.
WATCH the video below..
A professional photographer focused her talent on the plight of homeless dogs. Now her photos persuade hundreds of families to fall in love with the animals and adopt them.
She began by simply posting the photos on her Facebook page (like this one).
As a teenager, Mark Wiegardt went overseas to learn about the oyster industry in Japan.
Now his own company, the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery, wants to help that country’s industry recover from the annihilation caused to shoreline oyster beds by the recent tsunami.
“A while back they helped build the whole oyster industry here. Knowing that all those oysters were growing right now are originally from Japan” is reason to give back.
A baby dolphin has been rescued in Japan after being dumped in a rice field by a giant tsunami that hit the coast on March 11.
The dolphin was spotted in the flooded field, about a mile from the coast by a pet-shop owner who has been rescuing abandoned animals since the quake-tsunami struck.
Two Utah firms have joined up to send solar power units to hard-hit Japan, devices that can provide up to 50 hours of lighting from just collected sunlight.
They’ve already sent 300 units to Japan, and as soon as the solar panel is set under the daylight, the electricity starts flowing.
WATCH the NBC News video below…
Meat eaters should search out Heritage Acres’ all-natural pork products. Not only are their pasture-raised hogs hormone-free and fed only soy, corn and oats with no antibiotics, now its pork processing will become the first in the US to boast a zero-waste operation, fully powered by turning its waste products into biofuel to run the generators.
Russ Kremer, a fifth-generation Missouri hog farmer and leader of a coalition of 52 family farmers known as Heritage Acres Foods, says the plant should be completed in two years. With the new technology, Kremer and his fellow natural farmers will be able to reprocess all the farm’s waste, rather than paying to haul it or dump it, turning it all into bio-diesel fuel to power its entire operation.
Meat eaters should search out Heritage Acres’ all-natural pork products. Not only are their pasture-raised hogs hormone-free and fed only soy, corn and oats with no antibiotics, now its pork processing will become the first in the US to boast a zero-waste operation, fully powered by turning its waste products into biofuel to run the generators.
Russ Kremer, a fifth-generation Missouri hog farmer and leader of a coalition of 52 family farmers known as Heritage Acres Foods, says the plant should be completed in two years. With the new technology, Kremer and his fellow natural farmers will be able to reprocess all the farm’s waste, rather than paying to haul it or dump it, turning it all into bio-diesel fuel to power its entire operation.
Rick Sound, a TriMet bus driver for 24 years, was steering a No. 77 bus west over the Steel Bridge Tuesday morning when he saw something that stopped him – and the bus – in their tracks.
A woman had hoisted one leg over the railing of the bridge, which spans the Willamette River in downtown Portland. He quickly parked the bus in the lane — there was nowhere to pull over — and ran out to stop her apparent plan to jump.
“I thought I better do something quick,” he said. “It had about five seconds to go downhill real quick.”
Growing up in the Kenyan slums, Peninah Nthenya Musyimi was surrounded by drugs, prostitution and dire poverty.
“Because I was a woman, people looked at me like any other household slave,” she says.
Peninah turned to education as her lifeline, walking nine miles to attend school every day, and learning basketball within one month to secure a scholarship to college.
Now she’s helping other girls do the same. After getting her law degree she created Safe Spaces, a haven for girls living in extreme poverty in Nairobi, where they can get basketball, yoga, dance, and life skills training and professional development.
Peninah says she started Safe Spaces “to give girls who are growing up in the same harsh conditions that I grew up in a space where they can share their challenges, learn and nurture their talents.”
(WATCH her tell the story below)
What would you do if you were a college freshman and your MacBook Air was stolen?
Eighteen-year-old “technology entrepreneur” and Bentley College student Mark Bao didn’t write off his laptop as gone forever after realizing that by using the online backup software BackBlaze which he’d installed on his laptop, he would be able to see the machine’s browser history and track any hard drive updates.
The rest was an interesting look into what a fellow classmate does after stealing a laptop.
(READ the story in PCWorld)
6-year old Emily Bear was born to play piano, She has wowed audiences, even recently performing at the White House.
Playing the piano since age 3, Emily also composes her own music. She says her music comes from her heart (just like Mozart’s did).
WATCH the video from WGN with more than 17 million hits on YouTube…
6-year old Emily Bear was born to play piano, She has wowed audiences, even recently performing at the White House.
Playing the piano since age 3, Emily also composes her own music. She says her music comes from her heart (just like Mozart’s did).
WATCH the YouTube video from WGN that has more than 17 million hits…
An estimated 2,000 adult albatrosses and 20 percent of their newborn hatchlings nesting on a Pacific island did not survive a 5-foot tidal wave unleashed by the earthquake that hit March 11 off the coast of Japan.
But Wisdom was not a casualty — the 60-year-old albatross ranked as the oldest living wild bird known to U.S. biologists, named by the Scientists who were thrilled to spot her alive a week later.
Those tallies represent a small fraction of the overall population of 1 million Laysan albatross.
(READ the story at MSNBC)
The Seattle Mariners baseball club, with strong ties to Japan, is pledging support for relief efforts, led by their star outfielder Ichiro Suzuki, who has donated 100 million yen ($1.24 million) to the Japanese Red Cross in his native country.
The Mariners will also match all donations received from fans and employees during a fundraising campaign planned for their first six home games of the upcoming season, including a “Salute to Japan Night.”
(READ the AFP story in Yahoo News)
A US pilot — forced to bail out of his malfunctioning fighter jet over Libya — was greeted as a hero by villagers who lined up in the sheep field where he landed to shake his hand and tell him, “We are your friends.”
Villager Younis Amruni, 27, told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper: “I hugged him and said, ‘Don’t be scared. We are your friends. We are so grateful to these men who are protecting the skies.’ “
I got excited as the plane approached the tarmac. A wide smile overtook my face as I contemplated my last-minute decision to travel from New York to Cairo to vote in Egypt’s constitutional referendum.
Polling stations had opened early in the morning. Egyptians were finally getting their first taste of democracy.
