U.S. retailers posted better- than-expected monthly sales results for a second straight month in April, giving fresh evidence that consumer spending is warming up with the spring weather.
Nearly two-thirds of the retailers that reported April sales at stores open at least a year topped Wall Street estimates and a handful said their first-quarter results, which start landing next week, will be better than expected.
Everyone knows the grim news — unemployment in the United States has jumped to 8.5 percent, a 25-year high. Since November, the nation has lost more than three million jobs.
But not everyone knows the brighter side to the equation: deep in the maw of the deepest recession since the Great Depression, millions are still being hired.
So, while 4.8 million workers were laid off or chose to leave their jobs in February, employers across the country hired 4.3 million workers that month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
US actor Ashton Kutcher has pledged to donate the $100,000 he won in a bet, to help fight the spread of malaria, prompting other stars to chip in more money.
Oprah Winfrey and Kutcher’s wife, actress Demi Moore, gave $200,000 each and television-radio host Ryan Seacrest and CNN gave $100,000 each, according to Ray Chambers, special envoy for malaria to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
Ted Turner even said he’d have Ashton and Demi for dinner if they raised the money for 100,000 more bed nets.
Kutcher’s Twitter followers–1,000,000 strong–are helping.
The United Nations announced a plan on Wednesday that aims to finally rid the world of DDT, a toxic pesticide still used to spray homes against malaria-spreading mosquitoes.
Ten projects involving some 40 countries in Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia, are set to test non-chemical methods of eradicating the deadly disease without DDT, based on successful pilot projects in Mexico and Central America that successfully cut malaria rates.
Organic solutions range from eliminating potential mosquito breeding sites to securing homes with mesh screens, and deploying mosquito-repellent trees or fish that eat mosquito larvae.
Some people manage to maintain a rosy outlook no matter what’s thrown at them.
Tune in on Thursday May 7th, 2009 to see Michael J. Fox return to TV traveling the world in search of the nature of optimism. The ABC show is called, Adventures of an Incurable Optimist.
Watch this video sneak peak from YouTube.
Related News: Read in NY Daily News about 5 New Yorkers who overcame hardships to inspire others
Will Smith was honored as a humanitarian receiving the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 2009 Humanitarian Award. He talked to the press saying that from the time he was a child the idea of service was engrained in him as a way of life connected to success. His wife and kids were onhand to praise the family man.
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Scientists have found more than 200 new species of frogs in Madagascar, a discovery that almost doubles the number of known amphibians and illustrates an underestimation of the natural riches that have helped spawn a $390-million-a-year tourism industry.
New frog photo: Spanish Scientific Research Council (CSIC)
Polio paralyzed Martha Mason from the neck down in 1948, and she spent the rest of her days inside an iron lung, an 800-pound airtight tube that breathed for her. But Mason, who died Monday at 71, made people forget about her fragile condition as she talked passionately about politics and literature, theology and vegetable gardens.
She even wrote a book.
Uncomplaining and good-humored, she usually sent folks away feeling better than when they came.
(Continue reading, and see the photo, in the New York Times)
Newlyweds in Indonesia are planting trees under a program to replenish forests. Couples agree to plant 10 trees before they marry. But if they divorce, they must plant 50 more.
Photo courtesy of Sun Star
Can tomatoes be taught to make antiviral drugs for people who eat them? Would zapping your skin with a laser make your vaccination work better? Could malaria-carrying mosquitoes be given a teensy head cold that would prevent them from sniffing out a human snack bar?
These are among 81 projects that received $100,000 grants on Monday by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in a bid to support innovative, unconventional global health research on infectious diseases, such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrheal diseases.
Highlighted in Obama’s speech, a South Carolina teen’s plea to improve her run-down school inspired a quarter million dollar donation from local businessman.
Students who had grown resigned to old, “nasty” furnishings at their dilapidated middle school were elated on Monday to find new furniture and a freshly painted cafeteria, thanks to a student’s plea, a president’s speech and a businessman’s response.
South Carolina‘s highest court has temporarily stopped thousands of pending foreclosure sales so homeowners can take advantage of a new federal program to refinance mortgages.
(Continue Reading AP story in Yahoo)
While some students are rejected from colleges everywhere, the more common scenario is for a student to be sitting on multiple wait-lists but to have no firm offer in hand. Thankfully there is a great resource out there.
The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) compiles an annual list of schools that still have openings after May 1; go to www.nacacnet.org.
Read more great tips for students without college acceptance letters in the Charlotte Observer.
An analysis of “real-world” clinical data indicates that vitamin E, and drugs that reduce generalized inflammation, may slow the decline of mental and physical abilities in people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) over the long term.
Imagine feeling ill and being unable to tell anyone what hurts. Or longing for pizza on your eighth birthday but ending up with Chinese takeout because you couldn’t explain what you wanted. These are the kinds of frustrations, experts say, that are faced by the more than 1 in 150 children in the United States who have a diagnosis of autism.
The solution to some of those problems could be the push of a button away.
The government of Iraq has committed $30 million to projects this year that will assist children in rural areas of the Marshlands region, an area with some of the worst development indicators in the country. The allocation marks the first government investment focused exclusively on improving the lives of Iraqi children.
“This is a major achievement by the government as it’s the first-of-its-kind investment targeting children not only in Iraq but also globally,” stated Sikander Khan, UNICEF Iraq Representative. “This sets the standard and will be the beginning of a series of child-friendly investments that will help realize the long-deprived rights of all Iraqi children, specifically improving their prospects for survival and to fully develop their capacities.”
Angola’s farming sector could finally resolve what its oil and diamond exports have for years failed to do: lift millions of Angolans out of poverty.
Thousands of kilometres of roads have been rebuilt after a civil war that ended in 2002, enabling farmers from banana plantations in the south to coffee producers in the north to bring their products to market on time and at affordable prices.
On the campus of the country’s premier scientific university, the world’s best-known Buddhist leader Thursday called on educators to teach ethics and compassion without a basis in religious belief.
Hundreds gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Dalai Lama, speaking from the seated, cross-legged position of a sage, officially opened MIT’s Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values.
“The majority of the 6 billion people on earth, I think, we can categorize as non-believers,” the Dalai Lama said. “So we must find a way to promote ethics and values with these nonbelievers.”
(READ the full story from BeliefNet News)
President Obama last week honored a retired New York police captain, special education teacher Anthony Mullen, as the nation’s top teacher.
Teaching is not just about a paycheck — it’s a passion and it’s a calling,” Obama said. “Now, nobody, I think, exhibits that more than our honoree today.”
Watch the president celebrate all the regional Teachers of the Year in his first Rose Garden ceremony as president.
(Read more about Anthony Mullen via MSNBC)
National & State Teachers of the Year from White House.
Thousands of dolphins blocked suspected Somali pirate ships as they approached Chinese merchant ships passing the Gulf of Aden, the China Radio International reported on Monday.
Chinese merchant ships under escort in the Gulf of Aden received some help from thousands of dolphins. Suddenly they leaped out of the water creating a barrier between suspected pirate ships and the merchants. The suspected pirates turned back.
