The world’s first fully painted feature-length film is a beautiful story about the life of Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh — and it can now be streamed online for as little as $5.
Loving Vincent, which was directed by Polish painter Dorota Kobiela and Oscar award-winning filmmaker Hugh Welchman, is entirely created using an individual painting for each frame. A team of 100 artists have been working tirelessly for the last six years to paint the movie’s 65,000 frames in the style of Van Gogh.
If you’re interested in seeing the film on the big screen, you can check out the Loving Vincent website for showings in your area. You can also stream the film via Amazon.com.
(WATCH the breathtaking trailer below)
Click To Share The Exciting News With Your Friends
When Amanda Bowman Gray asked her daughter Lydia to watch her 25-month-old son so she could take a shower, she was taken by surprise upon her return.
Once Gray was finished in the bathroom, the mom of three stepped into the hallway and found her kids doing a duet of “You Are My Sunshine”.
Want to know the most incredible part? Because Bo has Down syndrome, he only knows about 12 words – and “every word he has learned has been through music and singing.”
Thanks to his sweet sister, however, he was able to pick up brand-new words from the song’s lyrics.
In a video that Gray posted to Facebook earlier this week, Lydia can be seen strumming her guitar with her little brother by her side.
As they sing, the toddler gets especially excited when he says the words “happy,” “gray,” “dear,” and “away”. It’s obvious that he can’t help but light up as he shows off his new vocabulary.
Please visit our partner’s website to view the sweet video… (GNN earns a small bit of revenue from viewers who click.)
The number one reason why people refuse to donate blood and platelets is because of their fear of needles – but the Red Cross wants to help ease that fear.
In celebration of National Blood Donor Month, the Red Cross is trying to recruit as many volunteers for blood donations as possible. Harsh weather conditions have already forced the organization to cancel 500 blood drives, amounting to about 13,000 uncollected donations that could have been used to save lives.
As a means of encouraging prospective donors, the Red Cross gives several recommendations for overcoming your fear of needles so you can make a donation and save a life.
For starters, the charity recommends immediately telling their workers about your phobia so they help make the process as tolerable as possible. Bringing along a friend or family member to talk you through the donation can help a great deal as well. They can even donate alongside you so you can both go through the ordeal together.
Next, the Red Cross suggests listening to soothing music while you donate. This can be all the more effective if you implement their fourth recommendation and remember to breath deeply, since deep breathing is proven to lower your blood pressure, calm your nerves, and even boost your levels of empathy. You can also visualize happier memories in your head as a distraction from the needle.
Finally, they suggest focusing on the fact that overcoming your phobia will inevitably help save a life.
(WATCH the Red Cross video below)
Don’t Be Afraid To Share These Tips With Your Friends
Delegates from North and South Korea have announced that their two countries will march under a single “unification flag” at the Winter Olympics this year.
The announcement came as a result of peace talks that were held by the two nations at the Demilitarized Zone just north of the de facto border between North and South Korea. The talks, which were hosted “to relieve military tensions” are the first of such diplomatic meetings between the two countries in two years.
While the two Koreas have met under the unification flag nine times in the past, this year’s Olympics will be especially significant because the nations agreed to field one single women’s ice hockey team. It will be the first time that a team has ever competed for both North and South Korea in the Olympics.
North Korea will be sending “as many athletes as possible” to attend the games, as well as a high-level group of delegates, members of the press, cheerleaders, and artists.
The peace talks went so well in the Panmunjoma village, the nations even discussed temporarily lifting their travel bans for the Lunar New Year so families who are separated by the tense border can temporarily reunite for the holiday. The sanctions would also be lifted in order to allow North Korean citizens to attend the Olympics.
(WATCH the video below)
Click To Share The News With Your Friends – Photo by CGTN America
“Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.” – James Broughton
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
The Lesson: Do you know the Five Love Languages? Each of us have specific ways with which we show our love, and want to be loved in return. Do you prefer Acts of Service, or Words of Affirmation, or Physical Touch? It is also equally important to know how our partners express their love. If a couple’s preferences are incompatible, there are still ways to satisfy each other’s needs—and this example-rich podcast will not only leave you eager to improve your romantic relationships, but also family ties and friendships.
Notable Excerpt: “Pay attention to what other people do. These are clues to what their Love Language is. We must learn to speak the other person’s language (because) love is something you do for someone else, not something you do for yourself. It’s about understanding yourself, but really understanding the other person, too.”
The Host: Dubbed a “Happiness Guru”, best-selling author Gretchen Rubin started her career in law and was clerking at the Supreme Court when she realized she wanted to be a writer. To date, the Manhattan-based speaker has written several biographies, self-help guides, and indexes on the happiest places and practices in the world.
Podcast: Her top-ranking, award-winning podcast, “Happier with Gretchen Rubin,” which discusses happiness and good habits.
While the laughter of children has been known to brighten up a room, this school’s reaction to electricity is particularly powerful.
The Academia Bautista de Puerto Nuevo in San Juan, Puerto Rico has been without power for the last 112 days since Hurricane Maria first made landfall in September. As of this week, 62% of Puerto Rican customers have reportedly regained power and 80% of the grid is generating electricity.
So when power finally returned to the building earlier this week, the students and teachers could not contain their happiness.
In a video posted to the school’s Facebook page, the students can be seen jumping for joy in the hallways, while the teachers can be heard ringing bells to celebrate the electrifying development.
(WATCH the heartwarming video below)
Power Up With Positivity: Click To Share With Your Friends
When an Australian father went to the police about his missing son, they assured him that he was simply overreacting – but it’s a good thing that he didn’t listen to them, because he turned out to be correct.
Tony Lethbridge of New South Wales, Australia first became concerned about his son Samuel when he woke up on Sunday morning and found that the 17-year-old had not yet returned from spending the previous night out with his friends.
Members of the local police department tried to soothe Lethbridge’s nerves by saying it was a false alarm, but the dogged dad didn’t believe it.
“When I saw the police, they thought he’d run away. I said ‘that’s not Samuel.’ When he doesn’t show up or phone, something’s seriously wrong,” Lethbridge told the Associated Press.
He added: “I understand that they’ve got a lot to do and they hear this every day, but I took matters into my own hands and was thinking all night that tomorrow morning, I’m just going to get a helicopter and go looking for him because we’re running out of time — it’s been long enough.”
Lethbridge then walked into the Skyline Aviation Group’s office near their home in Lake Macquarie and asked for help.
Despite Lethbridge not having enough money to rent a helicopter at full price, the pilots decided to give him a discount in lieu of his dire story.
Within fifteen minutes of taking off, the helicopter crew spotted Samuel’s car crashed in the bushes 12 miles from the family’s home. While it was easy to spot from the chopper, it would have been near impossible to see from the road.
When rescue crews arrived at the scene of the crash, Samuel had already been caught in the wreckage for 30 hours – but he was still alive. He is currently being treated for multiple fractures at the hospital, while Samuel’s family is simply grateful that he was found in time.
Thanks to the groundbreaking legislation that went into full effect on January 1st, over one million California residents can have their past marijuana-related felonies reduced or expunged completely.
Proposition 64, which was passed in November 2016, legalized the recreational use of marijuana for California residents aged 21 or older. Since the legislation was approved, thousands of state residents have already had their marijuana felonies reduced to misdemeanors.
The Drug Policy Alliance estimates that there have been at least 500,000 arrests for marijuana-related incidents over the course of the last 10 years in California alone. Moreover, the organization says that at least one million residents are living under the shadow of such charges altogether.
Not having felonies on their criminal records means that they can vote and apply for loans and licenses. Prop 64 also means that they won’t have to say that they were convicted of a felony when applying for jobs. Additionally, the legislation has spared thousands from having to endure jail time or probation.
Over the course of the last year, state lawyers and marijuana legalization advocates have been hosting free legal workshops to educate residents on how they can apply to get their records changed. According to the Associated Press, getting the old charges dropped can be as easy as spending a few minutes in court.
Romy McCloskey is a costume designer who put her needleworking abilities to the test when she rescued a 3-day-old monarch butterfly from certain death by fixing its shredded wing.
McCloskey, who is the proud mother to a garden full of monarchs, first found the baby bug in her backyard last week. While monarch butterflies usually have a lifespan of 2 to 6 weeks, this newborn insect had suffered a deformity while it was pupating in the chrysalis.
Upon determining that the mutation wasn’t due to a parasite, McCloskey took the injured baby into her “operating room” and grabbed her surgical supplies: a towel, a coat hanger, contact cement, a toothpick, tweezers, a cotton swab, scissors, talc powder, and an extra butterfly wing from one of her other recently deceased backyard bugs.
The designer used the coat hanger to secure the body of the butterfly against the towel so it would not struggle while she was attaching the wing. She then cut away the ragged part of its wing to make way for the replacement – and if you’re worried about the butterfly at this point, McCloskey assures her reader that cutting butterfly wings is the equivalent of trimming hair or fingernails.
She then attached the extra butterfly wing to her young patient so that it was virtually good as new.
McCloskey posted photos of the healthy butterfly to Facebook with the caption reading: “You can see that the black lines on his upper right wing don’t match up 100%, and if you look at his lower right wing, [it] is missing the black dot that indicates male gender. Oh, and the white on his wing is the talc used to make sure any stray glue doesn’t make the wings stick together.”
Just to make sure that her patient had made a healthy recovery, she let it rest for a day before giving it some homemade nectar and taking it into the backyard for a little joy ride on its new wing – and judging by the butterfly’s exuberant first flight, the surgery was a huge success.
“A quick spin around the backyard, then a little rest on one of the bushes… then… like the down of a thistle… off he flew! My heart soared with him, for sure!” said McCloskey.
Don’t Let This Story Flutter By: Click To Share With Your Friends (Photos by Romy McCloskey)
“In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” –Albert Camus
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
If you or your kids have ever played sports, you know that it can be hard to be extra kind to your opponent when you want to win.
But thankfully for one hockey player, the game didn’t affect his rival’s sense of kindness and sympathy.
Milwaukee Admirals hockey player Pierre-Cédric Labrie woke up in the middle of the night on New Year’s Eve just hours before a big game against the Grand Rapids Griffins because he received a phone call saying that his wife was in labor.
He needed to get back to Milwaukee immediately, but he couldn’t find a flight or a ride that would get him there in time.
Luckily, Griffins goalie Tom McCollum stepped up to save the day. He lent Labrie his truck so that he could drive the 276 miles to his wife’s side and witness the birth of their son Lionel.
He made it just in time, too, with only minutes to spare.
“It was an adventure. I made it on time—6:54 she delivered, and I got there by 6:15, 6:20,” Labrie told WXMI News.
Now that’s what real sportsmanship looks like — on and off the court.
CLICK to watch an interview with the happy parents – and be sure to SHARE this sweet story with your friends…
In a harrowing drama that was filmed at a Georgia family’s burning home earlier this month, a firefighter managed to catch a toddler as she was tossed by her father from the 3rd story balcony.
While the firefighters of Decatur had originally planned on climbing up the ladders and helping to escort the family down, the fire was spreading rapidly. The father then started to climb down the ladder with the toddler under his arm.
Because the child was hindering his ability to scale down the building, someone yelled for the dad to throw the toddler down to Captain Scott Stroup, who was waiting on the ground below.
Stroup then caught the child upside down and moved her away from the building, twisting his knee in the process.
While other children were successfully tossed to the rescuers from the balcony and saved from the blaze, Stroup’s heart-stropping rescue was the only one caught on a firefighter’s helmet camera.
The building’s residents have been treated for smoke inhalation, but thanks to the quick response of Decatur’s civil servants, there were no casualties from the fire.
You can donate to the displaced family’s GoFundMe page to help them get back on their feet following the fire.
(WATCH the video below)
Click To Share The Incredible Rescue Footage With Your Friends
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
The Lesson: “Your Erroneous Zones: Step-by-Step Advice for Escaping the Trap of Negative Thinking” became the best selling book of the 1970s because Wayne Dyer bought 5,000 of them and went across the country as an unknown, putting 45,000 miles on his car, and creating a demand for his book that wasn’t there. He wasn’t concerned about any outcomes; he acted only on his singular purpose – to get his message out to the world. You can use this same principle in your life and relationships.
Notable Excerpt: “Today, I trust that it will all work. You act on what you think about, so if you’re constantly thinking about the scarcity in your life… about what’s wrong… about what you don’t have, and processing your world that way, then that will be what you need to act on. You have to act on what’s missing. It’s just like in a relationship; if you think about what you don’t like about somebody, then you have to act upon that. Your relationship with another person is located within you, where everything is located… What’s inside is always within our control.”
The Guest: Dr. Wayne Dyer (who passed on in 2015) offered a transformative message as a motivational speaker and author of almost 40 self-help books. He was the mastermind behind the film The Shift, an eye-opening journey that leads you through the complexities of ego and ambition.
The Host: Tony Robbins is a best-selling author, motivational speaker, life coach, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. The California-based strategist has become such an influential lecturer, over 4 million people have attended his live seminars. In addition to founding several different companies (and his own foundation), Robbins has worked with charities such as Feeding America, Spring Health, and Operation Underground Railroad.
Jessica Bell, an attorney and advocate in Chicago was riding the subway home late last Friday evening when she witnessed a spontaneous act of kindness that brought tears to her eyes.
A homeless man, who later said he was from Louisiana, pulled his swollen feet from a flimsy pair of running shoes that were clearly not intended for a Midwestern winter. The shoe backs were folded down like slippers to leave enough room for a thick layer of socks to fit inside.
“I don’t know how many pairs of socks he’s wearing in an attempt to keep his feet warm but there is blood seeping through,” she wrote on Facebook.
38-year-old Maurice Anderson was traveling back to his hometown to visit his daughter, like he does every weekend, when he saw the same heartbreaking scene unfold in front of him.
He suddenly wanted to give his own boots, but started arguing with himself: He’d just bought the boots a few weeks ago, and paid $260 for the pair. But within 30 seconds he was unlacing them, and asking the man what size shoes he wore.
Size 12, was his answer—Maurice is a 12-and-a-half.
Bell continues, “Quietly in-a-blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fashion, the younger man takes off the boots he’s wearing and passes them to the old man… He opens his suitcase and gives him a pair of socks as well.”
Maurice then pulls out a spare pair of shoes from the suitcase. “These shoes are nice too, but not as nice as the boots,” Jessica wrote. “They would have fit the old man just as well, but they were not what this old man needed.” Especially because he believed his feet might already have frostbite.
“If you’ve got 20 pairs of shoes, you can only wear one at a time,” Anderson told Good News Network. “I wished I’d had more socks.”
“The reason I posted about Maurice is because we’ve all given, or see people give food, or money to the homeless, but I have never seen someone give the clothes off their back so unselfishly and so humbly,” Bell told Good News Network by email.
Maurice Anderson, 38
Maurice said that when he was exiting the subway car, Jessica, who is the founder of Project Bleeding Love, which supplies homeless women with feminine hygiene products, approached him and almost burst into tears, saying, ‘Ive never witnessed anything like that.’ She gave him her card so they could keep in touch.
Anderson, who had tried to find a job as a laborer with the city, finally needed to move to Cincinnati because he found work there. It would seem like a man with his integrity (and dedication to his daughter), would be a welcome addition to many companies in the Windy City.
Maybe his newfound fame will land him a position with good pay, and he can continue warming the hearts of people in this icy town.
Instead of taking the high road, this determined dad decided to build his own.
Indian father Jalandhar Nayak is being hailed for spending the last two years carving out a 5-mile road through the hilly terrain of Odisha just so his children would have an easier time getting to school.
His three sons used to spend six hours every day walking from their village of Gumsahi to their school in Phulbani. Upon seeing his kids stumble down the treacherous route, the 45-year-old vegetable seller grabbed a chisel, a pickax, and a garden hoe so he could carve out a less perilous path.
Nayak was recently featured in a news segment that attracted the eyes of local government officials who were impressed by the man’s progress. They then contacted Nayak and said that they would be more than happy to finish the last four miles of the road in his honor.
Nayak has since been compared to Dashrath Manjhi: a man who spent 22 years carving a tunnel through a mountain so his villagers wouldn’t have to travel 43 miles just to get to the nearest hospital. By the time Manjhi finished the tunnel (using only hand tools), the commute was slashed to a 1-mile journey through the 300-foot mountain.
(WATCH the video below)
Click To Share The Astounding Story With Your Friends – Photo by News World Odisha
Los Angeles County has just made a decision that is bound to make book lovers happy.
In order to encourage literacy amongst the younger generations who may be more used to playing on their smart devices, LA County libraries are no longer charging library late fees for young readers under the age of 21. To make it even easier for the kids, they have also all been automatically signed up for library cards by their schools.
For those who already have a pre-existing late fee balance, the library offers a unique way to pay it back: by reading it away.
Kids can now go to their local library and tell the librarian that they would like to pay off their balance. In turn, the librarian will start a timer and for every hour the youngster spends reading, $5 is taken off of their debt. According to the LA Times, at least 100 students every week have read away their debt and a total of 3,500 blocked accounts have been cleared. This debt relief can also be used for paying off lost or damaged books as well.
The program has already had a major effect on readership in the county. 15,000 kids have used their new library cards and parents said they were 80% more likely to allow their children to check out books due to the relaxed policy.
It seems that the smell of old books can still have a place in the younger generation’s hearts – they just need a bit of a boost.
Quote of the Day: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
8-year-old Daeyrs has spent much of his young life living in homeless shelters with other families after his mom lost her job.
All he wanted for Christmas in 2017, when the pair was finally accepted into a Michigan housing program, was a bed, and a kitchen table where he and his mother Dionna could eat together.
But, while they were finally in a home, Daeyrs slept and ate on the floor as there was no money to pay for furniture.
That’s when the Detroit based non-profit Humble Design stepped in to decorate their home for free.
When Daeyrs was told to cover his eyes before seeing his bedroom, he was overcome with emotion when he saw his very own bed and dresser inside the fully furnished home.
The boy can be seen in the video below looking around his new room in awe before breaking down in sobs.
“Seeing how much having a bed and his own room meant to Daeyrs, it really made me realize what’s important in life and grateful for everything I have,” Humble Design founder Tregar Strasberg said.
“He was so excited to have his own room, but also so overwhelmed by what having this really means for him after all he’s been through.”
In 2017, the organization aided more than 150 families in their transition out of homelessness and abuse shelters.
(WATCH the moment, and an interview on CNN, below)
When Amanda Bowman Gray asked her daughter Lydia to watch her 25-month-old son so she could take a shower, she was taken by surprise upon her return.
