It’s been 25 years since Chris Street set a basketball record for the most scored consecutive free throws. Now, thanks to Jordan Bohannon, Street’s name will stay in the history books.
Street was a forward player for the Iowa Hawkeyes in 1993. During his last game in his junior season, he scored his 34th consecutive free throw, which set a record at the school.
Tragically, Street was never able to extend his record because he died in a car accident three days later.
Bohannon, who is a current guard for the Hawkeyes, was given the chance to break that record during the team’s match against Northwest. Instead of surpassing Street, however, Bohannon purposefully missed the shot and pointed to the skies in an homage to the deceased player.
Until he shorted the shot during this weeks game, Bohannon has not missed a free throw since December, which made him perfect throughout 2018. Not only that, but the Hawkeyes were only leading by 8 points with a little over 2 minutes left on the clock when he missed.
Bohannon was still determined to honor the Iowa sports legend.
Street’s parents, who have season passes, hugged Bohannon after the game and expressed their appreciation over his touching gesture.
“What a good kid. He’s so kind,” Street’s mother told media sources. “That was so special that he thought of Christopher and that record.”
(WATCH the video below)
Score Big With Your Friends: Click To Share – Photo by Sports Center
Esmond Allcock is responsible for 71 different descendants, but none of them have ever been named after him – until now.
Allcock just turned 108 years old, making him the oldest man in all of Canada. Not only that, but he has the family to show for it; he is a father to six, a grandfather to 17, a great-grandfather to 36 and a great-great-grandfather to 12.
One of the grandchildren, Jenna Lehne from Alberta, just gave birth to a son in January – and she named him Esmond.
Lehne says that she is especially glad to give Esmond his name sake after all the happy memories that they shared when she was a youngster.
Lehne told Love What Matters: “While I was learning to walk, I’d make him hold my hands and parade me around the room. All I had to do was crawl up to him and say, ‘Walk Walk,’ and away we’d go. When I got a bit older, he would remember me and call me his little buddy.
“When I found out I was pregnant with my first son, he got on the phone and called all his children to let them know that I was increasing the population. When I got pregnant with my second, he mentioned to my grandmother that he was responsible for 71 descendants and no one had named their son after him. My husband and I had wanted to name our new son after family, and that just sealed the deal.”
A quick-thinking mother became a hero earlier this week when she pretended to be the mother of someone else: a little girl who was in the middle of a possible kidnapping.
The school girl, 12-year-old Amy Martinez, had been walking to class at Lathrop Intermediate School in Santa Ana, California on Wednesday when a woman who she described as “homeless looking” caught her up in a bear hug and started pulling her away from the school building.
Amy tried to get away from the intruding stranger, but she was too small to resist the grown woman’s strength. She continued to flail her arms around and yell at the woman until the youngster caught the attention of a woman who had just finished dropping her own child off at school.
The good Samaritan saw Amy’s movements and “knew that something wasn’t right”. She then confronted the kidnapper, said that she was Amy’s mother, and demanded that she be released.
Amy’s rescuer then took her to school and called the police. The 12-year-old says that she considers the anonymous woman to be her hero.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m going to live,’” Amy told KTLA.
(WATCH the video below)
Click To Share The Heroic Story With Your Friends – Photo by KTLA
Quote of the Day: “Tough times never last, but tough people do.” – Dr. Robert Schuller
Photo: by McKinley Corbley
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“Just wanted to say THANK YOU for existing! Thank you for spreading the love, the care, the good news and show the good in humans!!! If everyone makes a conscious choice of watching positive, uplifting contents, they wouldn’t be angry, depressed all the time. Each one of us can get inspired and influenced to make a good action. It doesn’t have to be huge. Just a little smile, hello in the elevator, holding the doors etc… The positivism and good actions can be contagious. Hope every one gets infected! Have a great day and god bless all!”–Christal Torres
There’s more than enough doubt as to whether peace will ever be possible in the Middle East, but this video could inspire naysayers with some much-needed hope.
Koolulam is an organization that is dedicated to bringing Israelis together from across all ages, races, religions, and demographics for mass singing events.
This most recent orchestration in Haifa asked 3,000 Muslims and Jews (none of whom had met before) to come together and learn the song “One Day” by Matisyahu in under an hour. Not only that, but they learned how to sing and harmonize the lyrics in three different languages.
The resulting concert, which was made in collaboration with Beit HaGefen, the Haifa Municipality, and the Port of Haifa, is a breathtaking display of unity and beauty.
(WATCH the video below)
Pass On This Story Of Peace To Your Friends: Click To Share
Robert and Ann Dobson have lived in the same house for 50 years – and for the first time ever, they received a citation from the city concerning the piles of trash littering their yard.
It’s not the Dobsons’ trash, however; whenever the wind picks up, the garbage from a nearby shopping center is blown into their yard.
The Dobsons have tried to keep their yard free of trash, but whenever they pick up the garbage, more trash takes its place.
Upon hearing that the the couple had received a citation for the litter, the students on the cross-country team from McQuaid Jesuit High School stopped by the senior’s house in Greece, New York on Saturday and picked up all the trash themselves. Not only that, but they installed a fence to prevent any more litter from being blown onto the lawn.
Additionally, the teens and their parents worked together with city officials to require the shopping center trash cans to install locks on their dumpsters.
One of the teen’s parents told Rochester First: “It wasn’t just us; people were stopping. A women and a couple little girls stopped and helped with the trash cleanup and a man came over and helped with the fencing.”
(WATCH the interview below)
Clean Up Negativity: Click To Share The Story With Your Friends – Photo by Democrat and Chronicle
Egypt has begun construction on what will become the largest solar park in the world.
The Benban Solar Park is expected to generate between 1.6 to 2.0GW of solar power by the middle of 2019.
For years, Egypt has largely depended on inexpensive fossil fuels for its energy needs. Due to the falling prices of solar panel components, however, the country hopes to generate at least 20% of their energy needs from sustainable sources by 2022.
The project is currently being built on a 14.3 square-mile plot of land that will host 32 different power plants near Aswan, according to the IFC.
“This project will help Egypt tap into its massive potential for solar energy and scale back its use of expensive—and polluting—fossil fuels. That’s especially important with the specter of climate change looming,” says Mouayed Makhlouf, IFC Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Milkmen have always been a classic staple of English towns – and now, thanks to a BBC documentary about the planet, more and more London residents are returning to their roots and turning their business over to milkmen.
UK-based dairy delivery company Milk & More has seen a surge in business since the release of Blue Planet II, a David Attenborough-narrated series of nature documentaries.
The show, which has already inspired a host of other environmentally-friendly initiatives, gives an in-depth look on the dangers of plastic pollution and why people need to use less wasteful forms of packaging.
According to the BBC, Milk & More has had 2,500 new customers since the release of Blue Planet II. The company’s website visits have also doubled.
Additionally, glass bottles were only requested by customers about 50% of the time. After the documentary’s release, over 90% of customers have requested glass milk bottles instead of plastic.
(WATCH the video below)
Deliver Some Positivity To Your Friends: Click To Share – Photo by BBC
It has been 38 years since Malcolm Alexander was outside of prison. But when he was finally exonerated and declared a free man last month, he was accompanied by the canine companion who had helped keep him sane on the inside.
Alexander was originally given a life sentence without parole for a crime that he did not commit in 1979. The Innocence Project, which is a nonprofit dedicated to freeing wrongfully-convicted inmates, assisted in proving Alexander’s innocence.
While he was behind bars, however, the dog of one of his convicted friends gave birth to a litter of 10 pups. Alexander adopted the runt of the litter because he said that “she needed the most love”.
Alexander named the dog “Innocent” and spent much of his time raising and adoring his canine companion in the common areas of the prison.
After he was proven innocent by DNA-testing and released from prison, volunteers for The Innocence Project brought Innocent to Alexander’s house the next day – and their reunion is tearjerking.
“I feel beautiful,” Alexander told Inside Edition. “I feel happy, very happy. I feel happy for her.
“I told you we gonna be free,” he said to the joyful puppy. “This is the end and [it’s] complete.”
(WATCH the video below)
Click To Share The Pawesome Story With Your Friends (Photo by the Innocence Project)
Julie Deane started out as a mother who was simply determined to make enough money to pay for her bullied daughter to go to a better school. Because private school tuition for both her children would cost a whopping $31,000, her budget needed some creative thinking.
Deane’s path to success had its obstacles, but her iron will and determination helped the hardworking mother to overcome every challenge that stood in her way.
You can also LISTEN to this story as told by GNN’s Good News Guru —> HERE on KOST-103.5
She considered taking a chance on creating her own business, so the mum from Cambridge – who previously had worked as an accountant – made a spreadsheet of all the things that she might be good at. Because she always hated cheap, ugly school backpacks, she decided she would try and make her own satchels, and roused the courage to invest $775 in startup money.
First, she made a prototype out of cereal boxes and brown paper. Then, she created the logo for her company on Microsoft Paint. Instead of hiring a staff, she enlisted the help of her most trustworthy and hardworking companion: her mother.
Next, she started calling a school supply store every half hour for two days, pestering the worker for the name of his supplier. Once he had given up on resisting the persistent mother, he gave her the name of the supplier and she started paying the company to manufacture her design.
Over the course of two days, Deane taught herself how to code so she could create her own website – and for two years, she mostly received orders for her satchels from family and friends.
In 2010, she sent a few of her most colorful satchels to some fashion bloggers who were attending New York Fashion Week. She could not afford to fly to the states with her tight budget, but she still hoped that perhaps the satchels would attract some new customers.
Following the fabled fashion event, a shocked Deane was flooded with over 16,000 orders.
The manufacturer that had been assembling the bags was too small to fulfill the massive influx of orders, so she approached a larger company for her production needs… that is, until she found out that the local firm was selling knockoffs of her designs on the street for a fraction of the price. When confronted about the issue, the owner of the company informed her that she didn’t have any other choice but to keep working with them.
“That sort of irritated me,” she told CNBC. “But then the next line was the real kicker: ‘Because you’re a stupid woman and you don’t know about manufacturing.’ And he was so pleased with himself. He turned on his heel and went out the back.”
Weeks later, Deane got her revenge after she fixed up a dilapidated warehouse location and hired almost every one of the employees from the manager who had scorned her.
The rest is basically history: ten years later, Deane is the CEO of Cambridge Satchel Company: a fashion brand that is worth over $65 million.
Her purses have been worn by dozens of celebrities, such as Zooey Deschanel, Alexa Chung, and Taylor Swift. In addition to meeting the Queen of England, Deane has been hailed as an entrepreneurial guru by Google, and Cambridge Satchel has five different retail locations in the U.K., with a net worth of $65 million since 2014.
And, needless to say, her daughter Emily attended the private school—and she was never again the victim of bullying.
(WATCH the inspiring interview below)
Click To Share The Story With Your Friends (Photo by The Pool / Cambridge Satchel Company)
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The fast food giant that has served billions recently served up a big announcement: they will finally be phasing out the use of foam containers in all of their stores worldwide by the end of this year.
Additionally, the company plans on using 100% recycled fiber-based materials for all of their packaging by 2020.
Currently, only half of the restaurants’ packaging is collectively made up of the eco-friendly materials.
By the end of 2018, McDonald’s will join the ranks of other companies, such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Jamba Juice, that have banned styrofoam from their production line.
The entirety of San Francisco has already banned styrofoam from being sold within city limits – and we hope it’s a matter of time before the rest of the world follows the Golden Arches into a greener day.
Clean Up Negativity: Click To Share With Your Friends (Photo by Mike Mozart, CC)
It goes without saying that it can be hard to adapt to civilian life after leaving prison.
Will Avila, who was in and out of jail over the course of 10 years, says he “went through 22 job applications and got rejected 22 times,” according to WTTG.
Unable to find someone willing to hire him, Avila decided to take matters into his own hands and start a business.
Avila now heads a company called Clean Decisions, a commercial cleaning service. Best of all, Avila’s success includes 15 full-time employees—all of whom are also former inmates.
One employee, Andre Thomas, told WTTG that the job has been instrumental in preventing him from turning back to his old ways.
He also started a nonprofit called Changing Perceptions, which pairs former inmates with mentors to keep them out of trouble.
Will’s hard work in turning his life around after prison, and helping convicts like himself, caught the attention of John Legend.
Legend has partnered with Bank of America, and an organization called New Profit, to support Clean Decisions with $50,000 in grant money. Other similar efforts are winning grants, too, so they can help more inmates, a mission that Legend supports “for personal reasons.”
The money is helpful — but the affirmation is even more important. Avila told WTTG: “My deepest fear was the community and society rejecting us as returning citizens… But for somebody like John Legend and all the support he has given us, it just opens the door.”
Quote of the Day: “Where is this fountain that throws out these flowers in such ceaseless ecstasy?” – Rabindranath Tagore
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After being delivered prematurely by C-section and surviving three different operations, this baby has become the first infant in the UK to survive being born with her heart outside of her chest.
The lucky newborn, Vanellope Hope Wilkins was born with ectopia cordis: a rare condition in which the infant is not only born without a breastbone, but arrives with its heart on the outside of its body.
While most babies who are born with the disease tend to die within three days of being born, Vanellope is still thriving to this day. There have been multiple successful surgeries in the U.S, too.
Back when little Vanellope was born in November, doctors wrapped her heart in plastic to keep it sterile. After the lifesaving procedure, her parents were thrilled.
“If you saw her when she was first born, to where she is now and what they’ve done… It’s beyond a miracle isn’t it?”
(WATCH the video below)
Pass On The Miraculous Story To Your Friends – Photo by Reuters
When this bamboozled grandfather was unable to find his ringing phone, a group of his family members all joined in on the search for the missing contraption – until they found it in the most unlikely place.
Marcus Van Zeilstra of Elmhurst, Illinois filmed the increasingly confused reactions of his “Papa” as he looked for the phone back in November.
Though it was not in any of Papa’s pockets, they could hear it ringing wherever he went.
Finally, after calling it several times and insisting that it must be stuck in his shirt, one of the persistent search party members discovered its peculiar hiding place – and it was not in his shirt.
When the students at Carmel Clay High School were asked to do something kind for their fellow classmates, they did not just rise to the occasion; they owned it.
Sarah Wolff, who teaches a ceramics class at the school in Carmel, Indiana, asked a group of her pupils to do something nice for their fellow students. She figured that – following the tragic events at the school in Parkland, Florida last week – her students could benefit from even a trickle of positive vibes.
The teens then agreed to write and print out inspiring notes for their peers—not just the ones they were friends with, but a note for every student in the school.
As a result, the youngsters wrote 5,100 individual notes of inspiration and taped them to the school lockers on Wednesday.
The notes said things like “you are loved” and “be the type of person you want to meet”.
Bread lovers, rejoice! There may soon be an efficient treatment for your celiac’s disease that will allow you to indulge your love of pasta once more.
Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder that affects by some estimates nearly 1 in 100 people. Celiac disease symptoms are triggered by gluten, a protein found in wheat and related plants, but gluten doesn’t act alone to cause the digestive symptoms that patients suffer. Rather, gluten induces an overactive immune response when it’s modified by the enzyme transglutaminase 2, or TG2, in the small intestine. New research published in the Feb. 23 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry identifies an enzyme that turns off TG2, potentially paving the way for new treatments for celiac disease.
“Currently, therapies to treat people with celiac disease are lacking. The best approach right now is just a strict adherence to a lifelong gluten-free diet,” said Michael Yi, a chemical engineering graduate student at Stanford University who led the new study. “Perhaps the reason behind this is our relatively poor understanding of TG2.”
The biochemistry of how TG2 interacts with gluten and induces an immune response has been well studied, but more basic mysteries remain, for example how TG2 behaves in people without celiac disease. Chaitan Khosla, the professor at Stanford and director of Stanford Chemistry, has conducted several studies showing that TG2 can be active or inactive, depending on the forming or breaking of a specific chemical bond, called a disulfide bond, between two amino acids in the enzyme.
Khosla said: “When it became clear that even though the protein was abundant, its activity was nonexistent in a healthy organ, the question became ‘What turns the protein on, and then what turns the protein off?’”
In 2011, Khosla’s team identified the enzyme that activates TG2 by breaking its disulfide bond. In the new paper, the researchers performed experiments in cell cultures and found an enzyme that re-forms this bond, inactivating TG2. This enzyme, ERp57, is mainly known for helping fold proteins inside the cell. When it turns off TG2, it does so outside of cells, raising more questions about its functions in healthy people.
“Nobody really understands how (Erp57) gets outside the cell,” Khosla said. “The general thinking is that it’s exported from the cell in small quantities; this particular observation suggests that it actually does have a biological role outside the cell.”
TG2 is now also the first protein known to have a reversible disulfide bond on/off switch of this type. “This is a very different kind of on-and-off chemistry than the kind that medicinal chemists would (typically) use,” Khosla said.
Understanding this mechanism has led the team to investigate whether there are any FDA-approved drugs that could target the switch directly. Because previous studies have suggested that lack of TG2 doesn’t seem to negatively affect the health of mice, blocking TG2 is a promising avenue for treating celiac disease patients without requiring lifelong changes to their diets.
Quote of the Day: “A really great man is known by three signs: generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success.” – Otto von Bismarck
Photo: The Rookery Building – Matt Shiffler Photography, CC
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