Snow fair! A Serbian police officer is outnumbered during this fun snowball fight with refugee children.
The cop is a member of the staff at a refugee camp in Sid, Belgrade — close to the Serbia-Croatia border. He joined the kids for some lively snow play, but appears to have backed himself into a corner.
The kids giggle with glee, pelting him with snowballs as he wags his finger at him.
Camp co-coordinator, Nemanja Božović, posted the video to Facebook, and you can hear him chuckle at his officer’s situation. You even can hear his boss laughing, instead of coming to his aid.
(WATCH the video below via Facebook)
Serbian police vs kids of the middle east
Posted by Nemanja Božović on Tuesday, January 5, 2016
Boston, Massachusetts has moved 533 homeless veterans out of shelters and into permanent homes in the past 18 months, since “Boston Homes for the Brave” was launched in June, 2014.
The 24 agencies and organizations united by the cause have overseen an 85% decrease in veteran homelessness in the city and have cut the time veterans spend in shelters by 25% in the last 18 months.
When the ‘Homes for the Brave’ program–consisting of city, state, and federal agencies working with private non-profit homeless advocates–started, only about six percent of veterans departed homeless shelters in six months or less. That’s up to 70% a year-and-a-half later.
The program set out to effectively “meet them at the door” and respond to homeless veterans’ needs immediately. This allows Homes for the Brave to move vets from shelters into permanent housing more quickly.
“We know every veteran who’s in the system, how long they’ve been there, what their housing needs are, and we go through the list every single week, making sure that we’re making progress,” Sheila Dillon, director of the city’s Department of Neighborhood Development, told WBUR News.
Photos: Liz West, CC; Katie Haugland, CC
Make Sure This Story is Heard Round the World, Share It…
Now we would like to also thank you. We don’t know you but would like you to know how much we appreciated your help.
The children were absolutely amazed on Christmas morning and so happy. It was a dream Christmas morning for them, Santa had delivered so much. For Mum and Dad it was so comforting to have cupboards full of food and to see them so happy. We let our eldest children know how we came to receive such a wonderful Christmas, so they would know the kindness and caring of people in the world, and grow up knowing there is good around us everywhere.
Thank you to our Christmas Angels. You have given us hope and spirit. We really appreciate what you have done for us. Not a day has gone by since then that I haven’t said “Thank-you” to you again and again.
Once more, from the family of 7 on the Sunshine Coast of Australia thank-you. You are all amazing, wonderful, and kindhearted.
A complete stranger, proved to be the perfect match for an Illinois woman — he donated part of his liver for a transplant, and they stole each other’s hearts.
Heather Krueger had stage 4 liver disease and her doctors told her she only had a couple months to live unless she could find a living donor.
Chris Dempsey overheard Heather’s cousin talking about the situation at his office, and offered to be tested to see if his liver was suitable for a transplant.
It turns out he was a perfect match – in more ways than one.
Doctors transplanted 55% of Chris’s liver in March, and the two spent a week recovering in the same ICU.
But, later, they wanted to spend more time together and last month, Chris asked Heather to spend the rest of her life – which can now be a long, healthy one– as his wife.
This bull literally kicked up his heels, celebrating his freedom after spending his entire life chained to a tiny stall.
Throw-back Thursday (#TBT) takes us back to August, 2014 when Austrian animal rescue group Gut Aiderbilchl rescued about 500 cattle from cramped stables.
At first, it seemed like he must have been transported to the tropics when Baby the quaker parrot flew into the window of his truck on an unseasonably warm night in Ontario, Canada.
Brandon Muir, the operations manager for a waste management company, was sitting in his garbage truck on Christmas Eve, listening to the 2-way radio chatter as his crews wrapped up work for the holiday. He’d lowered the windows to take advantage of the mild weather.
That’s when Baby flew inside the truck and made herself right at home.
Photos by Brandon Muir
As soon as he raised the window, Baby hopped on the steering wheel, looking like she was ready to go home. It turns out, she was lost and could use a lift.
“It’s amazing the way that it all worked out, he (Muir) was at the right place at the right time and someone else might have just shooed her away,” Carol Dedonatos told the Caledon Enterprise. “I can’t even begin to tell you how grateful I am that he did what he did. Without him, she probably wouldn’t be here today.”
When Christian college students set out to help build a hospital for women and children in Syria, they didn’t need a miracle to raise beyond enough money in a single day.
The students were attending an annual conference called Passion, a global gathering of college-age students that attracted 40,000 attendees over the past weekend in Atlanta, Georgia and Houston, Texas.
The passionate youth at the arena events, and others online watching the live-stream, donated $785,000 on the first day of the campaign alone.
The $811,813 raised in two days was more than the $575,000 needed for “Project Haraka,” the planned hospital that will serve 12,000 people a year in northwest Syria, including refugees in nearby camps. It will feature the country’s first newborn intensive care unit.
The extra $236,000 raised at Passion will go toward medical care for an additional 10,000 people in the country.
“Most people will seek a political angle any time Syria or the Middle East is mentioned,” Zach Walden, a law student at the University of Alabama, told USA Today. “But the reality is that the love of God transcends nations and politics.”
In past years, Passion events, organized by Choice Ministries, has raised money to fight modern slavery and human trafficking.
SHARE the Good News… (Photo via Passion268, Instagram)
This photo tells the story of an act of kindness credited with finding a homeless man a place to stay in the cold of winter.
A sheriff’s deputy spotted an unidentified homeless man alone in the cold midwestern weather. Sergeant Depuy gave the man a ride to a nearby McDonald’s, where he asked the staff to let him stay inside to get warm.
Alex Fischbach was watching the scene when he said the lawman pulled some money out of his pocket and told the homeless man to buy something to eat.
“The man tried to refuse but the officer said, ‘I’m not asking you to take it, I’m telling you to take it.’” Fischbach wrote on his Facebook page.
Fischbach says the two shook hands before the officer left. He snapped a photo as the sergeant left, and says he was touched that the officer wasn’t looking for “gratitude or recognition.”
This picture is a quick snap of one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. We pulled up to the McDonalds in...
The photo on Facebook was quickly shared around Morrison, Illinois, and a pastor located the homeless man — identifiable by his coat in the photo — and took him to a nearby shelter run by a church.
“He was basically just…showing that police officers have hearts,” the Whiteside County Sheriff’s Department spokesman told ABC News. “It goes on often, but someone caught it which is nice. It’s recognition for doing a good deed.”
What started as a pleasant New Year’s Day hike for a doctor and his girlfriend, turned into a rescue mission, with the need to carry a 280-pound man two miles to safety.
Dr. Dan Reardon and Dina Zaky were strolling around Escondido Falls on a holiday hike when they came across Mark Martinez, who’d fallen and hurt his ankle.
The man was hopping around on one leg, trying to get back down the mountain in Malibu, California. They didn’t know it at the time, but Martinez had broken his ankle and one of his lower leg bones.
The young doctor hoisted the man onto his back, even though Martinez was one-and-a-half times Reardon’s own weight–and the hero spent two hours carrying him out of the woods.
Zaky ran ahead of them until she could find cell phone reception to call for an ambulance.
Reardon, a former ER doctor, is CEO of a company that helps people get into healthy shape by analyzing their DNA. He plans to help Martinez lose some weight after his new patient and friend recovers from the broken bones.
“I’m happy to have been able to bring Mark to safety,” Reardon told TODAY. “The instinct of doctors is to help people and I don’t like to see people struggle.”
(WATCH the video of Reardon carrying Martinez below) — Photo: Dan Reardon, Facebook
Well today's hike with Dina turned into something a little different. As you'll see in this video, I ended up carrying a 280Ib guy 2.3 miles out of Escondido Falls, who'd injured his ankle and knee, so couldn't walk. Dina ran back to the beginning of the trail to call for assistance (no cellular reception whilst hiking), and so we had the EMT's waiting for us at the other end.Thank goodness I took today as my rest day, and thank goodness the FitnessGenes Muscle Building System has been helping me get stronger!I was very pleased to see Dina at the other end with a big bottle of water!The guy has a fractured ankle and proximal fibula!
A Texas millionaire is opening two mansions as temporary housing for families who lost their homes in the state’s recent storms. The payment due for rent? One dollar per month.
Businessman Ron Sturgeon, a property investor who owns RDS Real Estate, was moved to action by the devastating pictures from last month’s storms.
His company usually focuses on commercial real estate, but he had a pair of two million dollar mansions purchased as investments that are currently up for sale. He says the idea to offer them as housing for displaced families “just overtook me.”
“I was just thinking about having those two big homes,” Sturgeon told KDAF News. “It doesn’t make sense for them to be vacant when somebody could be using them that obviously would have a great need.”
He’s had more than 70 people apply, even though his properties are a two-hour commute from the Dallas-area communities where the storms struck.
His plan is to let one family live in each mansion for up to three months, but Sturgeon says he could extend that if he still hasn’t found a buyer by then. He hopes the amenities such as swimming pools, hot tubs, and personal theaters may “lift the spirits” of families who lost so much.
(WATCH the videobelow from KDAF News) — Photos: KDAF, Zillow
Every year around the holidays, since my kids have been little, we take home baked cookies down to the men and women who are homeless in Philadelphia.
This year we brought warm socks and clothing and my children really got a first-hand experience of talking to these men and women and seeing that they’re just like us.
I reached out to the community in which I live through Facebook asking for donations and we went back on New Years day and delivered over 100 pairs of socks, hundreds of pairs of sweatpants, and lots of food.
Amid the revelers and high security on New Year’s Eve in New York’s Times Square, there were also dozens of Muslims ringing in the New Year with a message of peace.
It’s part of a campaign this year called “True Islam and the Extremists” that will send the Muslim group traveling to mosques around the country speaking out against ISIL and other extremist ideologies.
Salaam Bhatti from Queens in New York City said if a celebration to mark the changing of the years gave his group just a few seconds to change people’s minds about his religion, it would be worth it.
In the wake of the San Bernardino and Paris shootings, and the ensuing backlash against Muslims, the young emissaries, dressed in t-shirts with the word “Extremists” crossed out, gave away flyers listing the differences between what terrorists embrace and what mainstream Muslims actually believe.
The group even returned after the celebration to help clean up the tons of litter left behind. Bhatti said helping the community demonstrates that good deeds are the true heart of Islam throughout the year.
A spur of the moment decision led to an impromptu pizza party for dozens of people staying at a Michigan homeless shelter–a gesture from a businessman who wants to make it an annual tradition.
Alex Garcia, the general manager at Flo’s Pizzeria Ristorante, had been thinking about a holiday pizza delivery for the homeless before floating the idea to the pizza parlor’s owner on New Year’s Day.
Owner Davide Uccello thought it was such a good idea, he decided to do it right away.
“2015 was our biggest and best year we’ve ever had at Flo’s,” Uccello told WXMI News. “So this was something, with my heart I wanted to say, ‘Let’s give back now.’”
The kitchen whipped up 80 pizzas in 45 minutes and Garcia and others rushed them to a shelter in Grand Rapids in what Uccello hopes will become a New Year tradition for his restaurant.
Fortunately for Timur the goat, dinner didn’t go quite as expected. He was supposed to be a meal for Amur the tiger, but became the big cat’s best friend instead.
Timur was released into the tiger’s enclosure at Primorye Safari Park in Russia as live prey for hungry Amur. But something about this goat earned him a reprieve.
“The goat showed his bravery and the tiger respected that,” park director Dmitry Mezetsev told BBC News. “He said, ‘Let’s be friends.’”
And they have been the best of friends for more than a month now, roaming the enclosure and playing together to the delight of park visitors, whose numbers have tripled since the formation of the unlikely alliance a month ago.
(WATCH the video from BBC News below) — Photo: Timur and Amur Facebook page
Volunteers have started remodeling hundred-year-old apartments in Ohio to serve as new homes for homeless veterans.
Iron Soup Historical Preservation is reworking old buildings in Campbell, Ohio, and hope to have the first apartments completed shortly. They believe they can remodel 160 old apartments in town to create a “veteran community” and roll back homelessness among vets.
Brian Reed owns a construction company and spent the weekend putting down tile, setting up drywall, and modernizing bathrooms in two apartments—all for free. Other companies and professionals have donated building materials and furniture to the cause.
The old apartments are part of a “company town” housing development constructed by Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company for its workers a century ago, which are abandoned but now on the National Registry of Historic Places.
Work started on the first pair of units which will provide shelter for four vets until they can find permanent housing.
“There are all kinds of units around here,” Iron Soup’s executive director Linda Gens told WKBN News. “They can all be rehabbed and it doesn’t take much money.”
Iron Soup has raised thousands of dollars toward their goal, but volunteer labor is going a long way in rehabbing the apartments. DONATE toward this major effort at the group’s GoFundMe campaign.
(WATCH the video below from WKBN News) — Photo: YouTube
A dog rescued from a shelter in August turned into the hero who did his own rescuing this week– finding a missing elderly woman who was lost in the cold wearing just a nightgown.
Rebecca Burley was taking Roxanne the Labrador-hound mix for a walk around their Suffolk, Virginia neighborhood last week when they ran into a police search party.
The officers were looking for an elderly woman who’d wandered away from a relative’s house.
Rebecca promised to keep her eyes open for the missing woman, but it was the dog who tracked down the senior later on their walk.
The dog started tugging on her leash, pulling Rebecca off the sidewalk and toward a ditch where the dog had spotted the missing woman, lying on the ground in distress.
A man risked his life to save a young deer after it fell through the ice covering a freezing Minnesota river.
Steven Peterson didn’t know how long the doe had been languishing in the Kettle River outside Duluth when he first spotted her, but he knew every minute was critical.
Peterson is deaf, and decided that trying to communicate with an emergency operator could waste precious time. So, instead of calling 911, he set out across the ice to rescue the deer himself.
Carrying a tree branch to spread out his own weight across the ice, he crawled out to tie a rope around the deer’s neck, before returning to pull the animal out of the water.
The deer was covered in ice but had only minor wounds. Peterson stayed with her for about an hour to make sure the doe, which he’d named “Miss Ice River,” could take care of herself.
207 years ago today, the man who devised a system for reading and writing for the blind, was born. Now, Louis Braille’s system of dots has been given a hi-tech design upgrade by a company called Dot, Inc.
The Dot Watch, which turns text messages into braille for the blind, is being celebrated as the first major innovation for visually impaired readers in nearly 15 years.
After seeing a blind classmate lugging around a heavy braille bible, which contained only five percent of the contents of the holy book, Eric Ju Yoon Kim was surprised that nothing like a Braille iPad existed.
So the University of Washington student set out to invent one.
His first product is a smart watch that raises and lowers pins on its face to create four Braille characters at a time. The watch works with both iOS and Android devices, allowing the blind to immediately read texts, alerts, and other short messages.
Electro-mechanical Braille readers can translate text on computer screens in a method similar to the DOT watch, but the bulky machines can cost more than $2,000.
His company, DOT Inc, plans to sell their wearable device for about $300.
It’s impractical for reading longer text such as an e-book, so DOT Inc’s next project is the world’s first Braille smart device which they plan to deliver in 2017.
The DOT Pad will feature multiple layers of Braille pins, allowing a more natural reading experience. The DOT Pad will also let users feel shapes, math symbols, and read e-books.
Only about one percent of all books in print have been translated for the blind. Having a pocket device that could translate vast libraries of e-books into Braille would write a whole new chapter in reading for the blind.
(WATCH the video from Arirang TV below) – Photo: DOT Inc
Imagine treating cancer as easily as taking a monthly shot in the arm.
Doctors in Texas have been cleared to move forward with another round of human trials on a “cancer vaccine” that turns a deadly disease into a chronic one that can be more easily treated — allowing patients to live far longer.
It’s a form of immunotherapy that eliminates the need for chemotherapy and other difficult treatments — allowing cancer to be treated like diabetes or hypertension.
“We don’t cure, but we control the disease,” Dr. Maurizio Ghisoli told KTVT News.
The immune system doesn’t recognize cancer cells on its own, so it needs outside help to attack the disease. With this particular type of immunotherapy, doctors create a personal shot for each patient. They take cells from the patient’s tumor, modify them so the immune system can attack the cancer, then re-inject the cells back into the body.
Monthly doses allow the immune system to keep cancer growth in check.
Researchers at Baylor Hospital in Dallas, Texas have been working on the experimental treatment for two decades. They have used it to control a wide range of cancers including throat and ovarian cancer and Ewing’s Sarcoma, a fast-spreading bone cancer that typically targets children, teens, and young adults.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved more extensive human trials on the Baylor treatment and the “cancer vaccine” could be available in four to five years.
It’s 2016 and many people have set resolutions to create a fresh start to the New Year. But sometimes we need help sticking with it.
Scientific research has shown what works best for achieving your goals. For example, did you know that you are more likely to reach a goal if you partner up with someone else? In one study, couples that were part of a 12-month fitness program had a drop out rate of 6% compared to a whopping 43% for people trying to stick to the program on their own.
Check out this info-graphic for a quick perusal of helpful strategies for success.
For more info on building happiness skills through scientifically designed activities and games, visit Happify. (Updated from a post in 2015)
