Movie greats like Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, and Julia Roberts came out on Monday night to celebrate the career of Tom Hanks, who was honored with the prestigious Chaplin Award by The Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York.
Watch vdeo below, or at Clip Syndicate …
Consumer confidence soared in April to its highest level since November, outperforming forecasts and reflecting a growing sense in the public that the economy may have bottomed out and Americans might be prepared to spend more money. The findings released Tuesday offered hope that families could open their wallets after months of austerity.
The school playground in the Israeli Bedouin desert town of Hura is abuzz with excitement as boys and girls get their first taste of cricket in a place as alien to the sport as any imaginable.
The British charity ‘Cricket For Change’ has come to Hura with the ultimate aim of getting kids to enjoy each others’ company, respect each others’ differences and, hopefully, become good at the sport.
(Read the full story from Reuters)
Two of the package food industry’s biggest titans announced massive giveaways last week aimed at combating hunger.
General Mills, through its Hamburger Helper brand, will give up to 3.5 million meals to various food banks. Kellogg Co. is donating an entire day’s cereal production, more than 55 million servings, valued at about $10 million.
Kellogg CEO David MacKay called the gift “unprecedented” in the company’s 103-year history.
Consumers can do their part through Kellogg as well, receiving $5 in coupons for every $5 donation to Feeding America on their new webpage: www.kelloggs.com/feedingamerica.
Beyonce’s ShowYourHelpingHand.com website will soon let consumers enter UPC codes from Hamburger Helper products to trigger a donation to Feeding America.
(Read full article in Advertising Age)
Thanks to hunger advocate Billy Shore (Share Our Strength) for the story tip on Twitter!
Scientists in Southern California are trying to design the next oil, and it may be floating in most oceans and ponds. Researchers say algae may be the next alternative to oil. The AP’s John Mone reports several efforts by companies to get this energy source off the ground (ahh, pond).
Video below may take a moment to load, or view at The News Room…
From the Lower Mississippi River Delta to the North Carolina coast, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will undertake 183 construction projects focused on energy efficiency, habitat restoration and facility improvements at national wildlife refuges across the agency’s Southeast Region, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced yesterday.
The projects, totaling $56.5 million, will create jobs while conserving fish and wildlife resources and treasured landscapes for future generations.
Work will begin in the Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge and the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, on two new visitor centers that will include office space for Service employees, eliminating thousands of dollars in annual rental payments.
Some families saw April food-stamp allotments grow from $176.00 to $200 thanks to the stimulus package. . .
This humble program may deliver the single biggest bang for the stimulus buck, boosting the economy by $1.73 for each dollar spent, according to an analysis last year by Moody’s Economy.com.
And that was just one of the places the money started to flow this month as the vast machinery of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act cranks into gear.
Read this story about a 1 year old baby found alive after spending a night in the woods in Quebec. It’s still pretty cold here. The fact that he survived and was in good condition is, I think, a miracle!
A student who visited a run-down African orphanage was so moved by the children’s plight that she raised the money to buy it.
Amy Lambert, 24, spent eight weeks volunteering at a Tanzania orphanage last summer, where she cared for 150 boys and girls – many of whom had lost one or both parents to AIDS and HIV.
She found children who were starving, dangerously dehydrated and sleeping in dirty beds. The undergraduate at Bath Spa university raised more than £30,000 in just seven months.
(Continue reading in the UK Telegraph)
To help out or read more, visit www.wearecollecting.co.uk
Sections of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have made a “spectacular” recovery from a bleaching event three years ago that devastated the coral, marine scientists say. Abundant corals have reestablished themselves in a single year, and overcome the choking seaweed.
A 17-year-old Colorado Springs student involved in search and rescue was honored Friday for his efforts behind a law that allows emergency crews to train for free in state parks, rather than paying prohibitive fees.
Fear is the greatest obstacle we face. It can stop us cold. Perhaps the greatest fear of all is loss of something dear to our hearts: Loss of a friend or family member; loss of our own self-respect or the respect of others; loss of a job, job offer or prized possession. Whatever fear we face, he have the opportunity to step out of our comfort zone, look it squarely in the eye, and back away from the fear in order to move forward.
My greatest fears have always been rejection and ridicule. Yet, I chose a high visible career path as a talk radio host. As any broadcast personality will tell you, rejection from listeners or viewers and ridicule about what we broadcast is common in the industry. However, I determined that my mission of delivering a message about positive living was greater than my fears.
With the socio-economic climate the world faces today, it is critical to check our fears, attitudes and feelings each day. For some, emotional paralysis will be unavoidable, but if we do our best to remain open and optimistic, these attitudes will help us discover new avenues of happiness and new doors to enter into in our journey through life: “Out with the negative, in with the positive!”
If you believe there are possibilities ahead, you are more positive and open. You expect good things to happen and trigger a self-fulfilling prophesy. Research has shown that we get what we expect to get. In other words, people who are able to take change in stride and “roll with the punches” tend to rewrite endings to match their positive expectations. They view the change as an opportunity, not as a threat..
One of the rewards of working through our fears is that they can become our greatest lessons in life. Years ago, I was at a business holiday party, and met a man who set up roundtable meetings for CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies. I asked him if those top executives had anything in common. He said, “Yes, they’re not afraid to make mistakes. They use their mistakes to learn, and to propel them to make the next decision.”
Each step you take rewrites the ending. You may wander off the path occasionally. You may even stumble. That’s the nature of “pathfinding.” The steps you take are based on the choices you make, and the choices you make are based on the values, beliefs and experiences that define who you are.
Take a moment for yourself and contemplate:
• What old attitude can you replace with a new one?
• Which of your strengths can compensate for a weakness?
• What have you done to “rewrite the ending” of a “mistake” you made?
• Remember a challenge you have overcome because of inner strength that guided you.
Find a solution to help put you on a path to personal success:
• What old attitudes, beliefs and behaviors can you discard as unhelpful to your new value system.
• Aks yourself how you can work through a fearful situation in a positive way.
Patricia Raskin, host of the Positive Living radio show, is a nationally recognized, multi-media radio talk show host. award-winning producer, speaker and author. For the past twenty-five years, she has been hosting and producing positive media programs that have aired on Fox, PBS and NPR affiliates and WTKF, 107.3FM. Her “Positive Living™” show is heard and streamed live on News Talk 630 WPRO, the Citadel Broadcasting affiliate in Providence RI on Sundays at NOON-2PMET and on voiceamerica.com on Mondays 2-3PMET/11AM-noonPT. www.patriciaraskin.com
They tossed pies, served spaghetti and walked miles to raise nickels, dimes and quarters.
It added up to $93,450 — enough to build 11 schools in Kenya.
”Can I just say, oh my gosh,” Marc Kielburger, chief executive director of the Free the Children organization, told the Miami Herald. “I’m speechless.”
Kielburger, who attending a celebration at Piper High School on Thursday, said that when Broward students first started raising money last year, he had hoped for enough to build just one school.
(READ more from NBC – Miami)
Photo courtesy of Sun Star
Earlier this spring, former Maryland center Edwin Williams was being honored at the football team’s postseason banquet. Williams struggled mightily with his grades early on at Maryland, but later was named to the all-ACC academic team in each of his final two years….
After the ceremony, Williams’s mother, Cheron, pulled offensive coordinator James Franklin aside.
“Edwin’s mom said, ‘You came into our home and told our son and me where Edwin would be . . . ‘ ” Franklin said. He paused and looked down at his desk.
“I get emotional talking about it,” he said, before continuing.
” ‘ . . . where Edwin would be five years from now,’ ” Franklin said, his voice quivering. ” ‘And all these things have come true for him.’ ”
(Continue reading in the Washington Post)
A new comprehensive collection of documents covering everyday life in London over more than 400 years is being scanned and made available on the internet, including parish registers, wills, land deeds, workhouse documents and school records.
The digitization project, which is expected to take until 2010 to complete, will enable millions of people in Britain and abroad to trace their roots further back than ever before.
Well over 200,000 people attending the Dallas Fort-Worth area Arts and Jazz Festival this weekend may be in for a ‘kindness surprise.’
Taking a page out of Michael Chase’s playbook from the Kindness Center in Maine, a Kindness Challenge Booth will be set up to urge passers-by to help complete 100 kind acts in 100 minutes.
If you elect to participate, you will choose a card and complete the good deed described right there on the spot. Many kind acts will be as easy as taking a DVD or book that has been donated and giving it to a nearby stranger. But others may be more challenging, such as picking up trash in the surrounding area for 5 minutes or donating 10% of the money you have in your wallet to the local soup kitchen.
The 100-minute challenge starts on Sunday, April 26th at 2:00 PM, but the Kindness Booth will offer a variety of kind deeds throughout the weekend, handing out stickers, flowers, cards, gifts, and more.
Sponsored by The Good Samaritan Society of Lake Forrest Village and hosted by idontstink.com, the Kindness Challenge Booth offers a refreshing way to:
1. be of service to others
2. raise awareness about the powerful effect kindness can have on our outlook
“We are extremely excited to be a part of this extraordinary event. We pride ourselves in helping others, but this challenge is to get others to do kind deeds also.” says Shannon Ratliff, Staff Development Coordinator at The Good Samaritan Society Lake Forest Village.
“I am truly honored to be in the company of so many outstanding volunteers for this event,” says Bill King of idontstink.com, organizer for the booth. “Our goal is to inspire others to take a new look at how they live their lives and to embrace the concept of doing kind deeds.”
When you attend the Arts & Jazz Festival April 24-26, be sure to stop by booth 18G and be challenged to give and receive kindness.
Today is “Willis Conover Day” by congressional proclamation honoring the legendary Voice of America jazz program host who introduced America’s musicians to listeners behind the Iron Curtain and around the world. Conover will be honored during the “Big Band Jam” on the National Mall.
“People used to say that Willis Conover single-handedly felled the Iron Curtain,” said Harry Schnipper, major organizer of the Jam. The jam helps educate students about America’s jazz heritage and brings jazz bands to Washington, D.C.
The congressional resolution, sponsored by Rep. John B. Larson, D-Conn., recognizes VOA and Conover for their “joint contribution toward spreading the language of jazz and American cultural diplomacy around the world over a span of more than 35 years.”
Six campaigners who have fought governments and industry to protect the planet won prestigious Goldman Environmental Prizes on Sunday. The awards, often referred to as the Nobel Prizes of the environmental world, went to people in six continents who took on everything from toxic chemical dumps in the former Soviet Union to ship-breaking in Asia, reports Reuters.
The 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize recipients include Maria Gunnoe, a born-and-bred West Virginian who faced death threats for her outspoken activism to stop the coal industry’s plunder of Appalachia via mountain top removal and valley fills.
Another recipient, Marc Ona, a wheelchair-bound civil society leader from the West African country of Gabon, faced arrest, imprisonment and public character assaults for his unyielding campaign to stop a destructive mining concession in a protected national park.
Other recipients include a Russian scientist connecting NGOs across Eastern Europe and the Caucasus to identify and safely remove toxic chemical stockpiles; two Saramaka leaders, members of a Maroon community in Suriname founded by freed African slaves in the 1700s, whose legal struggle to protect their tribal land rights led to a binding decision for all indigenous and tribal peoples in the Americas; Bangladesh’s leading environmental attorney, whose legal advocacy led to tighter regulations on the environmentally-devastating and exploitative ship breaking industry; and an Indonesian woman developing community-based waste management systems to stem her island nation’s overwhelming waste infrastructure problems.
The Goldman Environmental Prize, now in its 20th year, is awarded annually to grassroots environmental heroes from each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions and is the largest award of its kind with an individual cash prize of $150,000.
A baseball first in Bayonne, New Jersey: A 12-year-old, Mackenzie Brown, is the first girl in Bayonne Little League history to throw a perfect game. She retired all 18 boys she faced on Tuesday.
She’ll get to throw out the first pitch at Citi Field on Saturday when the New York Mets host the Washington Nationals.
Read or watch the story at MSNBC, or watch the video below…
National libraries and the U.N. put some of humanity’s earliest written works and illustrations on the Web this week at WDL.org.
From ancient Chinese oracle bones to the first European map of the New World, the World Digital Library is an enormous online collection of digital reproductions of original documents from libraries the world over.
The project is sponsored by UNESCO and brings together materials from 26 partner institutions in 19 countries and was the brain-child of US Librarian of Congress, James Billington.
The online descriptions are geared to the average person or casually curious to bring understanding of this treasure trove to all corners of the globe.
Watch both Videos below, one from AP , and another good one from AFP.
