Inspirational Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Inspirational Media Articles in Major Media
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Jim Estill was growing frustrated. Over the summer of 2015, the business executive from the ... Ontario town of Guelph watched the Syrian refugee crisis unfold. "I didn't think people were doing enough things fast enough," he says. So Estill ... devised a plan. He would put up CA$1.5m (US$1.1m/Ł910,000) of his own money to bring over 50 refugee families to Canada, and co-ordinate a community-wide effort to help settle them into their new life. Canada allows private citizens ... to directly sponsor refugees by providing newcomers with basic material needs. But Estill was looking to make a big impact, quickly. So he brought together 10 different faith-based organisations that were already looking at ways to help those affected by the Syrian civil war. Sara Sayyed remembers the night her husband, president of the Muslim Society of Guelph, came back from that meeting and told her about Estill's plan. "I was completely floored. I said: 'Let's get involved in this.'" In November 2015, the local Guelph paper published an article about the plan. It was translated into Arabic and spread around the Middle East. "People started emailing us directly from Turkey, from Lebanon, from within Syria, saying: 'Can you help us?'" says Sayyed. By December 2016, 47 of 58 families had arrived in Guelph. Many newcomers were having difficulty finding work because they lacked experience or English language skills. So [Estill] launched a program that provides Syrian refugees with jobs ... along with regular English lessons.
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Ninety-two times the Frenchman raced around the velodrome, a curved indoor bicyclist track, at an average speed of 14 mph. That speed would be impressive for just about anyone on two wheels, but it was probably particularly satisfying for Robert Marchand. Mostly because, when he was young, one of his coaches told him to give up the sport. It’s even more impressive when one considers Marchand is 105 years old. As the clock signaled that he’d been riding for one hour, the crowd of hundreds in Le Vélodrome National de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, near Paris, chanted his name, but it’s likely no one wondered whether he had captured a new world record. Of course he had — the category was created by the International Cycling Union specifically for him. And now it has been set: the record for longest official distance ridden in an hour in the newly minted older-than-105 class is 22.5 kilometers (14 miles). “I’m now waiting for a rival,” Marchand told the AP. Still, he said he could have gone faster, if he had not run into a little trouble on the track. “I did not see the sign warning me I had 10 minutes left,” he told the Guardian. “Otherwise I would have gone faster, I would have posted a better time.”
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Nearly five years ago, Charles F. Feeney sat in a cushy armchair in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan, grandchildren’s artwork taped to the walls, and said that by the end of 2016, he was going to hand out the last of a great fortune that he had made. It was a race: Mr. Feeney was then 81, and Atlantic Philanthropies, a collection of private foundations he had started and funded, still had about $1.5 billion left. Writing checks willy-nilly was not Mr. Feeney’s way. Last month, Mr. Feeney and Atlantic completed the sprint and made a final grant, $7 million to Cornell University, to support students doing community service work. He had officially emptied his pockets, meeting his aspiration of “giving while living.” Altogether, he had contributed $8 billion to his philanthropies, which have supported higher education, public health, human rights and scientific research. None of the major American philanthropists have given away a greater proportion of their wealth, and starting in 1982, Mr. Feeney did most of this in complete secrecy, leading Forbes magazine to call him the “James Bond of philanthropy.” For years, Atlantic’s support came with a requirement that the beneficiaries not publicize its involvement. Beyond Mr. Feeney’s reticence about blowing his own horn, “it was also a way to leverage more donations - some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights,” said Christopher G. Oechsli, the president and chief executive officer of Atlantic.
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Solar energy is now cheaper than traditional fossil fuels. Solar and wind is now either the same price or cheaper than new fossil fuel capacity in more than 30 countries, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum. The influential foundation has described the change as a "tipping point" that could make fighting climate change into a profitable form of business for energy companies. But investors and energy firms are still failing to put money into such green solutions despite the fact that they are cheaper than more traditional forms of electricity generation. “Renewable energy has reached a tipping point – it now constitutes the best chance to reverse global warming,” said Michael Drexler, Head of Long Term Investing, Infrastructure and Development at the World Economic Forum. Just ten years ago, generating electricity through solar cost about $600 per MWh, and it cost only $100 to generate the same amount of power through coal and natural gas. But ... today it only costs around $100 the generate the same amount of electricity through solar and $50 through wind. The cheap price of solar and wind energy is already encouraging companies to build more plants to harvest it. The US is adding about 125 solar panels every minute ... and investment in renewables in 2015 rose to $286 billion, up 5 per cent from the year before. Even despite that cheap price ... the worldwide investment is only 25 per cent of the $1 trillion goal set in the landmark Paris climate change accord.
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It started as a dare. Bob Rutherford's friend didn't believe the Saskatoon man could make a cheap knitting machine that worked really, really fast. That's when Rutherford got to work. The now 88-year-old used sewer tubing to put together two super-powered machines. "It could be knitting at 90 stitches a second," he proudly said. And the octogenarian has now finished making 10,000 pairs of socks with the machines for shelters in Saskatoon and across the country. How on earth did he do it? He puts it rather simply: "The wool comes in the door and I knit it." Rutherford started making the socks seven years ago. "When my wife passed away in 2010, I felt the loss that everybody feels and had nothing to do," said Rutherford. "[My son] said to me, 'If you want to help yourself, help somebody else.'" He made the knitting machines years earlier, but had never really put them into action. And so he got to work, knitting every week. He calls the living room operation "Socks by Bob." Rutherford emphasizes the socks aren't only his doing — he also has help of a few friends. The group includes 92-year-old Glynn Sully, 85-year-old George Slater and "youngster" Barney Sullivan. "He's a really young guy, 65 maybe," said Rutherford. "Very good company." Just in the last year, they've made more than 2,000 pairs of socks. It's the connection with the group that keeps Rutherford knitting. "I think everybody has to have this. I think people have to reach out and touch other people. And I can do this by touching the socks," said Rutherford.
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"People think that Bali is a paradise, but if you come inside you see it's a different story," said Ni Nyoman Sri Wahyuni. For 12 years she has been caring for orphans, autistic children and children with Down Syndrome. "Many Balinese believe that these children are cursed, due to bad karma." children with very low IQs are not received by Sekolah Luar Biasa (Special Needs Schools). Such children, many with autism and Down Syndrome, have little to no support. This is what inspired Sri Wahyuni and her husband, I Ketut Sadia, to open the Yayasan Widya Guna school 10 years ago. Today Yayasan Widya Guna provides daily schooling to over 100 students, both disabled and non-disabled. Besides providing English, exercise and art classes to the children, it also teaches organic farming and promotes a healthy diet among students. "We've received lots of information suggesting that poor nutrition is a factor in developing autism," said Sri Wahyuni. The foundation serves meals with lots of vegetables, and tries to not include too many fried foods. Sri Wahyuni says that kids who used to catch colds and the flu rarely fall sick these days. A student with epilepsy, whose parents complained was having three seizures a day, has stopped having seizures completely since he started attending the yayasan. The Yayasan Widya Guna ... also offers English classes for local children attending regular schools.
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Almost all Costa Rica's electricity was produced by renewable energy in 2016. The Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) said that around 98.1 per cent of the country’s electricity came from green sources. These included large hydropower facilities, fed by a myriad of rivers and heavy seasonal rains, geothermal plants, wind turbines, solar panels and biomass plants. The country used carbon-free electricity for more than 250 days last year with a continuous 110-day stretch from 17 June until 6 October. Science and environment journalist Maria Gallucci described the tropical country as "a verdant gem amid a pile of black coal rocks". In comparison, less than 15 per cent of the US electricity supply for January to October 2016 was renewable. Coal and natural gas together made up nearly two-thirds of the US electricity generation over that period and nuclear power provided the remaining 19 per cent. ICE president Carlos Manuel Obregón said he expected renewable power generation to stay “stable” in Costa Rica in 2017. The country, which hosts more than five per cent of the world’s species biodiversity despite a landmass that covers 0.03 per cent of the planet, has recently set up four new wind farms. Costa Rican clean development adviser Dr Monica Araya has said the extent of Costa Rica's renewable electricity generation is a “fantastic achievement".
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An entrepreneur who set up a successful sandwich chain which helps the homeless said he is "honoured" to receive an MBE as he dedicated the award to people "marginalised" from society. Josh Littlejohn, co-founder of Social Bite, receives the honour. The chain he helped found offers "suspended coffee and food", which means customers can pay in advance for a coffee or any item of food from the menu and a local homeless person can go into the shop to claim it. About a quarter of its staff have experienced homelessness. Mr Littlejohn said: "I'm honoured to receive this award in recognition for my work with Social Bite. "I would like to dedicate it to the hundreds of homeless people Social Bite works with in Scotland who are marginalised from society and have no stake in the economic system. "I'm relatively young but I hope to dedicate the rest of my working life to helping people who have been excluded from the system. "By working alongside the amazing Social Bite team - and other charities - I hope I can play my part in eradicating homelessness from Scotland and spread the social enterprise business model further afield." Social Bite also plans to provide a low-cost, supervised and safe living environment for up to 20 homeless people with 10 purpose-built homes in Granton, Edinburgh. Earlier this month, Olympic cycling veteran Sir Chris Hoy and around 300 of the most influential people in Scotland slept rough in Edinburgh's Charlotte Square to raise funds for the project.
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Most pop culture depictions of the future, from “The Hunger Games” to the zombie apocalypse, feature dystopia. Singularity University wants to help people — particularly corporate chiefs, global entrepreneurs, government officials, academics, creative types and nonprofit leaders — envision and create more upbeat prospects. “I have a sense of urgency about the need to tell positive stories about a future of abundance, so we have an alternative,” said CEO Rob Nail. “We’re creating a new lens of how to look at the world and create a long-term future we want to live in.” Singularity isn’t a university in the traditional sense. It combines a think tank, business incubator, worldwide conferences and short-duration on-site education programs. Founded in 2009, Singularity changed from a nonprofit to a benefit corporation, a form of for-profit business, four years ago. As such, it can consider its vision of solving big problems alongside ordinary corporate goals of profit-making. Singularity aims big. Its pitch to applicants to its accelerator and students at its intensive 40-day summer program called Global Solutions is this: Come up with an idea to positively impact the lives of a billion people. Think clean water, renewable energy, health, hunger, poverty. “We get thousands of applicants, and look for people ... who have the mind-set and talent to be a game changer and are dedicated to applying technology to address the world’s biggest problems,” said Brad Templeton ... chairman of computing at Singularity.
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Since the tender age of 7, Will has been focused on feeding the hungry. It all started when he saw a man on a street corner begging for food, and he decided he wanted to do something about it. With the help of his parents – Julie, a teacher, and Bill, a financial adviser – he established the charity Friends Reaching Our Goals, or FROGs. He named the organization himself ... and designed FROGs with a dual purpose: to inspire youths to carry out service work in their communities and to feed those at risk of going hungry. That was October 2010. Since then, he has helped provide more than 500,000 meals to those in need. He raises funds, he plans, he ropes in friends, and more. Tonight he is serving Asian-themed dishes as part of the monthly FROGs Dinner Club, a central event. Each time, Will and his fellow volunteers aim to serve a free, fresh meal with the twist that the recipients be introduced to new foods and healthier options. This go-round, honey-seared chicken is dished up with brown or white rice alongside Vietnamese chicken salad rolls. And edamame. “When I was 7, I was riding home from a Little League baseball game when I saw a man on a street corner who held a sign that said, ‘Need Meal,’ ” Will elaborates. “And it made me sad to realize that there are people in my community who didn’t have enough food to eat. So I started FROGs. Our motto is to have fun while helping others.” Will’s efforts have helped amass $852,000 worth of food items for hunger-fighting charities.
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The history of science is, like so much else, a human history. But history tends to get simplified; a map becomes a single road leading from point to point. It's not surprising that some scientists who contributed invaluably to the field have been kept out of the dominant narrative because they were women. But in the last days of the 19th century and the early days of the 20th, Henrietta Swan Leavitt - one of the many woman "computers" at the Harvard Observatory - used the measurements of variable stars to determine fixed distances across space. And fifty years later, Katherine Johnson - a black woman working at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia when the state was still deeply segregated - would map John Glenn's space flight, and America's trip to the moon. Women are indelible contributors to the field, and two of this year's best histories - Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures, and Dava Sobel's The Glass Universe - are out to prove it. There's deep value to these stories in the here and now. Women fought prejudice (twice over, in the case of Hidden Figures) and did crucial work that shaped our understanding and exploration of the universe. From a glass-plate storage room in the Observatory, Williamina Fleming could look at a far-off star and map it in a sea of numbers; in a segregated Virginia, Katherine Johnson could look at a sea of numbers and map out a path to the Moon. Taken together, these books make a case not just for acknowledging women's contributions to the field, but for the value of science itself.
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A transformation is happening in global energy markets that’s worth noting as 2016 comes to an end: Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity. This has happened in isolated projects in the past. But now unsubsidized solar is beginning to outcompete coal and natural gas on a larger scale, and notably, new solar projects in emerging markets are costing less to build than wind projects. While solar was bound to fall below wind eventually, given its steeper price declines, few predicted it would happen this soon. “Solar investment has gone from nothing ... five years ago to quite a lot,” said Ethan Zindler, head of U.S. policy analysis at BNEF. “A huge part of this story is China, which has been rapidly deploying solar” and helping other countries finance their own projects. The world recently passed a turning point and is adding more capacity for clean energy each year than for coal and natural gas combined. Peak fossil-fuel use for electricity may be reached within the next decade. Thursday’s BNEF report, called Climatescope, ranks and profiles emerging markets for their ability to attract capital for low-carbon energy projects. The top-scoring markets were China, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, and India. For populations still relying on expensive kerosene generators, or who have no electricity at all, and for those living in the dangerous smog of thickly populated cities, the shift to renewables and increasingly to solar can’t come soon enough.
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If you follow the news regularly - even if the stories you see are factual - youre likely to overestimate the amount of violence in the world, underrate the performance of the government, and develop an unduly low opinion of the average American. For every problem you see reported in the news, there are almost always people responding - and some are doing pretty smart things. One encouraging pattern visible across the country is a gradual shift from reflexive punishment, which is usually counterproductive ... to harm reduction and treatment. This theme is explored in Chasing Heroin, a two-hour PBS Frontline documentary ... which illuminates the countrys heroin crisis. The film explains the public policies that shaped the crisis and reports on some alternatives to punishment, including drug courts, and a promising initiative in Seattle, Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, which ... has been shown to markedly reduce criminality among addicts. The shift away from punishment can also be seen in schools, as they reduce the use of suspensions as the go-to discipline option, and turn to restorative justice practices, which have been shown to improve school cultures and improve graduation rates. The shift from punishment to treatment is supported by emerging insights from psychology, neuroscience and epigenetics. The Crisis Within, a four-part series ... explain how such toxic stress harms children, and explore ways that parents, educators and others can protect them.
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In a few days, the water-bound wind turbines off of Rhode Island’s Block Island are expected to generate electricity commercially for the first time, and New Englanders are set to become the first in U.S. history to use electric power generated from an offshore wind turbine. The Block Island Wind Project is the first commercial offshore wind farm ever built in the U.S., and the start of its operation marks the the beginning of a brand new clean energy industry in the United States. Offshore wind is one of America’s largest untapped energy sources. As part of its strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent global warming from exceeding 2°C (3.6°F), the Obama administration unveiled a plan in September to build wind farms off of nearly every U.S. coastline by 2050 - enough turbines to generate zero-carbon electricity for more than 23 million homes. In 2009, the Obama administration began ... leasing large swaths of the East Coast’s continental shelf to offshore wind developers. Since then, federal government lease sales have been held for areas off the coasts of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Delaware. New York is next in line for a lease sale this month. Once it is operational, the success of the Block Island Wind Project will prove that offshore wind power can be done in the U.S., said Steve Pike, CEO of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a publicly funded state agency that conducts offshore wind technology research.
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"Who’s this black guy trying to make friends with the Ku Klux Klan?” A raised eyebrow, a shake of the head. Such were the sentiments of Scott Shepherd, a former Klan grand dragon, when he first saw Daryl Davis, a piano-playing bluesman who travels the nation attempting to dispel racism from those who hate him most. It doesn’t often work, but over the decades Davis, like a man on a quixotic pilgrimage, has collected more than two dozen Klan robes from those who have disavowed white supremacy. His unlikely story unfolds in “Accidental Courtesy,” a documentary by Matt Ornstein that follows Davis on an odd and lively quest to Confederate monuments, Klansmen houses, boogie joints, churches and a hot dog stand. “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” Davis asks in the film, which opens in Los Angeles on Friday. “Throughout my life I have been looking for an answer to that.” The son of a foreign service officer, Davis spent part of his childhood overseas, far from the racism many African Americans learn early. His first encounter with bigotry came when he was a 10-year-old Cub Scout. Bottles and rocks were thrown at him as he marched in a parade. The bewildering incident was the seed of a mission that years later found him ... starting a conversation with Klan Imperial Wizard Roger Kelly. The two became close. When Kelly quit the Klan, he gave Davis his robe. Talking to Klansmen “has worked for me,” said Davis. “I don’t seek to convert them but if they spend time with me, they can’t hate me.”
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Sweden is so good at recycling that, for several years, it has imported rubbish from other countries to keep its recycling plants going. Less than 1 per cent of Swedish household waste was sent to landfill last year or any year since 2011. “We worked on communications for a long time to make people aware not to throw things outdoors so that we can recycle and reuse,” says Anna-Carin Gripwall, director of communications for Avfall Sverige, the Swedish Waste Management’s recycling association. Over time, Sweden has implemented a cohesive national recycling policy so that even though private companies undertake most of the business of importing and burning waste, the energy goes into a national heating network to heat homes through the freezing Swedish winter. “That’s a key reason that we have this district network, so we can make use of the heating from the waste plants. In the southern part of Europe they don’t make use of the heating from the waste, it just goes out the chimney. Here we use it as a substitute for fossil fuel,” Ms Gripwell says. She describes Sweden’s policy of importing waste to recycle from other countries as a temporary situation. “There’s a ban on landfill in EU countries, so instead of paying the fine they send it to us as a service. They should and will build their own plants, to reduce their own waste, as we are working hard to do in Sweden,” Ms Gripwall says.
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Boys should not be circumcised until they are old enough to choose for themselves, doctors in Denmark have said. The Danish Medical Association said it had considered suggesting a legal ban on the procedure for children under the age of 18, because it believed circumcision should be “an informed, personal choice” that young men make for themselves. When parents have their sons circumcised, it robs boys of the ability to make decisions about their own bodies ... the organisation said. Lise Mřller, chair of the Doctors' Association Ethics Board, said it was wrong to deny an individual the right to choose whether or not they wanted to be circumcised. The organisation said that because male circumcision is not without risk it should only be performed on children when there is a documented medical need. The doctors stopped short of calling for an all-out legal ban on the procedure, which is currently allowed but remains relatively rare in Denmark, because it said the move could have too many negative consequences. “We have discussed it thoroughly, also in our ethics committee," Ms Mřller said. "We came to the conclusion that it is difficult to predict the consequences of a ban – both for the involved boys, who could for example face bullying or unauthorised procedures with complications – and for the cultural and religious groups they belong to." The Danish Health and Medicines Authority estimates that somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 circumcisions are performed in Denmark each year.
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Native Americans conducted a forgiveness ceremony with U.S. veterans at the Standing Rock casino, giving the veterans an opportunity to atone for military actions conducted against Natives throughout history. In celebration of Standing Rock protesters victory [towards] halting construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline, Leonard Crow Dog formally forgave Wes Clark Jr., the son of retired U.S. Army general and former supreme commander at NATO, Wesley Clark Sr.. Salon published Clarks apology to the Natives, which read as follows: "Many of us, me particularly, are from the units that have hurt you over the many years. We came. We fought you. We took your land. We signed treaties that we broke. We stole minerals from your sacred hills. We blasted the faces of our presidents onto your sacred mountain. When we took still more land and then we took your children and then we tried to make your language and we tried to eliminate your language that God gave you, and the Creator gave you. We didnt respect you, we polluted your Earth, weve hurt you in so many ways but weve come to say that we are sorry. We are at your service and we beg for your forgiveness." This was a historically symbolic gesture forgiving centuries of oppression against Natives and honoring their partnership in defending the land from the Dakota Access Pipeline. Chief Leonard Crow Dog offered forgiveness and urged for world peace, responding that we do not own the land, the land owns us.
Note: A beautiful, two-minute video shows these U.S. veterans apologizing to Native Americans for stealing and pillaging their land demonstrates how our times are changing. Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
On a summer morning in 2013, Octavian Mihai entered a softly lit room. He swallowed a capsule of psilocybin, an ingredient found in hallucinogenic mushrooms. Then he put on an eye mask and headphones and lay down on a couch. Mr. Mihai, who had just finished treatment for Stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was participating in a study looking at whether the drug can reduce anxiety and depression in cancer patients. Throughout that eight-hour session, a psychiatrist and a social worker ... stayed by his side. The results from that study, and a similar small, controlled trial, were striking. About 80 percent of cancer patients showed clinically significant reductions in both psychological disorders, a response sustained some seven months after the single dose. Side effects were minimal. In both trials, the intensity of the mystical experience described by patients correlated with the degree to which their depression and anxiety decreased. Although cancer patients will not have access to therapeutically administered psilocybin anytime soon, the findings add vigor to applications to expand research in a multicenter trial with hundreds of participants. Psilocybin trials are underway in the United States and Europe for alcoholism, tobacco addiction and treatment-resistant depression. Other hallucinogens are also being studied for clinical application. This week, the Food and Drug Administration approved a large-scale trial investigating MDMA, the illegal party drug better known as Ecstasy, for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Note: See another article in the UK's Independent showing remarkable results from these studies. Learn more about the healing potentials of mind-altering drugs now being explored by the scientific community.
On a recent Friday morning, a group of about 20 homeless guys warmed up in a parking lot across the street from three shelters in East Harlem. In a circle, they did jumping jacks, twisted their torsos and touched their toes. Fifteen minutes later, they huddled up, chanted the Serenity Prayer ... and took off running. Ryan ... began jogging with the group, known as Back on My Feet, seven months ago. Never a runner, he always wondered what the big deal about it was. Ask him today, however, and hell tell you its so natural, almost spiritual. Back on My Feet is a program that uses running to help the homeless get their lives back on track. In addition to connecting participants with housing and jobs, Back on My Feet is founded on the notion that running can change a persons self-image. Early morning exercise, three days a week, provides an outlet for pent-up emotions and starts to change the way someone thinks about hard work. If the concept seems hokey or contrived, the programs numbers show thats not the case. Back on My Feets program has reached 5,200 homeless individuals. More than 1,900 have obtained employment, and 1,300 have moved into independent housing. Waking up so early every morning - whether the thermometers bubbling over or when its frozen solid - instills discipline and responsibility in the participants. Theyre two valuable concepts, but both are hard to teach in the abstract. They need to be lived to be experienced.
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Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.