Inspirational Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Inspirational Media Articles in Major Media
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.
CAIRO — People here are not afraid anymore — and it just may be that a woman helped break that barrier of fear. Asmaa Mahfouz was celebrating her 26th birthday on Tuesday among tens of thousands of Egyptians as they took to the streets, parting with old fears in a bid to end President Hosni Mubarak’s three decades of authoritarian, single-party rule. “As long as you say there is no hope, then there will be no hope, but if you go down and take a stance, then there will be hope.” That was what Ms. Mahfouz had to say in a video she posted online more than two weeks ago. She spoke straight to the camera and held a sign saying she would go out and protest to try to bring down Mr. Mubarak’s regime. It was a woman who dared put a face to the message, unfazed by the possibility of arrest for her defiance. “Do not be afraid,” she said. To her surprise, dozens of other people picked up on the spirit of her message and started to post their own pictures, holding similar signs to their chests that declared their intent to take to the streets. Ms. Mahfouz is one of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement, a group of young, Internet-savvy activists who have been credited with a leading role in organizing the mass protests. She uses Facebook and Twitter as convenient methods for organizing and disseminating messages but finds that talking to people face to face is the best way to motivate them. Although it is still overwhelmingly men demonstrating, there is a new quality to the way Egyptians walk the streets now. “Everyone used to say there is no hope, that no one will turn up on the street, that the people are passive,” Ms. Mahfouz said. “But the barrier of fear was broken!”
Note: Watch this video and learn how without this one woman, Mubarak might still be in power. One person can make a huge difference. For powerful and inspiring information on the military/industrial complex and what we can do to make a difference, click here.
Turning grandmothers into solar engineers is one of Sanjit "Bunker" Roy's favorite jobs. Roy is the social entrepreneur and founder of the Barefoot College and has been championing a bottom-up approach to education and empowering rural poor since 1972. It is now a global enterprise with roots in India. Roy recruits women from around the world to install and maintain solar lighting and power in their home villages. The United Nations estimates that around 1.5 billion people still live without electricity. "The way to go about this is not a centralized grid system, which brings in power from hundreds of miles away," he says. "It is to bring in basic light right down to the level of basic household wherein they take ownership and control over that technology." Women are the focus for the solar power projects that the Barefoot College runs because men "were very untrainable," says Roy. "(Men) were restless, compulsively mobile, and they all want a certificate and the moment you give them a certificate they leave the village and go to the cities looking for jobs. So why not invest in women, older women, mature women, gutsy women who have roots in the village and train them." Coming from countries across the world, the women are trained for six months before returning home. Many of the women have previously never left their villages before.
On a visit to Japan, Wangari Maathai learned the story of the hummingbird and the forest fire. While the other animals run in fear or hang their heads in despair, the hummingbird flies above the fire time and again, releasing a few drops of water from its tiny beak. "Why do you bother?" the other animals shout at the hummingbird. "I'm doing the best that I can," the hummingbird replies. "It's such a beautiful story," Ms. Maathai says, thinking of the immensity of the world's environmental problems. "There is always something we can do with our little beak like the little hummingbird." In 2004 Maathai was honored with a Nobel Peace Prize for her work founding the Green Belt Movement, which enlists villagers, and especially women, to improve their local environment. Since then, she's concluded that people's values are what motivate them. If the values are good ones, good actions will follow. Hence it's importance for people to tap their spiritual traditions for guidance in caring for the environment, she says. "If you don't have good values, you'll embrace vices," she says. And if we give in to the vices, "We destroy ourselves. We destroy the environment. If we can embrace [good] values, we also heal ourselves. And in the process we heal the environment." That's the message of her new book, Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World.
Amy Stokes uses the internet to connect South African teens affected by HIV/AIDS and poverty with volunteer mentors from around the world. Stokes is the founder of Infinite Family and spoke with CNN about the importance of her group's efforts in South Africa -- where nearly two million children have been orphaned by AIDS. CNN: How does HIV/AIDS affect a South African child? Amy Stokes: They will talk about being very happy as children and growing up with two parents until they were grade school level. And then they'll lose one of their parents. They will move where they can be in a community that helps support them and then they'll lose the other parent. Then they're moved into a home where it's an auntie running the house -- and they'll lose that aunt. And then they go to live with the gogo -- or a grandmother -- and before long, they're living with 10 other children in the same 20 square foot space. That gogo is spending all of her time just trying to feed everybody, much less being able to help them prepare for their future. CNN: How widespread is the problem? Stokes: Many of these communities have lost up to 40 percent of the young adults [from HIV/AIDS]. So the children ... are losing, not only love and nurturing, but ... the education of having a parent attend to them. They lack access to everything that would teach them what is needed to be successful. However, they are the most hopeful children you will ever meet. They are resilient, resourceful; they are joyful; they are very ambitious.
Note: Want to get involved in this life-changing program? Check out the Infinite Family website at http://www.infinitefamily.org and see how to help.
Bhutan has pioneered the use of Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a measure of progress, instead of the more commonly used GNP. GNH measures not only economic activity, but also cultural, ecological, and spiritual well-being. In September 2010, Bhutanese Prime Minister Jigmi Y. Thinley visited the United States to promote GNH education and economic theory. Prakash: What difference has it made to have GNH as your yardstick rather than gross domestic product? Thinley: First, we are promoting sustainable and equitable socioeconomic development which can be measured to a larger extent through conventional metrics. Second is the conservation of a fragile ecology, [using] indicators of achievement, [such] as the way the [vegetation] cover in my country has expanded over the last 25 years from below 60 to over 72 percent. The third strategy is promotion of culture, which includes preservation of the various aspects of our culture that continue to be relevant and supportive of Bhutan’s purpose as a human civilization. No Bhutanese should suffer a sense of insecurity arising from loss of their cultural identity, language, and so on, under the onslaught of modernization. Then there is the fourth strategy—good governance—on which the other three strategies or indicators depend. We know that democracy is the best form of governance.
Somalia has been at war with itself for 20 years. The health care system, like much of the country, has been demolished. There are very few functioning hospitals left. But for decades — as the government imploded, warlords took over, more warlords came and an Islamist insurgency swept across Somalia — Dr. [Hawa] Abdi has persevered, offering a refuge for thousands of families driven from their homes by relentless street battles. In a nation where the government controls only a few blocks in this war-torn capital, Dr. Abdi and her daughters, who are also doctors, are essentially running a small, desperate city on their own. But that is not enough, in her estimation. So, on separate patches of land she owns, she is organizing families to run farms and has bought a small fleet of fishing boats to help feed the camp. Her stubborn commitment has earned her recognition worldwide. Eliza Griswold, who wrote about the compound in her book The Tenth Parallel, said, “Mostly out of sheer moxie, Dr. Hawa and her daughters have built a city of healing within the war’s brutal chaos.” Dr. Abdi’s daughter Amina, who first learned to practice medicine trudging behind her mother during visits to the bush, said her mother needed to rest. “But she has never rested in 20 years,” Amina laughed.
Parents want their kids and teens to care about others. The good news is that children "are sort of hard-wired" to want to help others, says Michael Ungar, author of "The We Generation: Raising Socially Responsible Kids." While adults do wonderful things to help others, even more amazing is the number of children and teens who are "making a difference". Danielle Gram spent her childhood in Maryland in the years following the 9/11 attacks. "I really didn't understand why people from different cultures wanted to kill each other," says Ms. Gram, now 21 years old and a senior at Harvard University. In 2006, together with Jill McManigal ... Gram, then 16, founded Kids for Peace, a nonprofit, child-led group that inspires kids to work together toward a more peaceful world. Today Kids for Peace has more than 75 chapters. In August, its Great Kindness Challenge, where children try to see how many acts of kindness they can perform in a single day, drew thousands of participants in 50 countries. In November, she was named a winner of the World of Children award. "The passion to create a less violent world has really followed me throughout my life," Gram says. But a family tragedy last year brought it closer to home. Her only brother was murdered while on vacation. "It's certainly been a struggle. But every single one of my immediate family members has a deeper conviction that nonviolence is the way to respond." After graduation next spring, Gram hopes to work on peace issues in Bangladesh or at a refugee camp in Africa. Either way, she'll carry on with Kids for Peace, too.
Note: For a great collection of other inspiring news articles, click here.
William Swing, head of the Episcopal Church in California for 27 years - he retired in 2006 - is hardly letting up. His latest endeavor is nothing less than uniting the religions of the world. "For this, I have been called the Antichrist, New Age, nuts and an apostate," Swing said with a smile in his office in the Presidio of San Francisco. United Religions Initiative, marking its 10th anniversary this year, is in 78 countries, bringing together Christians and Jews, Hindus and Muslims, missionaries and animists, and Mormons and Mennonites. The organization has taken orphans off the streets of Pakistan, brokered peace talks in northern Uganda and integrated child soldiers back into their villages, and drawn Palestinian and Jewish women together in the Middle East. The idea for United Religions Initiative came about in 1993, when Swing was asked to host at Grace Cathedral the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. "I said, 'Sure,' and went to bed that night thinking the nations of the world have met every day for 50 years, yet the religions of the world have not spoken. So I figured if there is a United Nations, there has to be a United Religions." He and his wife set out in 1996 on a global tour to meet religious leaders of the world, including the Dalai Lama at his palace in India. It took an additional four years of planning, debating and writing the organization's charter for United Religions to be founded.
Studies at UC Berkeley show that ... generosity for many is driven by a sincere desire to benefit others, said Robb Willer, a UC Berkeley sociologist who researches the ways individuals overcome selfishness to contribute to the social good. He has found that people have varying levels of altruism, depending on such things as their personality, parental influences and experience. "Volunteering your time and giving money to charity tends to make people happier than spending money on themselves," Willer said. But for others, generosity pays. "It makes sense to be generous from a self-interested perspective," said Willer, who studies how people behave in groups. "If you're generous, you receive more respect, you have more influence and people cooperate with you more." Experiments Willer has conducted in five countries show that giving can be contagious. One of Willer's studies focused on users of the website freecycle.org, an online gift-giving community. Freecycle began in 2003 as an e-mail group in Tucson committed to reusing materials that would otherwise end up in landfills. Its only rule was that items be given without reciprocity or compensation. Freecycle has since grown to have more than 7 million members in 85 countries. The feeling of gratitude has driven the success of Freecycle, Willer found. "Giving in this community follows a pattern of contagious generosity, where if you received a gift from somebody else in the world, then you become more likely to give to somebody else in turn," he said.
Jessica Jamil would like to thank all the people who helped raise her - from the probation officers to the social workers, Secret Santas and the charities, including Season of Sharing. Because living with her real family nearly killed her. When she was 13, her father raped her, stabbed her in the head and neck 32 times, and then left her for dead. Soon afterward, Jamil's mother abandoned her. "She checked out mentally," Jamil said. "I haven't talked to her since." Now 30, the single mother from San Mateo is [a] full-time working mom and student ... raising her 12-year-old daughter, Deja Sullivan. "I'm doing the opposite of how I was raised," Jamil said. "I just like knowing I'll have someone there for me whatever happens, and I'm there for her in any way she needs." Since her daughter's birth, Jamil has been assembling a team of life helpers. She went back to school to earn a certificate as a registered addiction specialist, and accepted $150 from the Pacifica Resource Center to pay for classes. She found a "grandma" for Deja, a friend's mother who cares for the girl when Jamil has to work. She's now going to the College of San Mateo at night to earn her associate in arts degree so she can one day become a probation officer and work with troubled kids. She works full time with autistic infants and toddlers at the Stepping Stones Center in San Mateo. "A lot of them don't have words, or they have sensory issues, so we just work with them modeling language and behavior," she said.
Photons play an important role in the basic functioning of cells. In fact, it looks very much as if many cells use light to communicate. There’s ... evidence that bacteria, plants and even kidney cells communicate in this way. Various groups have even shown that rats brains are literally alight thanks to the photons produced by neurons as they work, [and] evidence is beginning to emerge that light may well play an important role in neuronal function. For example, earlier this year, one group showed that spinal neurons in rats can actually conduct light. Today, Majid Rahnama at Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman in Iran and a group of pals, suggest how this might work. Rhanama and co hypothesise that microtubules can act as wave guides, channeling light from one part of a cell to another. Microtubules are the internal scaffolding inside cells, providing structural support but also creating highways along which molecular machines transport freight around the cell. They’re extraordinary things. Could it be that they also work like optical fibres? Maybe. They go on to suggest that the light channelled by microtubules can help to co-ordinate activities in different parts of the brain. Electrical activity in the brain is synchronised over distances that cannot be easily explained. Electrical signals travel too slowly to do this job, so something else must be at work. It’s a big jump to assume that photons do this job. But science is built on leaps of imagination like this.
Note: Explore a great article taking this further to suggest that these biophotons play a key role in consciousness and the expansion of consciousness.
The tiny Vatican City is now by far the world's most environmentally friendly state following the installation of giant solar power panels, the Vatican's official daily said. "The Vatican has reached a small record in solar energy power production per capita: 200 watts at peak times ... per inhabitant, compared to 80 in Germany, the world leader in this field," Osservatore Romano said. The Vatican City is the least populated sovereign state in the world, with a population of only around 800 people. Osservatore Romano said that the panels installed on the Paul VI conference hall two years ago had saved the Vatican 89.84 tons of oil equivalent. Pope Benedict XVI has been dubbed the "green pope" by the Italian media for his strong emphasis on defence of the environment. Earlier this month Vatican officials said they were thinking of using an electric-powered vehicle to replace the iconic popemobile.
A portly, bearded, 74-year-old hippie clown, born Hugh Nanton Romney but better known as Wavy Gravy, he has been sending ripples of good will that have gently lapped around the fringes of American culture for more than 50 years. The subject of Michelle Esrick’s doting documentary portrait, “Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie,” he is first seen practicing his morning prayers at his home in the Berkeley branch of the rural California commune known as the Hog Farm. “May all beings have shelter; may all beings have food,” he intones before an altar crowded with iconography, both holy and comical. “Bless this day as it transpires and help me be the best Wavy Gravy I can muster.” Given his nickname by B. B. King at the Texas International Pop Festival in 1969, Wavy Gravy, who physically resembles an older, shaggier Robin Williams, is the real thing: an authentic unreconstructed hippie idealist living the communal life, doing good works and advocating peace, love, and laughter, in the guise of a clown. The movie looks back to his roots as a Greenwich Village poet, traveling monologuist and, among numerous projects, organizer of the Phantom Cabaret with Tiny Tim and Moondog. Along the way he forged connections with everyone who was anyone in the 1960s counterculture, including Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead. The person who emerges is a man who has long transcended rancorous political debate by embodying a holy fool. The Hog Farm became a touring hippie caravan invited to provide security at the first Woodstock festival, where the group ran a free kitchen that provided breakfast for thousands.
Note: For an engaging interview with this inspiring man, click here. For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.
Each fall, Marian Diamond walks into UC Berkeley's Wheeler Auditorium holding a round hatbox. What happens next has been watched nearly a half-million times on the university's YouTube channel, where Diamond's introductory anatomy lecture is the most viewed video. Diamond's discoveries in neuroscience have captured international attention and revolutionized how scientists view the brain's potential to develop at any age. Diamond became one of only a few researchers to analyze slices of Einstein's cortex. She found that Einstein had twice as many glial cells as normal males, a 1985 discovery that caused an international sensation. Scientists previously believed neurons were responsible for thinking and glial cells were support cells. Researchers now believe that glial cells play a critical role in brain development, learning, memory, aging and disease. Diamond has spent decades in the laboratory researching how environmental factors can alter the anatomy of the brain. She found that rats living in cages with stimulating objects and challenging activities developed dramatically thicker cerebral cortices than rats living without such stimulation. "I think scientifically she is one of the key people who opened up the field of thought that the brain is malleable in response to environmental exposure," said Dr. Robert Knight, director of UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. "Now that work is all the rage." Diamond found another secret to successful aging a decade ago when she established a link between the brain and the immune system.
Before Alex Taguchi proposed to high school flame Jenny Lee, the 26-year-old decided to liquidate about $11,000 in credit card debt, provided he could find a payment plan affordable on his salary as a software support specialist. His bank offered him a debt consolidation loan at 16.5 percent, but the Mountain View man decided to get a quote from a new online financial service that matches borrowers with lenders to give each better deals than are otherwise generally available. Today Taguchi is paying $380 a month on a three-year, 13.88 percent note issued through Lending Club.com, one of two Bay Area firms pioneering a new industry called peer-to-peer lending. The other is Prosper.com. Lending Club of Redwood City and Prosper of San Francisco have figured out how to perform [the] two-fisted function, of taking money in the one hand and lending it with the other, in a way that allows aspiring borrowers to specify how much they want, and for what purpose, and also gives them an overall risk profile - comparable, say, to a search engine ranking. These two online lending rivals then give potential investors the option to fund some of these loans at fixed rates and fixed terms - and interest levels designed to compete with bonds, stocks and other financial instruments.
Note: This exciting development may eventually change the face of banking, allowing us to lend to and borrow from each other directly without the need of intermediary bankers.
A new study says the level of armed conflict in Muslim countries is far lower than two decades ago, with support for ... radical Islamist groups waning as locals reject extremism and the killing of other Muslims. The report, released ... by the Canadian Human Security Research Project ... maintains the decrease occurred even though four of the world's five deadliest recent conflicts raged in predominantly Muslim Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Somalia. Report director Andrew Mack says armed conflict in Muslim nations has waned partly because Cold War proxy battles such as the Afghanistan-Soviet Union conflict have ended and independence wars have been resolved.
A Canadian couple who won $10.9m (Ł6.7m) in lottery winnings in July say they have given away $10.2m of the prize to groups in their community. Allen and Violet Large said they were plain country folks who needed no more than "what we've got". The two said they had donated about 98% of the cash after helping their family. The elderly pair gave the money to churches, fire departments, cemeteries, the Red Cross and hospitals, where Ms Large has undergone cancer treatment. "We haven't bought one thing. That's because there is nothing that we need," Mr Large, 75, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Mr Large, a retired welder from Canada's Nova Scotia province, added that he and his wife were quite content with their 147-year-old home and everything else they already owned. "You can't buy happiness," he said.
Note: Considering that the vast majority of people believe they don't have enough money, if you feel you have enough, you can consider yourself one of the richest people in the world, no matter how much is in your bank account. Think about this, and ask yourself how much is enough?
It would take an unusual man to decide, in a split second after witnessing a car crash, to crawl into the Subaru that had erupted into flames 8 feet high to try to save a little girl and her dad. Early Thursday evening in Ballard, that is what Kenny Johnson did. He remembers talking to himself as he went into the Subaru: "Oh, my God, this car is gonna blow up and I'm going to be in it. Well, if does blow up, I guess I'm going straight to heaven because I'm trying to save that little girl." He did save the 3-year-old, Anna Kotowicz, who suffered a broken arm and some bruising. Her dad, Andy Kotowicz, 37, who had just picked up his daughter at day care, died at Harborview Medical Center three days later. Amid the crackling and popping of the car on fire, Johnson says he heard the cries of the 3-year-old, "a beautiful princess with blonde hair and blue eyes. I go to the passenger side. I don't remember this, but people afterward told me that when I couldn't open the door, I ripped it off the hinges. I jump into the car. For a few seconds, it's like there is no sound, no smell, everything is in slow motion. I can't explain it any other way." Days passed, and Johnson went back to his routine. That is, until Tuesday morning around 6, he says. "Then there is this man standing right by the bed. He says he needs help with a few things. He says he wants me to give a message to his wife and to his daughter. He also tells me to talk to the people at Sub Pop [his workplace], he wants to let them know not to be mad at the driver that caused the accident. That's his message." Johnson says that later that day, he went to the Sub Pop website, and there it was, a memorial photo of the man who had stood by his bed: Kotowicz.
At least 15 million American adults say they have had a near-death experience, according to a 1997 survey -— and the number is thought to be rising with increasingly sophisticated resuscitation techniques. In addition to floating above their bodies, people often describe moving down a dark tunnel toward a bright light, feeling intense peace and joy, reviewing life events and seeing long-deceased relatives—only to be told that it's not time yet and land abruptly back in an ailing body. "There are always skeptics, but there are millions of 'experiencers' who know what happened to them, and they don't care what anybody else says," says Diane Corcoran, president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, a nonprofit group in Durham, N.C. The organization publishes the Journal of Near-Death Studies and maintains support groups in 47 states. In his new book, Evidence of the Afterlife, Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist in Louisiana, analyzes 613 cases reported on the website of his Near Death Research Foundation and concludes there is only one plausible explanation: "that people have survived death and traveled to another [mode of existence]." "The self, the soul, the psyche — throughout history, we've never managed to figure out what it is and how it relates to the body," [said Sam Parnia, a critical-care physician]. "This is a very important for science and fascinating for humankind."
Note: For two of the most amazing near-death experiences ever told, click here and here.
It’s striking that the most innovative activists aren’t necessarily the ones with the most resources, or the best tools. Maggie Doyne epitomizes this truth, for she began her philanthropic work as an 19-year-old financed by her baby-sitting savings. Yet she has somehow figured out how to run a sophisticated aid project in a remote area of Nepal. She took a “gap year” after high-school graduation and ended up in northern India, working with needy children. “The first little girl I met was Hema,” Doyne remembers. Then 6 or 7 years old (few children know their precise age), Hema spent her time breaking rocks and scavenging garbage and had no chance to go to school. Doyne, who decided to take Hema under her wing and pay for her education: “I knew I couldn’t do anything about a million orphans, but what if I started with this girl?” So she took Hema to school and paid $7 for the girl’s school fees and another $8 for a uniform so that she could enter kindergarten. “It became addictive,” Doyne said. “I said, if I can help one girl, why not 5? Why not 10? And along with scholarships, they needed the most basic things: food, shelter, clothing.” Doyne ... telephoned her parents with a strange and urgent request: Can you wire me the money in my savings account? Doyne returned to New Jersey and began to take odd jobs and proselytize for her shelter. People in her hometown thought that she was nuts, but in a benign way — and they wrote checks. After a few months, when Doyne had raised $25,000, she moved back to Nepal to oversee construction of the shelter, called the Kopila Valley Children’s Home.
Note: For a beautiful slide show of Maggie's work, click here. For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.
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.