Inspirational Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Inspirational Media Articles in Major Media

Below are highly engaging excerpts of key inspirational articles reported in the mainstream media. Links are provided to the original articles on their major media websites. If any link fails to function, read this webpage. These inspirational articles are listed by article date. You can also explore the articles listed by order of importance or by date posted. Enjoy the inspiring articles!

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At least $1.7bn of funding will be given directly to indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) in recognition of their key role in protecting the planet's lands and forests, it will be announced at Cop26 today. The governments of the UK, US, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands are leading the $1.7bn (Ł1.25bn) funding pledge, which is being announced as part of ambitious global efforts to reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030, with campaigners cautiously hopeful that this conference of the parties (Cop) could be the first to properly champion indigenous peoples' rights. Tuntiak Katan, a leader of Ecuador's indigenous Shuar people who serves as general coordinator of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, said: "We are happy with the financing announcement, but we will be watching for concrete measures that will reveal whether the intent is to transform a system that has directed less than 1% of climate funding to indigenous and local communities. What matters is what happens next." Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said the aim was to give IPLCs more of a voice in policymaking and discourse. It is hoped more funding will follow. Walker said: "It's a first step, it's a down payment." The money will support IPLCs' capacity to govern themselves collectively, assist with mapping and registration work, back national land reform and help resolve conflict over territories. It will continue until 2025.

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After more than a year of lockdowns, with limited access to nature, Magdalena Begh was delighted when her six-year-old daughter came home from forest school and informed her she had found three rat skeletons. Since Alia and her sister Hana, nine, started going to the Urban Outdoors Adventures in Nature after-school club in north London in June, they have used clay, learned about insects and made campfires, marmalade and bows and arrows. They are part of a wave of children across the UK who have joined forest schools since the start of the pandemic. Of more than 200 forest schools surveyed by the Forest School Association (FSA), about two-thirds said demand for their services had increased since March 2020. Among the reasons cited were increased awareness of the benefits of the outdoors, especially in relation to stress and anxiety, Covid safety, and dissatisfaction with the school syllabus after months of pandemic homeschooling. Forest schools, which centre around unstructured play, exploration and intrinsic motivation, arrived in the UK in 1993. Inspired by the outdoors culture – or friluftsliv – of Scandinavia, sessions are usually held either entirely or mostly outdoors and are intended to supplement, rather than replace, traditional education. State schools are increasingly putting on forest school sessions for pupils within the school day because they are considered to be beneficial to mental and physical health, behaviour and academic attainment – as well as being relatively "Covid-proof".

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President Biden and the other national leaders gathered for the Group of 20 summit formally endorsed a new global minimum tax on Saturday, capping months of negotiations over the groundbreaking tax accord. The new global minimum tax of 15 percent aims to reverse the decades-long decline in tax rates on corporations across the world, a trend experts say has deprived governments of revenue to fund social spending programs. The deal is a key achievement for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who made an international floor on corporate taxes among the top priorities of her tenure and pushed forcefully for swift action on a deal. Nearly 140 countries representing more than 90 percent of total global economic output have endorsed the deal. The minimum tax will be coupled with a broader change to global taxation intended to prevent countries and companies from undercutting the new floor. Under the pact, corporations trying to evade taxation by shifting profits to low-tax countries will face a "top-up" tax, which would require them to pay the difference between the tax haven's tax rate and the 15 percent minimum tax rate of the companies where they are headquartered. Supporters of the deal are also optimistic companies will not move to relocate their headquarters abroad, in part because so much of the world has committed to the new minimum. Treasury officials have said new "enforcement provisions" will impose tax penalties based in countries refusing to join the deal.

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For eight-year-old Toby, who is deaf, watching films or TV on streaming platforms can sometimes be a bit pointless - because so many of them don't have sign language versions. "We have captions but they don't really do anything for him because it goes quite fast. He would just watch and not get much from it," his dad Jarod Mills [said]. But now, Toby has some help thanks to an app developed by a 17-year-old A-level student. Mariella Satow, who has dual UK-US citizenship, lives in the UK but has been stuck in New York since summer 2020 because of Covid travel restrictions. In that do-something-new phase of lockdown, Mariella created a signing app called SignUp. She got the idea when she was teaching herself American Sign Language (ASL) - one of hundreds of sign languages used across the world. Mariella wanted to watch TV shows to help her learn, so was disappointed to discover how few had signed versions. It's taken a year for Mariella to develop the technology, with lots of help from ASL teachers and the deaf community. The app is available in the US as a Google Chrome extension - with an interpreter appearing in a box once the film starts playing. It only works on Disney Plus films at the moment, because that's where Mariella thought she could help the most children. Jarod, who works in Kentucky at a school for deaf children, says it was "exciting" watching Toby use Mariella's invention. "The app creates a level playing field," he says. "Kids are getting that understanding and information like any hearing child does."

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Last year, on the roof of a parking lot at Google's headquarters, engineers from X–Alphabet's "moonshot factory"–set up a panel to begin its first tests. The design, called an atmospheric water harvester, pulls in outside air, then uses fans and heat from sunlight to create condensation, producing clean drinking water drip by drip. In a new paper published today in Nature, the team calculates how much this type of device could potentially help give more people access to water that's safe to drink. Globally, as many as one in three people still drink unsafe water that can spread diseases. The study found that 1 billion people who currently don't have safe drinking water live in places where the device would function well. Because larger water infrastructure projects, like desalination plants, take many years to plan and build, the small devices could help fill the gap in the meantime. "This can leapfrog a lot of that and go directly to the source with a small device that's solar powered," says Jackson Lord, lead author of the paper. Alphabet ... wanted to be able to produce water at a cost of just one cent per liter. The team saw a path to reach 10 cents per liter, but not as low as one cent–so X decided to stop working on the project. But because the design could have a meaningful impact even at 10 cents, it's now opening up its data, prototypes, software, and hardware documentation ... so anyone can use the intellectual property and keep moving the work forward.

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Merck has granted a royalty-free license for its promising Covid-19 pill to a United Nations-backed nonprofit in a deal that would allow the drug to be manufactured and sold cheaply in the poorest nations, where vaccines for the coronavirus are in devastatingly short supply. The agreement with the Medicines Patent Pool, an organization that works to make medical treatment and technologies globally accessible, will allow companies in 105 countries, mostly in Africa and Asia, to sublicense the formulation for the antiviral pill, called molnupiravir, and begin making it. Merck reported this month that the drug halved the rate of hospitalizations and deaths in high-risk Covid patients who took it soon after infection in a large clinical trial. Affluent nations, including the United States, have rushed to negotiate deals to buy the drug, tying up large portions of the supply even before it has been approved by regulators and raising concerns that poor countries could be shut out of access to the medicine, much as they have been for vaccines. Generic drug makers in developing countries are expected to market the drug for as little as $20 per treatment (a 5-day course), compared to the $712 per course that the U.S. government has agreed to pay for its initial purchase. "The Merck license is a very good and meaningful protection for people living in countries where more than half of the world's population lives," said James Love, who leads Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit research organization.

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If anyone has earned a coffee break, it's 63-year-old Mike Mason of Midlothian, Virginia. He has served his country for decades – first as a captain in the Marines and later as the No. 4 man at the FBI. Mason left the bureau in 2007 and went to work as an executive at a Fortune 500 company, and then retired. But Mason said retirement did not sit well with him. [Yet] if he was going to start a new chapter, he knew it would have to be something really important. The choice was clear: He became a school bus driver. "When I gave them my resume, I actually got called by a very senior person in the county and he said, 'Just checking, why do you want to be a bus driver?' And I told him," Mason said. Mason had heard the Chesterfield County Public School District was short 125 drivers. It's part of a national crisis, with more than half of school districts in the U.S. reporting "severe" driver shortages. So Mason stepped up. "This is important work," he said, adding that he believes the work is just as important as what he was doing at the FBI. "I think in our society we need to get next to the idea that there are no unimportant jobs. I mean, what could be more important than the attention we pay to our education system?" As for the salary, Mason said he has already donated all of what he expects to make this year. But, of course, the much bigger gift is far less tangible. Mason had climbed to the highest level, but by ... beginning a completely new career in a time of need, he is demonstrating the greatest leadership of all.

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City council member ÉlĂ©onore Laloux barely fills out her desk chair but her persona and vision outsize any of the Arras giants. "I'm a very committed and dynamic person, and I like to be out working with people," says Ms. Laloux. She's become a household name in Arras and regularly receives congratulations from locals for her dedication to her work. Ms. Laloux is the first and so far only person with Down syndrome to be elected to public office in France. Last year, she was put in charge of inclusion and happiness in Arras, bringing an effervescent energy to city decisions. Alongside Mayor FrĂ©dĂ©ric Leturque, Ms. Laloux has utilized her lived experience and innovative ideas to make sure inclusion and accessibility are a part of every city initiative – from education to transportation to tourism. Ms. Laloux is not just helping the city rethink what inclusion means, but also changing minds about what it's like to live with a disability as well as what those with cognitive disabilities are capable of. "Inclusion isn't something that we just think about; it's not a generous act. It's our duty," says Mr. Leturque, who put forward Ms. Laloux as a candidate last year. "ElĂ©onore has helped the entire town progress in terms of how we see disability." France doesn't take census-type statistics on people with disabilities, but Ms. Laloux is one of the few French people with a visible disability to hold a political position here. Her mere presence has transformed Arras into a model of accessibility and inclusion, and can have an impact on towns across France.

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Even as the Covid-19 pandemic forced companies around the world to reimagine the workplace, researchers in Iceland were already conducting two trials of a shorter work week that involved about 2,500 workers – more than 1% of the country's working population. They found that the experiment was an "overwhelming success" – workers were able to work less, get paid the same, while maintaining productivity and improving personal well-being. The trials also worked because both employees and employers were flexible, willing to experiment and make changes when something didn't work. In some cases, employers had to add a few hours back after cutting them too much. Participants in the Iceland study reduced their hours by three to five hours per week without losing pay. The shorter work hours have so far largely been adopted in Iceland's public sector. Those who worked in an office had shorter meetings. Fewer sick days were reported. Workers reported having more time to spend with their families and on hobbies. Many appreciated gaining an extra hour of daylight, especially during the winter. Arna Hrönn AradĂłttir, a public-health project manager in Reykjavik's suburbs, was one of the first to trial shorter hours. "I feel like I'm more focused now," said AradĂłttir. "Before the pandemic, I spent a lot of time going to a meeting by car, but now I can sit in my office and have meetings through my computer. So I have gained four hours in my work day."

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When the pandemic began, Gavin, now working as a software engineer, realised, to his inexhaustible joy, that he could get away with doing less work than he had ever dreamed of, from the comfort of his home. He would start at 8.30am and clock off about 11am. To stop his laptop from going into sleep mode – lest his employers check it for activity – Gavin played a 10-hour YouTube video. "I work to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head," he says. "I don't see any value or purpose in work. Zero. None whatsoever." Gavin's job is an unfortunate expediency that facilitates his enjoyment of the one thing that does matter to him in life: his time. "Life is short," Gavin tells me. "I want to enjoy the time I have. We are not here for a long time. We are here for a good time." And for now, Gavin is living the good life. He's a time millionaire. First named by the writer Nilanjana Roy in a 2016 column in the Financial Times, time millionaires measure their worth not in terms of financial capital, but according to the seconds, minutes and hours they claw back from employment for leisure and recreation. "Wealth can bring comfort and security in its wake," says Roy. "But I wish we were taught to place as high a value on our time as we do on our bank accounts – because how you spend your hours and your days is how you spend your life." Perhaps time isn't a bank account, but a field. We can grow productive crops, or things of beauty. Or we can simply do nothing, and let the wildflowers grow. Everything is of beauty, everything is of equal value.

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After collecting hundreds of wishes the past year and a half on the trees outside her home, a La Jolla resident is sending her "wishing trees" into hibernation. Molly Bowman-Styles began her wishing trees in May 2020 as a response to the first weeks of isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. "One morning I woke up and I thought, ‘This is awful," she said of the pandemic and the concurrent, unrelated illnesses of her father and dog. "I just felt so disconnected and out of sorts." Bowman-Styles said she looked for a way to "feel connected to other people but at the same time help them to express how they're feeling through all this, because I know I'm not alone." She looked through her windows at her trees and had the idea to hang colorful index cards in leftover envelopes from the branches, with markers and paper clips to enable passersby to write on the cards and rehang them. "I wrote on the envelopes, ‘Make a wish for our world' and ‘Share a message of hope,'" Bowman-Styles said. And many people did. "I was excited, because in the morning I'd wake up and I had more cards and I read each and every one of them," Bowman-Styles said. In the first few weeks the cards were hung, Bowman-Styles lost both her father and dog. "I cannot tell you how [the trees] helped me so much with my grief," she said. Bowman-Styles said one of her favorite cards, written by a child during the divisive 2020 presidential election, read, "I love everybody."

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Brittany Walters made a promise to her mother the day she passed away from cancer: Brittany and her father would go to homecoming, where the high school senior was nominated for queen. Walters, who aspires to become a nurse, didn't win homecoming queen that night, but thanks to an act of kindness that has shined a healing light on a grieving family and community, she ended the night in a crown. Senior Nyla Covington was voted homecoming queen by fellow students at a school football game in late September. But moments after being crowned, [she] felt called to crown someone else. After asking permission from school officials to do so, Covington walked over to Walters, standing beside her cowboy hat-clad father, and put the crown on her. "I just felt like it was something that was put on my heart," Covington told CNN. "It was really just for her, to bring up her day a little bit, and she'd rather have her mom than a crown... but the point was, I was telling her that she was her mom's queen and I was just letting her know that she was loved by many and especially me." "I just felt so like so much love from her, and I just felt so much love for her and the whole school," Walters said of Covington. "As soon as I got off the field, I just got hundreds of hugs from every single person in the stands." There were tears on and off the field. Forrest County AHS School's principal Will Wheat tells CNN he is proud of the young women. "That wasn't preplanned, this was all on the kids, that's the beautiful thing about it," Wheat said.

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ABB has launched the world's fastest electric car charger, the Swiss engineering company said on Thursday, to plug into the booming demand for electric cars made by Tesla, Hyundai and other automakers. The company is launching the new Terra 360 modular charger as it presses ahead with plans to float its electric vehicle (EV) charging business, which could be valued around $3 billion. The device can charge up to four vehicles at once, and can fully charge any electric car within 15 minutes, ABB said, making it attractive to customers worried about charging times which can run to several hours. "With governments around the world writing public policy that favours electric vehicles and charging networks to combat climate change, the demand for EV charging infrastructure, especially charging stations that are fast, convenient and easy to operate, is higher than ever," said Frank Muehlon, president of ABB's E-mobility Division. Globally the number of electric vehicles registered increased by 41% during 2020 to 3 million cars, despite the pandemic-related downturn in the total number of new cars sold last year. The growth trend has accelerated in 2021, with electric car sales rising by 140% in the first three months of the year. ABB's Terra 360, which can deliver a charge giving 100 kms (62 miles) of range in less than three minutes, will be available in Europe by the end of the year. The United States, Latin America and the Asia Pacific regions are due to follow in 2022.

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Dr. Seema Doshi was shocked and terrified when she found a lump in her breast that was eventually confirmed to be cancerous. "That rocked my world," said Dr. Doshi, a dermatologist in private practice. "I thought, ‘That's it. I will have to do chemotherapy.'" She was wrong. Dr. Doshi was the beneficiary of a quiet revolution in breast cancer treatment, a slow chipping away at the number of people for whom chemotherapy is recommended. Chemotherapy for decades was considered "the rule, the dogma," for treating breast cancer and other cancers, said Dr. Gabriel Hortobagyi, a breast cancer specialist. But data from a variety of sources offers some confirmation of what many oncologists say anecdotally – the method is on the wane for many cancer patients. Genetic tests can now reveal whether chemotherapy would be beneficial. For many there are better options with an ever-expanding array of drugs, including estrogen blockers and drugs that destroy cancers by attacking specific proteins on the surface of tumors. And there is a growing willingness among oncologists to scale back unhelpful treatments. The result spares thousands each year from the dreaded chemotherapy treatment, with its accompanying hair loss, nausea, fatigue, and potential to cause permanent damage to the heart and to nerves in the hands and feet. The diminution of chemotherapy treatment is happening for some other cancers, too, including lung cancer.

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For most of his adult life, Aaron Presley, age 34, felt like a husk of a person, a piece of "garbage." Then, all at once, the soul-crushing, depressive fog started to lift, and the most meaningful experience of his life began. The turning point for Presley came as he lay on a psychiatrist's couch at Johns Hopkins University. He had consumed a large dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in what's more commonly known as magic mushrooms, and entered a state that could best be described as lucid dreaming. Visions of family and childhood triggered overwhelming and long-lost feelings of love, he says. Presley was one of 24 volunteers taking part in a small study aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of a combination of psychotherapy and this powerful mind-altering drug to treat depression–an approach that, should it win approval, could be the biggest advance in mental health since Prozac in the 1990s. Depression ... affects 320 million people around the world. Roughly one-third of those who seek treatment won't respond to verbal or conventional drug therapies. Magic-mushroom therapy is offering some hope for these hopeless cases. In the Hopkins study, published last year in JAMA Psychiatry, the therapy was four times more effective than traditional antidepressants. Two-thirds of participants showed a more-than 50-percent reduction in depression symptoms after one week; a month later, more than half were considered in remission, meaning they no longer qualified as being depressed.

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Kindness might once have been considered something of a soft topic, but it has begun to be taken seriously within academic research. When developmental psychologist Robin Banerjee ... surveyed past research, he found just 35 papers on kindness in psychology journals in the whole of the 1980s. In the past decade, there were more than 1,000. But there is still plenty to discover. One morning, people walking down a street in the Canadian city of Vancouver were asked to take part in an experiment. They were given an envelope containing either a $5 or $20 note. Half the people were instructed to spend the money on themselves. The other half were instructed to use the money to buy a present for someone else or to donate the money to charity. Whether they had $5 or $20 made no difference. The people who had spent it on someone else felt significantly happier than those who treated themselves. This is just one of many studies which has found that acting kindly can improve your wellbeing. In a meta-analysis, Oliver Scott Curry ... found that behaving kindly can have a small to medium effect on our wellbeing. On the BBC radio programme The Kindness Test ... neuroscientist Dan Campbell-Meiklejohn told me that this can seem counterintuitive. "Kindness can cost us, yet we experience a sense of reward in parts of our brain when we are kind to others, just as we do when eat yummy food or have a pleasant surprise. These parts of the brain become active and motivate us to do them again and again."

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It was six years ago when CEO Dan Price raised the salary of everyone at his Seattle-based credit card processing company Gravity Payments to at least $70,000 a year. Price slashed his own salary by $1 million to be able to give his employees a pay raise. He was hailed a hero by some and met with predictions of bankruptcy from his critics. But that has not happened; instead, the company is thriving. He said his company has tripled and he is still paying his employees $70,000 a year. "I make $70,000 a year," Price [said]. According to the Economic Policy Institute, average CEO compensation is 320 times more than the salaries of their typical workers. Price said despite the success his company has had with the policy, he wishes other companies would follow suit. "I would say that's the failure of this. You know, I feel like I've been shouting from the rooftops like, 'This works, this works, everybody should do it!' and zero big companies are following suit because the system values having the highest return with the lowest risk and the lowest amount of work," Price said. Price thinks Gravity's returns are up in large part because bigger paychecks have lead to fiercely loyal employees. "Our turnover rate was cut in half, so when you have employees staying twice as long, their knowledge of how to help our customers skyrocketed over time and that's really what paid for the raise more so than my pay cut," said Price.

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It was six years ago when CEO Dan Price raised the salary of everyone at his Seattle-based credit card processing company Gravity Payments to at least $70,000 a year. Price slashed his own salary by $1 million to be able to give his employees a pay raise. He was hailed a hero by some and met with predictions of bankruptcy from his critics. But that has not happened; instead, the company is thriving. "So you've almost doubled the number of employees?" CBS News' Carter Evans asked. "Yeah," Price replied. He said his company has tripled and he is still paying his employees $70,000 a year. "How much do you make?" asked Evans. "I make $70,000 a year," Price replied. To pay his own bills, Price downsized his life, sold a second home he owned, and tapped into his savings. According to the Economic Policy Institute, average CEO compensation is 320 times more than the salaries of their typical workers. "This shows that isn't the only way for a company to be successful and profitable," Hafenbrack said. "Do you pay what you can get away with? Or do you pay what you think is ideal, or reasonable, or fair?" Price said despite the success his company has had with the policy, he wishes other companies would follow suit. Bigger paychecks have lead to fiercely loyal employees. "Our turnover rate was cut in half, so when you have employees staying twice as long, their knowledge of how to help our customers skyrocketed over time and that's really what paid for the raise more so than my pay cut," said Price.

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The story of two enemies cuts through the darkness. It begins on a battlefield in the Iran-Iraq war, and ends 20 years later in a waiting room in Vancouver. The Iran-Iraq war began in 1980, and ended eight years later. It was the longest conventional war of the 20th century, claiming at least a million casualties. Najah Aboud was nearly one of them. Najah was severely wounded. He crawled off to a bunker, where he saw corpses from both sides and prepared himself to die. Zahed Haftlang ... was assigned as a medic. After the Iranians recaptured Khorramshahr in May 1982, Zahed was ordered to go into the bunkers and treat wounded countrymen. It was then that he ... spotted Najah near the back. Both men were suspicious of each other. Zahed thought Najah's body might be booby-trapped. Najah thought Zahed might kill him. Then Zahed reached into Najah's breast pocket and pulled out a photograph. It showed Najah, with a beautiful woman, and infant son. It was at that very moment that Zahed decided to save Najah's life, even though it meant risking his own. Najah was taken to a prisoner of war camp, where he'd remain in unspeakable conditions for the next 17 years. While reading magazines in [a Vancouver] waiting room, Zahed noticed the door open as another man entered the room. The two men erupted into shouts, hugs, kisses and tears. Their spectacular reunion happened two decades years after the battle of Khorramshahr and on the other side of the world. "Najah is like my family … he really is my angel, because he gave me life. After he got a new chance at life, he gave me a new chance at life. He is the dearest and most precious thing in the entire world to me."

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Pandit Tulsidas, 52, was resting under a tree by a road junction in Jaipur, Rajasthan, where he had begged for years. When an official approached him about a government scheme that would teach him job skills, he rejected the offer. "But when he told me I was guaranteed a job, I accepted," he says, fearing that otherwise: "After the training, I'd end up back on the streets, because how can I eat without an income?" Six months on and Tulsidas works at a snack stand outside a Jaipur hospital. Getting people off the streets is usually done by bundling them into a police van and hauling them away to a crowded, dirty shelter. Keeping them off the streets is a problem India has so far failed to crack. The Rajasthan Skill and Livelihood Development Corporation (RSLDC) has developed a four-month scheme for 100 men interested in developing their skills and who have families to support. After an assessment, it's established that some can cook, some know a little bookkeeping, others can bake and so on. For four months, trainers then work to build on these skills. Employers are enlisted to provide jobs and can visit the training centre. The men are given shelter and food and receive 230 rupees (Ł2.30) a day, slightly more than India's minimum wage. Without counselling, many of the men would drop out. Rakesh Jain, RSLDC's deputy general manager, believes it is a crucial aspect of rehabilitation. "The counselling is as important as the training," says Jain. It is this holistic aspect that accounts for its initial success.

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