Melbourne, with its beautiful parks, enviable healthcare, and Australian coastline, has been ranked the world's most livable city for the third year running. In fact, Australia dominates the list prepared by the Economist with four cities in the top ten. Three Canadian cities also made the list.
Last year in Timbuktu, an irreplaceable trove of manuscripts at risk of being destroyed by advancing fundamentalist rebels, was secretly evacuated at great personal risk by a team of archivists, librarians, and couriers. The manuscripts were saved from immediate destruction, but today they are still jam packed in footlockers used for their evacuation, while enduring higher humidity than ever before, without protection. Now, an internet campaign launched to fund the purchase of archival bags and boxes to protect these documents has engaged people around the globe and raised $42,500.
Archaeologists using revolutionary airborne laser technology have discovered a lost mediaeval city that thrived on a mist-shrouded Cambodian mountain 1200 years ago. The stunning discovery of the city, Mahendraparvata, includes temples hidden by jungle for centuries - temples that archaeologists believe have never been looted -- the city that founded the Angkor Empire in 802 AD.
10,000 Uno's pizzas will be delivered to U.S. troops overseas in time for Super Bowl Sunday, thanks to the Evans family of Illinois who started Pizzas4Patriots in 2008. Supporters of the operation want to send soldiers a taste of home, including the shipping company DHL Express, which delivers the pizzas for no charge.
An Indonesian mountaineer who faced death threats while battling illegal loggers and a Bangladeshi lawyer who fought to keep old rusty ships from being dumped in her homeland are among this year's winners of the Ramon Magsaysay Awards.
A 95-year-old Jewish man saved from the Nazis as a child is now funding the flight of Christians seeking refuge from ISIS, paying forward a ‘debt' he owes.
A U.S. ship carrying enough wheat to feed more than one million people for four months was delivered for distribution to the Syrian people. The United Nations World Food Program received the contribution, worth more than $19 million, on April 21 in Beirut, Lebanon. The ship's cargo gave the WFP the ability to add flour to the monthly food basket of more than one million people.
August 19 marks the 11th annual World Humanitarian Day. The day honors people like UN humanitarian veteran Sergio Vieira de Mello, who lost his life in the UN Headquarters bombing in Baghdad in 2003. It is a tribute to aid workers worldwide, a commemoration to those who have lost their lives and a celebration of the spirit of humanitarian work around the world.
For decades, everything to come out of the Democratic Republic of Congo has not been good: civil war, child soldiers and atrocities against women. The fact that an orchestra managed to exist in the midst of all of this was remarkable. 200 musicians defy the poverty of their war-torn country in a symphony orchestra that moves the hearts of all who hear.
Despite complaints of traffic jams and overcrowded hospitals and schools, Viet Nam is considered the second happiest country in the world in terms of sustainable well-being -- behind Costa Rica, with Colombia third. The ranking, the Happy Planet Index, was compiled and released by the New Economics Foundation, a UK independent think tank that wanted to create an index to measure the sustainability of a country and the happiness of its people (how efficient is their happiness).
In a nation wrenched by decades of war, perhaps it is no surprise that one of Afghanistan's most successful brands manufactures what is sorely lacking in the country: joy. The Herat ice cream factory dips vanilla bars in chocolate, and creates orange sorbets and frozen cones that are sold in each of the country's 34 provinces, a rare success for a business benefitting from no foreign investment.
Happiness, or the lack thereof, lies at the root of what makes life meaningful. But it is sometimes hard to figure out what exactly constitutes happiness, especially in a culture like the Unites States that tends to conflate money with meaning. Roko Belic, the director of Happy, the documentary, offers four tips to develop a happiness skill set.
Former Gang Members turn Lives Around
When Jihad Dib was appointed principal of Punchbowl Boys High School at age 33, it was a hotbed of violence and trouble. His modern and successful approach to reforming the school has transformed the student body and staff into a family, and recently earned him a Pride of Australia medal.
A decree recently signed by the Turkmen President ordered government ministries to plant 3 million trees in 2013 with the aim of transforming the desert Central Asian nation into a blooming garden. Radio Free Europe reports that 465,000 public-sector employees, including those working at schools and universities in the country, took shovels in hand on March 10 and spent the day planting 755,000 trees.
In a gesture of repayment for help that it received during the terrible local flooding of 2008, the town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa has sent $50,000 dollars in relief funds to the Czech Republic to rebuild a flood-damaged library.
The European Union has scored a series of mini-victories in recent months and is ending 2012 in perhaps the best shape of the past four years.
A new type of financial instrument is challenging the idea that giving and investing are separate and distinct. The social impact bond (SIB) is an experimental hybrid that applies a profit motive to some of the most intractable social problems. The government of Canada added itself to a short list of agencies around the world considering SIB programs, which can be seen as an alternative to charitable donations -- great for investors looking to place capital in a way that will generate economic and social value at the same time.
70-year old Thessaloniki mayor Yannis Boutaris stands apart from the political mainstream, pulling off reforms that have so far evaded the national government in its three-year-old debt crisis. In contrast to the rest of Greece, this sea-front city of one million is shrinking debt, cutting business taxes to help firms and paying city employees and contractors on time.
By big city standards, Peter Breiter, 41, is an unusual banker. He left a bigger bank, where it was all sell, sell, sell, to settle in the tiny southern German village of Gammesfeld and write transaction slips by hand for its 500 inhabitants.
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