Hero teenager saves five children trapped in burning house | Mail Online Heroes: Brave mother and son clamber into blazing house to rescue family of five terrified children
One comment was: Thank god that the police or fire brigade were not there, otherwise they would have been stopped because of health and safety issues...
Currently just over £12,000 and rising this morning ! BBC News - Seven-year-old raises thousands for Haiti quake victims
Good on him. It's crazy just how much money can be raised through a simple little charity event like that. Nice one.
I know there is a thread about the "Good Things that Our Younger Citizens" do to counter the bad bits that are often grumped about but I can't find it; please move this if you thnk it appropriate. On the Beeb today is the Schools Report including a report by the local school at Wootton Bassett looking at the Repatriation of the Fallen through their town. The trailers I have seen suggest a very good restpectful report. I understand that it will be on the BBC website BBC NEWS | School Report Jim
BBC News - Sussex cadets celebrate 150th birthday Don't tell my parents but at the age of 13 I learnt to swear, smoke and drink in the Army Cadets ! Here's to the next 150 years
My thoughts, There are plenty of youths that are trouble and do scare people from getting the bus, but at the same time, from reading all the posts about fantastic youngsters, it would appear that the difference must be a small one, i was a fairly troublesome young man, but joining the Army at 16 changed me completely, and it would do for any young person, being that i was a Life Guard,(if you did not guess that from the name). but personally i believe the blame should mostly be with the parents, A mother and father who either one have some sort of militarty background will naturally discipline their children more. this is where the problems stem, it is discipline and respect that youth today are lacking. National service is the way forward, take Isreal for example, what sort of youth problems do you think they have..... very little is my guess.
Teenagers, eh? Give them the chance look what they do, save their Platoon Commander & get awarded an MC. BBC News - Private Alex Kennedy plays down Military Cross award A teenage soldier awarded the Military Cross for bravery in Afghanistan has said the news is "overwhelming". Private Alex Kennedy, of 2nd Battalion the Mercian Regiment, saved his injured officer and took charge of colleagues during a battle with the Taliban. The 18-year-old, from Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, is the youngest soldier granted the award since World War II.
Knowing Andrea is disabled and I'm on crutches at the moment. Our next door neighbours son, who is nine years old, has just cleared our path of snow on his own for the second time this year.
Just posted this on the Aussie flood thread too. Selfless act of a 13 year old cost him his life. Australia floods: Queensland's Jordan Rice, 13, sacrifices his life to save brother | Mail Online Jordan Rice, 13, let his younger brother be rescued first, seconds before he and his mother Donna were swept to their deaths in the floods in Toowoomba, Queensland
12 year old Glynn Mullen, a pupil at Leith Academy in Edinburgh, has devoted several months of his spare time compiling a Roll of Honour of those former pupils who died in the Second World War. :: CWGC ::=
Just received this as an email, in light of the grand effort these youngsters are putting in I thought I would post it here, think it helps the cause the more people look, it also very enjoyable and moving regards lofty Quote. Ironically, where this was made in, Western Australia, they could no doubt do with a handout themselves after the devastating bushfires of the other week... Anyway I do hope you can help by playing this & passing it on... take care & feel blessed... Just before you listen & read this, get the tissues out, it made me cry & took me a while to work out why the two beautiful looking & gorgeous voiced blonde girls didn't hold their mikes but if you play it a couple of times you will see why - what they have lost in one way they have gained in another - they have voices of angels**** "Saturday just gone, at Karrinyup Shopping Centre (Western Australia) the Variety Club Youth Choir organized a FLASH MOB where they all were incognito in the Food Hall, and started standing up in groups singing "We are Australians" - The purpose is to raise money for the Queensland floods. Each time it is clicked on, money is raised thru GOOGLE ads, SO PLEASE WATCH!!!!!! It is a beaut way of supporting those poor Aussies over on the other side of our country. YouTube - Variety Club Youth Choir Flash Mob 'I am Australian'
Thought I'd bump this thread with this story about quick thinking US teenagers. BBC News - US student steers school bus after driver collapses Jeremy Wuitschick, 13, took control of the wheel and steered the bus to the side of the road in Milton, Washington, before starting CPR on the driver.
I am a foreigner, but I thought I would jump in here because an overseas perspective might be useful. I spent about 6 months in London doing research at the IWM and PRO, and I traveled a lot on the tube and the buses. I don't doubt that asocialized youth do a lot of vicious things in the UK, as they do here, but I seldom observed really disgusting behavior by young people, or indeed anyone else, while I was in the UK. I never felt the sense of alert insecurity I had all the time in my own youth in New York in the 1960's and 70's, when the city's youth crime problem was at its peak. I still have that here at certain times and places, the subway (your tube) being particularly bad when the students are traveling in the mornings and mid-afternoons. We have a lot of of police at my local subway station in the weekday mornings, and since this is the US they are of course armed. That makes sense, because many of the students are "packin'' too. By comparison, London felt quite mild and safe. Several times, I walked home inebriated after closing time from pubs in Kilburn to Hampstead (upwards of a mile), and had no problems. That said, I also exercised common sense. I avoided the dangerous areas, to start with (I had read enough to know where they were), and I walked fast and stayed alert after dark. I went to Brixton just once (Latin dancing at the Loughborough Hotel) with three women I knew. I walked back to the tube with one of them (quite quickly!), and we were OK. The other two women in the party followed us by about 10 minutes, and were robbed en route. They were glad it wasn't worse, as it could easily have been. That aside, though, I felt safer in London than I ever did in New York.
Still brings tears to my eyes. What a sportsman the opposing coach was. CNNSI.com - SI Online - Rick Reilly - SI's Rick Reilly: The Play of the Year - Wednesday November 13, 2002 09:37 AM The Play of the Year Posted: Wednesday November 13, 2002 9:35 AM Jake Porter is 17, but he can't read, can barely scrawl his first name and often mixes up the letters at that. So how come we're all learning something from him? In three years on the Northwest High football team, in McDermott, Ohio, Jake had never run with the ball. Or made a tackle. He'd barely ever stepped on the field. That's about right for a kid with chromosomal fragile X syndrome, a disorder that is a common cause of mental retardation. But every day after school Jake, who attends special-ed classes, races to Northwest team practices: football, basketball, track. Never plays, but seldom misses one. That's why it seemed crazy when, with five seconds left in a recent game that Northwest was losing 42-0, Jake trotted out to the huddle. The plan was for him to get the handoff and take a knee. Northwest's coach and Jake's best friend, Dave Frantz, called a timeout to talk about it with the opposing coach, Waverly's Derek Dewitt. Fans could see there was a disagreement. Dewitt was shaking his head and waving his arms. After a ref stepped in, play resumed and Jake got the ball. He started to genuflect, as he'd practiced all week. Teammates stopped him and told him to run, but Jake started going in the wrong direction. The back judge rerouted him toward the line of scrimmage. Suddenly, the Waverly defense parted like peasants for the king and urged him to go on his grinning sprint to the end zone. Imagine having 21 teammates on the field. In the stands mothers cried and fathers roared. Players on both sidelines held their helmets to the sky and whooped. In the red-cheeked glee afterward, Jake's mom, Liz, a single parent and a waitress at a coffee shop, ran up to the 295-pound Dewitt to thank him. But she was so emotional, no words would come. Turns out that before the play Dewitt had called his defense over and said, "They're going to give the ball to number 45. Do not touch him! Open up a hole and let him score! Understand?" It's not the kind of thing you expect to come out of a football coach's mouth, but then Derek Dewitt is not your typical coach. Originally from the Los Angeles area, he's the first black coach in the 57-year history of a conference made up of schools along the Ohio-Kentucky border. He'd already heard the n word at two road games this season, once through the windows of a locker room. Yet he was willing to give up his first shutout for a white kid he'd met only two hours earlier. "I told Derek before the play, 'This is the young man we talked about on the phone,'" Frantz recalled. "'He's just going to get the ball and take a knee.' But Derek kept saying, 'No, I want him to score.' I couldn't talk him out of it!" "I met Jake before the game, and I was so impressed," Dewitt said. "All my players knew him from track. So, when the time came, touching the ball just didn't seem good enough." (By the way, Dewitt and his team got their shutout the next week, 7-0 against Cincinnati Mariemont.) Into every parade a few stink bombs must fall. Mark Madden of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette grumbled that if the mentally challenged want to participate in sports, "let them do it at the Special Olympics. Leave high school football alone, and for heaven's sake, don't put the fix in." A few overtestosteroned Neanderthals on an Internet site complained, "That isn't football." No, it became bigger than football. Since it happened, people in the two towns just seem to be treating one another better. Kids in the two schools walk around beaming. "I have this bully in one of my [phys-ed] classes," says Dewitt. "He's a rough, out-for-himself type kid. The other day I saw him helping a couple of special-needs kids play basketball. I about fell over." Jake is no different, though. Still happy as a frog in a bog. Still signs the teachers' register in the principal's office every morning, ready to "work." Still gets sent on errands, forgets where he's going and ends up in Frantz's office. Still talks all the time, only now it's to NBC, ESPN and affiliates from CBS and Fox about his touchdown that won the game. Yeah, Jake Porter thinks his 49-yard run made for a comeback victory. He thinks he was the hero. He thinks that's why there were so many grins and streaks down people's faces. Smart kid.
And a more recent one. Girls this time. [YOUTUBE]W. Oregon Sara Tucholsky first HR - ultimate sportsmanship - YouTube[/YOUTUBE]
BBC News - Teenager sleeps outdoors for a year to help charity A 15-year-old has clocked up 365 nights in a hammock to raise money for a charity that helped to save his sister's life after a horse riding accident. Rob Challinor slept out in all weathers at the family home at Exning in Suffolk in aid of Magpas, the emergency medical charity