A day of Reckoning comes to the big screen

The Reckoning, a documentary film by Skylight Pictures about the first cases of the International Criminal Court, will be presented at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Festival organizers selected about 200 films for exhibition from more than 9000 submissions.

Launched in 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the first international tribunal of its kind, a permanent criminal court set up to prosecute individuals for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. The Reckoning, a feature-length documentary filmed in High Definition on 4 continents, follows charismatic, relentless Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo and his team as he issues arrest warrants for leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, puts 4 Congolese warlords on trial in The Hague, charges the President of Sudan with genocide and war crimes in Darfur, challenges the UN Security Council to have him arrested, and shakes up the Colombian justice system. How is this tiny upstart court in The Hague going to bring justice and enforce the Prosecutor’s mandate to end genocide in the Wild West of these conflict zones? As the Prosecutor tells us, he has to take this tiny court, created by dreamers, and turn it into a functional reality. He has a global mandate to prosecute perpetrators around the world for the worst crimes imaginable, whether they are warlords or military brass or heads of state, even as they continue to wreak havoc.  But he has no police force – he needs to shame and pressure the international community to follow through, to muster political will.  It has turned out to be a monumental David and Goliath challenge. Will it succeed?  This is a court for humanity, and it’s fighting for its life against the forces of impunity.

Carnegie Heroes awards 19 for bravery

A Wisconsin man who lunged in front of a train to save a 3-year-old from certain death and a New York man who twice entered a burning building to rescue two little girls were among 19 people awarded Carnegie medals Monday for their courage.

Merlin Harn, 40, and his wife were driving by a railroad track on Sept. 1, 2007, in their hometown of Menasha, Wis., when they saw an unattended 3-year-old boy wandering on the tracks.

Before police arrived, the crossing lights, bells and whistles went off. Harn ran to the boy, grabbed him under the arms and carried him to safety seconds before the train passed them, its emergency brake activated.

The Carnegie Heroes Fund gave its fourth group of awards this year to 19 people who risked their own lives to save others. Some of the people died or were injured rescuing others who were drowning, being attacked or were trapped in fires.

The heroes announced bring to 92 the number of awards made in 2008 and to 9,243 the total number of awards since the Pittsburgh-based Fund’s inception in 1904. Commission President Mark Laskow stated that each of the awardees or their next of kin will also receive a financial grant. Throughout the 104 years since the Fund was established by industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, $31.1 million has been given in one-time grants, scholarship aid, death benefits, and continuing assistance.

See the entire list of heroes here.

Another of the heroes, James Carpenter, was at his home in Gloversville, N.Y., when he noticed the house next door had gone up in flames. Running into the burning building, Carpenter made his way through dense smoke and found two girls trapped on the second floor.

He grabbed 5-year-old Chelsea and made his way out of the house with her, but her 3-year-old sister, Jocelyn, remained inside. Carpenter, 28, re-entered the burning home, ran upstairs and called for the little girl. Grabbing Jocelyn, Carpenter realized the stairs were impassable. He went into a bedroom and lowered her out the window into the arms of two men outside.

The two-fold mission of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission: To recognize persons who perform acts of heroism in civilian life in the United States and Canada, and to provide financial assistance for those disabled and the dependants of those killed helping others.

We live in a heroic age, Andrew Carnegie wrote in the opening lines of the Commission’s founding Deed of Trust in 1904. Not seldom are we thrilled by deeds of heroism where men or women are injured or lose their lives in attempting to preserve or rescue their fellows.

Those who are selected for recognition by the Commission are awarded the CARNEGIE MEDAL, and they, or their survivors, become eligible for financial considerations, including one-time grants, scholarship aid, death benefits, and continuing assistance. To date, more than 9,000 medals have been awarded, the recipients selected from more than 80,000 nominees. About 20 percent of the medals are awarded posthumously.  Awardees are announced five times a year, following meetings of the Commission.

Among the other heroes was Walter Rosenthal, 58, of Toms Place, Calif. He died trying to save James J. Juarez and John S. McAndrews from suffocation after they were buried by snow at a resort in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., on April 6, 2006.

Steel baron Andrew Carnegie launched the hero fund in 1904 after hearing about rescue stories from a mine disaster that had killed 181 people. Since then, $31.1 million has been awarded to 9,243 people. Each recipient, or their heirs, receives $6,000 and a medal.

Adam Bender - inspiration goes national

Back in November we published a story on the inspiring young man, Adam Bender.  Adam lost his leg when he was one year old but that has never held him back.  He plays baseball, football, soccer and wrestles.

ESPN writer Jeremy Schaap recently filmed a short story on Adam that airs on E:60.  This is a wonderful piece that all should enjoy.

You can read the text of Jeremy’s story - The Power of One.  A short excerpt of Jeremy’s story is below:

A year ago, when Adam Bender was 7 years old, he found a wheelchair in his family’s garage.

Standing just outside the garage, the door open, he called out to his mother, Michelle. “Mom,” he said, “come here.”

Pointing inside at the rusty, folded-up wheelchair, he said, “What’s that doing here?” Anger was floating in the air.

“That’s here just in case of an emergency,” she said. “We might need it if you hurt your leg.”

“Get it out of here,” Adam said. “Get rid of it.”

“What do you want me to do with it?” Michelle asked.

“I don’t know. Get rid of it. I’m never using it.”

Football and Autism

Meet Courtland Hale.  At the age of three he was diagnosed with Austism.  He did not let that hold him back from playing football.  Today he is a 6′4″, 270 lb high-school defensive tackle.

Cortland encourages special needs kids to get involved in sports and other activities as therapy.

Wayman Tisdale’s battle

Wayman Tisdale lost his leg to cancer.  But through it all he never lost his joy.

A native Oklahoman, Wayman became the first Division-1 athlete to be named All-American in his first three seasons.  An olympic gold medal winner, he enjoyed a 12 year NBA career before pursuing his life-long passion of music.

He became an accomplished Jazz musician and has released several award winning albums.

Enjoy some of Wayman’s music below:

Winning the 5th Quarter - life lessons

The NFL did a study a few years back and surveyed 1000 players who had been out of the league for at least four years. What they found was staggering: 87% were either divorced, having serious financial issues, or were dealing with drug/alcohol problems!

When I graduated college and stopped playing football, my finances too were depleted, and to the point that the State of Ohio helped me with welfare assistance.  But by applying the lessons I myself learned on the football field, I have since become a highly successful entrepreneur, have spoken to groups in ten countries, and am a published author a couple times over.

In my latest book, Winning in the 5th Quarter, I write that, “Football Players are told from grade schools to the professional level that the most important quarter in football is the fourth quarter. The only quarter that matters at all however is the 5th Quarter. This is the quarter we all play in, when the game ends and life begins.”

When my oldest son Robbie started playing football, he leveraged the life lessons the game could teach him. “To even play the game of football you have to execute the core principles of success,” I write in Winning in the 5th Quarter. “If you carry those principles forward to the 5th Quarter (Life) you will be successful and happy. When my son decided to dedicate himself to try to achieve a Division I football scholarship I had to ensure that whether he did or did not achieve his goal, he understood the true secret of football: winning… in the 5th quarter.”

According to the National Sporting Goods Association, statistics show that close to twenty million Americans over the age of seven participate in some form of organized football play.  But football is more than just a grueling physical sport; it is a microcosm for life.  “This book is nothing less than a guide for lifelong success,” says Grant Teaff, Executive Director of American Football Coaches Association. “The messages and concepts are timeless. They will have a profound impact on everyone who reads this book and more importantly uses it to create a foundation for happiness and achievement.”

Football player or not, we all need to understand how to leverage the principles of success that football offers us all.  Parents and coaches need to learn how to stress the life lessons football offers to their children and players. Players need to learn how to apply the lesson they learn on the field, off the field.

My goal in life is to reach out to as many players, coaches, parents, and people as possible to share my experiences and help them and their families realize their dreams.  Through the book, Q5 Workshops, personal life coaching, and a TV show my team and I are working on, I am on a mission to help people understand just how to use football as a foundation for lifelong success.

Head football coach of Rice University, David Bailiff, says, “We tell players that attend Rice University they are attending for fifty years not just four. We talk to them about the 5th Quarter their first day here. Bob Beck has expressed this message in the exact way I would like every player and parent to understand. This book will become part of our culture.”

Winning in the 5th Quarter
By Bob Beck

2008 CNN Heroes airs Thanksgiving night

Singer Christina Aguilera joins fellow Grammy Award winners Alicia Keys and John Legend for “CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute,” airing Thanksgiving night on CNN.

The show, taped before an audience of more than 2,000 at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, pays tribute to the top 10 CNN Heroes of 2008.

Liz McCartney, dedicated to helping survivors of Hurricane Katrina rebuild their homes, has been named the 2008 CNN Hero of the Year.

McCartney, of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, received the honor at Saturday night’s taping of “CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute.” The telecast airs at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Thanksgiving on the global networks of CNN.

McCartney, who will receive $100,000 to continue her work just outside New Orleans, was selected from among the top 10 CNN Heroes after six weeks of online voting at CNN.com. More than 1 million votes were cast.

“To the country and the world, I ask you to please join us,” McCartney said. “Together we can continue to rebuild families’ homes and lives. … If you join us, we’ll be unstoppable.”

Hosted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute” features moving musical performances by Aguilera, Keys and Legend.

LIFE Magazine photos available online

An online photo gallery has been opened by Google Inc. that will feature millions of images from Life magazine’s archives that have never been seen by the public before.

The new service offers about 2 million photos and will scan 10 million from Life’s library in the near future.

About 97 percent of Life’s photo archives have never been publicly seen.

Some of the images are famous and iconic pictures — Martin Luther King Jr. waving to a huge crowd during his “I have a dream” speech, two wounded Marines on Hill 484 in Vietnam in 1966, an American sailor and nurse kissing at the end of World War II, and Dorothea Lange’s haunting photo of a migrant mother in 1936 — but others have never been seen until now.

“Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints,” wrote Paco Galanes on Google’s blog.

According to the website from Life Magazine. “Whatever you want to look at, whether it happened an hour ago, a century ago, or any time in between, you’ll be able to find it here quickly, easily, and for free.”

The collection will be located at www.life.com, with search results from google displayed via the Google Image Search service.

Glass House - The El Salvador Action

Glass House, is an independent feature-length documentary about the historically-overlooked “El Salvador Action” in which two Salvadoran diplomats devised and implemented a daring plan to provide protection to approximately 30,000 endangered Jews during World War II.

Director Brad Marlowe who self-funded the project shot in high-end digital video brings Glass House to the Latino Film Festival in hopes of securing a larger distribution deal.

Glass House (78 minutes) is a moving documentary of how El Salvador, one of the smallest countries in the world, facilitated one of the most successful rescue operations during the second World War.   It shares the story that begins in 1942 when the lives of thirty thousand Jews were saved when they were issued certificates of Salvadorian citizenship thanks to “El Salvador Action”.   José Arturo Castellanos headed the operation, a man assigned to open the Consulate of El Salvador in 1938 in in Hamburg while Europe was under Nazi siege. Glass House shares one of the greatest humanitarian efforts in the Holocaust’s history.  The documentary was filmed over a three-year period on location in Central America, Switzerland, Hungary, and Spain, as the sons and daughters of the heroes themselves along with some of the survivors of the effort, share this inspirational story, all people who owe their lives to El Salvador.

Social Networking benefits teens

A study by the MacArthur Foundation said time spent by teenagers on online social networking is not lost. According to the “Living and Learning With New Media” report the hours young people spent on their MySpace accounts or even sending text messages provide them technological skills and literacy required for them to succeed in the contemporary world.

“They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher of the study.

Vicki Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, agreed that studies like the one made by the MacArthur Foundation are good at describing how social media fits into the lives of the youth, but she called for more surveys on the same topic to document the effects of these social networking sites.

Contrary to parental fears that predators and strangers lurk in the Internet, majority of the young people who spend a lot of time socializing online do it with people they met at school, camp or sports activities.

It did not discount the fact that the networks are venues for possible romantic relationships, but interactions in that kind of system are casual enough that lack of interest on the part of the other party is not a cause of embarrassment for the youth looking for a partner through the Internet.

MacArthur Foundation director of education Connie Yowell said in a statement, “This study creates a baseline for our understanding of how young people are participating with digital media and what that means for their learning… It concludes that learning today is becoming increasingly peer-based and networked, and this is important to consider as we begin to re-imagine education in the 21st century.”

The study is part of a $50 million project that focused on digital and media learning. Researchers interviewed over 800 youth and their parents and observed the young people’s online behavior for 5,000 hours.

MacArthur Foundation releases

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