New 'gold standard' for aid worker training aims to improve humanitarian support for disaster-hit communities

"Communities affected by major disasters will receive higher quality support from aid workers thanks to a groundbreaking new tool which aims to improve the standard of training humanitarian workers receive.

The new Trainer Competency Framework is being billed as a future ‘gold standard’ quality mark for capacity building in the aid and development sector. It will ensure that aid workers receive appropriate training content via proven teaching and learning methods from skilled, professional trainers. It has been developed by disaster relief charity RedR UK and French humanitarian agency Bioforce."

Learn more here.

Don't take a vacation from exercise

"When summer vacations roll around, folks often leave their exercise routines behind with their cares. But studies show that after 10 to 20 days without exercise, most people begin to display symptoms of detraining on all physical fronts. So it's important to couple your travel with exercise, not only to burn off the extra calories a vacation tends to include but also to retain the hard-won fitness gains you've made to date this year."

Click here for more on why you should take your exercise program along with you on vacation.

Blind woman learning to be a chef

"A kitchen is a spiritual place for Laura Martinez, a space that arouses her senses, excites her imagination. It's not where she imagined herself finding such satisfaction. When she was too young to understand that she was blind, she dreamed of being a surgeon. She grew up and out of such fantasies and studied briefly to be a psychologist.

But the kitchen beckoned. It lured her away from her family in Moline, Ill., to the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu culinary program at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago."

For more on this amazing woman's experiences, click here.