Area 6 : News & Views

NEWS ARCHIVE - Jan to Apr 2001

For the time being this service is available only from the "shadow" page at Project HappyChild - click here - the Shadow page is a back-up of the main welcome page and is used as a "re-direct" page for the site (when visitors come in to an expired page address, from the search engines) and appears instead of a "404" error (using .htaccess).

However adding this "instant" translation facility means that every single page it's added to has to be coded individually (so that the specific page where the flags appear will be translated when one of the flags is clicked) - this will be a *very* long process so we'll tackle this wherever there's a space within the ongoing pagebuilding schedule for the supplementary resources. Probably we'll just confine this to the main index pages across the site, for now, as a "translate-another-page" facility appears at the foot of each page that's been translated using their service.

Because InterTran is becoming so widely used, they do make a charge once a given amount of "free translations" have been used by any IP address. However we felt the benefits outweighed the minimal-charge-factor, and that this facility should therefore be included. Regardless we will maintain the links to the entirely-free grammar-aware translation facilities for the seven languages available through Systran and FreeTranslation.com and have clarified this on the text which accompanies the translation facilities - click here.

We'd like to extend our thanks to HATS and to PDG (Pathways Design Group, whose remarkable inventions make it possible for disabled children to use Nintendo consoles) for their continued advertising which makes it possible for the Project HappyChild website to stay on line, linking children across the world. Your support for our advertisers would be much appreciated.

18th April: A direct e-mail address and a website link for WellBeing have been added to their entry in the Project HappyChild Directory [1002]. If you have a cached or printed-out version of the Directory, you may wish to update this.

18th April: A direct e-mail address for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust has been added to their entry in the Project HappyChild Directory of UK-based organizations helping children [1007]. If you have a cached or printed-out version of the Directory, you may wish to update this.

13th April: The first part of the walk through for the Gold and Silver games has just gone on line at Andy's Guide to Pokémon.

13th April: A Leo Sayer concert has been added to the General Events calendar - on 15th May "Leo Sayer & Friends" will be in concert, benefitting the Haven House Foundation and Anti-Slavery, both charities in the Project HappyChild Directory. Tickets are available *now* (three price levels) - £25 tickets include an after-show buffet where Leo Sayer (and possibly other celebs) should be present. Details of where to get your tickets are on the General Events page.

11th April: The new area for Gold & Silver has just been uploaded at Andy's Guide to Pokémon; these games only came out in the UK on Friday 6th April but the first pages of the Walk Through should be on line shortly.

6th April: We've added The National Blind Children's Society to the Syndromes Links Index, and made a further update to the Project HappyChild Directory - Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital have modified their contact e-mail address. If you have a cached or printed-out copy of the Directory, you may wish to update this.

The National Blind Children's Society helps visually impaired children and young adults up to the age of 25, providing grants for essential IT equipment; professional, free of charge advocacy and IT training services, and a customised large print book service. Their other programmes include activity holidays, grants for recreational activities such as horse riding and music lessons, and holidays for low-income families. To reach their entry in the Directory [with a link to their website] please click here.

The second new entry in the Directory is a little unusual - the Haven House Foundation. Ten years of planning and fundraising has made it possible for the Haven House Foundation to take a 60-year lease on The White House (pictured right) with the aim of providing hospice care for terminally-ill children and their families, as well as short-term respite care for children with severe life-limiting conditions. They now need to raise £2.9m to carry out refurbishments and allow them to open their doors to sick children. All fundraising help and donations gratefully appreciated - click here for their Directory entry and a link to an Appeal page with more details of how you can help.

4th April: The Young World Concerts 2001, by schoolchildren across the UK, raising money for Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital between 21st November and 5th December, have added another date to the series, Tuesday 27th November 2001 at Nottingham Arena. Our thanks to Jan Kemsley, Special Projects Co-ordinator, for this update - more details on the General Events calendar.

4th April: Our thanks to Glenn Allan at Lake Munmorah Public School, New South Wales, Australia, who wrote in with details of their comprehensive listings of schools in New South Wales. These have now been added to the Schools Australia page in Schools Interchange - we've also taken the opportunity to update the listings for Schools Australia generally, as a few of the links had changed in recent months.

2nd April: The Syndromes Links Index page has been updated with the inclusion of a massive Conductive Education resource which links to a huge range of Internet sites/resources about Conductive Education worldwide. We've also amended the entry for Forest School Camps (special needs) - if you have a cached or printed-out version of the Index you may wish to update this.

2nd April: The entry for KIDS, which helps children with disabilities and special needs, has been updated in the Project HappyChild Directory (No. 1074), along with the addition of a direct e-mail address and a link to their website. If you have a cached or printed-out version of the Directory, you may wish to update this.

1st April: We're very aware that at this time of heavy pagebuilding for the remaining supplementary resources, there are a number of hyperlinks from the site as a whole which need renewing (where sites linked to have changed page addresses but not passed on details). Doing both the building and full maintenance is a physical impossibility (otherwise the new resources will never get finished!) so we'd ask for your patience whilst we get the rest of the new pages built over the next few months, and then gradually bring the whole site up to date again. If you find a broken link anywhere and can forward the correct address, we should be able to modify that relatively quickly, however.

We've made a start today with the listings for the Salvation Army from our area for Appeals & Projects worldwide - the SA work in around 100 countries and the links for each individual country page have now been renewed. We'll deal with other mass listings like this as soon as time allows, as these modifications are relatively straightforward. Completing the supplementary resources (French, Andy's guide to Pokémon and Sol's guide to Harry Potter) has to remain the overall priority for the next few months in order to safeguard the overall traffic flow to the site as a whole, for the foreseeable future, as well as ensuring that the areas of specific appeal to children are as comprehensive as the many other resources on the site.

1st April: Our thanks to a visitor who wrote in recently about the absence of Sheffield schools from Schools Interchange - we hadn't found any schools websites listings on the Sheffield City Council site - we have now added a link to the schools listings at Sheffield Careers Guidance Service, as per the URL kindly forwarded (see Schools England N-Z, under South Yorkshire).

1^st April 2001: Project HappyChild News for April 2001 is now on line.

Things here have been delayed since 21st March due to illness; there are a few items on hold now till the April newsletter is written, uploaded and despatched, but we hope to have everything up to date again within a few days.

21st March: We're delighted to say the first set of new free-to-print French pages are now on line - 60 pages of verbs, être, aller, faire, with separate worksheets for the various tenses, and also the templates for -ER, -RE and -IR verbs with 9 separate tense pages for each. Our thanks to Shaidi Khan who has offered help with preparation of comprehensive vocab lists to speed up the completion of this area. Click here for the full index to pages which will be available in due course, as well as for the 80 pages now on line.

16th March 2001: Michael Tipper's March articles on Accelerated Learning have just gone on line. Sorry they're late! - you'll know from the Newsletter why they were delayed initially, and pressure of work has meant that they couldn't be uploaded immediately they were received here. We're still clearing some residual items from the last five weeks since the Surftime fiasco, but hopefully everything will be up to date again within the next few days so we can return to pagebuilding for the supplementary resources.

Michael's pages this month cover subjects as diverse as "The No Blame Approach to Bullying" and Mary Anning, one of the world's first successful palaeontologists - see the Accelerated Learning section for the index to all articles currently on line in this area.

16th March 2001: Three further entries have been added to the Guestbook - an Appeal from a juggler asking for help to set up a circus school for deprived children in Bathore, Albania; an e-mail from a South African school governor planning to move to Canada and wishing to make contact with other ex-South Africans now living there, and one about the free-to-print guide to building a website, on line at this site - see Guestbook.

12th March 2001: As scheduled the new pagebuilding for supplementary resources started again last Monday - 42 pages have now been added to Solomon's Guide to The Magical World of Harry Potter, to divide specific areas into separate sections for the different books, to avoid visitors inadvertently accessing references to books in the series they haven't yet read, and 60 more pages have been built at FREEWAY, the free-to-print resource for learning and practising the French language. These are not yet linked in from the main French index as they are awaiting the second stage of checking by an outside specialist in languages, but we hope to be able to link them in soon.

9th March 2001: HOAX E-MAILS FROM NIGERIA - Please note that there are two hoax e-mails circulating the Internet at present, you may have received a copy in the last day or two - the first e-mail starts as follows:
CONFIDENTIAL - FROM:JEFF, MY PRIVATE CONTACT, REPLY BY FAX OR E MAIL ONLY.
FAX/PHONE#:(234)-42-4589155
Dear President,FUND MANAGEMENT / BUSINESS OFFER.
I humbly wish to seek your assistance in matter that is very important and needs utmost trust and confidence, I am Mr. JEFF UTARZI, a close confidant of one of Nigeria's most powerful family. The wife of top Government official and an oil magnet i.e. late General San Abacha former head of State Federal republic of Nigeria, who ruled from November 17th 1993 to June 8th 1998 and he died suddenly while in office. The wife wishes to move out of Nigeria the sum of u$42 million along with some large quantity of gold and diamond, she wishes to invest the aforementioned sum in viable investment overseas.....

20th February 2001: The Lady Hoare Trust, which has been supporting children with limb disabilities and juvenile arthritis for nearly 40 years, has recently moved and changed contact details. Please see their entry in the Project HappyChild Directory [1057] for new address, telephone number, e-mail address and also a link to their new website. If you have a cached or printed-out version of the Directory, you may wish to update this.

14th February 2001: The Sponsored Events calendar has been updated again today, with two new items added, firstly "The Foresters Big Toddle" which is an annual sponsored walk for under 5's. This year's Toddle takes place from 1-21st June and is set to be the biggest ever with over 100,000 children all toddling for Barnardo's. Over 70 Toddles have been set up all over the UK, in a variety of venues from theme parks to parks. If you're not near one of these you can set up your own event, which is what the majority of playgroups do. The Toddle 2000 raised over £500,000 pounds for Barnardo's and participants raised approximately £134,200 for themselves (playgroups keep £25 of every £100 raised).

The other new addition is the "Coast-to-Coast Corsican Challenge" raising funds for BIBIC - The British Institute for Brain Injured Children, and taking place in September of this year.

10^th February 2001: Project HappyChild News for February 2001 is now on line, along with Michael Tipper's February articles on Accelerated Learning. The Newsletter will explain all that's been happening recently - and why there's been such a long interruption to updating this page.

Events added to the ever-growing Sponsored Events calendar include the London Marathon, the New York Marathon and the GOSH Inca Challenge in May 2001. Both events calendars are now linked from the entry for GOSH in the Project HappyChild Directory, and we've also included a link to their new website.

24th January: We've had a delightful update from Betesda, in Galati, Romania, whose new day care centre for children is now completed; every day 20-30 street children drop by for a warm meal, shower, clean clothes, school, etc. Click here for pictures of the centre and the six street girls who have now moved into a rented flat; there are now a total of 32 boys living in the boys house, and the Betesda Foundation are making contact with more street children four times a week as well as being actively involved with the school in Giurgiulesti. The Foundation welcomes any help with the ongoing costs of their work, as well as their major fundraising (this time for a permanent home for the streetgirls) - click here for details - and are also seeking irrigation equipment for their farm which now has 30 pigs and cows and three hectares of land - see Resources Required.

12th January: Regular visitors will know we lost a number of the site graphics to the "Love Bug" virus some while back; almost all of them were replaced soon afterwards but we're still encountering the odd one missing here and there. Today we have replaced the blank disk master for our free-to-print reading system, "Bricks and Mortar". If any visitors should encounter any graphics missing elsewhere across the Project HappyChild site, an e-mail would be appreciated.

11th January: The first items have now been added to the General Events Calendar for 2001, including a Valentine's Ball at the London Hilton and a Golf Tournament in Marbella, in aid of the Rhys Daniels Trust which is now working on its third "Home from Home" project at the Kings College Hospital in London, following the ones in Bristol and Liverpool. Contact details for the Rhys Daniels Trust have now been updated in the Project HappyChild Directory [1067] along with a link to their website.

11th January: Three new e-mails (from the USA and Norway) have been added to the Guestbook at The Magical World of Harry Potter. This area remains hugely popular and it's hoped that the pagebuilding of further chapter guides can start again in a couple of weeks.

9th January: We've just started work on updating the Events calendars for 2001: please see Sponsored Events which already has an astonishing range of events scheduled for this year. More events will be added to this and the General Events calendar shortly.

8th January: Our thanks to everyone who's been sending in jokes recently - some of the more print-able ones have now been added to the Jokes page.

7th January: Andy's Guide to Pokémon has been updated with a new page of Cheats, Tips & Shortcuts, along with more Questions and Answers and additional info for the Missingno page. This area has been overwhelmed with a mass of e-mails recently; more will be added to the Cheats pages whenever time allows, and the mirror sites will be updated shortly.

1^st January: Project HappyChild News for January 2001 is now on line, along with Michael Tipper's January articles on Accelerated Learning.

NEWSLETTERS - this website has been on line since 1998 - there have been a lot of Newsletters! The archive is here and the very last Newsletter is here.