A 95-year-old veteran in full dress uniform came outside on the street to encourage and cheer runners in an 8K race but the admiration was turned on himself when the athletes began spontaneously shaking his hand in a tribute for his military service.
San Jose reporter Julia Prodis Sulek happened to capture the scene on video as Joe Bell became inundated with runners wanting to shake his hand.
A federal judge in Indianapolis ruled that police officers who stopped Willie King while he was recording video of an arrest had violated his rights.
As part of a settlement in the federal civil rights case, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department was ordered to institute a new policy prohibiting police officers from interfering with civilians who are recording their actions.
In the midst of the Oscar ceremony last night, host Ellen DeGeneres grabbed a bunch of the greatest Hollywood actors out of their chairs for a cell phone photo, which became a selfie for the ages.
Posted from her phone, Ellen tweeted the photo and told the television audience to make it the most retweeted photo of all time.Traffic on Twitter skyrocketed, even crashing the company’s servers, and by the next morning the group selfie was shared nearly 2.6 million times.
A super-sensitive Michigan elementary school student felt really sad when a child in the lunch line in front of him who had to put his tray down because he didn’t have enough money in his account.
After that experience, Cayden Taipalus decided to help raise money for the kids who could use a few extra bucks for their lunch account. He is returning cans to earn the recycling cash, and asking friends to donate.
After just two weeks, he has paid for 295 lunches!
After 8-year-old Myles Eckert found a twenty dollar bill in a restaurant parking lot last month, all he could think about was buying a new video game.
He changed his mind when he saw a man in uniform.
He wrote a note and gave it to Lt. Col. Frank Dailey.
When Rickey Young heard on the radio that there was a dog in the HOV lane on a Houston highway, he rushed over to help. Though the dog was frightened, Rickey was able to lure her to safety with a sandwich. She had broken bones and was bleeding, but this hero got her medical attention in time to save her life.
Divers in Australia rescued a critically endangered grey nurse shark off the coast of Sydney that was being choked to death by a plastic cord wrapped around its gills.
With its head and gills tightly entangled in industrial strength elastic cord, the five-foot long (1.5m) juvenile shark was facing a slow and painful death, with the cord continually tightening as the young animal grew in size.
Some 9 million poor women and young children who receive federal food assistance under the U.S. government’s so-called WIC program will have greater access to fruits, vegetables and whole grains under an overhaul of the program unveiled on Friday.
The expansion of allowable foods is the first change to the program in 34 years.
(READ the report from Reuters)
When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the United States in the mid-1990s, after being absent nearly 70 years, the most remarkable “trophic cascade” occurred, effecting hundreds of other species.
Gary Wockner, a wolf expert in Colorado explained, “Willows grew higher and spread more widely, beavers returned and made ponds, riparian-dwelling plants and animals returned including songbirds and trout, elk carrion fed scavengers such as grizzlies and ravens, and coyote populations dropped resulting in more ground squirrels and gophers which in turn fed hawks and eagles.”
With his short gray hair, watchful eyes, authoritative voice and stern manner, high school math teacher and Vietnam veteran Jim O’Connor is used to commanding respect in the classroom. So his students were surprised to learn about his nickname at the hospital where he volunteers: the baby whisperer.
O’Connor, who teaches algebra and calculus at St. Francis High School in La Cañada, Calif., a Catholic prep school for boys in suburban Los Angeles, takes a no-nonsense approach to schooling.
“They just stare at him adoringly and he can really just get the crabbiest baby to calm down. It’s amazing… He’s just a natural-born cuddler.”
(READ the full story at TODAY)
The bad news: Exotic acacia trees pose a pesky problem for native coastal dunes at Los Angeles International Airport. The good news: Giraffes like them — a lot.
Now a long-term partnership that began last fall between the airport and the L.A. Zoo keeps invasive species out of L.A.’s landfills and gives zoo animals a leafy treat.
(READ the story from the LA Times)
An upstate New York family toasted with champagne the $10 million Lottery ticket that almost slipped away.
Jerry Kajfasz, 53, of suburban Buffalo, said he initially gave back a very lucky “Win for Life Spectacular” scratchoff ticket when a store clerk handed him the more expensive $20 ticket by accident.
He had asked for seven scratchoffs, but the clerk gave him an eighth.
“I now call it the one that almost got away,” Kajfasz said Tuesday when he claimed his prize.
(READ the story from the NY Daily News)
If you’ve run out of drinking water during a lakeside camping trip, there’s a simple solution: Break off a branch from the nearest pine tree, peel away the bark, and slowly pour lake water through the stick. The improvised filter should trap any bacteria, producing fresh, uncontaminated water.
In fact, an MIT team has discovered that this low-tech filtration system can produce up to four liters of drinking water a day — enough to quench the thirst of a typical person.
Nearly 25 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill injured wildlife off the coast of Alaska, a new report issued today by the U.S. Geological Survey indicates that sea otters have returned to pre-spill numbers within the most heavily oiled areas of Prince William Sound.
In the last 14 months, more than a dozen mystery packages have arrived for a 6-year-old boy diagnosed with cancer and, often, for his three siblings and parents. They frequently appeared after Dylan’s “really bad days” and tough chemotherapy treatments, said Laurie Full, his mom, who blogs about their experiences.
Packages would show up outside their Illinois home, sometimes arriving when the family was inside the house, but never with any trace of the source’s identity, other than the signature “Dylan’s Secret Pal.”
(READ the story in the Chicago Tribune)
He lived on the same San Paulo street corner for 18 years. The black plastic bags wrapped around him and long tangled hair and beard protected him from the elements. Atop a small stool, this 75-year-old man could be seen every day, hunched over and writing.
Though homeless for 34 years, Raimundo (Portuguese for Raymond) was very well-read and loved to read.
In April 2011, he was befriended by a young woman named Shalla Monteiro, who was impressed by his poetry and wanted to help him realize his dream of publishing a book of his “mini-pages,” as he calls them.
She created a Facebook Page to feature the writings of Raimundo Arruda Sobrinho, who signed every poem with a nickname he gave himself, The Conditioned.
Neither could have dreamed the happy outcome of what happened next when a special someone saw the Faceboook photo.
(MUST SEE this AMAZING video below, from Facebook Stories)
Harold Krueger’s wife was planning a 90th birthday party for her husband on February 21, but passed away a month before the big day.
The World War II veteran, who lives in the tiny town of Wishek, North Dakota, was having a hard time with the loss because the couple’s relationship of 63 years had been so close.
Now, hundreds of strangers from around the country are providing happy relief and a new activity, since Harold’s daughter asked her friends on Facebook to send birthday cards.
The Facebook post was shared more than 650 times and resulted in more than 1,000 letters and cards arriving from 48 states, dozens at a time, every morning.
“It’s fun to read what the little kids say,” he said, referring to large envelopes sent by teachers containing letters from children. “‘Cause what they say is from the heart.”
(READ the story from KFYR-TV)
Elephants are known to be highly social and intelligent. Now there is evidence that they engage in something like a group hug when another elephant is in distress — similar to apes, wolves, some birds and dolphins.
When one elephant was disturbed, Dr. Plotnik said, other elephants — bystanders — gathered around. They made chirping sounds and touched the distressed elephant with their trunk.
Inspired in part by Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell’s call for a boycott of magazines that publish paparazzi pictures of celebrity children, People mag editor Jess Cagle has agreed to stop using the photos.
“Of course, we still run a lot of sanctioned photos — like exclusive baby pictures taken with the cooperation of celebrity parents, and photos of stars posing with their kids at events (like a red carpet) where they’re expecting and willing to be photographed,” Cagle, who took over People in January, said in an Editor’s Letter. “But we have no interest in running kids’ photos taken under duress…”
(READ the story from UPI)
If you took all the hilarious moments that cats jumped into tiny boxes and and bags and placed them end to end, you would get a laugh fest of epic proportions, like the one below.
Even the dogs are funny in this music video by HuffPost Comedy.
