The Obamas welcomed another dog into their family – a puppy named Sunny.
Just like Bo, she’s a Portuguese Water Dog, which helps avoid problems with allergies in the family.
Born in June, the bundle of energy is the perfect companion for Bo, especially when the girls are in school and the President is on the road. When these two youngest Obamas tussle you can tell which one is Bo because he has two white feet.
Patients who overheard him walking the halls singing old love songs and Broadway hits, began requesting that he sing to them.
Soon, serenading the sick became part of his daily rounds, gaining him the moniker “The Singing Nurse.”
According to Jared Axen, his singing seems to help patients handle pain better and exhibit a host of other improvements.
At one time he was considered one of the most notorious jewel thieves in the United States. He spent 11 years in some of the toughest federal prisons, but on Friday Larry Lawton was sworn in as an honorary police officer — the first time in the nation an ex-con will receive such an honor.
In 2012, Lawton released his book, Gangster Redemption
He has dedicated his life to keeping kids on a lawful and successful path, touring around the country and telling them honestly what prison is really like and what they will lose if they end up behind bars.
Lawton developed a “Reality Check Program” in 2007 after leaving prison, and uses it to help educate kids about the consequences of crime. It has a 90 percent success rate of keeping young kids out of jail. Copies of the program’s DVD are now kept in every patrol car, ready to be handed out by the Lake St. Louis Police Department.
Learn more about the program on Lawton’s website.
(WATCH the Fox video below and another at the bottom from MSNBC)
The microfinance organization Pro Mujer is celebrating a milestone, having loaned to poor women one billion dollars since its inception in 1990.
“Women in developing countries hold the key to their futures,” says Lynne Patterson, founder of the nonprofit group with the name means “Pro Women” in Spanish.
270,000 women have lifted themselves and their families out of poverty in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Peru, Mexico, and Argentina.
“We are enabling them to discover their own value,” Patterson told the Christian Science Monitor. “And that is immeasurable.”
(READ the story from Christian Science Monitor)
216 touring cyclists helped launch the expansion of Canada’s Waterfront Trail that adds a second Great Lake, Lake Erie, to the now 1400 kilometer bike trail.
The original Waterfront Trail stretched 720km along the Canadian shores of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, connecting 41 communities and over 182 parks and natural features.
Last week the trail expanded westward along Lake Erie to Windsor, adding 27 new waterfront communities to the signed, mostly on-road route.
Frieda’s family was decimated by the Nazis. But at 95, she discovered relatives she never knew.
More than 70 years after the Holocaust claimed both of her parents, her grandfather, all six of her siblings, her in-laws, and an almost inconceivable number of all the aunts, uncles, and cousins she had ever known, we learned the astonishing news: My husband’s grandmother had three first cousins alive and well.
On the sands of a Black Sea resort in Bulgaria, vacationers are encouraged to indulge in their favorite old-fashioned pastime: reading a book on the beach.
The library was the brain-child of German architect, Herman Kompernas, who designed the shelves from a material that is resistant to sun and water and stabilized the structure against the wind.
The library’s stock of over 2,500 volumes in more than 10 languages is so far proving a hit for the resort of Albena, especially because all books on the shelves can be borrowed for free.
(WATCH the video above or READ the story from EuroNews)
Trash Man Creates Free Library Out of 20,000 Books Found in Garbage
Dennis Komsa was 12 years old in 1963 when, while vacationing with family along the Jersey Shore, he wrote a note, put it in a glass jar and tossed it into the Atlantic Ocean.
It wasn’t until after Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast last October, that the Ball mason jar was found when Norman Stanton combed through storm debris in Seaside Heights, N.J.
In Jerusalem, a city too often divided among religious and nationalist lines, unusual heartwarming encounters do take place from time to time.
An Israeli volunteer medic, who is also an Orthodox West Bank settler, was reunited Friday with the Arab from Jerusalem whom he saved in the Old City last week.
“No one came to help me, none of the brothers, no Arabs. Only one Orthodox Jewish man came to help me,” the man’s brother recalled him saying upon his awakening.
The Deep Meadow Correctional Center houses 800 Virginia inmates. It is also home to 22 horses who like their handlers have often been cast aside.
“It gives you the sense of accomplishing something,” said one of the eight inmate who was chosen to care for the retired race horses. “I’m excited about doing it.”
Tario Holmes was an inmate who passed a long sentence with the horses at the James River Work Center. Now a free man, Holmes returns to the farm every few weeks, teaching other inmates the farrier skills he learned here.
A Florida soldier on his way home Friday from Walter Reed hospital in Washington, DC got a surprise welcome that included a sweet ride arranged by a local Cadillac dealership. Army 1st Lt., Ryan Timoney and his wife relaxed in the backseat of a BMW convertible while they were escorted by a large motorcycle contingent of veterans and law enforcement officers.
A rolling roadblock cleared the way on Interstate 295 near St. Augustine.
As the motorcade passed St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Mandarin, the student body was standing in line waving U.S. flags.
“Going by my school … It was wonderful,” said Ryan, who has been recovering from serious shrapnel wounds since 2012.
The event involved hundreds of volunteers who eagerly stepped up to honor the newly-married military man.
(READ the story, w/ photos, from St. Augustine.com)
Casey Brooks lost a virtual needle in a haystack this week after his oversized wedding band fell off in the Atlantic Ocean and no amount of sifting in the water could keep the waves from swallowing up the gold band.
About four hours later, he and his wife were walking at low tide when they saw a woman on the beach with a metal detector. They asked if she had found a wedding ring, but, unfortunately, she had not.
But this woman had successfully helped others in the past so she asked if they knew where they’d lost it. She volunteered to follow them to the location and soon after she went in ankle-deep water she got pinged by her machine.
After a minute or two of digging, miracle of miracles, they found the ring.
(READ more from HuffPost)
For the first time in 130 years, a new pole will be erected in the Gwaii Haanas area, detailing the history of the region and commemorating two landmark agreements that led to the creation of the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and the Haida Heritage Site.
The 13-meter pole, called a legacy pole, was carved by Jaalen Edenshaw to celebrate the 20th anniversary of an agreement between the Haida Nation and the Government of Canada.
A have-a-go-hero street sweeper who dropped his broom to apprehend a suspect after an elderly woman was mugged has been described as “incredible”.
The husband of 82-year-old Rose Bedborough said, “He did something really heroic, he’s incredible. We’re so grateful to him. I don’t know if we’d have got the purse back if it wasn’t for him. He’s a hero.”
What can a guy do with 4,000 CDs? Help someone heal with music therapy.
That’s what happened Tuesday when a former national music buyer for the now-defunct retailer A&B Sound, Vancouver’s Brian Thompson, packed up his massive collection spanning 23 years of music from 1990 and sent it to Vancouver General Hospital where a music therapist will use them in her work.
Described as a cross between a house cat and a teddy bear, scientists announced the identification of a new mammal species, the olinguito.
In the raccoon family, Bassaricyon neblina is the first mammalian carnivore species to be added in the Americas in 35 years, scientists at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington said.
The 2-pound olinguito (oh-lin-GHEE-toe), with its large eyes and woolly orange-brown fur, is native to the cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador.
Paul Williams was rushing to catch a bus home after ending work at a California Wal-Mart when he made a startling discovery in the parking lot: a wallet containing $4,000 in cash and a $1,000 check – with no ID.
Meanwhile, wallet owner Lynn Andries had discovered what she’d lost while shopping in a rush. “I was sick to my stomach,” says Andries, adding she didn’t think there was a point to returning to the store to see if it had been turned in but was talked into it by her sister.
A 12-year-old North Carolina boy on vacation with his family found a 5.16-carat diamond at Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park, the only diamond-producing site in the world open to the public.
Michael Detlaff didn’t even have to mine for the “honey brown diamond”. He found it simply by searching on the surface of the ground and noticing a pebble that looked different.
“It is thrilling any time a child finds a diamond here at Crater of Diamonds State Park,” said a park employee.
Among all the fantastical superhero figures parading at this year’s Comic-Con was an elegant and modest man who has earned the moniker “hero” in real life.
John Lewis began life as the son of sharecroppers on a farm in rural Alabama.
He went on to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington and become a U.S. congressman.
His incredible life story is now a graphic autobiography entitled “March
Two Phoenix police officers will be held forever in the heart of a young Latina girl who went home on her first day of school much richer than when she’d left.
Officer Ben Carro was assigned to help with traffic control on August 5, the first day of school for Loma Linda Elementary, when he saw a young girl walking alone toward to the school who appeared to be crying. A school aid asked the child, name Leslie Gonzales, what was wrong.
