A teenager from the West Midlands today told how he led a dramatic rescue of terrified passengers as chaos gripped the stricken Costa Concordia cruise liner. Dancer James Thomas acted as a human climbing frame to help 16 passengers into lifeboats after the luxury liner ran aground off the Italian coast, before toppling on to its side in shallow waters.
The nation's newest Miss America is a 23-year-old Wisconsin brunette who had long conversations with her family mulling whether or not to make her father's jail time for mail fraud the heart of her campaign in the beauty pageant. Laura Kaeppeler said she wants children of incarcerated adults to feel less alone, to have mentoring and as much of a relationship with their parents as possible.
If you're measuring the kindness at the Corner Perk in Bluffton, S.C., it's safe to say their cup runneth over. It's a cycle of generosity that started two years ago when an anonymous customer gave the barista $100 to pay the bills for the next customers in line.
The way Clay Taber looks at it, he's got three moms now, after a transplant nurse, practically a stranger, donated one of her healthy kidneys so that he might start married life untethered to a dialysis machine. When she heard a young 22-year-old man was in renal failure, she said, "It just tore me up."
For many it is just a game, but for two couples who live half a world away from each other, Words with Friends was more that that, it was a life saver.
Some quick-thinking Good Samaritans were lifesavers for a Richardson, Tex. family whose small seaplane crashed into the ocean off the coast of a small Caribbean island near Honduras.
Good Samaritans are undoubtedly the reason three children who were trapped in a car submerged in the Logan River are alive to experience the New Year. About eight men jumped into the icy water to try to free the children.
Chinese around the world will be wearing lots of red today, to celebrate the Lunar New Year marking the end of the disaster-filled Year of the Rabbit and to usher in a new year with more prosperity. January 23 begins the Year of the Dragon, which should bring relief following 2011, which was foreseen by the Chinese calendar as a very bad year.
Jenna Norton is not your typical medical school applicant. In fact, until two years ago, she had never considered a career in medicine. It took Jenna seven years to graduate with a degree in Theatre, while working as a waitress and acting on the side. The death of her father, Henry, who passed away after a brief battle with cancer, also delayed her graduation. But his death later propelled Jenna's future in a direction never imagined -- a tribute to the man who owned a hardware store and supported his daughter's passion for Shakespeare.
When one of the nation's 15,000 air traffic controllers does something wrong, you always hear about it. When one of them does something right, it's called a save. After just completing a class on recognizing the symptoms of oxygen-deprivation, a Denver-based controller averted disaster by talking to the wife of a pilot who had passed out from the condition.
The online news-sharing community, Reddit, came to the rescue again for member posting a personal appeal. Now, they have raised $65,000 in 24 hours for a defender of an orphanage in Kenya who was attacked by thugs and wanted to build a security wall to protect himself and the children.
Military families at the Red River Army Depot joined together to help the children of Texarkana in a Toys For Tots drive that broke previous annual records. Members loaded Army trucks with 500 bicycles, 1350 toys, 6,200 non-perishable food items and $875 in cash contributions.