Kids chase down a thief, and more

Kids chase down a thief

Angel Baldwin, 12, and his sister Carina, 10, were with their mom at the beach in Daytona Beach, Fla., when a woman reached into the mother’s bag and snatched her purse. The children chased the thief down the beach and into a store’s bathroom, where she dropped the purse and fled. Police caught up with the thief a few blocks away, and arrested her. “I’m very proud of them,” said the kids’ mother, Angela, of Daytona Beach. “But I did have a stern talk with them never to do this again. ‘Next time, you call for help!’”

Coast guards save dog adrift at sea from tsunami

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About a mile off the coast of Japan, coast guard officers in a helicopter this week spotted a dog on the roof of a house that had been washed out to sea by the tsunami three weeks ago. After determining that there were no other signs of life in the house, the crew rescued the dog and took it to a shelter. The owner of the dog, named Ban, saw a story about the rescue on TV and recognized her dog. “I am happy that she seems healthy,” she said, as her dog licked her face. “I want to cherish her.”

86-year-old man tracks down former girlfriend

In 1945, Mike Stadnyk was separated from his girlfriend, Phyllis Mitton, when the Canadian Army Medical Corps suddenly transferred him to a new posting hundreds of miles away. “I didn’t even have the chance to say good-bye,” Stadnyk said, “but we wrote to each other for about two or three years.” They eventually lost touch, and married other people. After his wife passed away last fall, Stadnyk, 86, tracked down Mitton to Fredericton, New Brunswick, and found that she was a widow. They soon picked up where they had left off. “We’re in love again,” said Mitton. “To think we’ve found one another after all these years.”