Pay-what-you-want taxi service, and more

Pay-what-you-want taxi service

When Eric Hagen launched his Recession Ride taxi service in Essex, Vt., last month, he decided to rope in customers with a novel business plan: He’d let them pay what they wanted. So far, the arrangement is working out. In two weeks, working four nights a week, Hagen has made $600. He even keeps a pay-what-you-can cooler, filled with various bottled drinks, in his cab. “Nobody has shortchanged me yet,” he said. “They like the fact they can decide.”

Rabbi honors Russian who saved him in Buchenwald

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Israel’s former chief rabbi has won recognition for the man who saved him from death in Buchenwald when he was a boy. Rabbi Israel Meir Lau never forgot his fellow prisoner, a Russian he knew only as “Feodor,” who stole potatoes for him, knitted him earmuffs, and protected him from guards. But the two were separated after the liberation, and Lau never saw him again. Last year, a Holocaust researcher uncovered his identity: Feodor Mikhailichenko, a geologist who died in 1993. In a tearful ceremony in Jerusalem this week, Mikhailichenko’s daughters received on his behalf Israel’s “Righteous Among the Nations” award, its highest honor for non-Jews. “There are not a lot of daughters in the world,” said Israeli President Shimon Peres, “who can be as proud of their father as you can.”

Persian Gulf War pen pals meet and marry

Nearly two decades ago, when she was just 13, Jaime Benefit wrote a letter addressed to “Any Soldier” serving in the Persian Gulf War to express her support for the troops. Her letter found its way to Pfc. Jeremy Clayton, then 19, of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. After becoming pen pals for a while, the two stopped writing. But Benefit always wondered what happened to Clayton, and this year, she found him on Facebook. They met in March and fell in love, and on July 15, they were married. “It was fate that I got her letter,” said Clayton, as was “her finding me 19 years later.”