It wasn’t all bad

•For decades, Irena Sendler, a Polish

Catholic social worker who helped save

2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis, was

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almost unknown among Holocaust historians.

But ever since four Protestant teenage

girls in Kansas wrote a play about her

eight years ago, Sendler’s reputation has

grown. Angelina Jolie will portray her in an

upcoming movie, and last month she was

nominated as a possible recipient of the

Nobel Peace Prize. Sendler, now 97, lives

in Warsaw, where she keeps in close touch

with the young Kansas women who have

been dubbed “the rescuer’s rescuers.” Each

of her letters starts the same way: “My dear

beloved girls, so close to my heart.”

•When Karen and Mark

Cline of Mansfield, Ohio, were

married in 1980, they hired

photographer Jim Wagner

to record the happy day. But

when the ceremony was over,

they couldn’t afford to pay him,

and they were left with just one

photo of Karen coming down

the aisle, snapped by a guest.

But last week, Wagner surprised

the Clines with the wedding

album, which he found

while doing some cleaning. In

tears, Karen paid him his long

overdue fee of $150. “I kept hugging and thanking him,” she

said, “but how do you thank someone enough when they

hand you something you never dreamed about getting?”

•In 1996, the city of Vaxjo,

Sweden, resolved to wean itself

off fossil fuels. Today, its greenhouse

gas emissions are down

30 percent and Vaxjo is on track

to cut them 50 percent by 2010.

Most of the reduction has been

achieved by replacing oil with

wood chips at the main heating

and power plant; the ashes are

dumped in the forest as nutrients.

“People used to ask, ‘Isn’t

it better to do this at a national

or international level?’” said

Henrik Johansson, Vaxjo’s environmental

controller. “We want to

show everyone else that you can

accomplish a lot on a local level.”