【推荐1】The trouble started at 9：30 p. m. last New Year’s Eve, in Newmark. When the fire engines（消防车）arrived at the fire, a very old woman was sitting in a third floor window. The firefighters placed a ladder（梯子）against the wooden house, and 26-year-old Marcus Reddick climbed 35 feet to the third floor.

The woman, 60 years old and very fat, was sitting with both feet out of the window. When Marcus reached the top of the ladder, the woman, afraid and nervous, put her two legs around him. Suddenly Marcus fell backwards off the ladder, with the large woman sitting on him. Marcus landed first—hitting a wall beside the front stairs-and broke the woman’s fall. She fell no more, but he fell another ten feet down the stairs. When the fire officer reached him, Marcus was unconscious.

Within an hour, a doctor told the men that Marcus was nearly brain dead, and would only get worse. Doctors talked of turning off the life-saving machine and asked if the family would like to give away his heart. The answer was “yes”.

On January 6, firefighters lifted Marcus’ coffin（棺材）—covered with an American flag-onto a yellow fire engine. Hundreds of firefighters from all over the state joined the procession（行列）through Newmark streets. Children watched silently from school windows. The day Marcus died, his heart was given away to a young girl. His family said that it was the second life Marcus had saved.

【推荐2】Katherine Commale has long known what it is like to greet admiring crowds of kids, to have strangers beg for her signature, and to be featured in books and on TV shows. And yet most of her fellow Americans have never heard of the girl, who has helped to save millions of lives in African villages from malaria. The story began when she was only five.

On a spring night in 2006, Katherine’s mother, Lynda, watched Malaria: Fever Wars. The documentary showed the mosquito-borne disease caused millions of deaths in Africa. The next morning, she told her daughter about the program over breakfast. The little girl was particularly troubled to hear that and Lynda switched the topic to things her little girl could do to help, like donating mosquito nets.

Initially, Katherine tried raising money by selling some old items, but failed. Soon, she and her younger brother Joseph decided to use small dolls to represent African families with Joseph dressed as a large mosquito, to explain to other children how a simple and cheap mosquito net could protect a sleeping child. Then they went to Katherine’s Sunday school and other schools. The idea took off. When that first effort ended, Katherine and her family donated $ 1, 500 to the United Nations Foundation to purchase mosquito nets.

Katherine’s efforts caught the attention of many international celebrities, such as David Beckham and Bill Gates. When she was six, she attended the first Malaria Awareness Dayobservance (纪念仪式) at the White House, and later a Clinton Global Initiative event where she met former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Although Katherine’s pace slowed down as she entered middle school, her fame was rising around the world. She has even been featured in a board game beside the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. “I’m not Malala whatsoever,” she said. “It’s just an act of kindness.”

【推荐1】In partnership with the Anchorage School District, Youth Summit Awards, an evening event honouring kids for amazing contributions within their community, focuses on good deeds, kindness, community involvement, friendship in the classroom or just kids doing something awesome in their neighborhood or school that makes our area a better place. There will be a red carpet style ceremony where each honoree will receive a plaque (纪念匾)with their name on the front. READ MORE

【推荐3】A call came into Jimmy Gilles’s bar this past March. A newly married woman who had spent the afternoon at the dive beach bar in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina couldn’t find her wallet. She didn’t care about her ID, credit cards, or $150— but her wedding ring was inside it.

Gilles, 42, the boss of the bar, didn’t like the idea that there was a thief at his place. So he set out to find the wallet. He spent hours looking for the footage from 16 different cameras, watching the woman’s every step in the bar until she went to sit on a bench outside and left when her ride arrived. Within minutes, a young man in a hoodie approached the bench, put something in his pocket in a hurry, and walked off.

Gilles posted the picture on the bar’s Facebook and asked if anybody knew who the guy was. Within hours, 17-year-old Rivers Prather came and said he had taken the wallet and told Gilles he’d done it because he hadn’t eaten for two days. He said he saw the ring but thought it was fake, so he took the money, and threw the wallet off the public docks into the ocean. Then he bought a sandwich.

Gilles, unsure whether he should believe Prather, told the teen to meet him at the docks. There Prather revealed that he wasn’t getting along with his family and lived in the woods for weeks. Gilles looked at Prather—his small stature, his ruddy cheeks—and saw him for what he was: more of a kid than a thief.

But the police were already on the case, and because of the missing ring, Prather could be facing severe charges. Gilles wanted to help him somehow.

Gilles recruited two local divers to search the waters where Prather had thrown the wallet. A crowd gathered to watch the two divers search in the strong current. More than an hour passed, with no sign of the ring. Gilles grew worried. Each passing minute increased the chances that the police would arrest the young man.

And then a diver came out from the water with the wallet in his hand, and inside was the ring. Cheers erupted from the spectators. When Gilles called the wallet’s owner, she burst into tears. She promptly dropped the felony charges against Prather for stealing the ring.

But it wasn’t over for Gilles. He’d been troubled about Prather sleeping in the cold woods. He told the teen he could stay with his family until the boy got on his feet again. He also gave the kid a job at his bar. “Most people would give the footage to police, but the boss chose to help me,” Prather told CBS News. “I say thank you to him every day.”