Blog Posts by Nadine Bells

A Kentucky man bought out his local Kmart — only to give everything to charity.

Rankin Paynter, owner of a jewelry exchange, headed to his local Kmart just days before it was set to close, looking to purchase some discounted display cases for his business.

While on the hunt for deals, he asked the store manager what was going to happen to the unsold items. The manager responded all the merchandise would go to Kmart "power buyers" on the last day of business.

So Paynter became a power buyer, filling out an application to purchase the goods. On the day before closing, the store called him and offered him all remaining merchandise, on one condition:

"They said you can buy it all but you must sign a contract and take everything left in the store," Paynter told ABC News.

And that's just what he did.

Having seen the toll hard economic times have taken on his jewelry customers — people are often selling their jewelry just to make ends meet — Paynter came up with a solution that was more

The butterflies have invaded Canada.

Record numbers of red admiral butterflies have migrated to central and eastern Canada from the Carolinas, Texas and Florida — and no one knows why.

"There's never been anything like this. This is like a tidal wave of butterflies making their way north," Jeremy Kerr, a biologist at the University of Ottawa, told The Toronto Star.

An estimated 300 million butterflies — 85 percent of them red admirals, but painted ladies are also swarming the nation — have made this season's migration "one for the history books," with at least 10 times more of the colourful insects arriving in Canada than usual.

The warm winter and spring across parts of North America may have contributed to the mass migration which began a month earlier than usual. With no cold zones to encounter during their migration, the butterflies "just kept going."

Kerr claims the butterflies won't have an immediate effect on their environment. Experts cannot yet predict what the increase in

Last year, a poodle fell from the sky — thanks to an eagle — to a better life.

This week, a similar story is making headlines.

Last weekend, a hawk dropped a puppy from the sky to the ground 30 feet below in Los Banos, California.

The tiny canine, named TJ Heavenly by its rescuers, had clutch marks on its body but was otherwise healthy. He opened his eyes for the first time this week, and has been eating well.

Elaine Bouschard and her grandson, Taylor Callaway, call finding the puppy a miracle.

"My thought is that when a god drops a puppy from the sky, you keep it," Bouschard told KSEE 24 News.

Bouschard assumes the puppy was snatched up from a junkyard as he was greasy when they found him.

Bouschard has added TJ Heavenly to her eclectic mix of pets on her sprawling rural property which includes dogs, cats, horses, and even hawks.

"I just want the puppy to be safe," she told NBC Bay Area of her immediate adoption of the pup that literally dropped into her life.

She added, "I actually

ReutersVictoria Shaw, 58, slipped getting out the shower on Sunday, hitting her head, breaking her glasses, and twisting her leg. Fortunately, her 9-year-old Yorkshire terrier, Louis, knew what to do: he hit the panic alarm, summoning help.

"He's just a pet but I've been training him to hit the button just in case," Shaw told The Telegraph. "But it's always been just a bit of a game. This is the first time he's done it for real."

Shaw suffers from glaucoma and arthritis. Because of this, the north Wales woman registered with Wrexham Council's Telecare service and has panic buttons installed in her home to ensure help is nearby should she need it.

When Louis pressed the button, his barking over the Telecare line indicated to operators that something was wrong.

Shaw, who had been knocked out in the fall, awoke to the voice of a Telecare operative coming from a wall intercom.

Paramedics arrived at the home soon after, where they found Louis at Shaw's side.

"He was right beside me, right in my

Surgeons in St. Louis, Missouri, have restored hand function to a 71-year-old paralyzed man — the first reported reactivation of muscles in thumb and forefingers after a spinal-cord injury — thanks to a new operation called a nerve transfer.

The innovative new surgery took a non-functional nerve that usually controls pinching the forefinger and thumb together and "plugging it into a functioning nerve" in the upper arm that had been used for bending the elbow.

"The circuit [in the hand] is intact, but no longer connected to the brain," Ida Fox, MD, assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgeon at Washington University and colleague of the surgical team that performed the operation, told the BBC. "What we do is take that circuit and restore the connection to the brain."

Fox added that the surgery can't restore full, normal function to the hand.

After eight months of physical therapy, the patient, who had sustained a spinal-cord injury in a motor vehicle accident in 2008,

Stolen iPad replaced by CBC Vancouver viewer Dennis Wong after watching the story.

It's a sad story with a happy ending.

On May 10th, Cassie Campbell was robbed on a SkyTrain in Burnaby, B.C.

Two men approached Campbell's wheelchair — Campbell is deaf, has cerebral palsy, and cannot speak — and snatched her iPad, her only means of communication.

When Campbell tried to chase after them, the men pushed her over in her chair and ran off with the device at the next station. Campbell sustained some bruising but was otherwise okay.

Despite several witness — some of whom even chased after the robbers — no arrests were made.

CBC News Vancouver shared Campbell's story on Wednesday. After it aired, a viewer contacted the station, offering to buy a new iPad for Campbell.

That viewer, Dennis Wong, presented the new iPad to Campbell at a nearby Apple Store a few hours later.

"You just want to help out as many people as you can," Wong said. "And I'm so glad I've been able to help her out."

Global

As Toronto's McMurrich Public School prepared to celebrate its 100th anniversary, teacher-librarian Coleen Vieira made a well-timed discovery: a journal started by D. D. MacDonald, the school's first-ever principal.

Vieira made the century-old find in the school's basement, the Toronto Star reports.

"It started off as his own personal diary; he was very reflective in his comments," said Vieira. "It's unique — you experience what was happening then, the events…it's like finding a time capsule."

The journal included details on the school's delayed opening due to construction:

"'Tis the first day for school," MacDonald wrote. "As is so often the case, the building is not ready. The second floor along shows any possibility of being used for sometime and even here no room is ready. At nine o'clock the teachers appear. Workmen are everywhere with clang of hammer and clatter of board and all the accompanying sounds of a carpenter's shop."

Vieira also discovered a, equally old ledger, listing

CBCLast Tuesday, Nova Scotia Power made the controversial and widely unpopular request to raise rates by six per cent over the next two years, the seventh increase in 11 years.

The next day, its parent company, Emera, threw a party at a restaurant on the Halifax waterfront.

While the company insists shareholders paid for the event and not Nova Scotia Power customers — the party's price tag is undisclosed, but CBC News reports it featured "Cape Breton comedian Maynard Morrison, the Halifax Titanic Orchestra, and the Mellotones, a popular band in Halifax" — all three of the province's political parties are unimpressed with the event, claiming the Emera executives are out of touch.

"It's insensitive, it's insulting to Nova Scotians, and it just shows exactly what's wrong at Nova Scotia Power," said Andrew Younger, the Liberal energy critic. "They're asking people to sacrifice, yet they're out there partying at a level that most rate payers in Nova Scotia could never possibly afford."

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