Blog Posts by Nadine Kalinauskas

Ithaca, New York, mayor Svante Myrick walks to work.

With his reserved parking spot downtown going unused all week, the 25-year-old mayor decided to turn his "parking space into a park space," he wrote on Facebook.

The city's youngest mayor in history quickly made headlines for added benches, tree trunks and flowers to his parking space.

"I'll be out here watering it on the weekends," Myrick said.

The "Reserved for Mayor" sign now reads "Reserved for Mayor — and friends."

Myrick recently gave up his car to join the 15 percent of Ithaca's residents who walk to work. He uses a local car-share program when he needs to drive to an event.

"I love to drive a car," Myrick told Your News Now. "But most of the work I do is within a two mile radius. So I thought the least I could do was give up my car and I sold it about three years ago now."

The mayor's "mini oasis" is an example of Myrick practicing what he preaches.

"The answer to too many cars is not necessarily more parking spaces…We can

All he did was buy a woman French fries. And now he's famous.

California-native Jason Loose, 22, is currently interning with a sports brand company at Nanjing University.

A passerby captured Loose's simple act of kindness of buying a homeless woman French fries on a hot day. The story went viral on Chinese microblogging sites, with Loose dubbed the "French Fry Brother," Xinhua News Agency reports.

The video shows Loose talking to the woman — he speaks Mandarin fluently — pouring water into her glass and providing her with food.

"I just gave some food that isn't really even healthy to an old woman and talked with her for a few minutes," Loose told the Los Angeles Times in a phone interview. "I don't see much that's newsworthy about that."

Surprised by the sudden media attention, Loose told Xinhua News Agency he feels "extremely shy, as it was just an encounter with someone in need. They (the beggars) are just like us, and they deserve respect and social concern."

Loose's generosity

An inspiring video of elementary-school kids encouraging a classmate at their school's field day has gone viral.

Matt Woodrum, 11, attends Worthington Colonial Hills Elementary School in Ohio. Once a year, Colonial Hills holds a track-and-field day for its students. This year, Matt wanted to take part with his peers, opting to run the 400-metre event on May 16th.

Matt suffers from spastic cerebral palsy. His ability to participate in any sort of rigorous physical activity is severely limited. This didn't stop the determined fifth-grader.

The other students in the race finished far ahead of him. Matt didn't stop running.

The school's gym teacher, John Blaine, walked — and then ran — alongside Matt, encouraging his run.

Then the other fifth- and sixth-grade students who had already finished the race joined Matt's run, cheering him on as they ran behind him.

Matt's mother, Anne Curran, watched from the sidelines, brought to tears by the outpouring of support for her son.

Curran told the

In 1945, American soldier Frank Fearing carved his wife's name into a British tree.

He had married Helen in secret just days before going off to war. As they said their goodbyes, Frank promised his new wife that he would carve their names into trees wherever he went. And he did, marking trees across France and Germany.

Helen thought Frank made up his tree-marking stories.

More than six decades later — and years after Frank's death in 2001 — Helen finally saw one of Frank's carvings, thanks to a 24-year-old British student specializing in tree carvings.

Chantel Summerfield was working on her PhD in military arborglyphs — inscriptions engraved on tree trunks — recording markings on 1,500 trees in France alone, and included the followed markings found on a Salisbury tree in her research:

"Frank Fearing — Hudson, Massachusetts, 1945," the markings on the tree read, followed by a heart and the name Helen.

Summerfield used this limited information to track down the couple's daughter,

Addison Logan, 13, and his grandmother, Lois, visited garage sales in Kansas looking for great finds, but they had no idea just how great of a find they would make.

At the third sale, Addison found a an old camera.

"I found this Polaroid camera and it looked pretty old and cool, so I just bought it for a dollar," Addison told ABC News.

The cool camera was missing one essential thing: film.

At home, after watching YouTube videos to learn about Polaroids, Addison opened the camera to discover a photo inside of a guy and a girl hanging out.

He promptly showed the old pic to his grandmother and she immediately recognized the male subject in the photo. It was her son, Scott Logan, who died 23 years earlier in a car crash.

"Wow. That's your uncle," Lois said, staring at the photo.

The photo was likely taken at the home of Scott's then-girlfriend, Susan Ely, who is in the photo with him.

Addison's father, Blake, couldn't believe it.

"He called me at work that afternoon, and I just kind of

Bass baritone Clayton Kennedy rehearses for the opera, I Will Fly like a Bird: a Tribute to Robert Dziekanski in a studio in Halifax on Tuesday, May 29, 2012.Upset with how the Canadian media dealt with the Tasering death of Robert Dziekanski five years ago? There's an opera for that. And it's set to premiere at the Scotia Festival of Music in Halifax on Thursday.

The one-show-only concert opera — vocalists don't act or wear costumes — chronicles the life of Robert Dziekanski, the Polish immigrant who died in 2007 after being Tasered repeatedly by Mounties at the Vancouver airport.

"Quite frankly, I got tired of seeing Robert Dziekanski die," J.A. Wainwright, a poet and author, told the Canadian Press.

"I wanted to see him live."

Dziekanski's death was captured on camera by an onlooker. The footage brought the story international attention.

Wainwright, who wrote the opera's libretto, says he wanted to treat Dziekanski as a human being and to give both Dziekanski and his mother a voice:

"It doesn't focus in any direct way on the Taser, although it's alluded to metaphorically and very powerfully in the music."

"He was a man filled with hopes

Lori Anne Madison, 6, of Lake Ridge, Va., reacts to the cold water while playing with friends in a park in McLean, Va., on Friday, May 11, 2012.Lori Anne Madison is a precocious, fast-talking 6-year-old with one very notable accomplishment: she qualified to compete in the prestigious Scripps National Spelling Bee. She's set to be the youngest contestant in the competition's 87-year-old history.

"She's like a teenager in a six-year-old body," her mother, Sorina, told the Associated Press.

"Her brain, she understands things way ahead of her age."

The Lake Ridge, Virginia, home-schooled first-grader will compete against 277 other spellers, some more than twice her age (and size).

The previous youngest contestant was 8.

Madison has been reading since the age of two, swims competitively four times a week — she can keep up with 10-year-old boys — and recently won major awards in both swimming and math.

"Swimming helps because when you see all the practice, all the hard work when you go to a meet, it inspires you to do the same in spelling," she said.

Unlike many of her older spelling competitors, this little girl doesn't labour

In February, Brendan Haas, 9, set out to earning an all-inclusive trip to Disney World.

On Memorial Day, the Kingston, Massachusetts, boy gave away the trip — to the family of a fallen soldier.

Haas and his mother, Melissa set up "A Soldier for a Soldier" on Facebook, initiating an attempt to trade up from a toy soldier to a Disney trip.

Inspired my the man who traded up from a paper clip to a house, Haas decided to trade a toy soldier up until he could help a military family.

With each trade, he amassed larger and larger items with his growing nationwide network.

Through his trading, he collected almost $900 worth of Disney gift certificates, airfare, and a stay at a Disney resort hotel.

On Memorial Day, he pulled Liberty Hope Steele's name out of a hat. The 2-year-old girl is the daughter of U.S. Army Lieutenant Timothy Stelle, 25, who was killed in Afghanistan last August.

"I think it would make them a lot happier," Haas told WHDH-TV of donating the trip to the Steele family.