On Friday evening, Kathy Maloney and Connie Burczyk of St. Cloud, Minnesota, were walking a dog near the Mississippi River when they heard splashing and yelling near the river bank.

Maloney stayed on the path with the dog while Burczyk decided to investigate.

Burczyk found a man who appeared to be injured in the water. Despite having multiple sclerosis and a fractured ankle, she entered the water and pulled the man to shore.

Maloney called the police.

"By the time we found him, his hands were already blue," Maloney told the SC Times. "It was a miracle that it happened the way it did because that man would have froze to death or drowned."

Captain Steve Richardson or the St. Cloud Fire Department told the SC Times that the man had slipped on a rock and fell in the water. While he wasn't at risk of drowning, he did face a serious risk of hypothermia. He was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

"I'm very proud of Connie, I'm just amazed…she was brave to do that,"

Read More »from Minnesota woman with multiple sclerosis rescues man from freezing Mississippi River

Paula Perone, 42, of Kansas City owes her life to her dog, a shelter dog named Sadie.

In June, Perone thought she had a migraine. She tried to sleep off the massive headache, but her 6-year-old Blue Healer Daschund mix wouldn't leave her alone, tugging on her nightgown and whining.

"I was lying down and my dog kept trying to get to my head," Perone told the Kansas City Star. "She was trembling."

Perone tried to push the dog away, but eventually her arm gave out. She knew someone was seriously wrong.

Sadie's persistent behaviour, which eventually made Perone realize that she was having a stroke, earned Sadie the American Stroke Association's Brain Saver Award.

"If it wasn't for her, I could have easily just gone to sleep and never woken up," Perone told the Kansas City Star. "By the time they performed surgery on me, I had already hemorrhaged. I already had bleeding on the brain."

"I still get goosebumps when I tell this story," Kathleen Henderson, stroke program coordinator at St.

Read More »from Kansas City stroke patient’s rescue dog saves her life

Martin O'Donoghue planned to propose to his girlfriend, Hannah Vahala, when she crossed the NYC Marathon finish line last weekend.

"I'd talked to the organizers," O'Donoghue told Huffington Post, adding that he planned to hold up a sign that read: "If you finish in five and a half hours, I'll marry you."

(He planned to bring a marker with him so he could cross out "five and a half hours" and add Vahala's time — if her pace was slower than anticipated — to ensure that her time fell within his proposal conditions.)

Even though the marathon was cancelled, O'Donoghue still went through with the proposal.

On Saturday, O'Donoghue brought Vahala, who had travelled to New York from Atlanta, Georgia, for the big race, and her friends and family to Central Park.

"I just basically said, 'Look, let's go to the finish line and do it," said O'Donoghue.

The tearful runner said yes.

Following the marathon's cancellation — a decision that affected 40,000 elite athletes — runners still flocked to the

Read More »from NYC Marathon cancelled, man still proposes to runner girlfriend at finish line

On Sunday, November 4, Zac Vawter, 31, became the first person to ever climb 103 floors of Chicago's iconic Willis Tower wearing a bionic prosthetic limb.

He finished the climb in about 45 minutes.

Vawter, who lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident, wore a mind-controlled motorized prosthetic leg "designed to respond to electrical impulses from muscles in his hamstring" for the record-breaking climb the Associated Press reports.

"The hardware is amazing, it's there, it is something exciting and fun and I hope we push the boundaries of the research and the leg are capable of," Vawter told CNN.

"Tiny blue lights blinked beneath Vawter's white shorts, and as the leg moved, it made a crunching sound that brought to mind the movie superhero Iron Man," the Chicago Sun-Times describes the bionic leg in action.

Nearly 3,000 climbers participated in SkyRise Chicago, the annual charity event to raise money for the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. The institute used Vawter's climb as a

Read More »from Zac Vawter climbs 103 floors of Chicago’s Willis Tower with bionic leg

The Obama Cafe opened on Toronto's Danforth Avenue on President Barack Obama's inauguration day in January, 2009, and became "an instant media darling."

Four years later, Emmanuel Debass, founder of the tiny coffee shop in the city's east end, is hoping Obama will win another term.

Debass, who was born in Ethiopia but has called Canada home for more than 30 years, told the Toronto Star of how he got swept up in Obama's campaign:

"He was talking about bringing America together. He seemed to be this great role model for young black people," he said.

"Owner Emmanuel Debass came up with the idea for the café post-election, so he had to act quickly in order to have the sign up before the inauguration in January. He managed to just make it, attracting hoards of both TV and print media, but he had to conduct all the interviews on the sidewalk (the actual café didn't even have tables or chairs then)," the Torontoist's Kaori Furue wrote of the cafe's speedy opening.

Debass claims that business

Read More »from Obama Cafe in Toronto hopes for second term for its namesake

Cuteness alert.

In 2012, seven giant panda cubs were born at the Chengdu Panda Base in Chengdu, China's Sichuan province.

The "cutest panda photo ever" of the seven adorable cubs, named Oreo, Xiao Qiao, Si Yi, Yuan Run, Miao Miao and twins Cheng Shuang and Cheng Dui, napping together is melting hearts worldwide.

"Pambassador finalist Melissa Katz from the U.S. formally announced the new additions today in Chengdu and all the cubs are in good health and were photographed together for the first time," Alejandro Grau, a spokesperson for the reserve, told Discovery News of the baby boom.

Earlier in the year, the Chengdu Panda Base announced its search for thee "Pambassadors," a dream job for panda-lovers that involves a year-long Global Panda Conservation Tour.

"I'm very excited to announce this big news, and with my fellow pambassador finalist friends be the first people to photograph all these babies together," Katz, a field hockey coach from Tinton Falls, N.J., said in a press release.

Read More »from Seven giant panda cubs steal hearts

Lucy Walkowiak, 11, of Sandy-stricken Hoboken, New Jersey, is finding a way to help others in need.

The young girl and her father, Steve, opened a pop-up internet cafe and charging station on one of the few blocks with power to help give their still-in-the-dark neighbours access to the internet and the ability to charge their phones.

In return, Lucy asks for a small donation to the Red Cross.

Steve insists the initiative was all his daughter's idea:

"Lucy does a lot of community service through her school, so this is on par with what she's been learning," he told PhillyMag.com.

Lucy's good deed makes her just one of the many local heroes helping out their battery-dead neighbours during Sandy's aftermath.

Redditor RuffDesperado uploaded a photo of a good Samaritan's makeshift charging station outside his home that welcomes strangers to plug in their gadgets as they await their power to return.

The Occupy Sandy Relief NYC campaign started an OWS bike generator service "to charge

Read More »from 11-year-old New Jersey girl opens pop-up Internet cafe to benefit Red Cross

Reddit may get its share of bad press — troll Violentacrez certainly didn't help — but it also celebrates good news, sweet moments and random acts of kindness. It has even become a place for the online community to rally together to help others.

Earlier this week, Reddit user womp0982 posted a photo of a typed note left on a truck:

"You do not know me but I saw that you needed some tires for your truck and I wanted to do something nice for a stranger because one day a stranger did something nice for me. The receipt is in the envelope and all you have to do is go by Warehouse Tire on 3rd Street and ask for Steven Hodges and they will be put on for free. All I ask is that one day you do something nice for a complete stranger," the note read.

After some Redditors expressed cynicism about the note — User AlexanderMoore2 immediately called the note a fake — Huffington Post determined that the note was, in fact, the real deal.

"[A] call to Warehouse Tire & Battery Sales revealed there indeed

Read More »from Good Samaritan ‘pays it forward’ and buys stranger new tires