Resilient Dogs Defy the Odds

Stories about super-dogs and a poignant bucket list highlight the week's most uplifting stories:

• Dog Hit by Car, Then Survives Euthanasia: One rescue worker has dubbed him "Lazarus," while another calls him "Houdini." But a mixed-breed dog who now bounds happily around the yard in a suburb of Birmingham, Ala., has escaped death not once, but twice. The first was when he got hit by a car, the second when a vet administered a supposedly lethal shot to put him down.
• Labradoodle Falls From 200-Foot Cliff, Lives: A Labradoodle named Gracie was playing on a trail in the Columbia River Gorge when she fell 200 feet over the side of a cliff. "We kept hearing her rolling and rolling and heard her hit on the ground and she yelped out and we didn't hear anything after that," says her owner. End of story? Not even close.
• Baby Completes Bucket List Before Brief Life Begins: When Jenna and Dan Haley found out the baby they were expecting, Shane, would live only a few hours after birth, the Pennsylvania couple decided give him as full a life as they could. They created a "bucket list" for him, and checked off items while Jenna was pregnant: a Phillies game, the Statue of Liberty, the beach, the zoo, a pumpkin patch. This week, Shane was born. Less than four hours later, his brief but full life was over.

• Students Wow Pizza Guy With 10,000% Tip: When a Domino's Pizza deliveryman brought two pizzas to a chapel service at Indiana Wesleyan University, he figured he'd get a tip on the $12.50 order. He just didn't think it would involve so many decimal points.
• Cop Skips Ticket, Instead Gives Mom a Booster Seat: Ben Hall could have given Alexis DeLorenzo a ticket. The Michigan public safety officer pulled her over because her 5-year-old daughter wasn't riding in a booster seat. Instead, Hall had DeLorenzo, who had fallen on hard times, meet him at a Walmart nearby—where he bought the booster seat and gave it to her.

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