Decade's Happiest Endings

Capt. Sully, Elizabeth Smart, even the Red Sox make the cut
By Nick McMaster,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 24, 2009 5:59 PM CST
Decade's Happiest Endings
Elizabeth Smart leaves a courthouse with her mother earlier this year. In 2002, then 14-year-old Elizabeth was abducted, but she was rescued 9 months later.   (AP Photo/Colin Braley)

This decade has had its fair share of tragedy, but Newsweek collects some of its best happy endings:

  1. The Red Sox in 2004. Many New Englanders lived their entire lives without seeing a Sox championship, making it that much sweeter in '04.
  2. Sully and the Hudson: The calm-under-fire performance of Capt. Chesley Sullenberger and his US Airways crew averted a tragedy on the Hudson River when the plane landed safely on the water.

  1. Euna Lee and Laura Ling: The intervention of Bill Clinton helped win the release of the imprisoned US journalists from North Korea earlier this year.
  2. Miners' rescue in Somerset, Pa: In 2002, nine miners were rescued after being stuck for three days—in shoulder-high water—in a collapsed shaft.
  3. Pirate rescue: Barack Obama's first foreign policy crisis ended when Navy snipers rescued the kidnapped captain of the Maersk Alabama, Richard Phillips, from Somali pirates this summer.
Click here for the complete list.
(More Chesley Sullenberger stories.)

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