👋 Happy Friday! Somewhere in Niagara this week, roughly a hundred men in full Santa outfits met for the annual Santa Congress… in 80-degree heat. We'll get to that later.

Also inside this weeks edition:

✈️ A 64-year-old airport worker hauling stairs across the tarmac had his life changed by internet strangers
🗞️ A 25-year-old just bought the 145-year-old newspaper he interned at to save it from corporate greed
🐕 A 100-pound dog collapsed two miles up a mountain trail far from anywhere, but firefighters weren’t leaving him

Plus much more…

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It’s not all doom and gloom out there. Here’s some positive news items from publications around the world.

✈️ California | A Stranger Filmed Him Limping Across the Tarmac. Nine Weeks Later The Internet Raised $184,000
LaCinda Thackeray was waiting on a flight home when she noticed a man on the tarmac hauling airplane stairs in what looked like real pain, so she posted a TikTok asking if anyone knew who he was. A million views later the internet had found James Blair, 64, a Navy veteran fueling planes since 2006 whose retirement plan was to work until he couldn't.
(Read more 👉 Sunny Skyz)

🗞️ Georgia | A 25-Year-Old Bought His Hometown Paper to Keep It Out of Corporate Hands
Evan Newton interned at The Monticello News in 2023 and now owns it, making him one of the youngest newspaper owners in the country at a moment when over half of America's daily papers belong to a handful of parent companies. His argument for local ownership is impossible to beat: "Our readers can find me at the grocery store."
(Read more 👉 Good Good Good)

🐕 Pennsylvania | Six Firefighters Carry Exhausted 100-Pound Dog Down Mountain in Four-Hour Rescue
Sable got nearly two miles up the Golden Eagle Trail before her legs gave out, and the terrain was steep enough that only two firefighters at a time could manage the rescue basket on some stretches. "These mountains are kind of unforgiving," said Tiffany Young of the Waterville Volunteer Fire Company, 30 years a volunteer.
(Read more 👉 Waterville Volunteer Fire Company)

🚗 Washington | Man Uses His Own Car to Stop Runaway SUV, Saving Woman and Child
Paul Jackson pulled alongside a car that had just cut across three lanes of I-5, saw the driver's eyes rolled back and a small boy in the seat behind her, and gently pinned the SUV against the concrete barrier until it stopped. The one casualty was his wife's birthday cake, still sitting unclaimed, which is why he texted her photos from the scene: "Proof that I wasn't pranking."
(Read more 👉 Fox 13 Seattle)

🧪 UK | Oxford University Built an Ebola Vaccine in Eight Weeks and Just Started Testing It in People
The outbreak tearing through the DRC is the fastest-growing on record and it's the Bundibugyo strain, rare enough that nothing in the existing arsenal touches it. Oxford University started work the day the emergency was declared and had regulatory approval 56 days later, with fifty UK volunteers due to receive the first doses within weeks.
(Read more 👉 BBC)

👗 Europe | It's Now Illegal for Big Fashion Brands to Burn Clothes Nobody Bought
Until this week, incinerating perfectly good unsold stock was entirely legal and extremely common, because storing it cost more than destroying it – somewhere between 4 and 9% of unsold EU textiles went up in smoke every year. Large companies must now discount, donate or resell instead, and publish an annual account of anything they do bin.
(Read more 👉 The Optimist Daily)

⚡ Brazil | The Grid Just Hit 84.6% Renewable and Solar Is Still Accelerating
Brazil opened 2026 with roughly six times the global average share of renewable capacity, and last August wind and solar together supplied over a third of the country's electricity in a single month for the first time. It's currently the only G20 nation on track to triple renewable capacity by 2030, though. So more work to be done.
(Read more 👉 The Rio Times)

Feel good stories from Happilynews.com guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

Twice a week for eight years, Dave Whitlow has walked into the neonatal intensive care unit at Children's Hospital of Richmond and taken up his role as chief ‘cuddler’.

He's 73 and he isn't a doctor or a nurse. But he spent forty years as a local government manager, raised two kids, and now has three grandchildren. So as he hit retirement, he decided he wanted to give back by volunteering at a local children’s hospital.

The first thing he does on each visit is find the nurse to find out more about each tiny pateint. "Tell me what this child is receiving. What kind of treatment? Is there anything special I need to know about it," he says he asks. Then he gowns up, pulls on gloves, and picks up a baby who might weigh less than two pounds to offer them some comfort while their parents eat, sleep, rest or even work, with some babies in the NICU for long stretches at a time.

On a normal visit he'll hold five or six babies. But on a busy day, eight.

He was not always this calm about it. "I was scared to death," he says of when he started. He'd held babies before – his own, decades ago – but his own babies hadn't been hooked to anything, or been facing such monumental health challenges.

There's no trick to what he does. He sits, holds and watches. Sometimes a parent is there and sometimes they're at work or asleep or three hours away, or looking after other siblings, and the baby is alone. "I pretty much just want to be with them," he says.

The research says this matters more than it looks like it does. Human touch helps a premature infant's body and brain develop – better vital signs, faster weight gain, shorter stays. One study found babies in a volunteer cuddling program went home six days earlier.

But that isn't why he does it, and it isn't the part he'd tell you about.

Every time, before he puts a baby back down, he leans in and says the same six words. He's said them thousands of times now, to thousands of babies who will never remember hearing them and to a few who didn't make it home.

Grow strong, grow smart, grow kind.

"It's important to me to think that this is what I want from people in general," he says.

A unique, sometimes quirky, but always eye-catching photo feature each week.

This week in Niagara, Canada, several dozen Santas, Mrs. Clauses, and elves from around the world gathered for the World Santa Claus Congress – in July, in full costume, in summer heat.

The itinerary included workshops on voice performance, sign language, best practices for children with special needs, and developing your Santa persona. And some fun activities thrown into the mix, like the visit to an alpaca farm and a stop for ice cream at a dairy.

The tradition dates to 1957 in Bakken, Denmark. When the original venue ended its sponsorship in 2022, the Boxall family brought it to Canada in 2023 to mark Peter Boxall Sr.'s 90th birthday and one of his lifelong dreams. And this part of Canada has hosted Santa and his helpers every July since.

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Do the hard version on purpose. University of Toronto researchers ran six pre-registered studies on 2,883 people and found that the more effort a task took, the more meaningful people found it – even when the task was pure busywork, like mentally adding 3 to strings of random digits. In one study, participants who wrote an essay themselves rated it as significantly more meaningful than those who had ChatGPT help, despite scoring objectively worse. The catch is a sweet spot: push into agonizing difficulty and the meaning falls away again. Moderate effort is where it lives. So pick one thing today and don't take the shortcut.
_{(Source: Campbell, Wang & Inzlicht, "Experimental evidence that exerting effort increases meaning," Cognition, January 2025)}

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain. Which might explain some of their life choices.

1921 – Congresswoman Alice Mary Robertson becomes the first woman to preside over the floor of US House of Representatives

1969 – Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon while roughly 650 million people watched, the largest television audience in history to that point.

1976 – Exactly seven years later to the day, NASA's Viking 1 became the first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars and send back pictures.

1978 – Louise Brown was born at 11:47pm in Oldham, England, the first baby conceived through IVF. Millions of children have followed. She's 48 today.

Feel-good clips are scientifically linked to better mood - consier this your weekend prescription!

A juvenile southern right whale – 10.6 meters long and nicknamed "Gail" by locals – spent 19 days lost in Western Australia's Peel-Harvey Estuary after wandering in on June 28. The estuary averages about two meters deep, which is potnetially troublesome for the gigantic sea creatures. It led researchers to fear it would die there if it couldn’t be guided to safety..

But incredibly, last Thursday it finally cleared the sandbar at the Dawesville Cut. And waiting on the other side was a pod of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins who live in the estuary year-round, who started escorting it out so it didn’t get lost again.

That’s it for this week. If you liked what you read, why not buy the team a coffee? We’re fuelled by caffeine and a thirst for sharing the most uplifting, positive stories with you, our beloved readers.

And don’t forget to share with your friends and family to brighten their day, too.

Have a great weekend!

~ Team Happily 😊