👋 Welcome to Smileworthy, where we round up all the good things happening out there that are not receiving the attention they deserve!

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

🤠 Montana | Rodeo Teen Ropes a Drowning Man Out of the Yellowstone River on His First Throw
A raft hit a bridge pillar and dumped four people into the fast-moving Yellowstone, and one of them was disappearing downstream with nothing but a cooler to cling to. But a 14-year-old on the bank grabbed the lariat he'd spent all year practicing with – the first one he'd ever thought to bring camping – and roped him clean on the first cast.
(Read more 👉 KTVQ)

🐕 Nebraska | A Dog Has Been Reunited With Its Owners Five Years After Going Missing
Chong slipped out of his Lincoln home back in 2021 and soon went missing. But his owner never stopped driving the old neighborhood hoping to spot him. After almost giving up, last week he surfaced 642 miles east behind a truck stop in Indiana, still carrying the chip that pinged his family and sent them on a very long, but very happy road trip to reunite with him.
(Read more 👉 KOLN)

👶 Iowa | The World's Most Premature Surviving Baby Continues To Reach New Milestones, Inspiring Others
Born at 21 weeks and given the slimmest of odds, Nash Keen is a year old now and crawling, sitting up on his own, and stacking new words by the week. His survival has rewritten what doctors thought possible for the tiniest newborns, with six of 17 babies born that early at University of Iowa Health Care now making it home.
(Read more 👉 Action News 5)

📚 Florida | Shelter Celebrates 11-Year-Old Boy for Spending Over 100 Hours Reading to Rescue Pets
Anxious shelter dogs bark less and settle faster when someone reads to them, so one boy in Jacksonville, Florida, kept showing up to do exactly that. Eleven-year-old Nehemiah Turner just became the first kid to hit 100 hours in the humane society's reading program, and his favorite pupil got story time right up until the day a family finally took him home.
(Read more 👉 People)

🦝 Washington | A Raccoon Shaped Like a Bowling Ball Just Raised Over $58,000 for a Food Bank
Jimothy, a short-spined Seattle raccoon with a devoted internet following, inspired a local artist to auction a painting for the Ballard Food Bank – it sold for $6,543.21. Then Amazon offered to match it and dared the rest of Seattle to follow, and Starbucks, Alaska Airlines and the Mariners all raised their hands. (Read more 👉 GeekWire)

🍎 New York | Free School Lunch Vanishes Every June. NY Just Sent Families $189 Million to Fill the Plate
Summer break pulls the cafeteria out from under roughly 1.6 million kids who rely on subsidized meals during the year. New York's answer loads $120 per child onto a card that works like SNAP at grocery stores and farmers markets, and a USDA study found benefits like these cut severe child food insecurity by a third. (Read more 👉 Bushwick Daily)

🐒 Brazil | 15,000 Animals Have Crossed the Amazon on Rope Bridges Without a Single One Getting Hit
When highways sliced the forest around Alta Floresta into deadly fragments, biologist Fernanda Abra strung eight rope canopy bridges between the tree lines. Camera traps counted 15,000 crossings by monkeys, sloths and opossums over 15 months with zero roadkill, and Brazil just made the design its national standard for highways.
(Read more 👉 Mongabay)

🦋 Hawaii | Two Species Written Off as Gone From These Islands Just Turned Up Alive
Native Hawaiian insects tend to blink out one island at a time, so nobody expected to find these two clinging on. Wildlife staff spotted Blackburn's sphinx moth caterpillars on Molokaʻi for the first time since the 1940s, plus a pinapinao damselfly on Hawai'i Island a full 102 years after the last confirmed sighting – one of them hiding in an unlikely eucalyptus plantation.
(Read more 👉 Hawaii DLNR)

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

Captain Jim Curtis had flown for 43 years, and on his 65th birthday the rules said he was done. Commercial pilots have to hang it up at 65 - no exceptions - so this Las Vegas to Oakland run would be the last commercial flight.

But he wasn't flying it alone.

In the first officer's seat sat Julia Curtis, his daughter – four months into her own career with the airline, and about to spend two hours doing the job her dad had spent her whole life preparing her for, mostly without either of them realizing it.

Before takeoff, Julia picked up the cabin intercom and told a plane full of strangers this was a special one. She walked them through his numbers: 21 years in the Air Force, 22 more flying commercial, over 18,000 hours in the air. Then she told them the part the numbers can't tell fully. That this was the man who taught her to walk and to talk, to ride a bike, to throw a baseball, to drive a car - and to fly. To carry herself, she said, with humility and kindness, in the cockpit and out of it.

"He inspired me to be a pilot," she said. And then she let them in on the secret – that the captain up front was her father, and that she'd wanted the whole cabin to know how proud of him she was.

Being Dad, Jim couldn't let the moment go by without one dig. He got on the intercom himself and told the passengers that after a full month of flying together, he and Julia still had one running argument, going all the way back to day one: she had a full-time job now, and she was still on his phone plan. He asked the cabin whether she ought to get her own. They booed. Julia celebrated. "She's on it for life, I guess," he laughed.

Later, off the intercom and away from the jokes, the 43 years caught up with him. Jim fought back tears and said it had been a good career, a long one, and that he knew exactly what this job had given him.

Then he said the thing a father says when he's handing something over for good.

"I know what this job has done for me. And I think it'll do the same for her."

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

The Louvre jewel heist last October horrified the art world and, if we're honest, lowkey impressed the internet's crime-caper enthusiasts. Part of the fascination was the sheer nerve of the getaway plan, which involved parking a cherry picker beside a museum window in broad daylight and riding a basket lift up to the crown jewels. Footage of the thieves gliding back down with their haul racked up millions of views.

What authorities saw as a dastardly act, another party saw as a marketing gift. Böcker Maschinenwerke, the German company that made the lift, ran an ad using imagery from the scene, and a deadpan caption stating: "If you're in a hurry." It went on to note that the machine hauls treasures up to 400kg and runs "quiet as a whisper" on its 230V electric motor. No word on whether they're offering a discount for museum-adjacent addresses, but the product demo more or less wrote itself.

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Keep Your Body Clock Steady, Even on Weekends

New research out of the University of Missouri points to something almost suspiciously simple: doing the everyday stuff at roughly the same time each day - weekend or not - can lower both pain and low mood, even when your actual sleep doesn't improve. The culprit it targets is "social jet lag" – that drift where you're up at 6:30 on weekdays but sleep in til 9am on Sundays, which stealthily knocks your body clock off its axis. You don't need a rigid schedule - just anchor a couple of daily fixtures – wake-up, meals, a walk – to steady times, weekends included, and let your circadian rhythm do the rest. Small, repeated, and free. (Source: Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 2026)

There's a full basketball court on the top floor of the US Supreme Court building. Fittingly, it's nicknamed "the highest court in the land."

1866 – The first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable comes ashore at Heart's Content, Newfoundland, after Brunel's Great Eastern lays out 1,686 miles of it across the ocean floor

1921 – Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate insulin at the University of Toronto, and diabetes stops being a death sentence

1935 – The first Penguin Books roll off the press, and the paperback revolution begins

1961 – The Beatles play their first gig as the Cavern Club's house band in Liverpool

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

A man in a wheelchair was stranded partway across six lanes of Arkansas traffic, the kind of spot where seconds matter and the countdown clock is not on your side. Helping him across took someone quick, fearless, and – as luck and timing would have it – already dressed for the job. What the Jonesboro street camera caught next is the most literal case of a friendly neighborhood hero you'll see all week.

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 😊