👋 Happy Friday! There's no out-of-office for good news, which is unfortunate for us and quite good for you. While half the country is promising to get back to anyone in September, here's what's been happening.

This week, we’ve got:

Let’s jump right in👇

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

⛵ North Carolina | Boat Company Founder Turns Down $400 Million and Hands the Profits to Charity
Offers "way north" of $400 million came in for Grady-White Boats, the near-bankrupt outfit Eddie Smith Jr. bought at 26 and spent 58 years turning into a company with hundreds of millions in annual revenue. But instead of cashing in personally, the 83-year-old moved it into a perpetual purpose trust instead, protecting his staff and directing profits to charitable organizations.
(Read more 👉 Fortune)

🐒 Global | Leonardo DiCaprio Backs a $200 Million Push to Pull 100 Species Back From Extinction
A $200 million war chest is now aimed squarely at the hundred species closest to blinking out, split down the middle between the Bezos Earth Fund and DiCaprio's conservation group Re:wild. The Phoenix Species Project reaches into 30 countries and covers everything from Madagascar's golden-crowned sifaka to a tiny South African succulent called the fuzzy belly button.
(Read more 👉 Good Good Good)

🏠 New Jersey | More Veterans Now Enter Housing Each Month Than Fall Into Homelessness
Crossing that threshold took $30 million and 20 months, and it means New Jersey can now say no veteran in the state has to sleep without a roof. Six regional hubs handle referrals under the Bringing Veterans Home initiative, promising contact within 24 hours and stable housing within 30 days, with more than 2,500 veterans permanently housed since launch.
(Read more 👉 Office of the Governor of New Jersey)

🎅 Virginia | A Santa Claus Lost 40 Pounds So He Could Donate a Kidney to a Stranger
Forty pounds had to come off before surgeons would sign him off, so Dave Bell, who spends every December playing Santa across central Virginia, lost them and donated anonymously at Henrico Doctors' Hospital. "I have two of these things, and I only need one," he said of the decision. "There's somebody who has none and they need one."
(Read more 👉 WTVR CBS 6)

🤸 Ukraine | 10-Year-Old Finishes a Five-Continent Dance Tour Four Years After Losing Her Leg
Paris, Times Square, Rio, Nairobi and now Tokyo have all watched Sasha Paskal dance on a prosthetic leg, telling her country's story without a word of narration. She suffered catastrophic injuries after a Russian missile flattened her family's seaside home near Odesa in 2022. But after seven months of rehab she was walkign again, and seven more later, she won her first gymnastics competition - and has spent the time since promoting peace through her performances.
(Read more 👉 CNN)

⚡ Utah | Boy Offers Dad His Entire Savings After Lightning Destroys His Work Truck
Lightning hit Casey Pettus's truck on I-15 and burned it to the frame in minutes, taking thousands of dollars of contracting tools with it. Back home that evening, his 9-year-old handed over the dirt bike fund he'd spent months building by hauling neighbors' trash cans and selling loose golf balls, and his dad choked up recounting it: "I'd never felt so loved." Casey refused the money, of course. But the internet has falled in love with his son’s kindhearted gesture.
(Read more 👉 FOX 13 Salt Lake City)

🎓 Florida | 18-Year-Old Becomes the Youngest Professor on Record, Teaching Students His Own Age
A 306-year-old record fell when Nathan Thomas walked into a C programming class at Miami Dade College aged 18 years and 346 days and met a room of faces roughly his own age. Bu this time he was their professor, not peer. Incredibly, he dual-enrolled at that same college at 10 and had both a bachelor's and a master's in electrical engineering banked before most people finish high school. He’s now returned to teach the next generation.
(Read more 👉 Guinness World Records)

🐶 Nationwide | Clear The Shelters Kicks Off Its 12th Adoption Drive, and It Runs All Month
Every August, NBCUniversal Local turns its stations loose on the shelter system, and last year's push rehomed more than 160,000 animals while raising $628,000 for participating rescues. This year's campaign runs through August 31 with a live map of participating locations, and the donation window stays open until September 15. Help if you can.
(Read more 👉 Clear The Shelters)

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

Madison George knew there was a chance. She was due right around the time her sister was getting married, and a baby doesn't much care what's on the calendar. So the sisters made a deal early on: if Madison went into labor, nobody was to leave the wedding on her account, their mother included.

At six in the morning on May 30, her water broke. Madison and her husband, Kirk, didn't tell a soul, because the wedding party was still asleep in Savannah, Georgia, and she wanted them to stay that way. Their 22-month-old, Blair, went to the wedding as a flower girl with a babysitter.

When the bride finally woke up, Madison called her from the hospital in tears, and it was Liz who ended up doing the reassuring. "I didn't want anything to take away from her wedding day," Madison said.

And so Liz Roberts married Keana Upshaw on the rooftop of the Perry Lane Hotel with her whole family there watching, exactly the way it was supposed to go. And at 8:11 that evening, right before the toasts, Madison had her healthy baby girl. Her brother Nick then got the FaceTime call and held his phone up over the reception so everyone could crowd around it.

But Madison and one extra surprise in store. As the DJ cut in to proceedings to announce Madison, it turned out, had recorded a toast from her hospital bed before the delivery and asked for it to be played. In it, she gave the baby's full name: Elizabeth "Ellie" Bennett George.

Liz had known there would be an Ellie. It had simply never occurred to her what Ellie was short for. The middle name, Bennett, was for the sisters' father, who died of cancer in 2021.

"When she said that Ellie was actually Elizabeth," Keana said, "we look around and everyone in the room, like there's not a dry eye."

"My sister is my best friend," Liz said. "To be honored in that way, it was a dedication that is impossible to even put into words."

Madison missed all of it. But later that night she got a text from the bride saying she couldn't stop crying, and she wrote back the only thing a big sister could: stop crying and get on the dance floor.

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

Your brain may want to argue with you about this one.

What looks to some like a bird hovering in a patch of open sky, is a bird standing in a puddle. The "sky" around it is genuinely the sky, reflected in a shallow lake so flat it outperforms glass. The red is coastal grass, and it runs for miles.

Russian photographer Vitaly Golovatyuk shot it from above at Elk Park, outside Dongtai City in eastern China, after several days scouting the location at sunrise and sunset, waiting for water still enough to pull the trick off. It beat 1,587 entries from around the world to take Aerial Photograph of the Year at the second International Aerial Photographer of the Year awards.

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Book the next thing now. Dutch researchers tracked 1,530 adults, 974 of whom took a holiday, and found the happiness boost didn't land where anyone expected. Vacationers were measurably happier than non-vacationers, but only before they went. Afterward the two groups were basically indistinguishable, unless the trip had been genuinely relaxing. Anticipation is doing most of the emotional work here, and it costs nothing. So keep something on the calendar: a weekend away, a dinner six weeks out. The looking-forward outlasts the thing itself.

Source: Nawijn et al., Applied Research in Quality of Life (2010)

Honey bees can be trained to sniff out explosives. Their sense of smell is precise enough that scientists have taught them to stick their tongues out in the presence of TNT.

1786 – Congress unanimously picks the dollar as the monetary unit of the United States.

1914 – The first electric traffic light in the US is switched on at East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.

1965 – President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, outlawing voting discrimination against minorities.

1991 – Tim Berners-Lee publishes the files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, and the web goes public.

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

Dasia Moore has loved everything about firefighting since well before she met an actual firefighter. Which is how her boyfriend of five years, Jayson Ralph, who worked his way from FDNY EMT all the way up through the academy, ended up planning the most elaborate proposal we've seen in a while. Check it out.

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 😊