Happy Friday! Today is National Senior Citizens Day, on the calendar since Reagan signed it into being in 1988 at the age of 77. Nobody has ever really worked out how you’re supposed to mark it, so we’re doing it in the way we know how - lots of good news produced by people who have been at this a lot longer than the rest of us!

Let’s jump right in to the good stuff 👇

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

👨‍⚕️ Kentucky | Woman Graduates From Great Grandad’s Medical School - And He Wears His Own White Coat To Ceremony
Fifty-six years after collecting his own, Westel Creager turned up to Haiden Hauret's white coat ceremony wearing it. He was a carpenter before starting college in his thirties, graduated from the University of Kentucky Medical School at 41 and was still working emergency rooms into his seventies, and he had told Hauret he would be there if she got into his school.
(Read more 👉 Newsweek)

🐕 Tennessee | Dog Survives 17 Hours on a Ledge 120 Feet Down a Cliff Face
A neighbor's drone located Carl, a 30-pound Lagotto Romagnolo, partway down a 200-foot bluff near Jones Creek the morning after he went over the edge at a Dickson County farm. Four fire departments put nine responders on a high-angle rope system to reach him, and according to Fire Marshal Mike Osman, Carl "was able to jump right into the arms of our guys."
(Read more 👉 Dogheirs)

🦦 Canada | Man Who Has Saved 10 People With CPR Adds an Otter Pup to the Tally
Three pups were found tangled in a fishing net left at a dock in Alert Bay, British Columbia, on July 28, and two swam straight to their waiting mother once Gordon Mellish cut them loose. The third had stopped breathing, so Mellish gave it chest compressions and then mouth-to-mouth, or "half a breath of life" as he put it, and after several days in care it was released back to its family.
(Read more 👉 paNOW)

🍕 Michigan | Anonymous Phone Call Turns Into a Wall of Prepaid Meals at a Small-Town Pizzeria
A woman rang Rosco's Pizza in Union to ask whether the kitchen threw any food out at closing time, which it doesn't, because everything is made to order. Manager Shanna Crice posted about the call instead, ordered a bulletin board that same night, and the wall now carries prepaid $10 meals tagged with hearts marking donors in Arkansas, Portugal and Spain.
(Read more 👉 TODAY)

🐶 California | All 16 Puppies Found Beside a Livermore Parking Lot Have Been Adopted
Good Samaritans gathered the litter out of a brushy patch outside a Walmart on July 8 and drove them to the East Bay SPCA, which treated them and put them up for adoption. Every one now has a home, and operations vice president Jes Cytron says the attention they drew also cleared out several adult dogs who had been waiting months.
(Read more 👉 NBC Bay Area)

🎬 USA | Michael J. Fox Lands the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award for $3 Billion in Parkinson's Research
The foundation Fox started two years after disclosing his young-onset Parkinson's diagnosis in 1998 is now the world's largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson's research, having backed more than $3 billion in programs across four decades of his career. The Television Academy presents the award at the Emmys on September 14, adding him to a list that includes Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney.
(Read more 👉 Television Academy)

🏠 California | Startup Cuts Students' Rent the More They Help the Retirees They Live With
JoeyCo matches college students priced out of the Bay Area with older homeowners who want the company and a hand with the shopping or the driving. Nanik Tagore, 22, has lived with Robert and Paige Miller since his sophomore year, earns $30 an hour for around 10 hours a week and takes roughly $500 a month off his rent doing it, in a market where a studio runs $2,200 to $3,300.
(Read more 👉 Good Good Good)

💉 UK | Newborn Intensive Care Admissions for RSV Halve in First Full Year of the Maternal Vaccine
Across the same 20 NHS trusts, babies under six months admitted to intensive or high dependency care with confirmed RSV fell from 131 in 2024-25 to 63 last winter. Around 62% of women giving birth in England took the vaccine, offered from 28 weeks of pregnancy, which UKHSA data shows cuts a newborn's risk of hospital admission by more than 80%.
(Read more 👉 GOV.UK)

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

Thalles Winner DeSouza was a shift manager at Wendy's, and in his senior year of high school he went to his bosses to hand in his notice.

He had done the arithmetic. Construction paid more than fast food, and more money was how he was going to get himself to college.

"My plan was to go into construction," DeSouza told TODAY.

Usama El-Sehrawey, who owns several Wendy's around Cape Cod and Plymouth, heard him out. Then he made a different offer.

"I said, 'If you stay at Wendy's, I will make sure you go to college.'"

El-Sehrawey and his business partner, Ernest Smily, started setting money aside for every hour DeSouza worked. Once he enrolled, they paid the tuition directly.

DeSouza was 13 when he arrived in the United States, in 2016, from Vila Kennedy, a neighborhood outside Rio de Janeiro. He came without English. His mother had decided they were leaving after he was nearly killed by gunfire inside their own home while he slept.

So he stayed at Wendy's and took the offer. He spent three years at Cape Cod Community College, where he got straight A's and was elected student body president twice. He moved on to Bunker Hill in Boston for a year. And in May, Yale accepted him on a full scholarship.

"Someone finally saw me, because no one ever saw me the way they did," DeSouza said.

El-Sehrawey does not want the credit. He says he only pointed the young man in a direction and encouraged him a little, and that DeSouza did the rest.

Ernest Smily died before he could see how it turned out. His son Terry says the offer was the kind of thing the company had always done, going back to founder Dave Thomas, who was adopted as a child and told everyone who worked for him to give something back.

DeSouza starts at Yale this fall, majoring in political science with a minor in human rights. He intends to become a lawyer.

Four years after the offer, he wrote a note to the two men who made it.

"Sometimes all it takes is one person who believes in you," he wrote. "I'm living proof of that."

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

You’d be grinning too if you just found possibly the oldest bottle of Guinness known to man. Stefan Panis found the bottle he's pointing at sitting on the floor of the English Channel.

He was diving the wreck of the Mindoro, a British sailing barque that went down about three miles off Dover in November 27, 1864, when he spotted a sealed bottle and brought it up. He rinsed the silt off and read the embossing on the seal: Guinness Extra Stout, London. It’s so old, Queen Victoria was still on the throne when someone capped it.

He found lots more still stowed in wooden crates and packed upside down, which Panis believes created a natural hydraulic block under deep-sea pressure and held the seawater out.

Samples have gone off to a microbiologist and if the lab says it's clean, he says he and his pals are drinking it, even though he admits he isn't especially a Guinness man, but says he'll be making an exception if it comes back all clear!

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Send the message you've been putting off. Four researchers ran 13 preregistered experiments across nearly 6,000 people, splitting them into the person doing the reaching out and the person on the receiving end. Initiators consistently guessed low on how much impact a note out of nowhere would have. But recipients rated it higher every single time, and the gap grew wider the more unexpected the contact was and the further the two had drifted apart. Which means the old friend you think you've left it far too long with is precisely the one most likely to be delighted - so don’t hesitate.

Source: Liu, Rim, Min & Min, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2023)

Cows give more milk when the music is slow. Researchers at the University of Leicester played herds everything from REM to Beethoven and found the ones on the mellow playlist produced about 3% more than the ones subjected to something up-tempo. No word on whether anyone asked the cows for a request.

1888 – William Seward Burroughs is granted four patents for his "calculating machine," the ancestor of every adding machine, cash register and pocket calculator that followed. He had spent seven years as a bank clerk hating the arithmetic.

1903 – Joseph Pulitzer hands Columbia University $1 million to found a school of journalism, having been turned down flat by its trustees a decade earlier. The money later seeded the Pulitzer Prizes.

1920 – Harry T. Burn, 24 and the youngest man in the Tennessee legislature, arrives wearing a red anti-suffrage rose with a letter from his mother in his pocket telling him to vote for suffrage and not keep them in doubt. He votes aye, as Tennessee ratifies the 19th Amendment by 49 to 47, and American women get the vote.

1932 – The BBC begins experimental television broadcasts from London, using John Logie Baird's 30-line system and reaching an audience that could probably have fitted in a decent pub.

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

Charlie Decker is 92, and he has spent a lifetime pulling his family into orbit around him – children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren following him from New Jersey to Florida. But after his great-granddaughter Jade brought four-day-old Kacey over to meet him - he couldnt hold back the tears at the emotional moment.

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 😊