Bite sized chunks of good news nuggets to help brighten the day.
Forgiveness Emoji
A Finnish group is fighting the good fight to find a design to express the emotion of forgiveness. We’re only sorry it’s taken so long. There are plenty of emojis online to cover the core human emotions of happiness, surprise, fear, anger and disgust, but there are fewer emojis that cover more abstract emotions. Campaigners will urge managers of the emoji list at the Unicode Consortium to add the winning idea for 'forgiveness' to the collection, which is used by millions of smartphone users across the world.
The Kinder Shop
The world’s first shop where luxury items could be bought with a little bit of kindness gave a huge boost to The Cumberland Building Society’s campaign to underline its commitment to kinder banking. Shoppers chancing upon the Kinder Shop which appeared for one day in Dumfries, Carlisle and then Kendal (all in north west England) were amazed to find that BBQs, hampers and other items such as garden furniture could be ‘bought’ by promising to spend time volunteering with local charities. A price tag on each item indicated the amount of time needed to ‘pay’ for the items. The pop-up shops secured over 1100 hours of volunteering for 27 charities. Tullie House, one of the charities involved in the project, described it as the ‘most innovative ideas in volunteering in 25 years’.
Poverty Plummets
Cambodia’s poverty rate has plummeted over the past two decades from nearly 40 percent in 2009 to 17.8 percent in 2020, driven by rising wages and earnings. The country’s COVID-19 cash transfer programme also helped, assisting 2.8 million people from poor and vulnerable households.
Free Transport
Numerous European countries are experimenting with free public transport. Spain, Germany, Estonia, and Luxembourg are already on the bandwagon while Ireland, Italy and Austria have reduced fares or introduced vouchers for lower-income workers. It’s an interesting idea - one day public transport could be a basic human right.
Metanoia
Noun: the journey of changing your mind, heart, self, and way of life.
A spiritual awakening is an example of metanoia.
Record Low
The difference between crime rates in New York and its residents' perception of them has never been wider. Widespread anxiety obscures the fact that crime is actually at decades-long lows. The reason for the mismatch? Views on crime are influenced more by what people see in the news than by hard numbers, says Bloomberg. A similar mismatch may be why few would realise that Americans are actually more tolerant than ever on almost every single social issue.
Lulo Rose
A big pink diamond of 170 carats has been discovered in Angola and is claimed to be the largest such gemstone found in 300 years. It's been named the 'Lulo Rose.' “Only one in 10,000 diamonds is colored pink. So you’re certainly looking at a very rare article when you find a very large pink diamond,” Lucapa Diamond Co. CEO Stephen Wetherall told The Associated Press. The pink diamond is an impressive size but many clear diamonds are larger than 1,000 carats. The Cullinan diamond found in South Africa in 1905 tips the scales at 3,106 carats and it’s one of the British Sovereign’s crown jewels.
Quote of the Day
“When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” Paulo Coelho
On this Day
9 August 1173: In Pisa, Italy, construction began on a bell tower that became internationally famous as the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Parts of the the reef have the highest levels of coral cover recorded in 36 years of monitoring by the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Read on...
More than 100 years after they disappeared, a land iguana is now naturally reproducing on the Galapagos Santiago Island. Read on...
Mood Booster
Remarkable footage of a whale giving a paddle-boarder a gentle nudge.