Sunday News Update!! Major Good News and Important Updates About this Channel!
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Good morning, everyone. As promised, our Sunday tradition continues: another weekly good news update. Share one piece of good news from your week in the comments, and pass this along so someone else can join in too.
My good news this week is that we were invited to the University of Texas to speak at the International Journalism Symposium about our work. That’s because of you. Independent journalism is finally being recognized in a big way, and it’s happening because people like you keep showing up for it.
A couple of quick notes. First, many of you have reached out saying that aaronparnas.com now redirects to Trump’s website. It’s true. Someone grabbed the domain after it lapsed and is now trying to charge me thousands of dollars to get it back. The attacks are real, and they’re not slowing down.
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Second, we’ll have a news update this evening, but then I’m going completely offline for Yom Kippur for 25 hours. As promised, tomorrow morning you’ll have a major deep dive report in your inbox that I’ve been working on, but your next news update after tonight will probably be late tomorrow night.
Obviously people are threatened by the work we’re doing. But it matters so much, and I’m just so grateful to all of you. None of this happens without you. If this community matters to you, if a media landscape that answers to people instead of billionaires matters to you, this is the moment to back it.
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Here’s some good news:
Conjoined twins are recovering well after a marathon separation surgery. Hiyab and Wuhbto, twin sisters born conjoined at the head, traveled from Ethiopia to St. Louis for treatment and underwent a cranial separation surgery lasting more than 24 hours in February at SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital, carried out by a large multidisciplinary surgical team. The twins turned two shortly after the operation and are now in rehabilitative care at Ranken Jordan Pediatric Bridge Hospital, where doctors say they’re beginning basic activities, like sitting upright, that simply weren’t possible while they were conjoined. Head neurological surgeon Dr. Joanna Kemp cautioned that it’s still too early to know how their long-term development will go, but said the surgery opened up opportunities for them that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. The case came together through a coalition of partners, including the nonprofit World Pediatrics, an Ethiopian children’s home, Ronald McDonald House Charities, and Ethiopian Airlines, underscoring just how rare identical conjoined twins are, occurring in roughly 1 in 50,000 to 100,000 births.
A 48-year-old father of three is suiting up for college football for the first time in nearly three decades. Justin Buzzard, a freshman defensive end for San Jose City College who wears jersey No. 48, had actually signed to play for Whitworth University 30 years ago, but he was redshirted and then injured before he ever got his shot. His son encouraged him to give it another try after hearing about other older men returning to college sports, so Buzzard spent months weightlifting and training to pack on muscle before he managed to earn a roster spot. Three weeks into the season, he’s already recorded a pass breakup, and he now regularly swaps tips with two of his own sons, who play high school football. Buzzard says that despite the soreness, the experience has shown him he can still accomplish what he sets his mind to.
A woman born without a right hand is heading into the inaugural season of the Women’s Professional Baseball League after being drafted. Britt Apgar, 22, was born with a limb difference and underwent 12 surgeries by the time she was 4, and her parents raised her to never treat it as an excuse, teaching her from an early age to adapt to everyday tasks on her own. After being cut from her high school baseball team and later leaving college softball, and eventually dropping out of school altogether to support her family, she found her way back to baseball after spotting a WPBL tryout post on social media, and she trained around the clock for more than a year to get ready. At a WPBL camp she split her arm open on a hard-hit grounder and had to develop makeshift batting protection on the spot, and that moment led a league investor to connect her with prosthetics specialists at the Hospital for Special Surgery, who are now building her a custom prosthetic and orthotics. Apgar was ultimately selected in the third round of the WPBL draft out of more than 600 tryout hopefuls, and she credits her tight circle of family and friends for helping her get there.
Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts is donating $600,000 to install a cooling system at an overheating Philadelphia high school. The gift, described as the largest his foundation has made to date, will fund cooling improvements at Northeast High School, one of the city’s largest schools, and builds on Hurts’ “Keep It Cool” campaign, which has been supplying air conditioners to district schools since 2024 and is funded in part by his pledge of $5,000 for every touchdown he scores. Organizers say more than half of the School District of Philadelphia’s 218 schools lack adequate cooling, a problem that has led to early dismissals and lost class time during heat waves, and that aging school buildings often lack the electrical capacity needed for simple air conditioning fixes. Northeast High in particular has dealt with severe scheduling disruptions caused by inadequate HVAC during extreme weather. Hurts, who has an established personal connection to the school through his community visits there, told students he understood how important it is to have support in pursuing their goals.
A Tennessee stonemason has become a TikTok sensation for filming the elaborate lunches his wife packs him, racking up 4.3 million followers. Jose Luis Perez, 33, started the videos after hitting a plateau with construction content in Spanish, and his wife encouraged him to try posting in English despite his self-consciousness about his accent. His first lunch video got 30,000 views, then climbed to 40,000 and 50,000 as the sing-songy catchphrases, like his rendition of “Peaches” from The Super Mario Bros. Movie, caught on with viewers. The videos have earned him celebrity fans including Bella Hadid and Joe Jonas, and his wife Sandra, whom he affectionately calls “chaparra,” now has 1.4 million followers of her own after joining the trend. Perez says the joy he shows on camera comes from wanting to give his own children the playful childhood he felt he missed out on after leaving school early to work.
About 30 inmates at a Kansas prison donated $4,267 of their own money to wipe out most of their local school district’s unpaid lunch debt. The men, part of a Norton Correctional Facility chapter of the rehabilitation program Reaching Out From Within, covered the majority of the roughly $6,000 owed by Norton Community Schools families for the 2025-2026 school year without being asked. Superintendent Corey Roy visited the prison in August to accept the donation and says many of the inmates told him they were motivated by their own childhood experiences with food and economic insecurity. Roy says the visit turned into hours of emotional conversation, with some inmates tearing up as they described their pasts, and several who expect to be released soon said they hope to keep giving back once they’re out. Reaching Out From Within operates chapters in every Kansas prison and typically raises money for causes like domestic violence shelters and homeless shelters, with this lunch debt payoff a rarer, locally driven effort.
A fox cub hit by a car and left unable to use its back legs is now recovering through hydrotherapy swim sessions. The kit, named Chance, was found badly injured in Nottinghamshire, England last June after being struck by a car, with a vet initially fearing he would need to be euthanized. Wildlife rescuers took him in instead and began a rehabilitation program that now includes assisted swims in a hydrotherapy pool normally used for recovering dogs at the Mansfield Canine Centre. Chance has started using his back legs more, regaining sensation and kicking them in the water, and staff hope continued progress could lead to his eventual release back into the wild. The rescue center says it has treated five foxes hit by vehicles this year, a rise they attribute partly to hot weather pushing prey animals, and foxes hunting them, closer to busy roads.
Blue crab numbers in the Chesapeake Bay jumped 46 percent this year, reaching their highest level since 2019. The annual winter dredge survey from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences estimated a total population of 349 million crabs, with juvenile crabs also at their highest count since 2019. Rising water temperatures and invasive blue catfish digging up dormant crabs remain challenges, but strict catch limits in Maryland and Virginia have prevented overfishing according to a separate 2026 assessment. The Chesapeake supports more than 3,600 plant and animal species and remains central to the region’s culture and economy. Maryland also recently reported underwater seagrass coverage grew nearly 13 percent in a single year, another sign of the bay’s improving health.
New York City is redesigning 11 blocks of Park Avenue to restore its original green character and add a protected bike lane. The plan from Mayor Mamdani and the NYC Department of Transportation covers 46th to 57th Street, expanding medians for seating, plantings and public art while converting one travel lane in each direction, including turning a southbound car lane into a two-way protected bike lane. Officials say the redesign responds directly to New Yorkers who asked for more green space and safer cycling infrastructure. The project coincides with a major rehabilitation of the Grand Central Terminal train shed beneath the avenue, letting the city pair infrastructure work below with public space improvements above. Local officials, including Congressman Jerrold Nadler and MTA construction president Jamie Torres-Springer, praised the project as a model for combining transit modernization with livable street design.
An untouched 600-year-old tomb holding 38 skeletons and elite grave goods has been uncovered at Peru’s Chan Chan site. The tomb, found within a palatial complex built by the Chimú civilization, contained a central chamber with one individual whose skull bore red pigment, surrounded by two side chambers holding 20 more people along with metal weapons, gold and copper artifacts, jewelry and textiles suggesting an aristocratic burial. Lead archaeologist Jorge Meneses said prior knowledge of Chimú elite burials came only from looted sites and museum collections, making this the first scientifically documented example. An outside expert, University of Florida anthropologist Gabriel Prieto, called it “the discovery of the decade” for offering the first undisturbed look at a Chimú elite burial. With just 7 percent of Chan Chan excavated so far, researchers believe the site could yield many more such finds.
A blind 54-year-old chimpanzee named Pierre can see again after the sanctuary’s first cataract surgery. Chimp Haven, the world’s largest chimpanzee sanctuary, spent months preparing Pierre for the procedure, using positive reinforcement training so he would voluntarily present his eyes for care even while still blind. A board-certified veterinary ophthalmologist performed the surgery, and within hours Pierre was responding visually to a longtime caregiver, reuniting with his close companion Jill within days. Staff say the case reflects the individualized care aging chimps receive at the sanctuary, which was founded in 2000 to house chimpanzees retired from medical research. Colony director Michelle Reininger, who has known Pierre for over 25 years, said watching him look at her again was something she’ll never forget.
Scientists have identified a completely new wild cat species in Bolivia, the first in over a century. The discovery began in 2016 when a “weird cat” kitten was brought to a Bolivian wildlife sanctuary, catching the attention of biologist Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, who initially assumed it was a known species before genomic analysis with geneticist Eduardo Eizirik revealed otherwise. Named Leopardus tilcayo after the local indigenous name for the animal, the species diverged from its nearest relative around 1.4 million years ago and lives in Bolivia’s Yungas forest, though little else about its behavior is known. The finding, published in the journal Cell, is reshaping scientists’ understanding of the Leopardus genus, which has grown from a single species once thought uniform into a more complex family tree. Researchers say the discovery is a reminder that even well-studied regions can still hold undocumented species.
Researchers have identified the cause of a massive snowfall event that added 695 billion tons of ice to East Antarctica between 2021 and 2023. The study found that unusual warming in the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans triggered an atmospheric wave pattern that funneled moisture toward East Antarctica, producing the largest ice mass gain event on record for the region. Simulations confirmed the warm ocean pool, not direct human-caused warming, was the primary driver, with researchers estimating only about 9 percent of the snowfall anomaly was attributable to climate change. Study co-author Qinghua Ding said this type of ocean warming tends to cycle naturally roughly once a decade, though he noted the possibility of a climate change link couldn’t be fully ruled out. Scientists say tracking this pattern matters because the Antarctic ice sheet remains one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in predicting future sea level rise.
A new refining technique developed in China separates crude oil at room temperature instead of through repeated boiling, cutting energy use by 90 percent. Researchers at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics created specialized chemical membranes that act like molecular sieves, letting certain crude oil compounds pass through while filtering out others based on tiny differences in molecular size. In lab testing on a light sweet crude mixture, the method achieved recovery rates of 85 to 90 percent while avoiding the boiling, vaporizing and condensing steps that make traditional distillation so energy intensive. Oil refining is estimated to be the third largest stationary source of global CO2 emissions, so a scalable version of this process could meaningfully cut industrial emissions. The technique remains a lab-scale discovery for now, with researchers not yet able to confirm whether it can be applied at the scale of the global refining industry.
A California family runs a nonprofit that turns hard-to-recycle plastics into new products before they can break down into microplastics. Nick Schick and his parents operate Peninsula Precious Plastics in San Carlos, shredding thermoplastics that lack conventional recycling pathways into granules that can be heat pressed into furniture, combs, clipboards and other items. The nonprofit draws in students, engineers and artists who help design new uses for the reclaimed material, extending its reach well beyond the family’s own workshop. One collaboration sent press machines to Malawi, where a partner nonprofit is using them to make desks for solar powered classrooms built inside shipping containers. The project shows how a small local recycling effort can scale into an international one through shared equipment and community involvement.
Three Harvard students won a James Dyson Award for a headset that screens young athletes for concussions in two to three minutes. The device, called Rumble Rims, uses infrared eye tracking to measure how an athlete’s eyes follow, fixate and move, translating the data into real time guidance a coach can use to decide whether a player should be pulled from a game. The team, Radhika Saran, Cleo Pontone and Sophia DeVito, designed the headset after research showing millions of high schoolers report sports related concussions each year, aiming to close the gap between expensive clinical concussion tools and subjective sideline judgment calls. A recovery dashboard also allows repeat testing over time so families and clinicians can track an athlete’s progress before clearing them to return to play. The team won $6,500 to continue refining the prototype and plans to pilot it with schools and youth sports programs.
A Nashville songwriter has become a local hero for personally trapping and rescuing red foxes suffering from a mange epidemic. Jerry Vandiver, whose songs have been recorded by country stars like Tim McGraw, has spent seven years baiting and trapping mange stricken foxes around Nashville and driving them to Walden’s Puddle Animal Rescue for treatment. Mange is treatable but requires catching the animal, and Vandiver’s Facebook posts showing before and after rescues have grown his following from 325 to 5,000 as more residents reach out asking him to help foxes in their area. In August alone he logged 234 volunteer hours, and Walden’s Puddle has already rehabilitated more foxes this year than in all of 2025. Experts say suburban development is pushing fox families into closer contact with each other, helping the disease spread faster, and they’re urging residents to avoid leaving out food or poison that draws foxes together.
Researchers believe magnetite deposits beneath Australia’s red deserts could generate enough natural hydrogen to power the country for generations. Scientists at Edith Cowan University found that magnetite reacts with hot water deep underground to produce hydrogen gas, a clean fuel capable of powering heavy transport like ships and jets, and they developed a method to stimulate that production by injecting solutions into iron rich rock formations. Lab tests replicating underground conditions over 60 days showed hydrogen generation depends heavily on how easily water can reach fresh mineral surfaces through cracks and pores in the rock. Researchers say Western Australia’s vast banded iron formations could make the country not just energy independent but a major exporter of clean hydrogen. The findings, while promising, are still early stage, with actual underground hydrogen yields not yet demonstrated at commercial scale.
Bison have returned to Mexico’s Chihuahua Desert after a roughly 200 year absence, part of an effort to restore a vital biosphere reserve. Last year 48 bison were brought to El Santuario Wildlife Reserve within the Cuatrociénegas protected area in Coahuila, a landscape known for its water pools, gypsum dunes and unusually rich plant life for such an arid region. Conservationists say bison act as ecosystem engineers, breaking up soil with their hooves to improve water and seed penetration, spreading seeds through their fur, fertilizing land with their dung, and even feeding other species when they die. The Fundación Pro Cuatrociénegas, which led the reintroduction, says the effort mirrors similar bison restoration projects in the US, Canada, Romania and Portugal. Because natural predators like the Mexican wolf are largely gone and the reserve area is limited to about 10,000 acres, managers are now looking to US and Canadian sustainable bison programs as models to prevent overpopulation while also creating economic benefits for surrounding ranching communities.
Christian Bale has opened a long-planned foster care village in California designed specifically to keep sibling groups together. The facility, called Together California, sits on a 4.67 acre property in Palmdale and includes 12 fully furnished housing units built to address what Bale says is a major failure of the foster system, the routine separation of siblings when they enter care. Bale and his wife became interested in the issue after the birth of their first daughter, when they began researching what would happen to her in the foster system and learned most siblings are split up. The $9 million-plus project drew support from the Austrian American Council West and a donation from Leonardo DiCaprio, along with help from LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger in securing the Palmdale location. Bale says the goal is to give the roughly 12 housing units in Antelope Valley a comprehensive, long-term approach to care, given that Los Angeles County has more children in foster care than anywhere else in the country.
A UK runner has completed the grueling Bob Graham Round four years after suffering cardiac arrest during his first attempt at the same course. Tommy Price went into cardiac arrest from hypothermia in January 2022 while attempting the 66 mile, 27,000 vertical foot route through England’s Lake District fells, and rescuers made three failed attempts to restart his heart before airlifting him to a hospital with his body temperature down to 64.4°F. Doctors believe the extreme cold likely protected his brain and organs during the time his heart wasn’t beating, and he was placed in an induced coma for five days before slowly regaining feeling in his hands and feet. He first returned to competition by running the London Marathon in 3 hours and 10 minutes to raise money for the mountain rescue team that saved him. Earlier this month he finally completed the Bob Graham Round itself, running part of the route with one of the original rescuers and finishing to applause from the doctor who oversaw his hospital recovery.
A metal detectorist in Finland uncovered two Viking age silver hoards weighing about 10 pounds combined, the largest such find in the country’s history. Kalle Lappinen was searching a field in the town of Sysmä when his detector led him to a cache of compacted coins buried about 18 inches deep, and shortly after he found a second hoard nearby containing coins, a silver bead, a bracelet, a charm and chopped up scrap silver. The objects date to the 11th century, near the end of the Viking Age, and no burial remains were found alongside them, suggesting they were hidden for safekeeping by an owner who never returned. An archaeologist at the University of Helsinki said the find shows how hobbyist detectorists can uncover valuable historical information in areas professional archaeologists don’t typically search. The Finnish discovery caps a remarkable year for Scandinavian treasure hunting, following record breaking Viking silver hoards found earlier in 2026 in both Norway and Denmark.
Station Casinos gave all 10,000 of its employees a stock bonus worth $1,000 for every year they’ve worked at the company, totaling $70 million, to mark its 50th anniversary. Owners Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta announced the awards at a company celebration, saying the gesture honors the principles their father built the business on when he founded its flagship Bingo Palace location in 1976. Longtime employee Ida Johnson, who joined the company in 1977, received $49,000 in stock, while seven employees with 45 or more years of service were also recognized. Another employee, Paula Barrett, who has 47 years at the company, called receiving the bonus “a complete honor” and said loyalty to the close-knit team kept her there for decades. Red Rock Resorts Class A stock, the vehicle used for the bonus, currently trades at $54.49 a share.
See you soon.
— Aaron
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