Good News Tuesday

Editor OGN Daily
26 minutes ago
3 min read

Today's eclectic round up of positive news stories from around the globe.

poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts wearing a hat and smiling — On a mission to put books in prisons

Freedom Reads

Through his nonprofit Freedom Reads, poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts makes books accessible to prison inmates across the US. Betts read The Black Poets while incarcerated as a teenager, and it “radically” changed his life, he told The Washington Post. Since launching in 2020, Freedom Reads has installed 500 prison libraries, with the latest at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institution. “We put millions of people in prison,” Betts said. “I want to put millions of books in prisons.”

Ancient silver etching of a human-chimera figure confronted by a monstrous snake — A relief from the silver goblet | Credit: Regular Sigg

Order Over Chaos

The earliest depiction of the creation of the universe has been found on a 4,300-year-old silver goblet discovered in the West Bank. The vessel shows “before and after” scenes with a human-chimera figure confronted by a monstrous snake, before the snake is subdued and the Sun takes its place in the sky, held aloft by two deities. Archaeologists say the images are an allegory for order triumphing over chaos at the beginning of time. The Sun is shown moving across the heavens in a celestial “boat of light”. It is the oldest known depiction of the formation of the cosmos and predates the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish - which was recorded on stone tablets - by more than 1,000 years. The artefact, which is 3.1in (7.9cm) high, is known as the Ain Samiya goblet, and was found in the 1970s near Kafr Malik in the West Bank. It dates from 2650 to 1950BC.

Local workers deliver trachoma medicines in Egypt | Sightsavers

Trachoma Eliminated

Egypt has become the seventh country in the Eastern Mediterranean region - and the 27th worldwide - to eliminate trachoma (the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness) as a public health problem, following a decade of mapping, surveillance and a nationwide implementation of the WHO’s elimination strategy.

Remarkable Leadership

Colombia has declared its entire Amazon biome, 42 percent of its territory, a reserve for ‘renewable natural resources’ and will block 43 pending oil blocks and 286 mining requests, halting all new large-scale extraction. Let that sink in for a moment. Colombia just declared all its rainforests, almost half its territory, a reserve. They used COP30 to urge neighbours to follow suit, framing the move as one of climate safety. But who’s protecting those rainforests? While in theory it’s the government’s job, in practice, unarmed indigenous patrols have become the most effective forces protecting the Colombian Amazon. More than 50,000 guards now operate year-round where state forces cannot, and their unarmed, community-rooted patrols deter illegal extraction and safeguard isolated tribes. It’s not just Colombia that’s doing this: indigenous guards are coordinating across borders and training their counterparts in Peru and Ecuador.

Painting of Frida Kahlo asleep in a bed with a smiling skeleton wrapped in dynamite on the canopy above her — Credit: Sotheby's

Female Artist Record

1940 self-portrait by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7m, setting a new top sale price for a work by any female artist. El sueño (La cama), or The Dream (The Bed), depicts Kahlo asleep with a smiling skeleton wrapped in dynamite on the canopy above her. The price surpasses the record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, which sold for $44.4m in 2014.

Fairer Ticketing

Football fans will be able to buy tickets for the men’s 2028 Euros without having to worry about dynamic pricing, after the Football Association (FA) confirmed that it would not permit the controversial practice.

Archaeologists digging at a site in Kenya — Credit: Koobi Fora Research & Training Program

10,000 Generations

Site in Kenya reveals 300,000 years of uninterrupted toolmaking. Archaeologists uncovered nearly 1,300 stone tools spanning 2.44 to 2.75 million years, showing that early hominins taught and replicated the same techniques across roughly 10,000 generations. During this time period, the surrounding landscape shifted from lush, humid forests to arid desert shrubland and back again - and the hominins survived in part because of their toolmaking traditions.

“November comes, and November goes. With the last red berries and the first white snows. With night coming early and dawn coming late, and ice in the bucket and frost by the gate. The fires burn, and the kettles sing, and earth sinks to rest until next spring.” Clyde Watson