Global round-up of positive news nuggets to help brighten the day.
Jam or Cream First?
It is a recurring debate about a quintessentially British tea time favourite, and now members of the Royal family have given their views on whether to go jam or cream first - with the Princess of Wales wading into the debate about the proper way to make a scone by divulging which side she takes. She revealed that she has been following in the culinary footsteps of Queen Elizabeth II, who preferred to put a blob of jam on her scone before the cream, also known as the Cornish method. The rival method, from Devon, traditionally places clotted cream on the scone first and then the jam. These two methods continuously divide Britons over which one is tastier.
Not News
The US murder rate has fallen by 10-12 percent this year. So far, the only coverage from mainstream media has been an article in The Atlantic and a mention in the New York Times newsletter. Can you imagine the attention this would have received if the trend had been in the opposite direction? A reminder that 'the news' doesn't tell you what's happening in the world, it tells you what is going wrong.
Like Mushrooms
A crop of new independent bookshops is hardly what one would expect to find blossoming in the Ukrainian capital. But, in defiance of Russian's ongoing invasion, they are springing up all around Kyiv. "They have popped up like mushrooms after the rain. They are lovely places where you can drink coffee, read, and just sniff the books," said Maria Glazunova who works at Kyiv's film archive. The shops are one part escape, one part community center and one part hope, particularly for the authors. "When writers see bookstores they are happy. They have faith that the books they are going to write will find readers," said Oleksandr Riabchuk, co-founder of the Book Lion, a new bookstore in Kyiv.
TB Vaccine
The Gates Foundation just announced $550 million for trials of a new TB vaccine covering 26,000 people in 50 sites in Africa and SE Asia. This is a big deal as tuberculosis is the deadliest infectious disease on the planet, reports the Washington Post. It killed 1.6 million people last year, and the only vaccine we have is over a century old. A new vaccine would instantly become one of the most important medicines in existence.
Life-Changing
The Indian state of Karnataka has made bus travel free for all women. The response has been a tidal wave of smiling women laying siege to buses. In the first nine days of the scheme, more than 40 million women climbed aboard. The policy could be life-changing, reports the Guardian. In India’s patriarchal culture, one way of controlling women’s movement is by denying them money.
Need More Threads?
Elon Musk’s changes to Twitter have led to a demand for an alternative - and Meta aims to provide it. Many Twitter users have been looking for a new home since the platform was bought by the Tesla boss - and one of Twitter’s main social media rivals is offering them a new home. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is today launching its Twitter rival: Threads.
Ironic
A man in the UK accidentally ordered too many pairs of reading glasses because he misread the amount on the website. Chris Arnold found his father's online shopping blunder hilarious and posted it to Twitter. "My Dad has accidentally bought 60 pairs of reading glasses off the internet after misreading the quantity of his order," he captioned the post. SpecSavers, the website he ordered from, had some fun in the comments of Arnold's post. "Do we even need to say it?" the account wrote. The good news is that SpecSavers has given a full refund.
“You know you’re getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.” Bob Hope
On this Day
6 July 1957: With her defeat of Darlene Hard, American Althea Gibson became the first Black tennis player to win the Wimbledon singles championship.
Today, currying favour has come to mean ingratiating yourself with others, but where did the phrase originally come from? Idiom...
Mood Booster
A pride of 20 lions squeezes together perfectly as they drink from a small stream of water in the Sand River, South Africa.