Good News Tuesday

Editor OGN Daily
11 minutes ago
3 min read

Some tasty bite-sized chunks of positive news to perk up the day.

Pillars director Lisa Strandberg with Richard Reetz | Pillars

Making a Difference

After a landlord in Wisconsin passed away, he donated all of his rental properties to homeless people in need of housing. Recently, the Wisconsin-based housing nonprofit Pillars received its largest property donation ever. It came in the name of Richard “Dick” Reetz, a landlord of over 50 years who died in June at the age of 97. He donated his entire rental estate, including 20 units across 10 properties, which increased the organization’s property portfolio by over a quarter. Pillars used to serve approximately 140 people at any given time. Now, it will serve even more.

Leaves Millions to Community: In a quiet little town in New Hampshire, a man of apparently humble means and unassuming presence has posthumously astonished his local community with a remarkable gift.

Remarkable Result

A golden retriever named Lola in Northern California was given a terminal cancer diagnosis with just a couple of months to live. However, Lola participated in a clinical trial at UC Davis that used inhaled immunotherapies to treat her aggressive oral melanoma that had spread to her lungs. Surprisingly, Lola’s cancer went into remission, and she is now cancer-free two years later. "I try to not let a day go by that I'm not in awe of what UC Davis and the science was able to do for her," Allison Roth, Lola's owner, told CBS News.

Chicago River

After more than a century of industrial abuse, the Chicago River is now seeing fish populations return, recreational use expand and pollution decline. Multi-billion-dollar investments in sewage treatment and stormwater infrastructure have transformed what was once an open sewer into a recovering urban waterway, reports Inside Climate News.

Good News For Authors

Authors have revealed that Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion and destroy all copies of the books the AI company pirated to train its artificial intelligence models. In a press release provided to Ars Technica, the authors confirmed that the settlement is "believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation." Covering 500,000 works that Anthropic pirated for AI training, if a court approves the settlement, each author will receive $3,000 per work that Anthropic stole. "Depending on the number of claims submitted, the final figure per work could be higher," the press release noted. Anthropic has already agreed to the settlement terms, but a court must approve them before the settlement is finalized.

Bluefin Tuna

After decades of absence, Atlantic bluefin tuna are making a remarkable comeback to Cornish waters off England's south west coast - a spectacular annual event that marine biologists witness each summer, yet remains largely unknown to the public. These magnificent ocean predators, some weighing over 600lb, have returned to Cornish waters for their annual summer feeding season - their reappearance signals improving ocean health and successful conservation efforts. Despite their dramatic return, scientists still don't fully understand what's driving these powerful fish back to our waters.

Darth Vader holding his lightsabre — Credit: Lucasfilm Ltd

Star Wars Record

The lightsaber prop used by Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies has sold for $3.7 million at auction. The piece, used in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return Of The Jedi (1983), recently went under the hammer along with more than 400 other lots of props and costumes used in film. The lightsaber is the only one with verifiable screen use to be offered at public auction, and now holds the title of the highest-priced Star Wars item ever to go under the hammer.