Monday's Upbeat News

14 minutes ago
3 min read

Kick-starting the week with an eclectic global collection of upbeat news nuggets.

Workers installing a 5.2-meter (17 feet) plant-covered West Highland terrier — Credit: @SixthTone | X

Giant Westie

Workers install a 5.2-meter (17 feet) plant-covered West Highland terrier at the 2026 Shanghai International Flower Show. For once, a West Highland white terrier is able to see over a crowd - the real dogs are typically around 10-11 inches tall. The show, which opened on Saturday, is showcasing floral art and themed gardens across the city through May 10.

Some Good Numbers

81 Percent: Share of Indian households with tap water, up from 17 percent in 2019, says the Indian Government.

47 Million: Number of galaxies and quasars mapped on the most detailed survey of the universe to date, reports New Scientist.

20: The BBC says that sightings of humpback whale “super groups” - 20 or more of the mammals - are skyrocketing now that humpbacks are recovering from the industrial whaling of the 20th century.

34: The percentage share of renewables in global power generation hit nearly 34 percent in 2025, rising above a third - and overtaking coal - for the first time, say Ember.

16: The percentage of Paraguay’s poverty rate in 2025, down from 50 percent two decades ago, says World Bank.

Paraguay’s Example

The country's poverty reduction shows what happens when governments focus not just on growth, but on productivity and jobs. In the last 20 years, poverty has plummeted and 300,000 people have escaped poverty in the last two years alone. The World Bank says the decisive factor is how the gains from growth has been distributed: labour income has been the main driver of poverty reduction as employment has shifted towards more stable, better- paid work.

Drawing of a shrew, the sacred animal of the god Haroeris, on ceramic | Tübingen Athribis Project

Ancient Horoscopes

Broken pottery pieces at a site in ancient Upper Egypt show 150 horoscopes for ordinary people in the region, revealing the location as a hub of astrological and astronomical activities thousands of years ago. The corpus of horoscopes in Athribis, modern-day Sohag, is “the oldest, largest, and most complex one in existence from antiquity, both in Greek and Egyptian languages,” says team member and horoscope specialist Marina Escolano-Poveda. Excavators on her team recently highlighted they had found thousands of ostraca - inscribed ceramic pottery sherds - covering many topics. Work has been taking place since 2003 and publication of these ostraca is being readied relatively soon.

ID / Library Card

Chicago has made every public school ID a library card. This is so good. More than 315,000 public school students will gain immediate access to the cities’s libraries using existing school IDs. A pilot launched in 2022 increased library access by 63 percent among economically disadvantaged students and by 81 percent among English language learners. "With this expansion, every student - no matter their ZIP code, school enrollment or their age, will have access to library cards and programs and resources that make their lives more enriched," says

Brandon Johnson, Mayor of Chicago.

Hungry Croc

When a 4m-long hungry crocodile discovered the buffet restaurant was closed at a hotel close to the Victoria Falls, it took matters into its own claws and headed straight for the kitchen. A British tourist has described how the reptile, one of the most feared predators in Africa, ambled into the A’zambezi River Lodge in Zimbabwe. John Richards, from England, said the crocodile entered the restaurant from the River Zambezi. “Waiters told us how it had just walked in as if it was a paying guest and when it couldn’t get a table enquired at the desk and finding nobody there, actually tried to climb over it to get into the kitchens,” he said.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." William Shakespeare, in Hamlet

On This Day

Palace of Westminster seen from the south bank

27 April 1840: Foundation stone for new Palace of Westminster, London, laid by Sarah Barry wife of its architect Charles Barry. This ceremony followed the 1834 fire that destroyed the old Palace, marking the start of a 30-year construction project.