Good News

mickeyrat

gift article.....

https://wapo.st/3vg8WtC 

  Boxes kept coming from a mystery donor. An obituary revealed her name.
By Theresa Vargas
December 23, 2023 at 11:00 ET
In the weeks leading up to Christmas last year, piles of packages from strangers arrived daily at the Virginia home of Susan Thompson-Gaines.
It was her third year of running a gift-giving project out of her house, an effort that involves her placing a desk in her yard, encouraging children to write letters to Santa and granting their wishes by buying and wrapping items on their lists. The first two years, it was a neighborhood effort. But last year, she expanded it to give others a way to provide gifts for the more than 200 children who wrote letters. She created an Amazon Wish List, and as people across the country learned about the project, they started clicking away.
That’s when the first package from E. A. Raven arrived.

continues.....

RunIntoTheRain

What a great story!
Here's the link to the wishlist for The Little Yellow Pantry is anybody wants to send something
Amazon.com

RunIntoTheRain

https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Living/college-students-raise-money-surprise-security-guard-trip/story?id=108043033

This made me cry while I was smiling. 
I wish that good news stories were profiled a lot more. Positivity breeds more of the same.
 As someone I admire greatly says, "Go out and do something nice for someone else today."
  

mickeyrat

Adam Kinzinger adbook post...

Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news? I know I am.

We are told, over and over, that America has gone cold on the rest of the world. That we have decided the people on the other side of the ocean are a threat to be kept out. That the welcome mat got rolled up and put away for good.

Then a soccer team from the North African nation of Algeria showed up in Lawrence, Kansas, and within a week the whole town was wearing green.

For today's Good News Sunday, I want to tell you about one of the best things happening in this country right now. It is happening at a soccer tournament, and it has almost nothing to do with soccer.

The World Cup is here, 48 teams playing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Each team in the tournament picks a base camp, one town to live and train in between matches. Germany set up shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Spain is training in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And Algeria, playing two of its games up the road at Arrowhead, picked Lawrence and made it home for the summer.

What the people of Lawrence did with that is the part I can't stop thinking about.

It started small, with a whole town of people who had never given Algeria much thought deciding, more or less overnight, that this was their team now. Flags went up in shop windows. Folks pulled on the green jerseys. People drove over just to catch a glimpse of the players. And then a local news crew stopped an older gentleman on a Lawrence sidewalk, standing in front of a storefront draped in a whole row of Algerian flags he had clearly just gone out of his way to find. 

They asked him what he actually knew about the country whose colors he was flying. He grinned, paused for a beat, and said something along the lines of: not much yet — but we want to welcome you here. There is no agenda in that man. Nothing performative. Just a neighbor, thrilled to his bones that these strangers chose his town, and perfectly at ease with the fact that he has a lot left to learn about them.

The welcome only got bigger from there.

The University of Kansas, the state's flagship school that calls Lawrence home, sent its marching band out to the training ground. They had spent the previous days learning Algeria's national anthem, note for note, and they played it as the players walked out for practice. Think about what that means for a moment. 

These men are thousands of miles from their families, living out of a hotel in the American Midwest, preparing for the biggest sporting event of their professional lives. And the first thing they hear when they step onto the grass is the sound of their own country's song, played by a hundred American college kids in red and blue who learned it just for them. Several of the players stopped walking. A few of them looked like they weren't sure what to do with themselves.

Algeria did its part, too. The team opened a training session to the public and spent the afternoon out on the grass with neighborhood kids, walking them through drills, signing autographs, posing for pictures. There are children from small-town America who are going to be telling the story of the day they trained with a World Cup team for the rest of their lives. And the Algerians have spent the last week calling themselves honorary Kansans, falling hard for a corner of a state most of them could not have found on a map two months ago.
But it's not just Lawrence. 

This is happening all over the country, in towns you would never expect.

The city of Alexandria, Virginia threw a street festival with an evening of Croatian food and music, and wrapped a city bus in the team's red and white. After crowds in Spokane, Washington flocked to watch Egyptian superstar Mohamed Salah, a brand-new Egyptian restaurant in town suddenly had locals lining up for food most of them had never tasted. All told, 19 American communities that are not hosting a single match still raised their hand to take in a national team and call them neighbors for a month.

There is a story we get told constantly about who we have become. That Americans have soured on outsiders. That we have decided the rest of the world is a threat. That we look at people who do not talk like us or pray like us or come from where we come from and see a problem instead of a person.

And then a college town in Kansas goes and learns every note of a North African country's national anthem, just so a group of strangers feel at home for a few weeks. An old local stands in front of a row of its flags and tells them, in so many words: we don't know much about you yet, but we are awfully glad you came.

That is who we actually are when nobody is telling us to be afraid. The band on the field, playing somebody else's song as if it were their own. The neighbor who knows next to nothing about you and waves you in anyway. We forget it sometimes. The good news is that it takes about one afternoon to remember.

That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.

— Adam

mickeyrat

When four dams were torn down along the California-Oregon border two years ago, scientists were stunned by the large numbers of salmon that moved so quickly up the newly unobstructed Klamath River. This month brought another striking development.

A Chinook salmon was detected going up the river in Oregon, past the former dam sites, and it was not part of the fall run of fish that’s already been racing up the Klamath in late summer and in early fall. It was a much rarer fish: a spring-run salmon, which migrates earlier in the year and has long struggled to survive on the West Coast.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s detection of the first spring-run salmon swimming into the upper Klamath Basin in more than a century suggests that this imperiled fish run has begun to reap the benefits of dam removal. The success of the run, on top of the fall run, stands to increase the prevalence, diversity and resilience of struggling West Coast salmon. Salmon have seen their numbers drop dramatically over the past 100 years as the rivers they depend on have shrunk, gotten warmer and been blocked by dams. A hotter, drier future with a changing climate will only make things tougher.

“If you think about the spring Chinook, we don’t have many, so it’s just incredible to have them make it up here,” said William E. Ray Jr., chair of the Klamath Tribes, one of the native groups along the river, which has its tribal headquarters in the upper basin community of Chiloquin, Ore. “The fish had to go through so much. I don’t think we’re fully taking into account what a Herculean effort this is.”

Read more via the link in our bio.

📸: @brontewittpenn/S.F. Chronicle

brianlux

mickeyrat said:

When four dams were torn down along the California-Oregon border two years ago, scientists were stunned by the large numbers of salmon that moved so quickly up the newly unobstructed Klamath River. This month brought another striking development.

A Chinook salmon was detected going up the river in Oregon, past the former dam sites, and it was not part of the fall run of fish that’s already been racing up the Klamath in late summer and in early fall. It was a much rarer fish: a spring-run salmon, which migrates earlier in the year and has long struggled to survive on the West Coast.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s detection of the first spring-run salmon swimming into the upper Klamath Basin in more than a century suggests that this imperiled fish run has begun to reap the benefits of dam removal. The success of the run, on top of the fall run, stands to increase the prevalence, diversity and resilience of struggling West Coast salmon. Salmon have seen their numbers drop dramatically over the past 100 years as the rivers they depend on have shrunk, gotten warmer and been blocked by dams. A hotter, drier future with a changing climate will only make things tougher.

“If you think about the spring Chinook, we don’t have many, so it’s just incredible to have them make it up here,” said William E. Ray Jr., chair of the Klamath Tribes, one of the native groups along the river, which has its tribal headquarters in the upper basin community of Chiloquin, Ore. “The fish had to go through so much. I don’t think we’re fully taking into account what a Herculean effort this is.”

Read more via the link in our bio.

📸: @brontewittpenn/S.F. Chronicle

Excellent!