Quote of the Day: “The things that matter most are the things that you can’t see—the love you share with others, your inner purpose, your comfort with who you are.” – Jimmy Carter
Photo: (White House image) Jimmy Carter with Rosalyn at Kennedy Center
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
5 years ago today, Diego the Hood Island tortoise retired with honors to the Galapagos Islands, after decades of captivity at the San Diego Zoo where his libido was credited with saving his species. Like many animals of the Galapagos Archipelago, the giant tortoises on each island are species unto themselves. To that end, his siring of 900 tortoises will no doubt be one of the primary reasons the Hood Island species of giant tortoise survives. READ a bit more… (2020)
In a big week for Egyptian archaeology, the tomb of a “conjurer-doctor” was found in ancient Saqqara.
Dating back 4,100 years, the tomb was heavily decorated with paintings and hieroglyphic inscriptions in vivid colors.
In life, this individual was known as Tetinebefou, “conjurer of the goddess Serket,” “director of medicinal plants,” and “chief dentist.”
Serket was a goddess associated with scorpions and protection from their stings, while the title director of medicinal plants is known from only one other inscription from ancient Egypt. Any reference to dentistry is rare as well.
“He was certainly the main physician at the royal court, so he would have treated the pharaoh himself,” Philippe Collombert, leader of the Swiss-French team that excavated Tetinebefou’s tomb, said in an email to Live Science.
While the sarcophagus was absent, a stone coffin revealed more hieroglyphic inscriptions bearing the name and titles of Tetinebefou.
GNN has reported before on the medical capabilities of the ancient Egyptians, which included a successful surgery for a brain tumor. One imagines then that the titles this physician earned were likely based on merit.
MORE EGYPTIAN ARCHAEOLOGY: Ancient Egyptian Observatory is Unlocking Celestial Secrets of Their Cosmic Culture
“The tomb is adorned with stunning carvings and vibrant artwork, including a beautifully painted false door and scenes of funerary offerings,” the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement, adding that the discovery reveals “new aspects of the culture of daily life in the era of the Old Kingdom through texts and drawings found on the walls.”
The tomb was likely looted in ancient times. Saqqara is a burial site for high-ranking members of the Old Kingdom, and Tetinebefou lived likely during the time of Pepi II of the sixth dynasty. United and still building pyramids, the end of the sixth dynasty is marked by the fracturing of the empire known as the First Intermediate Period.
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Reprinted with permission from World at Large News
An endangered bird famous for its elaborate leaping courtship displays is being reared in a special facility where the animals are able to develop their wild instincts.
With less than 600 individuals left in the wilds of Cambodia, conservationists have shown that the Bengal florican can successfully grow up in semi-captivity, raising hope that a safe and stable population can be reintroduced to prevent further declines.
A large facility inside the 144 square miles of forest comprising Phnom Kulen National Park is the world’s first assurance colony of this florican’s Indo-Chinese subspecies. As the name implies, it’s native to Bangladesh and India, where it is also endangered.
Amid waist-high grass, soft mesh netting divides areas for these members of the bustard family to grow up in seclusion. Minimal visual contact with their keepers ensures that these birds have room to practice all the important skills they’ll need for wild living—like foraging, keeping a lookout for predators, but most importantly for a florican, how to find a mate.
All species of floricans look to dazzle prospective mates with a remarkable courtship display. Standing in high grass, they will leap between 6 and 9 feet off the ground whilst striking a heroic pose that involves tucking their legs up and leaning back.
Hardly flightless, their goal isn’t to take to the wing, but to stay airborne enough to attract the attention of a female, before falling back to the ground and disappearing among the grasses.
Unfortunately, these birds need grasslands to live in, but grasslands in their native range are rapidly being turned into agricultural land by a developing South Asian population.
The Angkor Centre for Conservation of Biodiversity (ACCB) established the captive colony in 2019. Cambodia has a high degree of threatened biodiversity, with over 400 species listed as Endangered or Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, and 56 considered Critically Endangered.
The Bengal florican is just one of 30 such species held at the ACCB for future protection. The florican has just one remaining wild population of fewer than 600 individuals among the Tonle Sap Floodplains.
Conservationists from the ACCB work mainly to educate community members, especially Buddhist communities and students, about the plight of these ground-nesting birds.
“By engaging with diverse groups, we hope to bridge the conservation gap across generations,” Christel Griffioen, ACCB’s Country Director, told the IUCN.
These connections with the community have proved vital to the ACCB’s work. During the florican breeding season, the ACCB is notified where and when a wild florican nest is located. Depending on the timing in the season and the placement of the nest, ACCB biologists may choose to leave the eggs alone, but if the conditions aren’t optimal for chick mortality, they will safeguard the eggs, hatch them in their facility, and rear the birds in captivity for eventual reintroduction into the wild.
So far, the 11 surviving birds hatched at ACCB from eggs laid in the wild, along with four wild-hatched birds that have been taken in for one reason or another, are living and developing well.
“A full-time team at ACCB is dedicated to hand-rearing newly hatched chicks until they’re old enough to feed alone. They’re then moved into a facility that mimics their habitat where they remain, with limited to no human contact, safely cocooned in taller grass and soft ceilings that allow the males to practice their mating display,” writes the IUCN, noting that Christel and her team are always trying to transfer what they know about these birds in the wild to their conditions at the facility.
The conservationists hope to form a captive breeding program to further stabilize the animal’s numbers. WaL
WATCH their courtship displays…
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The famous king of Babylon Nebuchadnezzar II was lately enthroned when a group of Phoenician sailors watched their boat sink in shallow water off the coast of Spain.
Now, that very boat is the subject of an underwater archaeology expedition, as experts prepare to extract it for study and eventual museum placement.
The sailors would have been beside themselves watching the boat go down in just 7 feet of water, but before they could recover it and bring it to the shore around 65 yards away, a storm suddenly descended on La Playa de la Isla in the town of Mazarron, southeastern Spain.
The storm buried it in sand and silt, entombing it in a remarkable state of preservation for 2,600 years, and that has now allowed archaeologists and historians at the University of Valencia to get a fantastic insight into the Mediterranean’s first great sailing culture.
“The wreckage can no longer remain where it is because its sand protection is now disappearing,” said Carlos de Juan, an archaeologist at the University of Valencia who led the excavation project, in a July 2024 statement.
“The wreckage has survived for centuries, but now it is time to roll up our sleeves and ensure that we can continue to enjoy this asset of cultural interest.”
Dubbed Mazarron II, she was extracted from the sea in twenty parts and taken to the laboratories of the Cartagena National Museum of Underwater Archaeology for reconstruction
Laden with a cargo of lead ingots, she will not only offer an insight into the shipbuilding techniques of the Phoenicians but also their metallurgical sophistication.
“It will tell us what types of wood were used to build the boat, where it was built, what navigation was like at the time, the degradation processes of the wood, the contamination that may have occurred in shallow waters,” said Agustín Díez, a historian at the University of Valencia who also worked on the project, in the statement.
The first step in preservation will be to extract the corrosive salt, replacing it with a resin that will fill all the hollows and cracks in the wood to ensure it doesn’t immediately rot away.
OTHER SHIPWRECKS: Archaeologists Uncover 900 Ming Dynasty Artifacts From Shipwrecks in South China Sea
The Phoenicians thrived during the Middle and Late Bronze Age. Originating in modern-day Lebanon in early antiquity, the Semitic-speaking sailors hailed from important city-states like Sidon, Tyre, and Byblos in Lebanon, and expanded across the Mediterranean, founding cities like Cadiz in southwestern Spain and Carthage in North Africa.
MORE ANCIENT ARCHAEOLOGY: Greek Archaeologists Use The Iliad as a Map to Find 10 Ancient Shipwrecks
In an era when brutal conquest and depopulation were standard foreign policy methods, the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians all treated the Phoenician city-states with surprising gentleness, not wanting to too greatly traumatize what was the ancient world’s equivalent of the goose that laid the golden egg.
The trading connections, knowledge of sailing, and skilled shipwrights protected these progenitors of the Greek alphabet from undue violence for centuries, until their culture vanished under the hegemony of Rome.
WATCH the extraction in action…
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From the heartland of Sikhism comes an inspiring story of a former army colonel helping to free his countrymen from addiction through positive reinforcement.
Colonel Dr. Rajinder Singh is the founder and director of the Akal Drug De-Addiction Center in Punjab. His methods have helped over 10,000 patients kick addictions stemming from a variety of underlying causes.
Dr. Singh is 91, but you wouldn’t know it—he works all the time to improve the center, and plans to open a third location are moving right along.
His method is contingent on transformation born from compassion and steady reinforcement.
According to The Better India, Dr. Singh was among the earliest doctored psychiatrists in independent India, but it was his time in the army, fighting in the 1962 Indo-China War, that helped him understand the psyche behind addictions.
“Army personnel are exposed to highly stressful situations. Long periods away from home can affect their mental health. Some even experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after combat and war,” Singh said.
At the Akpal Center in Punjab’s Sangrur district, Singh has seen all kinds of addiction, from intravenous drug use to addiction to the fumes of whitener. He even admitted a man who was addicted to the adrenaline shock from snake bites.
In every case, his method is the same: physical exercise, organized sports, yoga, medical treatment if needed, and introducing the concept of service inherent in his Sikh faith without any room for “haranguing or preachiness.”
Dr. Singh believes that the root cause of addictions lies in certain experiences that the person has battled, and that an eventual moral reckoning, either with themselves or with those who have harmed them, is the end goal of the rehabilitation.
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Remembering one patient admitted for injecting a mixture of substances that caused two separate marriages to fail, a mixture of medication, individual and group counseling, and spiritual healing helped him through withdrawal.
“His withdrawal symptoms subsided, he gained six kilograms, his sleep and appetite improved, and his mood became cheerful. He was discharged with advice for regular follow-ups,” Singh notes. Today, the former patient works in a factory, is happily married, and has referred over 60 addicts from his area to this center.
MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: CNN’s Hero of the Year Founded a Dog Foster Program For Owners Who are Recovering Addicts Going to Rehab
The Sikhs believe that to be born as a human is a result of first being born as every single other animal on Earth once, and therefore that life is to be cherished and the fruits derived from it to be shared.
It’s a fine starting point for any attitude towards healing addiction in society: that the lives of addicts not only matter but are beautiful and endowed with purpose.
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Quote of the Day: “Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.” – Jon Acuff
Photo by: Simone Hutsch for Unsplash+
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
26 years ago today, The Sopranos debuted on HBO. Running for 6 seasons totaling 86 episodes, it is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential television series of all time. The series explores the life of Italian-American mob boss Tony Soprano as he attempts to balance family and ‘business’. A lot of the storytelling revolves around Soprano’s conversations with his therapist, as creator David Chase admitted he didn’t want to make a show about the mob in general, but of a particular man and the realities involved in his curious profession that often involves no violence or law-breaking of any kind. READ more… (1999)
A Portland woman’s fiery death was avoided thanks to the speed of police, fire, and medical first responders who conducted a harrowing rescue in late December.
Portland Police Bureau Sgt. Sarah Kerwin told local news that the 911 call of a vehicle ablaze near Mt. Scott Boulevard came from the driver herself, trapped inside.
“This was the first time I’ve ever… had anyone call in saying ‘I am trapped,'” said Kerwin. “All of a sudden the person in the car is calling in saying they’re on fire and they can’t get out.”
Those were the stakes when Kerwin and her partner arrived at the scene where the vehicle was tipped on its side and engulfed in flames that were so hot that neither officer could reasonably try and rescue the driver.
With the help of Portland Fire and Rescue, they were able to get the woman out of the car.
The firefighters first contained the fire with their hoses, then approached the car in their protective clothing and shattered the windscreen with a battering ram.
She was not breathing when they stretched her out in the grass at a safe distance. Kerwin immediately started CPR. Oxygen was later administered.
“I felt this was the epitome of the call that you train for, and that Portland Fire was critical in getting her out of the vehicle because I just don’t think we could have safely done it,” Sgt. Kerwin told KOIN 6 News.
The woman was taken to the hospital where she was recovering at the time of reporting.
WATCH the story below from KOIN 6…
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The most invasive species on Earth is not a mouse or boar, but the water hyacinth.
Blooming in an ornamental pond, the water hyacinth seems lovely and harmless, but look at how it can take over freshwater ecosystems like Kenya’s Lake Naivasha, and one can understand why the UN set up a program specifically to combat this aquatic plant.
Connecting environmental work with business, low-income rural villagers with jobs, and incentives with issues, Hyapak Ecotech Limited is turning this plant pest into plastic that biodegrades.
When the water hyacinth spreads across Lake Naivasha, (a phenomenon that can be seen from space) it chokes the life out of many native species. Casting a net or line into the waters beneath is a hopeless exercise for local fishermen who rely on native fish for income. CNN reports that, entering a hyacinth patch, a man became so entangled it took a government helicopter to free him.
As long as the hyacinth is destroying the livelihood of the fishermen, HyaPak offers to pay them for as much hyacinth as they want to collect. It’s then dried, processed, and turned into biodegradable alternatives to single-use disposable plastic products like wrappers, straws, tumblers, and party plates.
Thusly incentivized, locals have so far cleared around 47 acres of water hyacinth from the lake.
HyaPak founder Joseph Nguthiru embarked on his entrepreneurial journey after taking a trip on Lake Naivasha and getting moored in the hyacinth for 5 hours. At the time, the Kenyan economy was adjusting to a government decision to ban single-use plastic items. No domestic supply of alternative products was available, and plastic shopping bags became a common item of choice for smugglers.
MORE GREAT AFRICAN INNOVATIONS: Female Entrepreneur Set to Revolutionize Transportation for All of Africa, After Transforming her Native Ghana
Fishermen on the lake speaking with CNN said they’re pleased to have the opportunity to make the extra income selling hyacinth to Nguthiru.
The opportunities may continue if the upcoming partnership between HyaPak and Kenya’s Forestry and Land Restoration Acceleration program succeeds.
This government initiative to plant 15 billion tree seedlings will need little soil bags for those seedlings to grow in. Nguthiru and his 45-strong team have so far created 30,000 seedling bags out of water hyacinth for the program. Rather than producing emissions and creating trash, the HyaPak bags hold water in the soil where they slowly degrade, releasing nutrients like nitrogen.
“You offset the carbon emissions that are going to be produced, you’ve used less water, you’ve added more nutrients… it’s a win-win situation for communities, for the planet, and for yourself as a farmer,” Nguthiru told CNN.
HyaPak is already exporting to the US and Germany, and will soon expand to India and El Salvador: two countries plagued by water hyacinth.
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Observing individual stars halfway across the observable universe has generally been regarded as impossible in astronomy, akin to trying to use binoculars to see individual grains of dust in the Moon’s craters—yet that’s exactly what the James Webb Space Telescope just accomplished.
Leveraging a pair of remarkable cosmic phenomena, an international team of astronomers accomplished this seemingly unattainable goal—now set to change our understanding of the cosmos.
Using JWST data, the astronomers observed a galaxy nearly 6.5 billion light-years from Earth, a time when the universe was half its current age. In this distant galaxy, the team identified many individual stars, which were made visible thanks to an effect known as gravitational lensing and JWST’s high light-collecting power.
The paper describing the discovery has been published in Nature Astronomy, and is led by Yoshinobu Fudamoto, an assistant professor at Chiba University in Japan and a visiting scholar at Univ. of Arizona Steward Observatory.
Recent advances in astronomy have opened new possibilities by leveraging gravitational lensing—a natural magnification effect caused by the strong gravitational fields of massive objects.
As predicted by Albert Einstein, gravitational lenses can amplify the light of distant stars by factors of hundreds or even thousands, making them detectable with sensitive instruments like JWST.
“When we predicted in 2018 that stars in galaxies at cosmological distances might be observed with Webb individually as they go across these nearly infinite magnification lines (the so-called ‘caustics’), I never dreamed of Webb seeing them in such large numbers,” said Rogier Windhorst from ASU.
“And now here we are observing these stars popping in and out of the images taken only a year apart, like fireflies in the night. Webb continues to amaze us all.”
Most galaxies, including the Milky Way, contain tens of billions of stars. Astronomers can observe stars one by one in nearby galaxies such as the Andromeda galaxy. However, in galaxies billions of light-years away, stars appear blended together. This presents a long-standing challenge to scientists studying how galaxies form and evolve.
“It was amazing to see the observations taken over time of the Dragon Arc. Stars would appear and disappear from image to image like a twinkling Christmas tree,” said Nicholas Foo, a graduate research associate at ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, and co-author on the paper.
“These findings have typically been limited to just one or two stars per galaxy,” Fudamoto told ASU press. “To study stellar populations in a statistically meaningful way, we need many more observations of individual stars.”
Study co-author Fengwu Sun was inspecting JWST images of a galaxy known as the Dragon Arc, located along the line of sight from Earth behind a massive cluster of galaxies called Abell 370. Due to its gravitational lensing effect, Abell 370 stretches the Dragon Arc’s signature spiral into an elongated shape—like a hall of mirrors of cosmic proportions.
In December 2022 and 2023, JWST obtained two pictures of the Dragon Arc. Within these images, astronomers counted 44 individual stars whose brightness changed over time due to variations in the gravitational lensing landscape.
“This groundbreaking discovery demonstrates, for the first time, that studying large numbers of individual stars in a distant galaxy is possible,” Sun said, as long as nature is there to lend a helping hand.
However, even powerful gravitational magnification from a galaxy cluster is not sufficient to magnify individual stars in galaxies so far away. In this case, the discovery was made possible by a serendipitous alignment of “lucky stars.”
“Inside the galaxy cluster, there are many stars floating around that are not bound by any galaxy,” said co-author Eiichi Egami, a research professor at Steward Observatory. “When one of them happens to pass in front of the background star in the distant galaxy along the line of sight with Earth, it acts as a microlens, in addition to the microlensing effect of the galaxy cluster as a whole.”
MORE WORK FROM JAMES WEBB: Earliest, Most Distant Galaxy Discovered with Webb Telescope Dates to 300Mil Years After Big Bang
While the extra-galactic stars provided a microlensing effect, large clusters of dark matter provided a macrolensing effect, ten times stronger than that provided by the stars.
Over a brief time frame—ranging from a few days to a week—when these two effects perfectly align with distant stars, the magnification and the apparent brightness of the stars increase significantly.
THE BEAUTY OF OUR COSMOS: Once Bright and Lively the Sombrero Galaxy Mellows Out Under James Webb Telescope’s Infrared Light
The combined effects of microlensing dramatically increase the magnification factor, allowing JWST to pick up individual stars that would otherwise be too far and faint to be detected.
By observing the same galaxy multiple times, astronomers can detect stars in distant galaxies as they appear to twinkle due to the varying effective magnifications created by the combined macrolens/microlens effect.
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A little-known federal regulatory agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) just finalized a rule that will prevent medical debt from affecting consumer credit scores.
Millions of Americans live in fear of developing too many bad marks on their credit score. This mysterious number shared between financial institutions can govern whether or not an American can receive a loan. Any missed payment or default is likely to show up as a black mark, and may hinder them from receiving a mortgage, car loan, or other kind of liability.
The CFPB’s ruling will remove an estimated $49 billion in medical bills from the credit reports of about 15 million Americans. The CFPB’s action will ban the inclusion of medical bills on credit reports used by lenders and prohibit lenders from using medical information in their lending decisions.
The CFPB has found that medical debts provide little predictive value to lenders about borrowers’ ability to repay other debts, often because large medical expenses are typically incurred involuntarily. They frequently represent absolutely necessary expenses that would be prioritized above most other discretionary spending had they been seen ahead of time.
FICO and VantageScore, two major credit scoring companies, have agreed to reduce the degree to which medical-related costs affect credit scores, while Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, three national credit reporting conglomerates have agreed to remove $50 billion of medical debt from affecting credit scores.
The CFPB expects the rule will lead to the approval of approximately 22,000 additional, affordable mortgages every year and that Americans with medical debt on their credit reports could see their credit scores rise by an average of 20 points.
“People who get sick shouldn’t have their financial future upended,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. “The CFPB’s final rule will close a special carveout that has allowed debt collectors to abuse the credit reporting system to coerce people into paying medical bills they may not even owe.”
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Quote of the Day: “You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
Photo by: Marcos Paulo Prado
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
An Ohio news outlet is leading a change of tradition in American reporting which their editor-in-chief calls the “right to be forgotten.”
Long considered taboo to retract or erase old stories from newspaper archives, those that feature mug shots and report on residents charged with crimes can, in our search engine-powered world, continue to detract from their professional lives years after they’ve paid their debt to society.
Now, in much the same way that civil rights attorneys fight to get citizens’ criminal and court records sealed, Chris Quinn, editor of Cleveland.com and Plain Dealer newspaper is advocating that newspapers remove old stories regarding crimes or misdemeanors that have been atoned for.
The Guardian reports that the concept has since spread to the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Bangor Daily News in Maine, the Oregonian, and New Jersey’s NJ.com.
Quinn explained the reasoning behind his efforts in an article on Cleveland.com, which began back in 2018 and had just finished taking 5 names and mug shots out of the archives.
“One was someone who had been in the health field and stole some drugs from her employer. A judge eventually declared that she not only had completed her sentence but had completely rehabilitated herself.”
“She lost her license to work in her healthcare field, but as she sought to begin a new career, any Google search of her name brought up our stories about her crime, along with her mug shot. Another was a man who stole some scrap metal years ago, completed his sentence, and had his record sealed. Yet our story dogged him.”
Quinn was interviewed in the Guardian and said he regularly received phone calls and emails from these people, asking for their stories to be taken down. He was tired of “standing on tradition” instead of just being compassionate.
“I couldn’t take it anymore… I just got tired of telling people no,” he said.
FORGIVING AND FORGETTING: Michigan Clears Criminal Records for Thousands of Low-Level, Nonviolent Offenders–‘Meaningful 2nd Chances’
An ironic ally in the fight to be forgotten came from Google, who in 2022 paid Quinn and his team $200,000 to proactively search their own archives of 1.4 million content pieces and delete stories that may be embarrassing to citizens who have served time and or paid their debt to society, or even just those who committed embarrassing acts.
The Oregonian is also taking action to ease the burden of past misdemeanors on their perpetrators. According to editor Therese Bottomly, each request is taken very seriously and looked at individually. Some are removed, others are deindexed from Google so they don’t appear in a search query but can still be found on the Oregon archives for one reason or another.
OTHER STORIES LIKE THIS: Jobs, Not Jail: A Judge Was Sick of Sending Kids to Prison, So He Found a Better Way
Some, however, are maintained because the subject’s behavior rose to certain levels.
“These folks are going to be our neighbors, our co-workers and hopefully contributing members of society someday,” Bottomly told the Guardian. “So should we figure out ways to at least not be an unnecessary barrier to re-entry for something truly minor and in the past, and for which somebody has paid their debt?”
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The last 15 years have seen a remarkable change in the clinical considerations of coffee.
Studies examining the caffeinated beverage for its potential effects on more than several different biological systems, from the kidneys to mood, have pinned it as something like a health drink.
Now, research from the University of Utah published in the journal Cancer has shown that people who drink 4 cups of caffeinated coffee per day were at a lower risk of developing head and neck cancer.
The seventh most common form of cancer worldwide, head and neck cancer had an almost 50% mortality rate among 750,000 patients in 2020—the last year worldwide data on head and neck cancer was collected.
The team from Utah examined 14 older studies covering around 9,500 head and neck cancer patients and almost 16,000 cancer-free people to see how the diagnosis rates stacked up when the patients’ coffee consumption was factored in.
People who drank more than 4 cups a day “had 17% lower odds of having head and neck cancer overall, 30% lower odds of having cancer of the oral cavity, and 22% lower odds of having throat cancer.”
A 2016 meta-analysis found that coffee consumption was linked to a reduced risk of oral, pharynx, liver, colon, prostate, endometrial cancer, and melanoma but an increased lung cancer risk, while a separate paper from the same year showed a dose-dependent reduction in risk of colorectal cancer.
COFFEE AS A CURE:
Speaking in the broadest and least scientific language, plants that contain strongly flavored chemical compounds, such as cinnamon, ginger, garlic, turmeric, clove, or tea, generally prove to be strong promoters of wellness.
Perhaps this trend extends to coffee.
TELL Your Friends About Yet Another Reason To Drink Coffee, SHARE This Story…
For millions of Chinese women, this road-tripping grandmother divorcè is an inspirational figure of freedom from convention.
Separating from an abusive, violent husband, she has spent the last four years traveling around her vast country all alone, while amassing a gargantuan social media following that refers to her affectionately as “auntie.”
Reporting from Beijing, BBC’s Chinese correspondent Laura Bicker spoke with social media celebrity Su Min about her adventures and the marriage she has worked hard to terminate.
“I was a traditional woman and I wanted to stay in my marriage for life,” she says. “But eventually I saw that I got nothing in return for all my energy and effort—only beatings, violence, emotional abuse, and gaslighting.”
Virtually, her whole life has been that of a traditional Confucian woman, supporting her brothers, then supporting her husband, then supporting her daughter, and then supporting her granddaughters.
Throughout it all, however, life was brutally hard with her husband, whom she married via arrangement.
Diagnosed with depression after nearly 40 years together, she made an agreement with her daughter that after the grandkids had left Kindergarten, she would leave her husband—a promise she kept in the most extraordinary way after watching a TikTok video of a couple living together in a van and traveling the country.
She thought this was her way out.
Even the country’s COVID-19 response couldn’t stop Su Min, who told her husband in 2019 that they were finished and entered into divorce court where she paid out a settlement of around $21,000. Shortly thereafter, she was on the road in a VW hatchback with a rooftop tent, a pension, and true liberty.
Her followers call her the “road-tripping auntie,” and she was named one of BBC’s 100 most influential women of the year.
“We women are not just someone’s wife or mother… Let’s live for ourselves!” wrote one follower of Su’s on a video.
Another mentioned the settlement was “worth every penny,” adding it was her turn to “see the world and live a vibrant, unrestrained life.”
OTHER VIRAL SOCIAL STARS: 3rd Generation Shoemaker Goes Viral–Has Millions Watch Him Fix Shoes as ‘America’s Cobbler’
Over the last 48 months, she has driven in 3 different cars across 20 Chinese provinces, and through 400 cities. She hopes to take her travels internationally but is afraid of language barriers.
MORE STORIES FROM CHINA: China ‘Angel’ Stops 469 Suicidal People Jumping off Bridge Over 21 years
Many of the travel experiences she enjoys are little acts of defiance, allegorically even, in the face of her old life—not just visiting a street market in her home province of Henan, but stopping to smell the chili peppers her husband forbade her from bringing into the home.
Su never imagined becoming a figure of inspiration, but believes that all women, no matter where they’re from or what their circumstances are, must be good to themselves.
“I want to tell you that no matter how old you are, as long as you work hard, you will definitely find your answer. Just like me, even though I’m 60 now, I found what I was looking for,” she said.
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One might imagine a star NBA forward would already feel he had achieved his dreams, but not for the Brooklyn Nets’ Mikal Bridges.
Since he was young, there was something else he had always wanted to do—teach second grade.
Getting back to Brooklyn after 1:00 a.m. following a March 2024 victory over the Cavaliers 120-101, Bridges was up the next morning teaching a second-grade class at PS 134 in the borough.
Despite the dearth of sleep, Bridges told CBS News that the kids helped energize him.
“Their energy was just like, what got me going so fast. They got me excited,” Bridges said.
“I loved second grade when I was young,” he added. “I feel like that was one of the years I really remember. Just having a great year. I had a great teacher named Ms. Porter and just I feel like I always loved second grade.”
Bridges got to lead PE class, teach math, which he says was his most successful subject, and also sit in on the xylophone course.
POST-COURT CAREERS: Former NBA Star Rick Fox is Manufacturing Concrete That Absorbs More CO2 Than it Creates
Bridges told both the kids and CBS that he has his eye on a teaching position after his career in the NBA comes to an end.
“But basketball doesn’t go forever,” he answered to a child’s question. “This is just the first part of my journey, so I think teacher is going to come up next. Trying to do both.”
WATCH the story below from CBS News…
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Quote of the Day: “Faith makes all things possible… love makes all things easy.” Dwight L. Moody
Photo by: Octavio Fossatti
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50 years ago today, Ella Grasso became the first woman to be elected to serve as a state governor in the US. A member of the Democratic Party, Grasso served as the 83rd Governor of Connecticut, after two stints in the House of Representatives from 1970 to 1974. READ a bit about her tenure… (1975)
A 7-year-old boy has survived nearly a week lost on the savannah in Zimbabwe.
Returning home to his rural village on New Year’s Eve, he avoided lions and ornery herbivores while using a clever trick to stave off dehydration. For food, he ate berries.
Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (ZimParks) received notice of a missing boy on the evening of December 27th.
A statement from ZimParks explained that fellow villagers, police officers, and park rangers organized a search party, but were hindered by heavy rains. On December 30th, human footprints were found that eventually led rescuers to the boy in the early morning hours of the following day.
“Remarkably, it is estimated that he walked through the harsh terrain of the lion-infested Matusadona National Park for 49 kilometers (30 miles) from his village to the point where he was found,” ZimParks said.
“During this period, he survived on wild fruits and would dig a small hole along the dry river bank to access underground water to drink.”
According to the parliamentarian for the province in which Matusadona lies, the boy “was very frail when he was rescued” and “had to be put on [an IV] drip.”
“What saved him is the technique learnt from a young age in dry [and] drought prone areas of drawing water from a dry river bank — digging a mufuku,” the parliamentarian, Mutsa Murombedzi, wrote on X.
She thanked everyone in and around the community who lent their efforts to the search, calling it “a testament to the power of unity, hope, prayer and never giving up.”
MORE SURVIVAL STORIES: 20-yo Hiker Survives to See Family Again After Incredible 50 Days Lost in the Rockies
Stretching 570 square miles, Matusadona is a vibrant ecosystem where much of the classic African megafauna live, breed, and die in peace. Populations of lions, rhino, buffalo, and elephants flourish, making it a real challenge to avoid encountering them, which as a small boy, one could only imagine the consequences.
His technique of digging a mufuku, sometimes called a “gypsy well” in English, was well remembered, and is a day-1 survival technique for getting uncontaminated drinking water if none is available.
ANOTHER INSTANCE OF THIS: Little Boy Lost for 6 Days in Harsh Kenyan Wilderness is Rescued: ‘An Amazing Moment’
The method is perfectly straightforward. Find a stream or creek where the bank is flat and beach-like. Measure about four hands-width from the water and dig a trench. Smooth down the sides as best as possible.
The river water will eventually seep through the hole, where the gravel, sand, and dirt will help to make the water safer from water-born parasites. The first liter or so of water will be brown and muddy. The more water one scoops out, the clearer it eventually will become.
CELEBRATE This Community Getting Their Little Fellow Back Home…
