The Rest of the World Report | May 10, 2026 — Good News Sunday Edition
The View From Everywhere Else
Five things that went right. Sourced, verified, and genuinely worth your Sunday morning.
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1. A POLISH LIVESTREAM RAISED $76 MILLION FOR KIDS WITH CANCER. IN NINE DAYS.
On April 17, Polish influencer Piotr Hancke started a livestream to raise money for the Cancer Fighters Foundation, a nonprofit supporting children with cancer. What began as a solo fundraiser turned into a nine-day event, as athletes, musicians, and celebrities from across Poland joined him — many shaving their heads in solidarity with the children being treated. According to Guinness World Records, the event more than tripled the previous world record for a livestream fundraiser, raising over $76 million. A spokesperson for the foundation said they were “reaching for the stars, reaching for space, to help those who need it most, the innocent children who fight the hardest battles every day.”
Poland’s equivalent of a telethon — except it ran for nine days straight, held together by strangers who kept deciding not to stop.
Source: Reuters, April 27, 2026
2. SHE TESTED THE WATER FOR POISON EVERY MORNING SO HER GIRLS COULD GO TO SCHOOL
Every day, before her students arrived, Razia Jan tested the drinking water at the Zabuli Education Center for poison. It was not a theoretical precaution. In Afghanistan, those who opposed girls’ education had burned schools and poisoned students. Jan, the founder and principal of the first free school for girls in Deh’Subz, outside Kabul, did what she had to do. “Every day I pray that nothing goes wrong,” she told PBS filmmaker Beth Murphy. “I can’t really be sure what tomorrow brings, but at least they are in school this year. If the water is poisoned, I’m just one person.”
Jan was Afghan-American, born in Quetta in 1944, a tailor and Rotary Club president in Marshfield, Massachusetts, who in her sixties decided to go back to Afghanistan and build something. She opened the Zabuli Education Center in 2008 with 109 students. It grew to 800. She then built a free women’s college with a midwifery program, because Afghanistan’s infant and maternal mortality rates were among the worst in the world and she intended to do something about that too. When the Taliban returned in 2021 and shut the secondary school and the college, she pivoted again, continuing through her Razia’s Ray of Hope Foundation to reach girls with early education, nutrition, and health services. She was, her colleagues said, totally undeterred by rejection. “She said, ‘We’ll teach as many of them as we possibly can.’”
Razia Jan passed away in July 2025 at the age of 81. She would hold a single flower when she spoke to her students and tell them: “You deserve to be here. You deserve to learn, you deserve to laugh, you deserve to have your dreams become a reality. You are strong and you will bloom and you will be beautiful.” On Mother’s Day, that’s the story.
Sources: Good Good Good, May 2026; Boston Globe, August 2025
3. SCOTLAND’S REWILDING EXPERIMENT CAME BACK WITH ASTONISHING NUMBERS
Researchers at Liverpool John Moores University surveyed more than 100 rewilding sites across Scotland and compared them to adjacent non-rewilded land. On rewilded land, the number of bird species rose by 261 percent and their breeding territories increased by 546 percent. The number of bumblebees and butterflies more than doubled in variety and rose over tenfold in abundance. The network is now estimated to support 2.5 million pollinating insects.
The part that should quiet the skeptics: several of the rewilded sites combine nature restoration with farming and tourism, showing that biodiversity and economic activity can work side by side. One former livestock farm and conifer plantation is now a regenerative farm and eco-tourism destination receiving 50,000 visitors a year, with four times as many birds as before. Dr. Ross Macleod, who analyzed the data, called the results “astonishingly clear.”
Source: SCOTLAND: The Big Picture / Liverpool John Moores University, March 2026
4. SCIENTISTS USED SUNLIGHT TO TURN PLASTIC WASTE INTO CLEAN FUEL
Researchers have developed a process that uses sunlight to break down plastic waste and convert it into hydrogen, a clean fuel. The method addresses two problems with one solution: plastic waste that would otherwise persist in landfill or oceans becomes an input for the clean energy transition rather than a burden on it. The research is part of a broader wave of photocatalytic chemistry that uses solar energy to drive reactions previously requiring fossil-fuel-derived energy inputs.
It is early stage. But the direction is the point: the waste we have already made may turn out to be part of the answer to the energy problem we still have.
Source: ScienceDaily, May 4, 2026
5. CHILE IS ABOUT TO PROTECT 150,000 HECTARES AT THE END OF THE WORLD
At the very southern tip of South America, where the continent tapers toward Antarctica, Chile is creating a new national park. The proposed Cape Froward national park will span 150,000 hectares of subantarctic forests, peatlands, and coastline — formerly a base for the whaling industry, now home to endangered wildlife including wild pumas, huemul deer, and whales. The driving force is Rewilding Chile, which donated 127,000 hectares of land to the Chilean government on the condition that the national park be established within two years.
When completed, Cape Froward will form the final link in a 2,800-kilometer wildlife corridor at the southern tip of Chile — one of the longest protected wildlife corridors on earth. A place that spent a century being stripped is being handed back.
Source: Positive News / Reuters, 2026
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
I'm in tears. The good kind. Thank you, Rudy.
Oh a breath of fresh air on Sunday. Thank you!