Good Morning!

Today's edition has a little bit of everything!

Ancient giants 🐢 reclaiming their islands, a South African grandmother ⚖️ who has spent her life fighting for human rights on the world stage, and a global health story 🤰 that deserves far more attention than it typically gets.

Grab your coffee and read on.

In the 1800s, the Aldabra giant tortoise was in serious trouble. Like so many large, slow-moving animals, they were easy targets.

Passing sailors took them by the boatload for food, and by the 19th century fewer than 1,000 were left. Their survival looked genuinely uncertain.

Today, the story looks completely different!

A new study estimates that about 183,000 giant tortoises now live on Aldabra Atoll. That’s more than the entire human population of the Seychelles, which sits at around 123,000.

The credit goes largely to the protection of Aldabra Atoll, a remote UNESCO World Heritage Site that serves as the primary home for the species. With human access tightly controlled and habitat kept largely intact, the tortoises have been allowed to do what they do best — live slowly, eat a lot, and reproduce steadily over their exceptionally long lifespans. Some individuals are believed to be well over 100 years old.

This story is a reminder of what can happen when you simply protect a place. Sometimes removing the threat and leaving animals alone is the most powerful thing you can do.

The Aldabra tortoise seems to agree!

Human rights work is often invisible. It happens in courtrooms, in UN chambers, in painstaking negotiations, and in years of effort that rarely make front-page news.

Navanethem Pillay has been doing exactly that kind of work for most of her life, and this year, the Nobel Committee finally put a spotlight on it.

Pillay grew up in a poor Indian community in Durban under apartheid, and the injustice she saw shaped her entire career. In 1967, she became the first non-white woman to open her own law practice in Natal Province.

No law firm would hire her. So she started her own and defended anti-apartheid activists and political prisoners. For years she wasn’t even allowed to enter a judge’s chambers.

After apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela appointed her to South Africa’s High Court in 1995, making her its first non-white woman judge.

That same year she joined the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, later serving as its President. There she helped set landmark precedents, including the recognition of rape as an act of genocide.

She went on to serve as a judge at the International Criminal Court, and then as the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights. In that role she was known for speaking plainly about injustice, even when it made powerful governments uncomfortable.

She’s 85 now and still working in international law. This Nobel Prize feels like a long-overdue thank you.

Childbirth should not be a life-threatening event. But for millions of women in low-income countries, it still is.

The absence of trained birth attendants, clean facilities, and emergency care means that complications which are routine to manage in well-resourced health systems can quickly become fatal.

It is one of the starkest and most persistent forms of global inequality.

Since 2008, programs supported by the UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, have helped facilitate 41.7 million safer births.

They helped train skilled midwives and birth attendants, equipped clinics with essential supplies, and made sure that when something goes wrong during delivery, someone nearby knows what to do.

Progress in maternal health is painfully slow relative to the scale of the problem, but 41.7 million is a number that shows the work is making a difference.

For the past 3 years we’ve been sharing good news stories on YouTube. We love doing this and we’ll keep going for a loooong time!

But not everyone is on YouTube. Your grandma probably isn’t. Or that uncle who’s sure everything is going downhill.

So we’ve been working on something in the background!

We’re writing a book.

The Good News Book!

Over the years we’ve found so many incredible stories. More people are surviving cancer than ever before. Jaguars, rhinos and Khulan are making a comeback. Mangroves are recovering around the world, and Amazon deforestation alerts are the lowest in 12 years.

These are some of the best news of 2026, and they’ll all be in the book, along with a lot more stories.

We want to create this book so that you can give it to someone you love. Especially that one person who thinks the world is falling apart.

There’s still a ton of work ahead, but I’ll keep you posted along the way!

Feel free to share some feedback!