Sam Neill is cancer free and ready to make another movie

Happy Friday. We made it. And honestly, today's issue feels like the right way to close out the week, because every single story in it is about someone who didn't give up. An actor who fought his way back from a cancer diagnosis that looked grim. A woman in Canada who has quietly been showing up for kids in her community for 14 years straight. Landowners in two countries who decided the best thing they could do with what they had was protect it. And a city that turned its worst drought into something it could share with its neighbors.

Also worth noting: today is National Bike to Work Day in the US. We have a story later that will make you feel very good about that.

Let's get into it.

—Stephanie S

Happy Friday. We made it. And honestly, today's issue feels like the right way to close out the week, because every single story in it is about someone who didn't give up. An actor who fought his way back from a cancer diagnosis that looked grim. A woman in Canada who has quietly been showing up for kids in her community for 14 years straight. Landowners in two countries who decided the best thing they could do with what they had was protect it. And a city that turned its worst drought into something it could share with its neighbors.

Also worth noting: today is National Bike to Work Day in the US. We have a story later that will make you feel very good about that.

Let's get into it.

👉 P.S. For less than a cup of coffee a month, you can upgrade to Good News Break five days a week and get stories like these delivered every single weekday. Good news that actually makes a difference in how you start your day.

—Stephanie S

Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor best known for Jurassic Park, announced this week that after a five-year battle with a rare blood cancer called angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, he is completely cancer free. For fans who have followed his journey, it's the news they'd been hoping for.

Neill began chemotherapy in early 2022, but after a while the chemo stopped working. He described that moment with the kind of quiet honesty that made people love him in the first place: it looked like he was on the way out, which wasn't ideal. That's when his doctors switched him to CAR T-cell therapy, a Nobel Prize-winning treatment that has changed the game for several blood cancers and one GNN has covered extensively.

It worked. Neill recently shared that a fresh scan showed no cancer in his body, calling it an extraordinary thing. He says it's beautiful to watch his grandchildren grow up, and that his experience changed how he thinks about what remains of his life.

As for his fans, he has something for them too. Read what he said about getting back to work.

Some of the most important conservation work happening right now isn't being done by governments. It's being done by private citizens quietly deciding that the land they own is worth more wild than developed. In Australia alone, 24 million acres of private land has been set aside for conservation, with a growing share coming through bequests in people's wills. Bush Heritage Australia saw nearly 4,600 of those last year, almost double the number from 2022.

In the United States, the Land Trust Alliance reports that 61 million acres of private land, more than the entire US national park system combined, are already held for conservation. Organizations like American Prairie in Montana are adding to that number every year, with a goal of protecting 2.3 million acres of wild grassland alone.

Together that's 85 million acres and counting, held not by policy but by people who simply chose to. The full story is worth a few minutes of your time.

San Diego knows what a brutal drought looks like. Back in the late 1980s, a five-year drought wiped out a third of the county's water resources and forced the region to bring in imported water just to survive. Instead of waiting for it to happen again, San Diego built the Carlsbad Desalination Plant, the largest seawater desalination facility in North America, pumping 54 million gallons of fresh drinking water into the region every single day.

The investment paid off so well that San Diego reduced its reliance on water imports from 95% down to just 10%. And now, in a genuinely lovely turn, Arizona and Nevada are in talks to receive part of San Diego's Colorado River allocation in exchange for funding the plant's operating costs, which would give up to 500,000 people in those drought-stricken states access to clean water.

It's the kind of story that makes you think differently about what it means to plan ahead. Read how one city's hard lesson became its neighbors' lifeline.

Every spring, Krista Richard of Moncton, New Brunswick starts pulling donated bikes and tricycles out of storage, fixing them up, and getting ready to give them away to families who can't afford to buy one. She's been doing this for 14 years through her program Bikes and Trikes for Everyone, and the waiting list last year had 400 kids on it.

Two of those kids were brothers named Younis and Aws, who put on their best Friday clothes and got their hair done for the day they'd finally ride off on their first real bikes. That detail says everything about what a bike means to a child who doesn't have one.

Krista does most of the work herself, with a small team of volunteers helping collect donations. She's even started keeping adult bikes so parents can ride alongside their kids. As she put it, when you get a bunch of kids on bikes, they get to know each other, the families get to know each other, and the whole neighborhood comes alive. See the photo of Krista with Younis and Aws. It'll make your Friday.

🇬🇧 UK — A decade in the making, V&A East opened its doors in London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park on April 18, offering two free permanent galleries, a landmark exhibition on 125 years of Black British music, and a museum co-designed with local young people to welcome absolutely everyone.

🎨 Ireland — After a three-year pilot showing artists produced more work, reported greater wellbeing, and generated €1.39 back for every €1 invested, Ireland made its Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent, opening 2,000 spots paying €325 a week to creative professionals.

🧬 Sweden — Scientists at Karolinska Institutet developed a more reliable method for creating insulin-producing cells from human stem cells that successfully reversed diabetes in mice, clearing a significant hurdle on the path toward a potential cure for type 1 diabetes

☀️ Global — The International Energy Agency confirmed that solar power had its single largest annual increase in history in 2025, accounting for more than 25% of all global energy demand growth and prompting the IEA to declare the world has entered the Age of Electricity.

🐳 USA — The North Atlantic right whale, one of the world's most endangered mammals, just had its biggest baby boom in 17 years, with 23 calves born this season off the southeastern US coast, the highest number since 2009.

On this day 81 years ago, Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced to the world that Nazi Germany had surrendered unconditionally, bringing six years of war in Europe to an end. From New York to Moscow, from London to liberated Paris, people poured into the streets. Church bells rang. Strangers embraced. In Germany, the day became known not as a defeat but as a day of liberation, the moment an extremist government finally fell and the long work of rebuilding could begin.

The surrender came just 11 months after D-Day, the massive Allied landing on the beaches of Normandy that turned the tide of the war. For the millions who had lost someone, or spent years in fear, in rationing, in waiting, May 8th was the exhale the world had been holding for years. It remains one of the most joyful days in modern history.

Other notable May 8 events:

1753: Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa, later becoming the first African American woman ever to be published, despite being enslaved as a child and brought to Boston at a young age.

1837: Hans Christian Andersen published his first volume of fairy tales, including The Tinderbox and The Princess and the Pea, works that would eventually become beloved around the world.

1911: Robert Johnson, the Delta blues musician who would go on to influence Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, and The Rolling Stones, was born in Mississippi.

1926: Sir David Attenborough was born, and turns 100 today, the legendary naturalist whose nature documentaries have shaped how generations understand and care for our planet.

— Desmond Tutu

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🧠 Mapping the Brain: Scientists have now mapped over 200,000 neurons and their connections in a tiny piece of human brain tissue, the most detailed picture of the human brain ever created, opening new doors to understanding memory, consciousness, and neurological disease.

🌊 Cleaning the Ocean: There are now more than 1,000 Marine Protected Areas around the world covering nearly 30% of coastal and ocean territory, giving marine ecosystems real room to recover and thrive.

🦁 Lions Coming Back: Lion populations in several key African reserves have doubled over the past decade thanks to coordinated conservation efforts, reversing a decades-long decline across the continent.

💊 Curing the Incurable: Gene therapy has now successfully treated patients with sickle cell disease, a condition that was considered lifelong and untreatable just ten years ago, with some patients showing no symptoms whatsoever after a single treatment.

🛰️ Seeing the Universe: The James Webb Space Telescope is showing us galaxies that formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, rewriting what we know about the origins of the universe and our place in it.

Spread a little good news, and good things come back your way.

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