She asked them to find her missing brother. He was volunteering in their own shop

Happy Monday. I want to start with a story that stopped me when I read it. A woman in a London hospice had one wish: to find her brother, who she'd lost touch with 15 years ago. The staff took it on. After months of searching, they found him volunteering in one of their own charity shops. The photo of them together is something you will want to see.

We also have orcas returning to the northeast coast of England in numbers nobody can remember, a California water company doing something genuinely worth knowing about with plastic recycling, and three mule deer in Siskiyou County who didn't feel like waiting for their new wildlife bridge to be officially finished.

Here's your good news.

👉 P.S. Want good news in your inbox every weekday? You can upgrade to receive Good News Break five days a week for $5 per month or $45 per year.

—Stephanie S

Muriel Bujega is 73 and receiving palliative care for breast cancer at St. Christopher's Hospice in South London. After her husband died she arrived withdrawn and isolated. The staff got to know her, and eventually she shared her wish: to find her brother Colin, who she hadn't seen in almost 15 years. The siblings, both with learning disabilities, had lost contact when Colin's caretaker passed away and he was forced to move.

Nurse specialist Phoebe Mooney took it on, spending months working through every avenue she could find until she reached someone who knew Colin well. What she discovered was almost impossible to believe. Colin was already part of the St. Christopher's community, volunteering in one of their own charity shops.

The reunion happened. Muriel cried on his shoulder. Colin couldn't believe it was her. "I'd missed him a lot," she said. The hospice has since shared their story as part of research showing just 20% of people know that hospices can help patients reconnect with loved ones.

"By asking people what matters to you," said the hospice's rehabilitation lead, "we shift the question away from simply asking what's the matter with you." That single shift is the whole story. See the photos of Muriel and Colin and read the full story.

In 2025, there were five verified orca sightings off the Northumberland coast, after decades of near absence. This year, a pod of up to 10 was spotted by fishermen in April. Then last Saturday, tourists on a Farne Islands boat tour watched in disbelief as a pod of around 30 orcas surrounded their vessel. It is believed to be one of the largest pods ever seen off the northeast coast of England.

Martin Kitching, coordinator of the North East Cetacean Project, told the BBC that boatmen across every port in the area couldn't remember seeing them before. "Now, all of a sudden, sightings are definitely up." Wildlife experts believe the orcas are drawn by the 6,000 seals and seabirds at the Farne Islands, and that recovering fish stocks may be bringing them back more regularly.

Crew member Jake Tiffin, 19, caught one of the animals fully breaching the water in an acrobatic flip on camera. "To see a creature that big jumping out of the water is mental," he said. There were calves doing barrel rolls alongside the adults. Watch the video. It's the kind of thing you don't forget.

Most plastic bottles end up somewhere complicated after you toss them in the recycling bin. The materials get sorted, baled, shipped, and processed through a supply chain that often sends them overseas. Niagara Bottling, a family-owned California water company, decided to change that for its own bottles. In May, they acquired a shuttered 305,000-square-foot recycling facility in Vernon, Los Angeles County, along with the rPlanet Earth brand, and began the work of bringing it back to life.

The facility processes what the industry calls B-bales, the mixed materials from curbside recycling bins that are more difficult and expensive to handle. Niagara sorts, cleans, and reprocesses the PET plastic into high-quality recycled flakes and pellets, then uses those materials to manufacture new Niagara bottles right there in California. It's a genuine closed loop, and one of the few true bottle-to-bottle operations in the country.

"We're proud to bring this facility back to life and become one of the few companies in the country with a true bottle-to-bottle process," said Niagara president Rali Sanderson. Mark Murray of Californians Against Waste called it a tangible investment in California's closed-loop recycling economy, noting that billions of PET containers returned by Californians will now make their way back into new bottles. Read the full story.

Along a stretch of I-97 in Siskiyou County, California, the state Department of Transportation has been building a $20 million wildlife overpass to help animals cross the highway safely. The completed version will eventually have trees growing across it. The contractor is still finishing the final touches. None of that mattered to three mule deer, who showed up on the bridge last week and used it anyway.

Camera traps caught them mid-crossing, a bobcat too, while workers were still on site nearby. The corridor they're protecting runs from about 20 miles south of Weed all the way up to the Canadian border, bisecting key migratory routes for deer, elk, and bison. Between 2015 and 2020, vehicles killed over 50 deer and 16 elk in this area alone. Eight-foot fencing will eventually funnel animals from three miles in either direction toward the crossing.

"While the contractor is still completing final touches, it's incredible to see wildlife already embracing the new structure, even with workers still in the area," the DoT wrote on Facebook. "Seeing animals use the structure this quickly is an exciting sign of the positive impact this project will have." See the camera trap photos and read the full story.

💊 Global: A major study of more than 110,000 women found that those taking GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy were around 30% less likely to develop breast cancer, independent of age, BMI, and breast density, with researchers calling it a compelling reason to study these drugs as potential cancer prevention tools.

🥑 Mexico: The Avocado Institute of Mexico has broken the Guinness World Record for the largest bowl of guacamole ever made, preparing 15,000 pounds of the dish to celebrate a banner avocado harvest season and the crop's growing global importance as a nutritious, sustainable food.

🔌 USA: Tennessee has joined a growing number of states requiring data center owners to pay the full cost of electricity infrastructure they use, preventing AI companies from shifting those costs onto ordinary ratepayers and setting a precedent for how states can manage the energy demands of the tech industry.

💒 USA: A historic Hudson Valley estate is offering a completely free wedding to the couple with the best love story, covering venue, catering, flowers, and photography, in what the organizers are calling a celebration of real love in a place that has hosted celebrations for over two centuries.

💉 Global: Scientists at the University of Cambridge and DIOSynVax have successfully tested an AI-designed universal coronavirus vaccine in humans for the first time, finding it safe and well tolerated in 39 volunteers, with the needle-free vaccine generating immune responses against SARS-CoV-2, SARS, and related bat viruses that could cause future pandemics.

On this day 77 years ago, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in London, a novel he had written while dying of tuberculosis in a remote farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura, racing to finish it before his body gave out. He completed the manuscript in December 1948 and died in January 1950, never knowing what he had unleashed. The book has never gone out of print. It has sold more than 30 million copies and has been translated into 65 languages, and the terms it gave us, Big Brother, doublethink, Newspeak, Thought Police, thoughtcrime, are so thoroughly embedded in the language that politicians use them without attribution in nearly every democratic country on earth.

The story is set in a totalitarian future Britain called Airstrip One, where the Party maintains power through omnipresent surveillance, the rewriting of history, and the persecution of independent thought. Orwell was drawing on what he had seen in Spain during the Civil War and in the Soviet Union, trying to warn the postwar world about what unchecked power actually looks like from the inside. He succeeded so completely that in 2012, US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer referenced the novel by name while questioning the government's request for continuous warrantless GPS tracking of American citizens.

Other notable June 8 events:

1789: James Madison introduced the proposed Bill of Rights in the US House of Representatives, laying the foundation for the ten amendments that would be ratified in 1791 and remain the cornerstone of American civil liberties.

1867: Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Wisconsin, going on to design 532 buildings including Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum, guided by his philosophy of organic architecture and the belief that buildings should grow naturally from their environment.

1906: President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act into law, giving presidents the power to designate national monuments and protect historic and natural sites from development. The Grand Canyon was among the first areas preserved under it.

1953: Six years before Rosa Parks, 86-year-old NAACP activist Mary Church Terrell walked into Thompson's Restaurant near the White House and challenged its segregated policy, leading to a unanimous Supreme Court ruling on this day that Washington DC restaurants could not refuse to serve Black patrons.

1985: Tears For Fears hit number one in the US with Everybody Wants To Rule The World, one of the defining songs of the decade and a track whose sardonic commentary on power feels at home alongside today's history feature.

— African proverb

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:

🧠 Understanding Depression Differently: For the first time scientists have identified specific biological subtypes of depression using brain scans and AI, meaning treatments can be matched to what is actually happening in each individual brain rather than relying on trial and error across years of medication adjustments.

🌍 Mapping the Ocean Floor: Scientists are mapping the deep ocean in unprecedented detail using sonar and autonomous submarines, revealing mountain ranges, canyon systems, and entire ecosystems that had never been seen before and transforming our understanding of the planet we actually live on.

🌱 Fertilizer From the Air: Scientists have engineered nitrogen-fixing bacteria into the roots of major crops, with early field trials showing plants can draw significant nitrogen from the air rather than synthetic fertilizer, potentially transforming one of agriculture's biggest environmental burdens.

🏥 1,000 Rare Disease Treatments: For the first time the number of approved treatments for rare diseases has surpassed 1,000, meaning millions of patients with conditions once considered untreatable now have at least one approved option, driven by gene therapy, RNA medicine, and targeted biologics.

🩺 Reversing Type 2 Diabetes: Clinical trials have demonstrated that type 2 diabetes can be put into full remission through intensive dietary intervention and weight loss, with some patients remaining diabetes-free for over a decade, challenging the long-held assumption that the condition is inevitably progressive.

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