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And this is the Daily This is the Daily ohs oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It is Saturday, the seventh of December, and welcome to another good News episode. Zara, so nice to do this every week.
I know, shout out to my brother, it's his birthday today.
That's a big shout out.
Good place to start for a good news podcast, and we have got a bunch of feel good stories today. Sam, why don't I throw to you first because you're actually the one that found this story and it's amazing.
Well, talk about a good place to start. A good place for these guys to start was the East coast and they needed to get to the West coast. So let me wind it back.
Yeah, take us back.
I want to shout out three young men from New Zealand. Their names are Tane Talton, Ben Reeve and Alex Smith. And this week they finished a challenge to walk across the length of New Zealand, so crossways, not down in a straight line. Now let's just sit on that point in a straight line to raise ten thousand dollars for November.
Did you know that this was a trend walking in a straight line across the country.
I've seen a couple of YouTube kind of diaries of people you were blogging their ways walking across the straight line, And of course the hardest thing with walking in the straight line across the country is that there might be different terrain there.
I must say, I don't know that I fully appreciated this story until I read more into it, because at a quick glance they were walking around sixty kilometers.
I was like, that sounds fairly straightforward's fairly easy.
What I didn't think about is if you are walking in a straight line across the country, if there's a mountain in front of you, if there's a sea in front of you, if there's a river in front of you, you have to find a way to cross it. And I watched these videos of these three young men walking like older deep in the most rank water you've ever seen. It's really cool, and they had to still go straight.
So you are allowed a deviation from this direct straight line of up to one hundred meters either way, So fifty meters either way. That doesn't give you much leeway. I mean, if there's a mountain, there's a mountain. But they did it. They did it, and the three men finished, and they whatever it was in their way, rivers or roads, they crossed it, they crossed.
It, and all in the name of a good cause.
It's a great cause. So November is a charity that raises awareness of men's health issues, including prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and suicide. And it was a personal cause for one of the men, Alex Smith, who lost his mother to suicide as a child and his father to prostate cancer earlier this year. I'm going to link you their Facebook page in the show notes because, as the boys say, you can actually watch the highs, lows and wipeouts on
their page. So now I'm going to start planning my trip to.
Walk across the line straight line.
No.
Look, I will just add, because I had this question, November usually tied to November. We're in December, but they got delayed due to terrain challenges. So that's why we're talking about it in December, and that's why they finished in December. But a mighty effort by those three young guys, and as you said, for such a good cause.
And am we're going to stick with young people for this next story, Zara, tell me what a museum in the US is doing.
Yeah, So for this story, we are going to the US city of Milwaukee in Wisconsin, where an anonymous donor has given three point five million US dollars to a museum to allow for the free admission of children to the museum forever.
Wow.
So this person, who didn't want to be identified, did it out of the goodness of their heart, said that they had really fond memories of visiting this art museum with their family throughout their life, and they wanted to be able to foster similar experiences for future generations of families, and so they donated this incredibly generous three point five million dollars so that anyone twelve an under can forever now visit this museum, create great memories, learn a lot,
you know, have all of those kind of sensory experiences that we know are so fundamental to you know, developmental growth, all for free, and so it's accessible to all families.
No matter who you are, where you are.
You can go to this Milwaukee Art Museum for free thanks to the generosity of one anonymous person.
Accessibility to arts always comes up in conversations amongst art and culture departments of various governments around the world. There's lots of NGOs and charities that work in their space as well, and it's you know, the principle of giving people who otherwise might not have had access to the arts. Yeah, giving them access at an early age can make a lifetime of difference.
Yeah, exactly. I think this is a fabulous story all round.
Two more stories to Gozara. And now we're moving to another US state. We were in Wisconsin. Now we're going to go to Hawaii. As the crow flies.
Perhaps, I don't know why I do this with someone that makes dad jokes so often, but this week, five Hawaiian crows were released on Maui, the island of Maui, for the first time as part of an effort to return the species to its home. So, if you're not familiar with the Hawaiian crow or the alala, it became extinct in the wild in two thousand and two, so decades ago, and that was mostly due to this combination of habitat loss and disease that was introduced by mosquitos.
If we needed another reason to hate mosquitos, there you go. But making this a good news story. Now, San Diego Zoo has collaborated on this conservation project, and they said that this represents hope for the future of Hawaii, for its wildlife, for its people, and for their shared ecosystems. Now, I was doing a little bit of reading as to how you introduce a bird that is otherwise extinct, because that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
And what I read was that the experts raised the two females and three male birds in a social group, and that was to strengthen their relationship building skills.
So they were in this.
Kind of really concentrated pilot program thing where they were being observed and all of the kind of natural tendencies were playing out socially.
Watching a few ted talks on the theories of.
Leadership exactly, and that allowed the researchers to figure out how these birds depend on each other, and they were able to then deduce how these birds might succeed in native habitats.
Can I just quickly call out San Diego Zoo.
The second time?
The second time, I was like do people think that this is sponsored by San Diego Zoo.
It's not.
It's not sponsored by San Diego.
However, we are open to being sponsored by such an illustrious ecological institution. For those who didn't catch last week, last week we celebrated the fortieth birthday of a penguin at San Diego Zoo whose name is best Friend. And this week San Diego Zoo legends are back releasing crows into the wild.
Yeah, and I just wanted to end this story on a note about the birds themselves, because apparently their cries are interpreted as warning signs by local communities. So there's this really important role that the Hawaiian crow plays in local communities. Sometimes though cries are actually included in Sacred Chance. So San Diego Zoo is basically saying that to Hawaiians, these birds are family and they're so so important.
We'll bring you another installment of what's happening at San Diego Zoo next week. But good news story, or one more good news story. We're changing continents again and this time we're heading to Europe.
Yes, so this story many of our listeners will remember, but not Tre Dame. It is, of course the massive cathedral in Paris. It is today reopening five years after a fire tore through it.
So that was on the fifteenth of April twenty nineteen. It's wild. It feels like yesterday.
I remember seeing the vision of those huge flames engulfing the spiral and every part of that cathedral. It destroyed most of the wood, the metal roof, and as I said, the spire. We never really found out what caused the fire, and I think investigators believed it to be accidental. There's
kind of never been a concrete resolution there. But then in twenty nineteen, French President Emmanuel Macron, who we've spoken about on the pub this week, he's not having a great week, but back then he said the church would be restored more beautiful than ever within five years, and he has stuck to that and today it reopens that eight hundred and fifty year old cathedral. He's saying that it's going to give the world shock of hope.
That's an interesting turn of phrase. Maybe there's some French translation issues there.
Well.
I think he was saying when I was trying to understand this more, he was saying that the vision of the flames shocked the world to its course and now he wants to shock them with hope. Yeah, okay, anyway, we'll leave that to Macron. Entry to the cathedral will remain free, but they are expecting a lot of people to rock up over the coming weeks and months, so attendees are encouraged to book ahead if you find yourself fancying a French winter holiday over the new year.
There were lots of references to the cathedral during the opening ceremony of the Paris Games, I remember, and they were talking about it as kind of rebuilding the soul of the city and all of that. So it's amazing to hear that it is reopen to the public. Zara, can I give you a recommendation for the week?
Are you going to ask me mine in return?
Yeah? I will.
The first time I've actually had like, well.
Why don't you go first? No, no, you go first, Okay, I will. So the
No?
ones the Sydney Swans, and I will admit a conflict on air. I am a diehard Sydney Swans fan. The Sydney Swans have partnered with TikTok to make I think it's the first in the world, the first vertical sports documentary series and attracts eight young members of the Swan's development squads. So they're all about sixteen years of age, four boys and four girls, and their journey to thinking about whether they want to become a professional AFL player
full time but or not. It's a mixture of professional footage, like proper documentary drive to survive style stuff, and the players actually just kind of logging their way through their day and their week and going from school to training and all of that kind of stuff. It is heartwarming and beautiful. The episodes are short, which I think is an interesting format for any new generation of documentary viewers, and I couldn't recommend it more. I'll put a link in the buy it, love.
It, and I'm going to stick to the sport to segue. I'll call it exercise theme. My recommendation is that I have never ever been able to stick to a form of exercise in my whole life, as long as I have lived on this earth.
Exercise has just not been a thing for me.
But I have just finished my sixth month of pilates at a local pilates studio.
I mean, look at that, I know you know what.
They sent me a message saying congratulations, and I was like, I do deserve congratulations. That is just like good for the body, good for the mind, good for the soul. And I've actually just never found an exercise thing that I really enjoyed.
So shout out to Peaches pilates.
You are getting me through what is otherwise a hectic job and a hectic news cycle.
Anything that makes you feel like you're a brave Warriorszara. That is very brave of you to discover pilates for the first time. Nu, and thank you so much much for joining us everybody on today's episode of the Saturday Good News. It's always a pleasure to bring you the stories from the good News cycle. We're going to be back on Monday morning for you. Until then, have a wonderful weekend.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Calcuttin woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadigol people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Okay, let's cut through the noise. It's a Saturday morning, you're listening to the Good News podcast. I don't want to take up too much of your time, so I'm going to get straight to the point. UP Bank is the bank with no extra fees, no fossil fuel investments, nobs. It's just smart banking tools that actually help you to get what you want out of life. Built by freethinkers who understand that young ozzies need banking that works for them,
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