Good News Headlines 9/8/2025

Photo courtesy Louis Staples

The One Change That Worked: I Abandoned My Cynicism – And Joined Europe’s Biggest Gay Choir

by Louis Staples, The Guardian

It is April 2022 and I am standing in the middle of the stage at Cadogan Hall in London. As the pianist plays a plucky staccato intro, it dawns on me that I am about to sing the West Side Story classic I Feel Pretty, with choreography, in front of a packed audience, alongside 200 gay men. This was my first time performing with the London Gay Men’s Chorus (LGMC) – Europe’s largest gay choir. I first saw them perform years earlier in Soho, where they sang Bridge Over Troubled Water at a vigil for the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida in 2016. After making it through the months of rehearsals, I was under the bright stage lights, trying to remember the first line of the song and thinking: “what have I got myself into?”

How LA Is Uniting To Provide Mutual Aid For Those Impacted By ICE Raids

by Victoria Valenzuela, Waging Nonviolence

At 8 a.m. on July 4, about a dozen people gathered in front of a tamale cart stationed outside an abandoned 99-cent store building in Pasadena, California — some 10 miles outside of Los Angeles. While the tamales were delicious, that wasn’t the only thing drawing out the crowd — they were there for a fundraiser to support 14-year-old Chris Garcia, who started running his mom’s cart after ICE took some of her customers a few weeks earlier. Her business suffered, and she fell behind in bills, so Garcia stepped up. An hour after the event started, the lowrider car community came cruising and bouncing down the street in support of Garcia.

Small Chinese County Reverses Desertification With Arduous Tree-Planting Method Across 240,000 Acres

by Andy Corbley, Good News Network

A rural village has led the transformation of a barren ravine into a flourishing forest mosaic in one of the least-habitable parts of their country. When Deng Xiaoping took control of Communist China in the 1970s, the land around the Mo Us desert was described by visiting environmental scientists as a heavily desertified landscape unfit for human habitation. Given to large social engineering projects, there were discussions among Party bosses about moving the entire Youyu county population away from the hostile land, where yellow sands would whip through towns, darkening the sky.

‘The Forgotten Forest’: How Smashing 5.6m Urchins Saved A California Kelp Paradise

by Katharine Gammon, The Guardian

On an overcast Tuesday in July, divers Mitch Johnson and Sean Taylor shimmy into their wetsuits on the back of the R/V Xenarcha, a 28ft boat floating off the coast of Rancho Palos Verdes, south of Los Angeles. Behind them, the clear waters of the Pacific are dotted with a forest of army-green strands, waving like mermaid hair underwater. We are here to survey the giant Pacific kelp, a species that once thrived in these ice cold waters. But over the past two decades, a combination of warm ocean temperatures, pollution, overfishing and the proliferation of hungry sea urchins that devour the kelp has led to an 80% decline in the forest along the southern California coast.

Immigrant Farmworkers Win Housing Rights In Vermont

by Riley Ramirez , Civil Eats