In the headlines...

🏳️‍⚧️ Blocking President Trump’s executive order, a federal judge said the U.S. Bureau of Prisons must keep providing gender-affirming care to transgender people who are incarcerated.

🧇 After more than a month in jail, a waitress in a small Missouri town who immigrated from Hong Kong 20 years ago was released by ICE. Carol’s arrest rattled her conservative community, which came together to call for her release. (Gifted link)

🍿 The ‘Wicked: For Good’ trailer is officially out, and it’s everything the internet hoped it would be (and maybe more).

LGBTQ+

To protest a statewide policy, a Florida city’s LGBTQ+ community used handheld lights to display a rainbow across a bridge

In 2020, the city of Jacksonville installed lights across its Acosta Bridge, lighting it up in rainbow colors for Pride Month from 2021 to 2023. In 2024, the FDOT ordered it to be lit up in red, white, and blue for the entire summer, and it continued that policy in 2025.

So, for the second consecutive year, both to kick off Pride Month celebrations and as a symbol of resilience and protest, the city’s LGBTQ+ community walked across the bridge, illuminating handheld lights in the color of the rainbow.

Last year, they lit up an adjacent bridge, the city’s iconic blue Main Street bridge, but had to move locations this year due to its drawbridge being raised.

Why is this good news? While what colors light up a bridge, or which flags are allowed to fly in a city, might seem like a small issue — these displays send a much larger message. They make people feel welcome, accepted, and seen, and everyone deserves to live in a city where they experience those things.

The fact that it was neighbors making sure that message was on display is particularly meaningful.

→ Read more​

More Good News

​In an effort to help save public lands, an artist displayed lit-up protest statements at night on Yellowstone National Park. Swedish-American artist and activist Michele Pred has been creating guerrilla public art installations across the United States for years, and her latest at Yellowstone projects messages like “Money for parks, not oligarchs.”

​As the U.S. government boosts fossil fuels, mayors in cities like Cleveland, Ohio, are tackling climate change on a local level. Together with ambitious state governments, hundreds of cities large and small are pursuing climate action plans — documents that lay out how they will reduce emissions and adapt to extreme weather — with or without support from the feds.

​Florida just passed a new state law inspired by a dog that was chained to a fence in Florida during Hurricane Milton. The bull terrier, who was later named “Trooper,” was seen in a viral video chained to a fence while belly-deep in water. After being taken into the Florida Humane Society’s care, he’s also now officially found his forever home following an influx of applications.

​The LA County Public Library is expanding free, in-person tutoring for elementary school students to 45 locations this summer. Last year, more than 2,700 students participated in nearly 14,000 tutoring sessions, and pre- and post-tests show participating students made gains in both reading and math at the end of the summer.

Environment

Coral ‘micro nurseries’ offer breakthrough in repopulating the Great Barrier Reef: ‘There is still time’

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good progress

A disease that once killed nearly 1% of London’s population annually, tuberculosis is now rare in wealthy countries

In the mid-18th century, 1 in 100 people died from tuberculosis in London every year. In all of England and the United States, TB was responsible for as many as one-quarter of deaths during parts of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Initially, deaths declined thanks to the discovery of the real cause of TB in the late 1800s. Then, public health interventions were introduced to raise awareness about how it spread to help families and communities prevent it, and specialized hospitals were set up.

Later, when antibiotic treatments became available in the 1950s, TB rates dropped dramatically.

The nuance: While very few people die from TB in rich countries today, many low- and middle-income countries still face unacceptably high rates of infection and death. If every country could control and treat TB like the United States, there would be “only” 16,000 TB deaths annually — saving over 1.2 million lives every year.

→ Read more​

More Good bits

🥹 Baboons like taking walks with their friends, too.

👶 There’s a bipartisan effort to make childbirth free. (Yes, you read that right.)

💼 Meanwhile, dads across the pond want better paternity leave laws.​

🎧 That’s Elmo’s boy, Stevie! (TikTok)

🐸 Bad Bunny makes an endangered toad the star of the show.

What’s good?

We’re planning to dive into this in tomorrow’s Goodnewsletter, but for those who like to read ahead a bit ... World Ocean Day is on Sunday!​

Do you live close to an ocean?

Reply and tell me ... East Coast or West Coast!

— Megan