Punch the Monkey!

0:03 Hey there, I'm Johnny Mac with five good news stories. A monkey rejected by his mother is now caring for other baby monkeys. Yeah, a monkey became an internet favorite after being abandoned by mom. Has a new role, looking after other young monkeys. Punch the monkey! Lives at a zoo in Japan. Shortly after he was born, mom abandoned him. Keepers gave the little monkey a stuffed toy for comfort. And pictures of Punch the monkey went viral. You may recall Punch the monkey. They tried introducing Punch to the other monkeys, but those guys rejected poor Punch too. Punch could be seen sitting by himself with his stuffed animal friend. But six months later, Punch's story has a much happier turn.

0:45 According to the zoo, Punch has been spending his time with younger monkeys who are having trouble adjusting to the group. It sounds like the group has a problem. Videos show Punch cuddling the babies, grooming them, and approaching new arrivals. He's also become protective in one instance. Punch reportedly spotted a crow hanging around near one of the babies and stayed beside the younger monkey until the crow went away. The babies have become attached to Punch themselves, seeking out Punch when they wake up and treating him almost like a big brother. One social media user said Punch became what he once needed. Gotta love this guy. A man won a two-year court battle over a parking ticket. How much was the parking ticket? 90 cents. This guy's 76. He lives in England. He spent more than two years fighting a parking company over a 90-cent parking fee. John parked at the Foreman Center car park. He and his wife went shopping. He paid 90 pence for an hour of parking and entered his vehicle registration in the machine.

1:39 When the ticket came out, it displayed only the final four characters of his license plate. He figured that was on purpose. He left 36 minutes later, well within the hour he had paid for it. Two weeks later, he gets a ticket saying he hadn't properly paid for parking and owed 100 pounds. That's about $ 135, reduced to 60 pounds if he paid quickly. He had kept that ticket. He also had his bank statement showing the payment, so he went to the company and figured that'd be the end of it. The company rejected his appeal, but offered to settle for 20 pounds. He said no. He said paying the 20 pounds is still a 2,000% increase. I'd already paid for the parking. I was annoyed that they were seeking to extort money from me. He fought with them for two and a half years. He kept answering every letter and preserving his paperwork. He even told the company he was willing to go to court and would counterclaim his own costs. Civil enforcement took him to court, seeking 277 pounds. But Deputy District Judge Chan dismissed the parking company's claim and helped John's counterclaim over the anxiety, intimidation, The company was ordered to pay John 289 pounds and 50 pence, plus court expenses and 4 pounds 50 pence for the parking he had to pay for when he went to court. Love that. His advice to other drivers?

2:51 Save the parking ticket, save your receipts, save the letters. Some dogs have a new job. Their job? Scare the bears. Nevada wildlife officials have hired two dogs to deal with some black bears that got a little too comfortable around humans. The dogs are Badger and Banjo. Their job? Chase the bears. Badger and Banjo are Karelian bear dogs, which sounds like something out of Star Wars, a breed traditionally used for hunting and working around large animals. The Nevada Department of Wildlife uses them to teach black bears that hanging around humans is a bad idea. Nevada's black bear population has come back. By the 80s, habitat loss and illegal hunting had reduced the population to around 30 bears. Now there are around 700 black bears in western Nevada, which is good news, except for when the bears get a little too close to the humans. That's where Badger and Banjo come in. The dogs work with wildlife biologists, responding to bears hiding underneath houses, entering buildings, or repeatedly hanging around neighborhoods.

3:49 Wildlife biologist Carl said the bears' experiences for the most part around people have been positive. We're just trying to give them a bad experience around people. The long-term solution is to get humans to stop accidentally feeding the bears by leaving garbage, food, or other attractants where the animals can reach them. Good news for monarch butterflies. You guys had a good year. After years of steep declines, the population of monarch butterflies spending the winter in Mexico appears to have gone up. That's good. It had been going down. I've been watching this for years. According to the World Wildlife Fund's annual survey of monarch butterflies, monarch butterflies occupied about 7.2 acres of forest during the winter of 2025 to 2026, that up from the previous winter's 4.4 acres.

4:33 If you do the math there, that's an increase of roughly 64% in a single year. If you go back to 2023, the area has more than tripled from Valerie is a conservation researcher. Say that three times fast. You're listening to Take Six right now. That is not an easy sentence to say. Anyway, Valerie said the increase could represent anywhere from a few million to tens of millions more monarch butterflies. Scientists aren't ready to declare the monarch completely recovered. 30 years ago, monarch colonies covered close to 45 acres of Mexican forest. So if you compare this to the 90s, the population is still down anywhere between 80 and 90%. And good news for Voyager 2, NASA scientists figured out how to give it another year of life nearly 50 years after Voyager 2 left the Earth.

5:17 The problem is Voyager 2 is slowly running out of electricity. Voyager 2 launched in 1977 and gets its power from radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which turn heat from decaying plutonium into electricity, but the plutonium doesn't produce as much heat as it once does. Voyager loses about 4 watts of available power every year. Doesn't sound like a lot when you're a spacecraft billions of miles from home. Every watt matters. NASA engineers have already been shutting down instruments and other equipment to stretch out Voyager's remaining power for as long as possible. Now they've figured out they can switch off some deeply integrated systems while making sure Voyager stays warm enough to operate. It was a risky enough plan that engineers gave the planet a nickname, the Big Bang. And it worked! Without the change, NASA figured they would have had to shut down another scientific instrument before the end of the year.

6:08 Since 2024, engineers have already turned off two science instruments on each of the Voyager spacecraft. They will now do a similar power-saving operation on Voyager 1, which is even farther from the Earth. And eventually, the Voyagers will go silent, do no word on what happened to Voyager 6, which disappeared in what they used to call a black hole. If you got my Star Trek reference, you got it. If you didn't, there is no Voyager 6. Just move on. Just trust me. That was for the Trekkies. And those are your five good news stories for today. Have a great day.