Puppy TV

0:01 Hey there, I'm Johnny Mac with five good news stories. Andre has been in prison in Australia for over 20 years. He's 55 years old. He's serving a life sentence. And for most of his time in the prison in Perth, He's been denied access to Vegemite. You may know Vegemite from the song Down Under. The court has decided that is a human rights violation. He argued that as an Australian, Vegemite is integral to his cultural identity. The reason the prison had banned it is because like many yeast-based products, Vegemite can theoretically be fermented into a low-grade alcohol, and that was enough to keep it off the approved list.

0:42 Andre appealed and went before the Supreme Court of Western Australia. The judge ruled in his favor. The judgment noted that denying a person their cultural foods without adequate justification was an unjustifiable infringement on his rights. The court also took note that drug-sniffer dogs are already on duty at the facility, and that Andre simply wanted to eat Vegemite on toast, the way Australians have been doing it since 1922. The prison also cited the MinuteWorks song Down Under, which references the Vegemite, as evidence of the product's deeply Australian character. Andre told reporters he cried when he heard the ruling. In Finland, every year the national broadcaster puts a camera in front of a dog and her newborn puppies and leaves it running. The program is called Pint Alive. It's been on the air for six seasons. This year's broadcast featured Hicca, a Legoto Romangolo with a litter of six.

1:30 The camera ran continuously for weeks, picking up nothing more dramatic than sleeping, nursing, and the occasional pile of puppies, rearranging themselves for no reason. More than six million people watched. Finland has a population of 5.7 million. We got to get this thing on NBC after football. The program is simple. There's no narration, no music, no dramatic arc. Viewers can tune in at three in the morning to watch puppies breathe. Yet the program regularly outperforms primetime scripted TV. Researchers have studied the show and found that watching it triggers the same release of oxytocin, a.k.a. the love hormone that comes from holding an actual puppy. For years, a stretch of Interstate 25 between Denver and Colorado Springs had a vehicle wildlife collision roughly once a day. Animals like elk, deer, even toads were trying to cross the road to get to the other side. The math rarely worked out in the animal's favor. And now the Pikes Peak Regional Wildlife Connectivity Collaboration, say that twice, I did, that was take two, spent years designing a solution. A bridge 209 feet wide and 200 feet long, arching over the highway, planted with native grasses and shrubs. bordered by fencing that steers the animals toward the crossing rather than the road. They also added five underpasses built specifically with the smaller creatures in mind.

2:46 In the 10 months since the crossing opened, remember I told you there was once a day? In the 10 months since it opened, there have been two collisions in that stretch. Trail cameras on the crossing have recorded elk, mule deer, black bears, and mountain lions using it. The underpasses have picked up toads. Nice job by some engineers 3,200 years ago. These are the guys that built the Temple of Abu Simbel. They arranged it so that twice a year, once in October and once in February, the rising sun would travel down the main corridor, penetrate 160 feet into the mountain, and illuminate the faces of three of the four statues of Ramses II seated in the innermost chamber. Where is Indiana Jones with a stick and pendant when you need him? This happened again on October 22nd. As science would predict, hundreds of tourists arrived in the pre-dawn darkness to watch Some had slept outside the night before rather than risk missing it. At the right moment, the sun crept over the horizon, aligned with the temple entrance, and lit up the king's face in stone. The fourth statue, traditionally associated with the god of the underworld, does not light up. This is thought to be intentional. Now this is interesting. The temple was partially dismantled and relocated in the 1960s to save it from the rising waters of Lake Nassar during the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

3:57 The entire structure, roughly 50,000 tons of stone, was cut into blocks, moved 200 feet uphill, and reassembled so the solar alignment would continue to function. And back in the summer of 1952, the SS United States crossed the Atlantic Ocean in three days, 10 hours, 40 minutes, setting a speed record that has never been broken by a passenger liner and almost certainly never will. She was the fastest, most powerful ship of her kind ever built. Her top speed remains classified by the U.S. Navy. She's been sitting empty in a Philadelphia dock for nearly 30 years. This month, the SS United States will be towed out of Philadelphia and sunk approximately 22 nautical miles southwest of Destin, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico. When she goes down, she'll become the largest artificial reef in the world, all 1,000 feet of her, resting on the seafloor in about 90 feet of water, shallow enough for recreational divers. This planning took years. The ship had to be stripped of hazardous materials, including asbestos, PCBs, fuel residue. Permits had to be acquired.

4:51 And now she'll be a habitat for coral, sponge, fish, sea turtles, and sharks. That's good news for those guys. And those are your five good news stories for today. Have a great day.