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👆 This report was released last week and has not been covered by any of the world’s top 50 English-language news sites. They’ve all decided that saving more than two million human lives isn’t newsworthy, even as they serve us up thousands of articles, videos and posts every day about the US midterms. The news is not a report of what’s going in the world — it’s a funhouse mirror that shows us to ourselves in the worst possible light.
Child malnutrition in Gaza has halved. A MedGlobal survey across four governorates found acute malnutrition among under-fives fell from 16.8% in July 2025 to 8.4% in July 2026. The reason? After the October 2025 ceasefire, therapeutic food, community treatment and health workers got in; MedGlobal alone treated more than 21,500 children. In Edition 354 we covered Gaza’s farms starting to recover; this is the human side of the same story.
Hungary is steadily dismantling the Orbán era. On 13 October Péter Magyar’s two-thirds majority repealed the homophobic sections of the 2021 “child protection” law, which had banned any depiction of homosexuality where minors might see it (down to a rainbow flag in a shop window). The same day the EU lifted the rule-of-law funding curbs it imposed in 2022, releasing €4.2 billion and readmitting Hungary to Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe, with another €12.2 billion still pending Commission sign-off. DW / Euronews
India’s clean power capacity has quadrupled in a decade. India now has about 300 GW of renewables, and non-fossil sources made up more than half of installed capacity in 2025, five years ahead of the country’s own target. Four-fifths of all generating capacity added over the past ten years was non-fossil, and the country put $72 billion into the transition last year, 1.7% of GDP. Last year India passed the United States to become the world’s second-biggest builder of wind and solar, after China. Capacity isn’t generation though; coal still supplies about 68% of electricity, and non-fossil is roughly a third. Bloomberg / BNEF
In 1989, a project started in Oregon by bunch of self-described ‘anarchist hippies’ started sending mental-health workers and medics, not armed police, to low-risk 911 calls. Today 93 similar programmes run across 31 US states and take about 200,000 calls a year, calling police for backup only 1–3% of the time. Where it’s implemented, the programme cuts police-handled calls by an estimated 23%. Fantastic overview here from our friends at The Progress Network.
Ghana is getting close to eliminating malaria deaths. They’ve fallen by an astonishing 98% since 2011. The national malaria programme logged 3,300 deaths in 2011, and just 52 last year. At Cape Coast Teaching Hospital, infectious-disease chief Elisabeth Tabitha Abbew says nobody has died of malaria in two years. Gavi / Ghana News Agency
Wildlife losses are awful… but comebacks show they can be reversed. WWF’s new Living Planet report, covering nearly 36,000 animal populations, finds an average decline of 73% since 1970, largely concentrated in tropical, biodiversity-rich regions. Ooof! The heartening news: it’s increasingly obvious those declines can be reversed. Wild tigers have risen from about 3,200 in 2010 to roughly 5,700, Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna are no longer considered threatened, and green sea turtles went from Endangered to Least Concern after 50 years of work across about 80 countries.
In honour of the report’s release, some recent (less well-known) wildlife comebacks:
The Farakka Barrage, built in 1975, cut off their migration from the Bay of Bengal, but over the last seven years Indian scientists have released 385,000 young and adult hilsa and 4 million fertilised eggs above the barrier.Hilsa fishhave reached the upper Ganges for the first time in nearly 30 years.Chhattisgarh will translocate 50
blackbuck antelopefrom Barnawapara Wildlife Sanctuary to Gomarda Wildlife Sanctuary,restoring the species to an area where it vanished more than five decades ago due to hunting, poaching and habitat loss.**The world’s rarest ape is making a comeback.**Hunting and logging cut Hainan gibbons from more than 2,000 in the 1950s to about seven in the 1980s. There are now 44, in seven family groups, up from 37 in six groups in 2023. Rangers track them by their dawn calls, and the only island where they now live has been replanted with 300,000 food trees.XinhuaFrance has released 50,000Scientists have spent 20 years trying to bring back a critically endangered species that last spawned naturally in 1994. Earlier releases have turned up as far away as Denmark, Belgium and Portugal, and since 2022 adults over two metres long have been swimming back up French rivers.European sturgeoninto the Garonne and Dordogne.Fishing pressure in the Mediterranean and Black Sea has halved in a decade.The share of overfished stocks is at its lowest in ten years and the biomass of commercial species is up 25% since 2013, according to theFAO.Kashmir’s. The latest census counts 323, up from 289 in 2023 and 127 in 2008.hangul deerpopulations are climbingThere are now moreThe first full count since the late 1990s puts the islands’ tortoise population at about 180,000, up from fewer than 1,000 in the 19th century.tortoisesthan people in the Seychelles.
Fun fact: Giant tortoises in the Seychelles primarily inhabit Aldabra, a single atoll far to the south-west of the main Seychelles archipelago. Isolated, inhospitable, and lacking fresh water, Aldabra was never settled by humans in numbers, which is why the giant tortoises survived there and nowhere else in the Indian Ocean (tortoise was considered a delicacy from the 17th to the 19th centuries). The isolated island’s tortoises were saved partly by Charles Darwin and others petitioning the governor of Mauritius to protect them. It became a nature reserve in 1981.
The NHS has announced that Martha’s rule will go into effect in every emergency department in England by March 2028. Martha Mills was 13 when she was hospitalised after a bike accident; as her condition deteriorated, her parents flagged concerns to her care team. Their concerns were repeatedly ignored, and she died of sepsis, with a coroner finding she likely would have lived if she had been moved into intensive care. After her death her parents campaigned for a rule to let patients, families and staff ask for a different medical team to examine the care provided on inpatient wards. In its first 16 months ‘Martha’s Rule’ generated more than 10,000 calls and potentially saved 446 lives. Martha would have turned 19 this month. The Guardian
Don’t feel sorry for the rich world’s millennials, they’re doing fine. The Economist gathered data from 32 OECD countries and found millennials out-earning earlier generations at the same age in 29 of them (only Italy, Greece and Japan are lagging). The 2010s hit hard, but strong labour markets and the retirement of baby-boomers have changed that. In America, the oldest millennials now own homes at the same rate GenX did at their age.
Rising millennial fortunes have two main causes: the economy and demography. The financial crisis of 2007-09 whacked them especially hard. Young workers are last in, first out of any business, so they suffer most in a recession. And that one was especially deep and long. Today, however, the rich world’s labour market is about as strong as it has ever been (see chart 2). Some countries have recovered even more impressively. Although their incomes are lagging behind those of their elders, close to 80% of 35- to 44-year-old Greeks are in work, probably the highest ever share for that age group.
A third of new cars in Germany are now fully electric. Full battery EVs took 34.5% of September registrations, and the rest of Europe is moving the same way: half of new cars in Portugal and Belgium are now fully electric, and in France it’s one in three. With petrol and diesel at €2 a litre since the Hormuz crisis, carmakers can’t build them fast enough. KBA / El País
Indonesia has now officially shelved the world’s largest planned deforestation project. Last week we reported campaigners’ claims (Edition 356); now, according to The Jakarta Post it’s official. On 6 October presidential envoy Hashim Djojohadikusumo said the government “sees no further need to expand rice cultivation in so-called forest areas”, dropping plans to clear 20,000 km² of Papuan forest after Indonesia reached rice self-sufficiency three years early.
Malaysia has cut its use of ozone-destroying HCFCs by nearly 80% and plans to end all HCFC** **use by 2030. It phased out CFCs and halons in 2010. A reminder of the wider regional context: as we reported in Edition 355, China finished phasing HCFCs out of its solvent industry last month. Malay Mail
Solar farms in the Gobi are cutting dust storms. A study of 17 farms found the panels slow surface winds by more than 9% and make soil up to 17% less erodible, reducing springtime dust by about 352,000 tonnes a month. RenewEconomy
How do you map every wire in the brain of a fly? Slice it into millions of pieces, photograph each one, and let AI stitch it back together. Google Research, together with HHMI’s Janelia campus and the University of Cambridge, has done exactly that for the male fruit fly, producing the largest complete brain map ever built, 166,000 neurons and 125 million synaptic connections. Paired with an earlier map of the female fly brain, researchers can now compare, neuron by neuron, what actually differs between the sexes’ courtship and aggression circuits.
“I came back from 10 restful days in New Mexico, my head filled with nothing, when I opened X to a video of a fly playing Beat Saber.”
Since the fruit fly connectome went public, hobbyists have wired it into everything from Doom to a stock-trading bot. Feed a game’s video frames into the fly’s real sensory neurons, map its motor neurons to a controller, and the wiring diagram alone starts producing outputs, no training required, since the 138,000-neuron connectome itself is doing the work. Projects on GitHub now run that actual brain to play Mario 64, dodge obstacles in Beat Saber, and pilot a simulated drone that swerves from looming objects using the fly’s own threat-detection circuit.
As fun as this is, computational neuroscientist Patrick Mineault has pushed back hard: most of these, he argues, are just neurons randomly mapped to buttons, “random button mashing” dressed up as intelligence, because the raw wiring diagram is missing the synaptic strengths and timing that actually produce behaviour. The drone project is the exception. Its makers ran a control test, scrambling the connections, and the flight behaviour broke, real evidence the specific wiring mattered rather than just providing the illusion of it. Hackaday / Patrick Mineault
