Global News Podcast - The Happy Pod: 2024 News Review

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

The happiest stories of 2024 - from the extraordinary achievement in raising Notre Dame Cathedral from the ashes, to the success of the chopsticks manoeuvre to catch a rocket booster; and the baby hippo who went viral.

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This is the HappyPod 2024 News Review from the BBC World Service. I'm Jackie Leonard and in this edition, we look back at the most positive things that happened this year and yes there were actually quite a lot of them from a space story that made our science correspondent positively giddy. Oh my goodness they've done it they've done it first time that was absolutely astonishing. To the rebuilding of a cultural icon in Paris. I didn't think that in five years that I've managed to work so many wonders on the reconstruction. It's heartwarming to see it again. I didn't think that in five years that I've managed to work so many wonders on the reconstruction. It's heartwarming to see it again.

A celebration of sporting achievements, world records and a star is born in a zoo in Thailand. Every news outlet is talking about her. This is Mooding's world and we are all just living in it. And our brilliant health and science correspondent explains an excellent new treatment for asthma. Oi, you sinophils, knock it off. And let's start big with what could be a breakthrough in space travel. In October, the giant Starship rocket built by SpaceX performed a remarkable feat, nicknamed the Chopsticks Manoeuvre by taking off from its launch pad

in Texas before landing its first stage booster back on the very same spot caught by huge robotic arms. The SpaceX team hope the successful recovery will take them one step closer to a fully reusable spacecraft capable of carrying humans to the moon and perhaps even Mars. Our science correspondent Pallab Ghosh was on TV talking to Nicky Schiller when it happened. Pallab, we've just witnessed history. Oh my goodness, they've done it. They've done it first time. That was absolutely astonishing. So Pallab, please explain exactly what was going on there and why it was a big deal. You know when there are rocket launches you need a big booster to do the heavy lifting,

literally, to get the main spacecraft into space. The booster is called the super heavy booster so it is absolutely huge. Incredible, 70 metres high and once it's done that about two minutes or so into the flight it jettisons and then normally it just kind of falls into the sea. But SpaceX wants to reduce the cost of space travel and so they want to reuse it. Previously they've got it to land on platforms in the sea but this time it was actually quite astonishing. What the booster did was a little backflip in the air and then it was piloting back to the launch pad and then the launch pad had two arms hence the name the chopsticks maneuver. You saw it gently sail towards these chopsticks which then shut just at

the right moment and I was convinced that it would blow up on the launch pad and I just couldn't believe that they actually succeeded and not only had they succeeded, they succeeded in the very first time they actually tried it. It was just, as I said, quite astonishing. Now you have been a science correspondent for quite a long time. You are an expert, highly esteemed colleague. I have never heard you sound quite so giddy. I'm giddy quite often. It's just no one catches it on air. That's the wonderful thing about this job. There are so many exciting things. Maybe, I suppose I was just so astonished

because I didn't think it would happen. But, you know, I suppose I was just so astonished because I didn't think it would happen. But, you know, science is just full of fascinating things. Maybe you don't get quite as, you know, lose control in quite that way. But science is fun, it's fascinating, it's interesting and I got the best job in the world. And that was Pallab Goat. Now to Paris, which has had quite a year. To celebrate the extraordinary achievement of an estimated 2,000 masons, carpenters, restorers, roofers, foundry workers, art experts, sculptors and engineers, whose work on rebuilding Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was unveiled this year.

The magnificent building suffered a catastrophic fire in 2019. Now, five and a half years and $740 million later, it is reopened to the public. Our reporter Chantal Hartle looks at how this feat was made possible. In the aftermath of the fire, the French President Emmanuel Macron declared that Notre Dame Cathedral would be restored more beautiful than ever and opened within five years. Few believe that a project of this scale could be achieved in that time frame. But his promise was seen through, thanks to millions of dollars in donations and thousands of dedicated workers.

At the Cathedral's reopening ceremony earlier this month, the firefighters who saved the Gothic masterpiece were given a standing ovation, and Notre Dame's organ with its 800 pipes was blessed and awakened after years of silence. 1,500 trees were needed to rebuild the wooden lattice structure supporting the new roof. The cathedral's stained glass windows, paintings and the religious relic known as the crown of thorns escaped the worst of the damage. All have now been carefully restored. As Dani Sandron from Sorbonne University in Paris explains, the building is now much brighter too. Before the fire, the cathedral was very dark. It was the result of dirty environment, pollution.

And now it's very light and closer to the original state. One of the most devastating moments of the fire was when the cathedral spire toppled to the ground after becoming engulfed in flames. It was rebuilt through a mix of traditional and computerised methods. And at the top of the structure, a new gilded cockerel has been fitted to replace the original that was lost. These people in Paris are impressed. It's an extremely impressive monument in terms of its architecture and history. And

I didn't think that in five years they'd have managed to work so many wonders on the reconstruction it's heartwarming to see it again. I think it's an incredible event I'm thrilled to see this Cathedral which is the most beautiful in the world. This enormous task could not have been possible without the thousands of crafts people working around the clock to rebuild Notre Dame. So, donations aside, how did France manage to pull this off so quickly? Didier Reichner is the chief editor of the French art magazine La Tribune de l'Art. In France we have very good restorers, very good architects,

and we know how to restore historical monuments. And we have a law, you know, heritage law. It's one of the conditions of the success. But the success story doesn't end there. Several trades in France including stone carving, carpentry and roofing have seen an increase in apprenticeships as a result of what experts have called the Notre Dame effect. That was Chantal Hartle. 2024 has seen some potentially far-reaching developments in the field of medicine. James Gallagher is our Health and Science correspondent and he talked us through some of the year's more eye-catching stories, starting with some excellent news on cervical cancer

treatment. Now I really like this story as well because it's also really cheap. So many of these new pioneering pieces of medicine are so expensive that you go, well most of the world's not going to get access to that for 50 years, whereas this is something that is so cheap lots of places could do it straight away. So the whole idea here was instead of just giving chemotherapy and radiotherapy at the same time, what you do is you give six weeks of chemotherapy first that starts to shrink the tumour and then you go for that combined chemotherapy and radiotherapy after that. And that sounds

so simple. It sounds like it shouldn't really make any difference. And yet it does. It reduces deaths by 40% the risk of the cancer coming back by more than a third over the following five years after doing it. It's been described as the biggest advance in cervical cancer for four decades. Well, it's the big kind of like gold standard piece of medical research. It took place over more than a decade in the UK, Mexico, India, Italy and Brazil. So it's truly representative. We think this should work in everybody that has cervical cancer around the world. So really important piece of research. And I think what's going to be really interesting is not just cervical cancer, but every other type of cancer too. If something this simple can nudge the dial

in terms of the number of lives you can save and it works here, there's no real reason it wouldn't work in other cancers too and there's a lot of excitement about that. OK, that is fantastic. We also have some developments in the treatment of diabetes, particularly using reprogrammed stem cells. Please explain. So this is the first woman in the world in China, she's 25 years old and has had her type 1 diabetes completely reversed by this therapy. So the headline is outstanding, it's really interesting.

The type 1 diabetes caused by the immune system destroying what are known as your islet cells, they're the cells in the pancreas and the body that release insulin into the blood and that's how you control your blood sugar levels. But they're basically wiped out in type 1 diabetes. This was a way of bringing them back. So you take cells from the patient, you genetically tinker with them to turn them into what are known as stem cells. A stem cell is just a cell that can become any other type of cell in the body and then they coax that into becoming a beta cell And then in this case they injected one and a half million of them back into this woman She's completely off her insulin injections now

She is having to take some immunosuppressants presumably to try to stop her immune system destroying those reprogrammed cells But nobody's gonna call this a cure for type 1 diabetes until they've seen much longer data so something going like five years or beyond and seeing that that benefit is still there. Very exciting stuff. Very expensive. Very expensive, very exciting. Another very exciting development. Now the WHO says 339 million people around the world have asthma and in November we heard about the first new treatment in a very long time. 50 years! That's a very long time, isn't it Jackie? Yeah, so this is for asthma attacks.

So you know, most of the time you'll be controlling your asthma with just your regular inhalers but sometimes that's not enough and you might end up needing to go to a hospital and at the moment what would happen is they would prescribe you a steroid. This is a new drug. This one, got a word for you, eosinophil, Jackie. That's a very good word, James. Thank you. Please explain. Eosinophils are a white blood cell and they are responsible for about half of asthma attacks and a third of cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. So it's these eosinophils that are wrong. So this is a drug called benrelizumab and the only thing it does in the body is

go, oi, eocytophils, knock it off and basically gets rid of them. And so you give this really targeted drug in these particular people and it just gets rid of the cause of their asthma attack, brings them back down to baseline and that is way more effective than steroids are. Has this been an exciting year for medicine James? Every year is an exciting year for medicine, you know I'm contractually obliged to say that Jackie. For me personally the cervical cancer, the fact that it's cheap and you can just do it straight away, I mean that's like your gold star breakthrough for me. That was James Gallagher and should you be interested, Eosinophils is also a 16 point word in Scrabble. I looked it up. Now this year saw a lot of firsts, not all of them earthbound.

Sarah Gillis is an astronaut and musician and in September she gave the first violin performance in orbit. She played Ray's theme by the composer John Williams on her custom-made violin aboard the Dragon spacecraft. And she was accompanied by young musicians from Haiti, the US, Venezuela, Brazil, Uganda, and Sweden. ["Dragon Spacecraft Theme"] I think for me personally, one of my favorite moments was just seeing a wooden violin floating in this 21st century spacecraft.

I think all of us were pretty emotional the first time we unpacked it and pulled it out. I think my brain will permanently be rewired with just the image of floating. My body keeps wanting to go back and just experience that true weightlessness again. ["Symphony No. 5 in D Major"] Sarah Gillis, the first person to play a violin in space. And we're back in Paris again now to celebrate a summer of sporting excellence. Exactly a hundred years since last the French capital hosted the

Games, Nigel Adderley was there for the Olympics and Paralympics and it's fair to say he rather enjoyed it. Despite the teeming rain which poured throughout the innovative opening ceremony on the River Seine, both the Olympics and Paralympics were an undoubted tour de force. Everyone loves a redemption story, and few have been achieved under more pressure than that of Simone Biles. Her exit from the Tokyo Games in tears following a bout of the twisties seemed to signal the end of her career. But she took time out to prioritise her mental health and produced a stunning comeback with three gold medals and a silver to cement her mental health and produced a stunning comeback with three

gold medals and a silver to cement her place as an Olympic legend. I like Simone because she makes like a lot of unique skills that no one else can even like attempt to do so I feel like that's really cool. She has taken place but she has came back and she's really good. Like she's so strong and I just think she has accomplished so much and helped the sport progress. Over 200 nations gather for the Games. Winning a medal is a distant dream for some. But on a remarkable night, two Caribbean islands captured their first ever medals, and both of them golds. Dominica's Taya LaFond Gadsen in the triple jump and St Lucia thanks to sprinter Julian Alfred who beat favourite Sha'Carri Richardson in

the women's 100 metres. In the men's sprints, Botswana's Let's see Le Tobago won an incredible 200 metres race to strike gold for his country for the first time. It wasn't easy. I didn't think my body would push me through it all. So I still believe there's still a lot of me to do. And with the team that's really riding behind me, I'm grateful for it. His homecoming was incredible. There was also a first ever medal for the Olympic refugee team.

History was made by female middleweight boxer Cameroon-born UK-based Cindy Ungamba, who won a bronze to inspire way beyond sport. The Paralympics were magical too. There was the outpouring of national pride when the host's blind football team overcame Argentina on penalties under the Eiffel Tower. Team GP Para Archer Jodi Grinnam won gold while seven months pregnant and Italy sprinter Alessandro Osola ran over to the crowd during his heats and asked his partner, Arianna Mandaradoni, one of 40,000 people at the Stade de France, if she'd marry him, she said yes. But these huge global events often rely on the people, both to support and inspire, and

residents of Paris even got their own chance to compete. When I returned to my hotel after the penultimate night of the Games, the streets were thronged with runners and well-wishers. 40,000 people took the opportunity to run the Olympic marathon course at midnight a few hours before the main race. A stream of humanity snaked around Paris all night to epitomise the people's games. That was Nigel Adderley. And it wasn't just the Olympics that got sports fans excited

in 2024. It's been a great year for Caitlin Clark, who back in March broke a 54-year-old record to become the all-time leading scorer in either men's or women's major US college basketball. She now plays in the professional league for the Indiana Fever. Her star power is drawing a multitude of new fans to the women's game, a phenomenon known as the Caitlin Clark effect. We must also salute Takara Fujii who in March made history in the ancient Japanese sport of sumo wrestling by becoming the first wrestler in 110 years to win a top division tournament on his debut. And let us not forget the achievements of another Japanese athlete Shohei Otani. The Los Angeles Dodgers

superstar became the first player in baseball history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season during his side's match against the Miami Marlins. And the ball he hit for his 50th home run of the Major League Baseball season sold for a record $4.4 million at auction. Bravo all. Still to come in this podcast. It's about a celebration of nationhood, identity, cultural connection, just a real unifying force.

How thousands of New Zealanders claimed back a very significant record. For just as long as Hollywood has been Tinseltown, there have been suspicions about what lurks behind the glitz and glamor. Concerns about radical propaganda in the motion pictures. And for a while, those suspicions grew into something much bigger and much darker. Are you a member of the Communist Party?

Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? I'm Una Chaplin, and this is Hollywood Exiles. It's about a battle for the political soul of America, and the battlefield was Hollywood. All episodes of Hollywood Exiles from the BBC World Service and CBC are available now. Search for Hollywood Exiles wherever you get your podcasts. How much do you love your phone? If you were hiking in the Australian wilderness, say, and you dropped it, how far would you go to try and get it back?

In October, we heard about one woman who ended up wedged upside down for seven hours between two boulders, and from the resourceful team who got her out. Our reporter, Anna Aslam, has the details. Madilda Campbell was taking photos on a hike in New South Wales' Hunter Valley region when her phone slipped out of her hands. As she tried to get it, she fell head first into a thin three meters deep crevice and almost disappeared. Only the bottom of her feet could be seen poking out of the crack between the rocks. Her friend called the emergency services who said they'd never seen anything like it. We had to bring her out essentially the same way she went in and it wasn't a straight up and down. She went in in a bit of an s-shape so we had to manipulate her to get her out but at the same time not allowing her to slip back down the hole. It was an out of the box rescue for us that's for sure.

Peter Watts told ABC the team used a winch and a frame made from wood found at a nearby property to move the boulders without cracking them and create a gap big enough to rescue the woman. We ended up moving seven boulders all up, so ranging anywhere from, I think the smallest was maybe 80 kilos up to probably 500 is what we were thinking the last big one was. That gave me access, I was just lucky enough to be one person with some longer limbs and so I got allocated down the hole. Between my back and my chest was maybe 10 centimetcm in front of me, that's all. I couldn't turn to the side, it was pretty tight down there. Eventually, seven long hours after she was trapped between a rock and a hard place,

Mathilda Campbell was freed. The rescuer said she remained cheerful throughout the ordeal. She was such a trooper, like I would have been beside myself, stuck in that sort of situation, but when we were there she was calm, she was collected. Amazing, amazing." Miss Campbell suffered minor scratches and bruises, but her cool demeanor escaped unscathed. The 23-year-old, who described herself as the most accident-prone person ever, thanked the emergency services for saving her life and swore off rock exploration for a while.

But she added, too bad about the phone though. That was Anna Aslan. Now this next story had to be included, not least because several members of the team have been playing it pretty much on a loop since May. Cabin Crew and Liz Dunevarna Crew, energetic pre-teen rappers based in Cork and Clare in Ireland went massively viral with The Spark, a techno rap track described more than once as the banger of the year. This is some of them. We decided to do some lyrics and we made a music video and we posted it and it ended up going viral. It feels amazing and it's great to have these opportunities.

Being creative, being you and well, finding your spark. We've got the energy, we'll tell you all about it. I searched for my spark and I found this. Everybody in the crowd start bouncing. It even made the Grammys long list. Well done to all of them. Now, some of the other people who aren't celebration this year, how about the new chess world champion, the youngest ever? 18-year-old Gokesh Domaraju from Chennai in India, who became a Grandmaster aged 12,

beat defending champion Ding Liren from China in a dramatic match staged in Singapore. We don't often champion the opposition, but Bob Van Dillon of Fox Weather was out in Atlanta in September reporting on flash flooding after Hurricane Helene when he heard a woman screaming from her car that was stuck in rapidly rising flood waters. So he interrupted his broadcast and went and rescued her. Northside Drive is a pretty big populated area right here. She is still screaming but we got you. We got you! 911 they're coming! Oh man, it's a situation. We will get back to you in a little bit. I'm going to go see if I can help this lady out a little bit more you guys. I'll be back. And he was. Now there are good teachers and great teachers and then there's

this. A round of applause please for Carissa Fisher in New York who stepped up and donated part of her own liver to her former preschool pupil, five-year-old Ezra Totecek. Both are said to be doing well after surgery. And you might remember what was described as an emotional rollercoaster from February this year. Richard Pleu spent eight years of his life constructing a matchstick model of the Eiffel Tower, 7.19 metres tall. He was then told that it was ruled out of claiming the Guinness World Record for the tallest matchstick building because it used the wrong type of matches. Fortunately the next day the adjudicators agreed they'd been too harsh and the record was indeed his. Now prepare to feel stirred and uplifted because in September New

Zealand reclaimed the world record for the largest hacker, the traditional Maori dance made globally famous by the All Blacks and indeed black ferns rugby teams. The record had been held for 10 years by France. No idea why, that's not really the point here. 6,531 people heeded the call from Dame Hinawehi Mohi to turn out. So why does the haka matter so much? It's about a celebration of nationhood, identity, cultural connection, just a real unifying force through the Hakka. Be that on the night was everything I hoped it would be. It was such a celebration of who we are, our unique cultural heritage, but also our connection through this icon, this cultural icon that we all share but I did get an absolute sense of adrenaline and excitement and exhilaration to see that spectacle right in the moment where we all started in unison to perform Ka'u. Which means it is death, but it is life.

Dame Hinawehi Mohi, and if you are one of the 6531, well done. Now, over the past year we have heard a lot of very clever solutions to problems from our colleagues at People Fixing the World. Mayra Anubi told us about developments designed to tackle violent crime this year. I have to admit, guns and weapons, it's not the kind of thing you'd expect to hear any positive news about. But on People Fixing the World, we've come across clever ideas that are trying to reduce gun crime in countries like America. Just to give you an example, a group called Biofire claimed to have developed the world's first smart gun, which can only be fired by its licensed owner. The aim is to stop guns from being stolen to commit a crime or from being accidentally fired. a crime or from being

accidentally fired. Now almost like a smartphone, this gun has two ways to authenticate with a fingerprint sensor on the trigger and facial recognition when someone is registered as its owner. Now Kai Klopfer, one of the brains behind this project, described how it all started and how the gun works. I've already enrolled as the owner and so you'll see as I pick this up it unlocks. It'll then stay unlocked for as long as I have control of it with my primary hand. I can manipulate things, adjust it, do whatever I want, right? But it also immediately locks as soon as you lose control of it.

There's a reason why the vast majority of big innovations come from people in their garages. It's not because garages are magic, it's because most people in their garages fail, right? But the ones who succeed succeed because they have a lot less of the preconceived notions about like what the right way to do things. And so the benefit for me is, you know, I, I'd never had a job before this, right? I definitely had never run a gun manufacturing company." From one innovation that started in a garage to an idea that's happening in a prison. The United States has the largest prison population on earth, with over a million people behind bars. It also

has one of the highest rates of reoffending, with two-thirds of former prisoners engaging in crime within three years after getting out. But in the state of Pennsylvania, one prison is testing a very unusual model that they hope will eventually bring down these numbers and reduce violent acts within prison. Prisoners are given privileges like keeping pets, TVs, air conditioning, all to try and set them up for success. Our reporter Ben Wyatt went to the prison to find out if it's working. This is a beautiful black and white cat. It has his platform and his little tunnels to play with. What's the cat's name? Wodey. And I suppose that's not something you'd see that I would imagine being in a prison, like pets. I would have never thought, yeah. What did you think when you first started

working on this ward and you saw some of the ideas that were being put into practice? The guys seem to thrive on it, it gives them a sense of purpose. You've seen change behavior in guys, you know, when they get animals, so. The calmer temperament, for me, is better from traditional

Corrections Crucially according to the academics behind the scheme residency on the wing is not a reward for good behavior Inmates are chosen at random, which is why murderers are serving time alongside minor offenders Unlike in the rest of the prison inmates inmates are called residents here, while those serving life sentences are called mentors in a bid to reframe identities. That was Ben Wyatt. We also heard from Myra Anoubi and you'll hear more solutions from People Fixing the World wherever you found this podcast. Right, are we ready for an animal story or two because Anna Murphy has corralled all the most newsworthy beasts of 2024 together

for us. There is one animal who I think it's fair to say became a celebrity this year and are only two months old. She's the hottest new it girl on the planet. Every news outlet's talking about her. This is Moodeng's world and we are all just living in it. We are of course talking about the pygmy hippo from Thailand known as Moodeng. With her stumpy little legs, podgy body and gappy teeth, she wasn't exactly an obvious social media sensation.

But when a zookeeper started posting videos of her wobbling adorably around her enclosure, he never expected what was to come. Moodeng gained a vast online fanbase, got her own Wikipedia page, and was hailed by Time magazine as an icon and a legend. She is the moment, it said. She attracted huge queues at Kaokyo Open Zoo, doubling visitor numbers and bringing attention to her species, which is endangered. BBC Thai reporter Panisa Emoshah witnessed her fame close up. The zoo itself, they actually officially launched 24-hour live stream that you can watch mudeng from everywhere in the world. So she's still super super famous. Another strong competitor for animal

celebrity status this year rose to fame during the Olympics. In recent years there's been a growing focus on athletes' mental health and wellbeing, especially in sports with lots of young competitors. Well the USA Gymnastics team found a novel way to help ease stress and anxiety. Enter Beacon, the therapy dog. His owner and handler, Tracy Callahan-Mulner, worked alongside him. He's very intuitive with people. He will scoot a little closer or he might put a paw on their leg. He's wanting to get their attention to say, focus on me, pet me. And it is such a wonderful feeling. Beacon loves it. I love it for Beacon. The gymnasts love it. The coaches love it for their gymnasts. To know that Beacon is making a difference, I could not be happier.

The golden retriever was given the official title of the team's goodest boy. Well deserved. Moving south now, four new colonies of emperor penguins have been identified in Antarctica and scientists believe that means they now know the whereabouts of all the world's remaining breeding pairs. So how did they find them? I'll let our science correspondent Jonathan Amos explain. So from several hundred kilometres up you can't see the individual penguin but if a large group of them huddle together and they start defecating on the white ice, then that brown patch will become apparent to a satellite. And that's what the scientists have done. They've been looking and looking and looking and they've

found a further four, which brings the total to 66. Now it's likely if you look at the distribution of those colonies that they've found pretty much all of them around the Antarctic. Our final story is the tale of a cat from Utah who travelled hundreds of kilometres from home after unwittingly climbing into an Amazon parcel. Galina survived seven days stuck in the box before she was reunited with her owner, Carrie Clark. I started to lose hope and then miraculously I got a phone call from a mysterious caller who told me that they had my cat Galina and she was in California, which is 650 miles away from

my home in Utah. There were so many miracles that led up to her surviving. Being able to be reunited with Galina is something that I will never forget. Carrie Clark ending that report by Anna Murphy and we cannot wrap up 2024 without the adventures of Honshu, a Japanese snow monkey who escaped from a wildlife park in the Scottish Highlands and became the subject of a major search operation involving drones and monkey catching rangers. Honshu was safely found but his story didn't end there. My colleague Callum Leslie was moved by his story to bring us this. Oh and William Wallace was a Scottish national hero

which is information that might help. At the Highland Wildlife Park up near Kincraig an adventurous monkey had an exciting few days. His name was Hon Shu, a Japanese macaque, and this is the story of how he escaped and came back. It all got too much when one fateful night he got fed up of his troop after a really big fight, so he hopped a fence and channelled William Wallace, yelling freedom as he ran off to the forest. As he explored his fame grew and grew, people loved the story of the Scottish monkey on the loose from the zoo. After five days they found him in a garden eating Yorkshire poods. And the adventure was over, but not quite for good.

He went back to the park, but things stayed the same. The other macaques didn't let him join in in their monkey games. They asked him if he'd like to go to Edinburgh Zoo. stayed the same. The other macaques didn't let him join in in their monkey games. They asked him if he'd like to go to Edinburgh Zoo. He thought for a moment Edinburgh seems far big and new. But then he remembered how he felt on that fateful night and how things that seem at first scary can still be alright. And as it turns out, everyone was excited to see him too and people came from all around to visit him at the zoo. So this is a story for anyone who thinks they don't fit in.

Maybe you're just waiting for your adventure to begin. There are people out there who will appreciate you for you. Just like there were for the Scottish macaque, the famous Honshaw. Callum Leslie with the story of Honshu. Who is fine? I rang Edinburgh Zoo to check. They say he's thriving and he has some new friends over from Amsterdam Zoo. So good news.

And that's all from the Happy News review of 2024. There is a weekly burst of cheerful stuff in the HappyPod every weekend. If you'd like to get in touch as ever, the address is globalpodcast.bbc.co.uk. This edition was mixed by Stephen Bailey. The producer was Anna Murphy. Our editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jackie Leonard and from all of us, we wish you peace, health and joy and inspiration for the year ahead. Thanks for listening. For just as long as Hollywood has been Tinseltown, there have been suspicions about what lurks behind the glitz and glamour. Concerns about radical propaganda in the motion pictures. And for a while, those suspicions grew into something much bigger and much darker. Are you a member of the Communist Party? Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

I'm Una Chaplin, and this is Hollywood Exiles. It's about a battle for the political soul of America. and the battlefield was Hollywood. All episodes of Hollywood Exiles from the BBC World Service and CBC are available now. Search for Hollywood Exiles wherever you get your podcasts.