2026-10-26

October 26, 2026

The morning file for this date: Today's Five, then the wider set. Headlines open the original article.

Today's Five picks filed on this morning

Image: BBC News

Knowsley libraries are passing last year's Halloween costumes on to the next child

Knowsley Council is running a half-term costume swap so a pumpkin-season outfit can be worn again instead of thrown out. Parents leave unwanted children's costumes in recycling bins outside libraries, then pick one up at Halewood, Stockbridge Village, Prescot, or Huyton. Clare Taylorson, the council's waste prevention manager, said Halloween has become an expensive round of new costumes and decorated gardens, and that parents do not want to disappoint their children. The council says about 90 percent of families buy a new costume and about 40 percent of costumes are worn once. Taylorson said the bins have already taken in a Spider-Man and a zombie mermaid, and that any costume is welcome. She wants the swap to come back in later years.

A costume waiting on a library table is a small way through half-term: one less thing to buy, and a costume that already knows how a child moves in it.

The 90 percent and 40 percent figures are the council's. The article does not say how many costumes have been dropped off or collected, or which days each library is handing them out.

BBC News ↗· Oct 24, 2026

Image: The Guardian

Nature2

Corvo switches off its streetlights so young shearwaters can follow the stars out to sea

Each autumn the smallest island in the Azores goes dark for five nights. Since 2019, Corvo's roughly 450 people have switched off the public lights so fledgling Cory's shearwaters can leave the nest and aim for the ocean by the stars. The young birds spend about three months in the burrow before that first flight. Streetlights pull many of them into the lanes of Vila do Corvo instead. Neighbours have been walking those lanes since 1991, when the deaths became too many to ignore. In 1995 the Azorean government widened the rescue, called SOS Cagarro, to the other islands, and the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds later joined. Corvo is still the only island that blacks out the public lighting. Household lamps can stay on. Many people turn those off too. A bird that has landed in the street spends the night in a cardboard box and is let go the next day from a cliff above the water. The campaign says more than 30,000 fledglings have been picked up across the Azores since 2015, about 6,000 of them on Corvo.

A dark village and a cardboard box are enough to give a lost chick a second try at the sea.

The rescue totals are the campaign's. The photo essay documents a blackout the island has repeated every autumn since 2019. It does not give this year's count. Cats still hunt chicks, and the story does not claim the lights-out nights have ended those deaths.

The Guardian ↗· Oct 25, 2026

Image: Good News Network

Kindness3

A Queens commuter filled ten bags under a Crown Heights bridge the city had left

Joshua Service, riding the train from Queens, filmed a pile of dumped rubbish under a metro bridge in Crown Heights, near Atlantic Avenue, and reported it to 311. Sanitation told him the site might be a homeless encampment, and that social services would have to visit for seven days before a crew could clear it. Comments on his video told him to stop filming and pick it up himself. He did. With gloves and a rake he filled ten bags in about two hours, and he came away thinking the spot had become a dump even if someone had slept nearby. Haile Ali, who lives in Crown Heights, called the cleanup a step that counts. The Department of Homeless Services later said it had met a homeless resident in that immediate area and found the person a shelter bed. While Service worked, passers-by asked if he was on a city crew. He said he was a New Yorker who was worried about the block. Councilmember Chi Ossé planned to honour him at the same spot last Friday.

Two hours with a rake made a corner usable again, and the same visit put a person indoors before the cold settled in.

The bag count, the two hours, and the conversation with sanitation are Service's account, as he told CBS and as Good News Network retells it. The shelter placement is what the article says the Department of Homeless Services reported. The story does not say the dumping has stayed gone.

Good News Network ↗· Oct 26, 2026

Image: Science News

Science4

A new study lines the stars in The Starry Night up with a July dawn in 1889

Astronomer Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim and colleagues report in Scientific Reports that the sky in Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night fits the hours just before dawn on 22 July 1889, over Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. They read the painted cluster as the Hyades, the sideways V in Taurus, and used a shape comparison called Procrustes analysis to score that match against other constellations. The moon in the painting is a sharp waning crescent, which does not match the waxing gibbous of 19 June, an earlier candidate. Venus sits in the same narrow view. Kim says he stood at the window in 2019 and saw the moon, the Hyades, and Venus of that July morning fall inside a drawing of the view. Art historians have long dated the canvas to mid-June, because van Gogh wrote his brother Theo on or about 18 June that he had a new study of a starry sky, and because he then fell ill and stopped painting for about six weeks. Donald Olson, an astronomer at Texas State who has worked on skies in paintings, says that letter is still the stronger evidence, and that the window frame the team used may not be the one van Gogh saw.

A painting people treat as pure dream may also be a careful look out of a hospital window, taken down to one morning.

This is one team's reconstruction, published on 22 October, and a specialist in the field disagrees. The June letter is van Gogh's. The fit is described as close, not perfect. The article does not claim the date of the painting is settled.

Science News ↗· Oct 22, 2026

Image: The Guardian

Spaces5

Nearly a kilometre of Oxford Street closed to traffic so people can walk the shops

From 7am on 26 October, the stretch of Oxford Street from Orchard Street, near Marble Arch, to Great Portland Street is closed to traffic between 7am and midnight, every day. That is nearly 0.6 miles, almost a kilometre, and about half of the 1.2-mile street, taking in Selfridges and John Lewis. Private cars were already barred from 7am to 7pm. The new rule runs all day and also keeps out buses, black cabs, and bicycles. North-south traffic can still cross, including at Oxford Circus and New Bond Street. Bus routes 7, 98, and 390 shift onto Wigmore Street, which runs parallel. Taxi ranks sit within 100 metres. Shops can take deliveries outside the closed hours, on set routes, but vehicles cannot drive the length of the street. Mayor Sadiq Khan has wanted the change for years as part of clean-air plans. Central government backed him over local council objections. The wider scheme is put at £150 million. London looked at central Sydney and talked with Barcelona, whose La Rambla is the comparison planners keep making.

The pavement on a street this crowded was never really a place to walk. A morning without buses in the roadway is the start of one.

This is the first stretch, not the whole of Oxford Street. Buses, cabs, and bikes are pushed onto neighbouring roads, which is the objection the councils raised. The Guardian's account was filed as the closure began. It does not describe the trees, seats, or squares planned for later phases.

The Guardian ↗· Oct 26, 2026

Also that morning

Image: The 19th

Community

Pittsburgh nurses win a county vote for 12 weeks of paid leave after a baby comes home

On Tuesday night Allegheny County Council voted 11 to 4 for up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave, which The 19th calls the first policy of its kind passed at county level in the United States. Birthing and non-birthing parents would be covered in the first year after a birth, an adoption, a foster placement, or a stillbirth, with the job and health benefits held. Full-time workers need six months on the job. Part-time workers need at least 625 hours. Employers with 15 or more employees would have to offer it and pay for it themselves, rather than through a statewide insurance fund. An earlier draft had asked for 18 weeks and would have covered smaller employers. The push came from nurses at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh, including neonatal nurse Jean Stone, who watches parents go back to work while a baby is still in intensive care so they can save the unpaid days for when the baby comes home. The nurses, in the middle of a union contract, started the campaign on Mother's Day with other parents and local officials. The chamber was full. One mother described a stillbirth at 41 weeks and a husband who had three weeks off and no paternity leave. Council vice president John Palmiere said the testimony moved him to vote yes.

A parent who can stay while a new baby is still in the hospital does not have to spend those days choosing between the ward and a paycheck.

The article is about the council vote and what the policy would require. It does not say anyone can take the paid weeks yet. Businesses with fewer than 15 employees are exempt, and employers, not a public fund, would pay. The 'first county-level' description is The 19th's. Pennsylvania still has no statewide paid leave program.

The 19th ↗· Oct 21, 2026

Image: Positive News

Mind & Wellbeing

A free tool has walked more than 60,000 young men through how to take responsibility

SafeBae, a sexual-violence charity in the United States, built a free site called Vibe Check for young men who think they may have crossed a line and do not know what to do next. Drew Davis, the charity's director of strategic initiatives, says the replies those questions usually get online split in two: total condemnation, or a private chat that says nobody was hurt. Vibe Check is a decision tree, not a chatbot. It walks someone through situations where consent may have failed, uses short exercises drawn from cognitive behavioural therapy, and offers language for a boundary and an apology. Davis says it can also make a school or workplace process less of a fight, which matters for the person who was harmed. Positive News reports that more than 60,000 people have used it since the launch in April, and that the largest audience outside the United States is in Britain. Davis calls the feedback overwhelmingly positive on the practical skills: how to apologise, how to own what happened, how to walk into a disciplinary meeting. The charity's next adaptation is for young people caught in sextortion, who often assume they are the ones in trouble.

A quiet set of questions can be the difference between owning a mistake and being talked out of it.

The 60,000 users and the description of the feedback come from SafeBae. The tool launched in April. This is a six-month account, not a study showing that harm went down. Positive News does not report an independent evaluation.

Positive News ↗· Oct 26, 2026

Image: Smithsonian Magazine

Nature

Arizona's Wonderland of Rocks is a national park, a century after it became a monument

Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona is now Chiricahua National Park, the 64th national park in the United States and the first new one in six years, after West Virginia's New River Gorge in 2020. The 12,000-acre site has been a monument since 1924. It sits in the Chiricahua Mountains, a sky island about 120 miles from Tucson where the Rockies, the Sierra Madre, the Sonoran Desert, and the Chihuahuan Desert meet. About 27 million years ago a volcanic eruption laid down ash that hardened into rhyolitic tuff. Wind, rain, and frost have since cut that layer into spires and balanced rocks, the Wonderland of Rocks. The Chiricahua Apache lived across a territory that reached into New Mexico and northern Mexico until the U.S. government forced their removal in the late 19th century. The same ground later held Buffalo Soldiers, homesteaders, and Civilian Conservation Corps crews. Smithsonian Magazine says nearly 200 bird species have been recorded, along with deer, javelina, bears, and coatis, and that the park has 17 miles of trail. In 2025 the monument counted 70,406 visits. Local businesses and outdoor groups hope a national-park name brings more.

A maze of stone that already had a century of protection now has the name that makes a person pull off the highway and walk into it.

The change reported here is a redesignation of land protected since 1924, not a new boundary. The hope of more visitors is a hope. The bird count and the 2025 attendance figure are the ones Smithsonian Magazine cites. The article does not say staffing or the budget changed with the name.

Smithsonian Magazine ↗· Oct 22, 2026