Good News: UK’s first queer museum, how coffee grows cucumbers & how to land a plane for beginners

Headlines can be hard going, but some news is good news. Here is your weekly digest of what’s going well in the world.

1. An anonymous donor pays off the student loans of a hundred students in the United States

2. The UK’s first queer history museum opens its doors

3. How co-living is countering loneliness for young people with disabilities

4. An Albanian farmer using coffee waste to grow fruit and veg

5. And how a man with no flying experience managed to land a plane

Watch the video above for more on each story, or read on below.

Students at Wiley College in Marshall, East Texas, USA, were given the ultimate graduation gift when they found out a generous stranger had paid off their student loans.

The 100 students of the 2022 graduating class were told at their graduation ceremony on 7 May that they were leaving college debt-free.

Wiley College president Herman J. Felton Jr. told the students: “You do not owe the college a penny. If you have a balance, you had a balance. You no longer have a balance.”

According to the school’s estimates, the combined debts totalled $300,000 – the equivalent of €280,000 euros.

Wiley College is an HBCU – an official designation for Historically Black Colleges and Universities that were founded before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the intention of primarily serving the African-American community.

The liberal arts institution made history in 1935 when the college debate team competed on equal footing with whites for the first time in the American South. The team prevailed over the reigning national debate champion, the University of Southern California, sending a strong message to a heavily segregated country – a story that was told by the 2007 movie The Great Debaters, directed by and starring