A Risky Rescue and a Superlative Speller

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:03]Good morning, Donald. Where's Daisy?

[00:00:07]>> Okay, anyone can call a duck Donald and ask about Daisy. The difference at this pub in Northern England is that these ducks are regulars. They first showed up several weeks ago. The land lady there did what anyone would do when they want an animal to come back. She fed them.

[00:00:21]And they did come back the next day, leading to the lady ordering duck food, leading to the birds becoming familiar with the place and its workers, leading to the ducks returning five times a day and getting their own food bowls and running up a bill and serving mozzarella sticks. Okay, maybe not the last part, but the pub's bouncers have set up a duck zone to keep them safe from customers who don't really phase the animals. They sometimes eat out of the owner's hands. They peck at the door when it's shut. and they now have a following on social media that's contributed to what the land lady says is a real feel-good story for the town.

[00:00:55]A bit of good news from our partners at Good News Network.

[00:01:08]Welcome to your nonpartisan source for news and global events. This is the world from A to Z and I'm Carl Isus.

[00:01:15]excited to be starting a new week with you. Next up on today's international coverage takes us to a place you're going to identify.

[00:01:28]Where in the world? This is a communist country you'll find in Southeast Asia.

[00:01:34]It's the only landlock country in the region and it's surrounded by Cambodia, Thailand, China, and Vietnam. The nation's name means land of the Lao people.

[00:01:48]This is Laos, a mostly Buddhist country of almost 8 million people.

[00:01:54]Catching you up on a story we reported Friday. Five Lao miners known to survive a cave flooding last week are once again breathing fresh air. They'd become trapped underground by the region's seasonal monsoon rains. To reach them, rescuers had to dive underwater and navigate through subterranean chambers almost totally filled with it. A high-risisk operation on Friday saved one of the men. He was given scuba equipment and made his first dive ever through dangerous murky water. Jen Sullivan tells us how the others were brought to safety.

[00:02:28]>> Cheers and cries heard as the remaining four men trapped inside a cave in Lao for more than a week are finally free.

[00:02:39]This video capturing their emotional reunion. Families tearfully embracing.

[00:02:44]The four remaining men were able to crawl out on their own on Saturday after rescue crews successfully pumped out water inside the cave. Originally, divers from an international rescue team planned to rescue them in high waters, which they say would have been dangerous for everyone involved.

[00:03:02]>> It was the best outcome. Exhausted after spending 10 days in dark, damp conditions, the men were taken to a camp to undergo medical care. You can see them wrapped in foil on stretchers.

[00:03:14]>> The adrenaline, they run for the life and once they arrive to the camp, they just run out.

[00:03:19]>> You can see one of the villagers being placed in an ambulance. Some of the men developed skin and intestinal problems.

[00:03:26]The five villagers were illegally mining for gold May 20th when torrential rain caused flash flooding, sealing their exit more than 850 ft away. Rescuers finally discovered them a week later.

[00:03:42]>> Friday, one of the trapped men was able to be rescued, telling people he was grateful to be out.

[00:03:56]There are still two other villagers not connected to this group that are believed to still be trapped inside. I'm Jen Sullivan reporting.

[00:04:10]>> On this date in world history, >> June 1st, 1774 was when the Boston Port Act took effect. Britain had shut down the city's harbor in an effort to punish the colonists for the Boston Tea Party.

[00:04:24]One of the intolerable acts or coercive acts, the Boston port closure further angered the colonists and strengthened their resistance in the leadup to the American Revolution. A significant event during that revolution occurred on June 1st, 1779. It was the start date of a court marshal or military trial of Benedict Arnold accusing the American officer of breaking numerous military regulations. Arnold was eventually cleared of most of those charges, but he later defected to the British and became one of the most infamous traders in American history. This was the date in 1831 when British explorer James Clark Ross reached the magnetic north pole, becoming the first European to do that.

[00:05:04]He continued his voyages of discovery and has both a sea and an ice shelf named after him in Antarctica.

[00:05:14]What day is it?

[00:05:17]June 1st is National Heimchick Maneuver Day. It marked the date in 1974 when American doctor Henry J. Heimlick published his famous method of stopping someone from choking. The technique has been credited with saving tens of thousands of lives.

[00:05:33]A world of knowledge. How do you spell fuchsia? Is it A, B, C, or D?

[00:05:49]WIDELY considered one of the hardest words to spell, fuchsia, option C, can be either a plant or a color.

[00:05:59]But it was words like brmoryine, a polyeptide that mimics dopamine and is spelled correctly right here, that won a 14-year-old named Shrey Periq the 2026 Scripts National Spelling Bee last week.

[00:06:11]Other words the young Californian had to face in the final lightning round tiebreaker included entham fedo pahurakawa and toro cathapsia. Don't ask us how to spell those. The centuries old tradition became a national event in the US back in 1925 with its final held in Washington DC and its winning word being gladiololis. 11-year-old Frank Newhauser won $500 for that. Last week Shay Periq won a cash reward exceeding $50,000 plus other prizes.

[00:06:42]Tight, sick, Gucci, drip, all words that have been given new meaning as American slang. According to Nasim Garbari with the Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research, teens pretty much own slang, creating new words and giving old words new meaning. And they've done it for decades. Groovy, tubular, gnarly, all those words used to be the latest in slang. But words like that or sayings like the bee's knees feel a little awkward to say now. That's because the kids who grew up saying them, well, grew up. In high school, our use of slang peaks. There's always a new phrase or word we're hearing our friends use. We pick those words up and begin adding them to our own vocabulary. But by our late teen years and early 20s, we tend to start phasing out slang. Part of that has to do with the fact that we're no longer a part of slang's in crowd high schoolers and part of it is due to the situations we're in. We're usually in college or career settings in our 20s.

[00:07:44]So our language becomes a bit more straight laced to adapt to those settings and it doesn't unadapt. By age 25, Tom Dzel, an author and expert on slang, says we almost completely stop using it, unless those words become so popular that they level up into more formal vocabulary. Sweet, cool. Both words used to be slang, but now their slang meanings are right alongside their original definitions in the dictionary.

[00:08:13]Slang isn't appropriate in a lot of settings, but who knows? As you're generating new words and phrases, you just might help create one that actually ends up in the dictionary.

[00:08:27]Starting in the Canadian province of Alberta, we want to recognize Mr. Sads or Sed's class today. EW Pratt High is here from High Prairie, the home of the Chargers. From Trenton, New Jersey, a warm welcome to all the Ravens watching from Robinsville High School. Great to see y'all there. Moving west, we bark with the Bulldogs of New London Intermediate Middle School. We see Miss Richie's class in New London, Wisconsin.

[00:08:50]And Mountain View Middle is the home of the Mountaineers in Beaverton, Oregon.

[00:08:54]Hello to Miss Jennifer's class.

[00:09:00]Last story, something police in Waco, Texas are calling routine. Yeah, that's a pun cuz for the second time since September, there's been a marsupial on the lamb from the Waco Wildlife Rescue.

[00:09:12]Last fall, officials had to wrangle two of them. So, this event was half as challenging. But a challenge it was, as you could see, because kangaroos are fast and flighty. In this case, like the last one, the animal was caught and safely returned to the wildlife facility. If someone there left the gate open again, the manager would be hopping mad. Even if it had hidden an energy drink in its pouch, it shouldn't be able to sneak out back. It's possible it was antella pining for the joey of unbridled freedom. Maybe it thought I'd just walabe somewhere else. But later on a macro podcast, police would have told you those powerful legs couldn't out jump the long arm of the law. I'm Carl Isus for the world from A to Z. Thank you for watching. You mean the world to me.