Good news: Behind the scenes of some of the world’s most uplifting stories of 2025

By MICHAEL MELIA, Associated Press

It was one of the year’s biggest stories — the selection of the first American pope — and an Associated Press journalist was interviewing the pope’s brother at his home in suburban Chicago. Suddenly, they heard a ringing coming from the basement. “That might be the pope,” the new pontiff’s brother said.

Indeed, the man who had emerged hours earlier on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as Pope Leo XIV was calling to catch up with his older brother. Obed Lamy, a video journalist, listened and recorded as the conversation played out on speaker.

“I was shaking because I didn’t know what the pope would say,” Lamy said. “Am I supposed to say something or not say anything?”

In a year marked by political strife, natural disasters and other calamities around the world, 2025 also had its share of uplifting moments. AP journalists were in the middle of many of them.

Some found stories of joy amid disaster, including a wedding in a typhoon-flooded church in the Philippines and a youth theater group that staged a production weeks after a devastating wildfire in California. Some became part of the stories they were covering, simply by being there. In Seattle, an AP photographer broke the news to a ...