Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, where your intrepid GNR Newsroom (Myself, Killer300, and Bhu) bring you all the good news to start your week off right.
I’ve been a part of the GNR family for seven years now, and because of the confluence of events, doing Memorial day weekend has always fallen upon me personally. Back in the day, I wished everyone a happy memorial day, and was chastised because Memorial day is supposed to be a somber holiday of remembrance.Which is fine, but Memorial day is more than that, for a lot of people, its also the beginning of the Summer season, a time when people barbecue and go swimming and generally have a good time, and I had just as many commenters come out to defend me.
And so, its become my tradition to meet both sides of this argument in the middle, and wish you all a “Good” memorial day. Whether you spend the day remembering fallen loved ones or honoring the troops, or if you celebrate it by having a big cook out, I hope you have a good memorial day.
Oh and I was back to work this previous week. However I was removed from Dairy Frozen and placed back on carts. Like ya do, but as they say life is at best bittersweet.
But enough of that, lets get down to the good news wont we?
The South Dakota secretary of state’s office on Thursday announced that a proposed measure to reinstate abortion rights has enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot in November. Dakotans for Health, the primary group that backed the ballot measure, submitted 55,000 signatures in support of it earlier this month, far surpassing the 35,000 requirement. Secretary of State Monae Johnson’s office estimated that 85% of the signatures are valid, and the measure is eligible for the upcoming election. Currently, South Dakota has a total ban on abortion and threatens doctors in violation with prison time.
“Two long years after we began, the South Dakota Secretary of State today certified that the people of South Dakota, not the politicians in Pierre, will be the ones to decide whether to restore Roe v. Wade as the law of South Dakota,” Rick Weiland, co-founder of Dakotans for Health, said in a statement shared with Jezebel. The proposed measure would ensure abortion is legal under all circumstances in the first trimester of pregnancy and allow some regulation by the state after this point.
Yeah of course the anti abortionists didn’t want it on the ballot because they knew they were going to lose. Because they always lose when it comes to a vote. Its one of the reasons they are working so hard to kill democracy. But we wont let them.
The Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic had already been in power for a decade, when a small group of university students began organizing what would become a successful nonviolent revolution in 2000. Calling themselves Otpor! (“Resistance!” in English), they began by developing their strategy and agreeing to not only rely on nonviolent tactics but to train others, making that a hallmark of their struggle.
Knowing they couldn’t count on fairness from the government-controlled mass media, they focused on widely-felt weaknesses of the regime that could be dramatized by creative tactics and spread by word-of-mouth. They also issued a kind of manifesto — through their trainings — that defined their analysis of the problem, their vision of objectives and their commitment to nonviolent direct action. Because their goal required a mass movement, they networked with organizations less radical than they were. That choice to go beyond “political correctness” to relate to other interest groups paid off by giving them the numbers needed for boycotts, strikes and eventually strategic general strikes.
Our worst enemy is fear and despair. We only truly lose if we give up. Keeping spirits up is what the GNR is all about.
Form Energy launched in 2017 to tackle one of the biggest problems hindering the clean energy transition: how to cheaply store renewable energy for days on end. In developing its iron-air battery, though, the company stumbled on a potential breakthrough for another notorious climate challenge: cleaning up the iron and steel industries.
Form designed a novel battery that stores clean energy by converting rust into pure iron, and discharges electricity by oxidizing or rusting the iron again. The company now is building out a commercial-scale factory in West Virginia to start mass-producing these novel batteries by the end of the year. But Form’s early-stage R&D engineers started thinking about how to decarbonize the iron that goes into those batteries, and realized the charging mechanics helped out there too: They could prepare iron using electricity rather than high heat and fossil fuels.
One by one we are cleaning up the industrial world. You love to see it.
How do you get more people to ride bicycles? The question bedevils every cycling enthusiast and fuels a large sector of industry and advocacy. Bob Giordano of Missoula, Montana, has a simple answer: Give them a bike (or help them repair the one they already have).
Giordano started his mission to create more bikers by distributing shared bicycles among his community, as well as setting up a stall at local events to repair bikes for free. After years of grassroots advocacy and hopping between small garages for their repair work, Giordano and his team landed a permanent spot, buying a retail location and opening Free Cycles. The unique shop upcycles old bikes to give away to children, sells inexpensive refurbished bicycles, helps walk-ins with free repairs, and even teaches people to build or repair their own rides.
I wish I could get a free bicycle
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Biden announced another $7.7 billion in student-debt cancellation for 160,500 borrowers.
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It's a result of fixes to PSLF and income-driven repayment plans, including the SAVE plan.
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This means that one out of every 10 federal borrowers have now gotten debt relief.
ME NEXT ME NEXT ME NEXT!
*Ahem* Sorry bout that, Just wishful thinking. Lets make sure Biden gets another term so he can keep this up.
Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here.
A few weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission revealed evidence of oil sector price-fixing, showing that domestic shale corporations had colluded with foreign producers in 2021 and 2022 to withhold oil from the market so gas prices would go up. This alleged scheme cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars collectively, and those who have heard about this scandal are pretty mad.
So you’d think that the FTC evidence would be a big deal, and that the Biden administration would talk about this conspiracy they just discovered, one that confirms what polling shows most Americans believe about corporate greed. But you’d be wrong. Two weeks ago, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about it. Here’s what she said.
Killer300 asked me to include this one specifically and get the word out on what Biden is doing. And Biden, buddy, its alright to be humble, but you can crow about your victories, we want to hear about this.
Artist Indu Antony was enjoying conversation over chai at a women’s center in Bengaluru, India, when an angry man walked in. He tore a piece of art off the wall, took a lighter from his pocket, and set it on fire. Antony’s companions recognized the man as a local official in a right-wing political party; they scampered away.
“This is a center that is attacking men,” the official fumed. It was three in the afternoon, and Antony smelled a day’s worth of drink on his breath. “You cannot burn our stories,” Antony shot back. The man’s eyes flared; he was not used to being challenged.
The two went back and forth, debating the community center she had founded: Is something created for women inherently against men? In a city with so few safe spaces for women, why did he think it was okay to charge in? Just as the official’s voice grew louder, his tone more belligerent, Antony sensed movement behind her.
“Don’t talk to her like that!” All of her sisters had returned, and now formed a wall behind her. The official was catatonic. The women were all most likely lower-caste; those who worked did so as domestic workers and street cleaners. Women — especially poor women— were not supposed to talk back.
After he stormed off, the women huddled over the singed fabric. It was part of an artpiece they were creating, stitching fragments of their lives onto shreds of cloth and into a room-sized tapestry of stories.
The words on this piece read: “It hurts a lot when he beats me.” They recognized the stitching — it belonged to one of their sisters. She had recently been hospitalized after what neighbors shrugged off as a lover’s quarrel. The official had come to destroy the evidence.
I don’t think there’s anything to add here. The above anecdote speaks for itself.
Georgia is a small, mountainous country that neighbors Russia. Beginning on April 15, demonstrations by tens of thousands of mostly young people have brought its capital, the ancient city of Tbilisi, to a standstill. The self-styled pro-Western protesters decry the government’s perceived turn away from closer integration with the European Union, which is supported by over 80 percent of Georgians.
The catalyst for the current unrest was a proposed law requiring nongovernmental organizations and civil society groups that receive at least 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register as “organizations carrying out the interests of a foreign power.” It was dubbed the “Russian Law” by the opposition, after similar legislation passed by Vladimir Putin in 2012. Domestic critics, as well as the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and other Western countries, accuse the governing Georgian Dream party of backsliding on its commitment to EU accession. They invoke the supposed Moscow sympathies of the party’s founder, the reclusive billionaire businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s.
All over the world the fires of revolution are sparking.
When Grinnell College wanted to begin compensating community advisors (CA), who work to provide students living in residence halls with programming and support for personal and academic issues, on an hourly basis, undergraduates at the private liberal arts school in Iowa took collective action. They went on strike at the end of the spring semester in 2023.
Hannah Sweet, a third-year student at the school who works as a CA, opposed the change because it would have amounted to a substantial pay cut given the 24/7 nature of the job.
“One of the main things we did was we performed ‘structure tests’ leading up to the strike date,” said Sweet, who’s now co-president of the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers (UGSDW), which now represents all undergrad labor on campus. “What a structure test is, is [to] kind of like make sure that you can get your membership mobilized and coordinated — see what your organizing can really handle.”
Prior to the strike, she said student-workers organized what the union framed as an “evening without student work.” Undergrad employees walked off the job around 5 pm that day. “We actually got some movement at the [bargaining] table when we did it,” Sweet told Truthout.
Considering the work force they will inevitably have to enter, probably not a bad set of skills to have to be honest.
Ebola tamed by vaccines
Remember Ebola? If you're wondering why you don't really hear about it anymore, it's because scientists came up with a vaccine, and there are now over half a million doses in the global stockpile. As outbreaks become smaller and containment happens more quickly, most of the doses are now being repurposed for preventive vaccination. WHO
Viruses are not unbeatable. We’ll conquer COVID eventually as well (It will just take longer than it should)
The moment Alok Shukla first saw the forest in central India stretching out before him, he knew two things instantly.
One: that this forest - known as the lungs of Chhattisgarh, home to thousands of tribespeople, endangered animals and rare plants - was one of the most beautiful places he had ever seen.
And two: that he would dedicate his life to stopping the multi-billion dollar companies hoping to uproot it in search of the coal beneath its soil.
The only question was, how?
Twelve years later, Alok can smile at the memory. After all, what he has achieved in the intervening years has been impressive.
On Monday, the 43-year-old was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, otherwise known as the green Nobel.
Never underestimate the little guy.
This issue is both a housing issue and a civil rights issue,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis said during a bill-signing ceremony outside the state’s Capitol. “It really is both. For housing, the opportunity for people to officially be on the lease — it gives them protections, allows them to start establishing their credit, gives them the certainty that they get to live here.”
Polis was signing HB24-1007 into law. As of July 1, 2024, local governments in Colorado will be prohibited from restricting how many unrelated roommates could live under one roof unless a strong case can be made for health, safety or fire code needs.
Previously, different municipalities in Colorado were able to implement restrictions at their discretion. Fort Collins, for example, limited occupancy to three unrelated tenants, which meant that in homes with upwards of four bedrooms (not including basements and garages) tenants would be subsidizing empty rooms, whether or not they made use of them.
More good news from the world of affordable housing.
Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican from Ohio, has sparked anger among conservatives over his efforts to put President Joe Biden on the state's November ballot.
Democrats are scheduled to officially nominate their candidate, presumably Biden, too late to comply with Ohio's ballot access laws—a situation that, while not ideal, has occurred before and has been quietly solved by the state's legislators. In 2024, the issue threatens to cause a partisan clash in the battleground state's GOP-controlled legislature.
Thursday, DeWine announced that he was calling for a special session of the Ohio General Assembly to begin on May 28 so legislation could be passed to ensure that both former President Donald Trump and Biden would be on Ohio's ballot in November. He is also calling on lawmakers to pass legislation to prohibit campaign spending by foreign nationals.
Yeah even members of the GOP are becoming fed up with this nonsense. What a bunch of miserable piss babies.
Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here.
Today, the government, led by Antitrust Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter and 30 state attorneys general, filed a suit asking for Live Nation/Ticketmaster to be broken apart. They sought a jury trial, meaning they want this case heard by citizens, against a deeply unpopular company. The consequences of this suit are fascinating, and even in the few hours since it’s been filed, we’re seeing reverberations in the world of politics and antitrust law.
Let’s start with something extremely simple. Everyone hates Ticketmaster. Take Jim Cramer, the CNBC host who never met a monopoly he didn’t like. Cramer on TV said that the Biden administration was right to seek to break up Ticketmaster, and that he only thought it was a good stock because “it’s the best gouger in the world.”
And another empire falls.
And I think that’s a good place to stop for this week. Everyone have a good Memorial day no matter how you choose to celebrate it. I’ll see you all next week.