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From the GNR Newsroom: Its the Monday Good News Roundup! [1]
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Date: 2022-12-05
Good morning everyone! Its another beautiful Monday and you know what that means: Myself, Killer300. Bhu. Good stories. Lets go.
More good news from me, I got my EPC card, meaning for the time being I don’t have to worry about food. I have a pantry and a fridge full of food and it feels pretty good if we’re being honest. I also fumigated my apartment last friday, so less cockroaches and more food. That’s good.
But enough of personal news, its time to get to the good stuff. The Good News Stuff. So lets strut our stuff with this weeks good news.
Some have voiced concerns in this area. But the past month has generated a bevy of stories suggesting that the Biden administration’s diplomacy seems to be bearing some fruit. Ironically, perhaps the loudest example is the dog that didn’t bark: NATO’s reaction to the deadly missile explosion in the Polish border town of Przewodów. CNN’s story on the U.S. response can be boiled down to “senior U.S. officials in the White House, State Department, and the Pentagon calling their counterparts in Poland and Ukraine and sharing intelligence with allies.” The Washington Post’s David Ignatius summed up the diplomatic response as: “[doing] what generations of crisis managers have recommended. In a hot moment, it cooled down. Despite pressure for action, the administration realized it lacked reliable information. It waited to gather facts.” The result was no escalation of conflict and no ruptures within NATO. For Ignatius, this was indicative of the Biden White House’s larger diplomatic strategy: “The past few weeks have been a case study in how to support a war and prevent one at the same time.” Indeed, while the Biden White House has been wary of letting hostilities with Russia escalate, they have continued to apply pressure on Putin to aid Ukraine. As the Wall Street Journal’s Ian Talley reported last week:
Its nice to have a president again where we aren’t hearing about his constant screw ups. Believe me, the more boring the Biden administration the better.
or most of the Shinnecock Nation’s history, the waters off the eastern end of Long Island were a place of abundance. Expert fishermen, whalers and farmers, the Shinnecock people lived for centuries off the clams, striped bass, flounder, bluefish and fruit native to the area. Today, the area is best known as a playground for the rich, where mansions sell for tens of millions of dollars. The Shinnecock community no longer lives off the water as it once did — rapid development, pollution and warming waters have led to losses in fish, shellfish and plants that were once central to the Shinnecock diet and culture. That’s why Tela Troge, an attorney and member of the federally recognized tribe, started planting kelp.
The revival of ancient agricultural practices will help people and the environment. Its a good thing.
No quote from this one because its a bit graphic heavy, but the number of people smoking is dropping rapidly, and that’s great.
Paris, ranked among the world’s most expensive cities to reside in various surveys , might not make the most obvious of role models for housing affordability policies. But after succeeding in making 25% of its accommodation accessible to people on lower incomes by the end of last year, the French capital has set a target of lifting that to 40% by 2035. That means a major expansion of public housing so that homes for low-income tenants make up 30% of all units with an additional 10% comprising below-market rate abodes for middle-income tenants, Paris Housing Commissioner Ian Brossat told French media on Sunday
Great news, we need more affordable housing all over.
In 2021, the Global Mangrove Alliance, a consortium of NGOs, published “The State of the World’s Mangroves,” the first snapshot study compiled from satellite imagery intended to provide an up-to-date record of global mangrove forest cover.
The second installment of the report, published in September, draws on improved and updated maps.
The report shows a decline in the overall rate of mangrove loss and outlines concrete actions to halt the loss for good and help mangroves begin regaining ground.
Fantastic news for the Mangroves, lets home they can bounce back.
he Karuk Tribe partnered with the U.S. Forest Service and other stakeholders to reintroduce traditional burning to help restore forests in the Klamath Mountains.
The four-year-old project aims to prevent wildfires and make overgrown forests in Northern California look more like they did thousands of years ago when the Tribe stewarded them.
So far, the project’s successes have been encouraging, however, the Tribe and Forest Service have encountered hurdles in their relationship and have had difficulty agreeing on different fire techniques.
The project hopes to make burning a seasonal and sustainable part of ecosystem management.
Here’s hoping their efforts bear fruit. I’m confident they know what they are doing.
Even in the most biodiverse rainforest of the world, the pirarucu — also known as arapaima — stands out. First, there is its mammoth size: It can weigh up to 200 kilograms, by far the largest of 2,300 known fish species in the Amazon. It is found primarily in flood plain lakes across the Amazon basin, including in the region of Medio Jurua. Second, the giant fish nearly vanished from Jurua not so long ago, as vessels swept the lakes with large nets. The illegal and unsustainable fishing left Indigenous communities struggling to catch their staple food. And it left pirarucu designated as threatened with extinction. But now something remarkable has happened. The fish has come back to the lakes of Medio Jurua.
Another species makes a comeback. Good on the Arapaima.
A federal jury on Tuesday found the leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, and one of his top associates in the far-right militia group guilty of seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S Capitol. Three other defendants were acquitted of the seditious conspiracy charge, the most serious offense against them, but Rhodes, Kelly Meggs and the others, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell, were all convicted of obstructing an official proceeding.
Good riddance, throw these cretins in jail and throw away the key. Just make room for Trump.
The Senate on Tuesday passed legislation to protect same-sex and interracial marriage, called the Respect for Marriage Act, in a landmark bipartisan vote. The final vote was 61-36. The bill was supported by all members of the Democratic caucus and 12 Republicans, the same dozen GOP members who backed the bill for a procedural vote earlier this month. The House will now need to approve the legislation before sending it to President Joe Biden’s desk to be signed into law. The House is expected to pass the bill before the end of the year – possibly as soon as next week.
Great news, lets get this done while we still can, before the SCOTUS gets any funny ideas.
Ranked choice voting is coming to three more Cascadian jurisdictions.
Even-year elections advance in King County and elsewhere.
Alaska and Corvallis have partially tabulated their ranked choice elections, though best practices support full tabulation of preliminary results.
When voting becomes easier, we win. Its as simple as that.
Morality police have nothing to do with the judiciary" and have been abolished, Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri was quoted as saying by Iran's ISNA news agency. He was also cited by the semi-official Iranian Labour News Agency. "The same authority which has established this police has shut it down," Montazeri was quoted as saying. Newsweek has been unable to independently verify the claims and has contacted Iran's Ministry of Justice for comment. It comes after Montazeri said Iran was reviewing the decades-old law that requires women in Iran to cover their heads. "Both parliament and the judiciary are working (on the issue)" of whether the law needs any changes, he said.
Its a little early before we see how sincere this is or if there is something else going on, but it seems like a major win for the protestors in Iran. Good for them.
he latest round of Medicaid expansion negotiations comes as states prepare for the eventual end of the Covid-19 public health emergency, which helped millions of people stay on Medicaid during the pandemic, and as nearly a third of rural hospitals are at risk of closure, two factors Medicaid experts believe could persuade conservative lawmakers. In Wyoming, for example, some Republicans, worried about the state’s changing economy and hospital closures, are attempting to pass expansion legislation, which died last year after advancing in the state House but not the Senate. The Affordable Care Act sought to lower the uninsured rate by expanding who is eligible for Medicaid with the federal government picking up most of the tab. But the Supreme Court ruled that states are not obligated to participate, and most Republican-controlled states refused to do so. Citizen-led ballot initiatives forced red states such as Missouri, Oklahoma and, most recently, South Dakota, to expand Medicaid, leaving 11 states without an expansion program.
I guess the last election was a bit of a wakeup call for the GOP. the Amazing thing is that some of them are starting to hear it.
One of the myths about China is that it is such an oppressive regime that protests is unheard of. In fact, protests by workers, peasants, students and other groups occur relatively frequently and even brief acquaintance with China will impress you with how little respect is shown to regular uniformed police. The backchat and taunting of police is not as shocking as it might at first seem.
As my GNR Newsroom comrade Killer300 said: that quote enough makes this GNR worthy.
Some 82 tribes across the U.S. — from New York to Alaska — now have more than 20,000 bison in 65 herds — and that’s been growing in recent years along with the desire among Native Americans to reclaim stewardship of an animal their ancestors lived alongside and depended upon for millennia. European settlers destroyed that balance when they slaughtered the great herds. Bison almost went extinct until conservationists including Teddy Roosevelt intervened to reestablish a small number of herds largely on federal lands. Native Americans were sometimes excluded from those early efforts carried out by conservation groups. Such groups more recently partnered with tribes, and some are now stepping aside. The long-term dream for some Native Americans: return bison on a scale rivaling herds that roamed the continent in numbers that shaped the landscape itself.
So I guess the Buffalo Gal is going to come out tonight.
Public health was on the ballot last week — and it won. I’m not talking about specific candidates, as important as those races are. I’m talking about the ethos of public health — the principle that health is a fundamental human right and the understanding that we must look out for one another, to think not just about our own well-being, but about the public good. That ethos has been in retreat for the past two years, beaten back by the forces proclaiming that individual freedom trumps all. In one of many low points, protestors targeted a breast cancer clinic in Los Angeles for requiring masks to protect their patients, many of whom had weakened immune systems as a result of chemotherapy and were therefore at higher risk from COVID. This failure of empathy has been deeply disheartening. Yet as I’ve tracked election results over the past week, I’ve found many reasons for optimism. In blue states and in red states, voters made choices that reflected care and concern for their fellow citizens. Again and again, they voted to protect public health. In an extension of that trend, voters also opted to use the levers of government to extend dignity to individuals in bleak circumstances, such as extreme poverty, crushing debt and imprisonment. The most high-profile examples of public health wins are the abortion referendums. Voters in California, Michigan and Vermont endorsed women’s right to choose. In conservative Kentucky and Montana, too, abortion rights supporters scored clear victories on ballot measures. This clean sweep for reproductive freedom in the midterms follows a resounding win for abortion rights supporters in a statewide referendum in Kansas in August. These successes are critically important for public health because restrictions on abortion put women’s lives, health and economic futures at risk, and are particularly dangerous for low-income women and women of color.
Hopefully this is a trend that continues.
A hundred UK companies have signed up for a permanent four-day working week for all their employees with no loss of pay, a milestone in the campaign to fundamentally change Britain’s approach to work. The 100 companies employ 2,600 staff – a tiny fraction of the UK’s working population – but the 4 Day Week Campaign group is hoping they will be the vanguard of a major shift. Proponents of the four-day week say that the five-day pattern is a hangover from an earlier economic age. They argue that a four-day week would drive companies to improve their productivity, meaning they can create the same output using fewer hours. For some early adopters the policy has also proven a useful way of attracting and retaining employees.
I love that this is catching on.
An overwhelming share of U.S. adults (88%) say either that marijuana should be legal for medical and recreational use by adults (59%) or that it should be legal for medical use only (30%). Just one-in-ten (10%) say marijuana use should not be legal, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted Oct. 10-16, 2022. These views are virtually unchanged since April 2021.
Looks like another all out victory in the war on drugs…for the drugs.
et it’s also easy to see hope and signs of democratic renewal. In cities and states nationwide, all varieties of red, blue and purple, people have come together behind reforms to improve democracy and show all of us a path forward. Perhaps no reform has more momentum behind it than RCV, which works like an instant runoff: When voters have more than two choices, they can rank their choices top to bottom. If no candidate wins 50% in the first round, the last place candidate is eliminated, and the second choices kick in. Even as voting rights have become a depressingly polarized topic in our current crisis of democracy, RCV has been increasing in popularity nationwide. For a growing number of people, voting now means ranking. In 2016, only 10 cities used RCV. Now that number is well over 50, ranging from small towns in Utah and liberal cities like San Francisco and Minneapolis. In 2020, several states used RCV to select presidential candidates in primaries, and in recent years Virginia Republicans have used RCV to select their nominees for governor and candidates for the U.S. House. In recent years, Maine and Alaska adopted RCV, and last week, Nevada took a step toward joining them after voters passed a constitutional amendment instituting RCV in key state and national elections (a second vote in 2024 will be needed to seal the win). Seattle and Portland, Oregon, were among the seven new cities and local counties that adopted RCV on Election Day this year while Arlington, Virginia voted to adopt it by statute. More than 15 million people now live in cities, counties and states that regularly use ranked choice elections. One consistent theme: younger people across the political spectrum are most ready for RCV.
RCV is coming to America, and it will help make our elections more fair. Anything to get more people to vote.
The story of essential workers during the pandemic is part of the long unraveling of the New Deal. The destruction of the welfare state, the attack on unions, and the rise of neoliberalism provide the historical backdrop for the pandemic labor unrest. As workers’ fortunes came under renewed attack in the early 1970s, the historic gains of the New Deal were rolled back decades. Inequality became the defining feature of our economy as we arrived at a second Gilded Age. This was more than unfair — during the pandemic it had deadly consequences. A 2020 study found that in over 3,000 U.S. counties, income inequality was associated with more cases and more deaths by the virus.
The pandemic was a wakeup call about how bad things had gotten in recent years, and now its time for a course correction.
Unsurprisingly, both BT and Royal Mail workers voted to strike in huge numbers over the summer, with one postal ballot registering a 97.6% yes vote with 77% turnout. That’s the biggest mandate for industrial action since the implementation of the anti-labor 2016 Trade Union Act, which requires 50% turnout for a strike vote to be considered valid. So did the 40,000 rail workers of the Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers (RMT). Their fight against pay cuts and layoffs has been given a great boost by Mick Lynch, the union’s unpretentious and quick-witted general secretary, whose media appearances have gained mass popularity. Lynch called a Tory member of parliament a “liar” 15 times in three minutes, told a House of Lords member criticizing him that “I don’t even know who you are,” and accused a news presenter of “entering the world of the surreal” for implying that RMT members might provoke picket line violence. As the months go on, these workers have been joined by other sections of the working class involved in their own disputes. After an unprecedented vote for national strike action, 70,000 members of the University and College Union (UCU) have hit the picket lines in recent days, with 100,000 civil servants belonging to the Public and Commercial Services Union looking set to follow them soon. Unite, the second-largest British union, led by the combative Sharon Graham, has engaged in relentless guerrilla warfare against regional bus companies, local councils, and multinational corporations. Members in transport, airports, and local councils have fought inspirational battles featuring mass picketing and occupations of council buildings. Most dramatically, the 465,000 nurses of the Royal College of Nursing — the largest nurses union in the world — have voted to strike for the first time ever.
And part umpteen of an ongoing series: “So Brexit is going well I take it.”
Spoiler warning: its not, and people are getting fed up.
n a major defeat for former President Donald Trump, a federal appeals court on Thursday halted a third-party review of documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate. The ruling removes a major obstacle to the Justice Department’s investigation into the mishandling of government records from Trump’s time in the White House. The three-judge panel of the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed US District Judge Aileen Cannon’s order appointing a so-called special master to sort through thousands of documents found at Trump’s home to determine what should be off limits to investigators. The court said the judge should not have intervened in the first place.
Trump is running out of tricks, the walls are closing in. Tick Tock Donny.
An experimental HIV vaccine has been found to induce broadly neutralizing antibody precursors among a small group of volunteers in a Phase 1 study. The findings suggest that a two-dose regimen of the vaccine, given eight weeks apart, can elicit immune responses against the human immunodeficiency virus. The clinical trial results, published Thursday on World AIDS Day in the journal Science, establish “clinical proof of concept” in support of developing boosting regimens to induce immune responses against HIV infection, for which there is no cure and which can cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, known as AIDS.
We might be getting close to a cure for AIDS. I love living in the future.
And with that we bid adieu for another week. Have a good Monday and a better rest of the week.
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