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From the GNR Newsroom, its the Monday Good News Roundup [1]

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Date: 2022-12-19

Happy Hanukah from the Good News Roundup, where me and the GNR newsroom (Bhu and Killer300) come to give you the good news to make your week a better one. I’m halfway through my vacation (and I picked a good week for it given how icy it is out there), and I have been staying in and taking it easy. And I hope you all are enjoying the holiday season as well.

But enough holiday wishes, you’re here for your presents. Well I definitely got some good ones this week, the gift of good news, so lets get to it.

And should DeSantis run for president, Shirvell said, “if there’s a big pro-life champion to contrast their record with Gov. DeSantis’ record, there’s no doubt that he will be hit. That is his weak point.” It isn’t just DeSantis’ position that makes him a potential target for a future conservative rival; it’s also the state he represents. Florida is a paradox. It’s firmly in Republican hands now. But it also has one of the highest rates of abortion in the country — nearly twice the national average. And as surrounding states have tightened their laws, the number of women seeking abortion care in Florida clinics has roughly doubled, according to Planned Parenthood. “From my perspective, it’s terrible, but for those who would completely ban abortion, it’s not enough,” Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state lawmaker, said of the 15-week ban. “If he thought it was popular, DeSantis would have campaigned on that, and he didn’t. He wouldn’t even say ‘abortion.’”

Ooh, DeSantis. I do not like this guy. Trumpism may be dying out, but I feel like this guy is the next generation of that BS. Hopefully this time we can shut him down before he gives us too much trouble.

Cambridge Dictionary has expanded its definition of the word "woman" to be inclusive of transgender women. In addition to the longtime definition of the word, "an adult female human being," in the dictionary entry for woman, additional descriptors have been added. Cambridge now also defines a woman as, "an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth." Included in the new entry are the examples, "She was the first trans woman elected to a national office," and, "Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth."

Trans rights are human rights, and its good to see more and more people getting with that program.

On Tuesday researchers from the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California confirmed that for the first time, they have produced a fusion reaction that resulted in a net energy gain, a major breakthrough in the pursuit of nuclear fusion power. When we talk about nuclear power, we’re usually talking about nuclear fission, which splits atoms to create energy. You’ll recognize the radioactive waste it produces as the usual subject of controversy when it comes to discussions around nuclear. The other type of nuclear power is nuclear fusion, which combines atoms to create energy. Nuclear fusion is how the sun powers itself, and humans have been trying to make it happen here on our planet since the 1950s. As many outlets have explained this week, producing energy using nuclear fusion is a tantalizing possibility because it has virtually no waste and no carbon footprint.

Once again, I love living in the future.

On a stretch of West Georgia highway, in the triangle of land where an exit ramp meets the road, 2,600 solar panels soak up the bright southern sun. The 5-acre site used to be barren and eroding, but now it provides enough power for more than 100 homes. That’s exactly what the team at the Ray C. Anderson Foundation’s sustainable highway project, known as The Ray, was hoping for. “What it is today is a field of clean, green energy,” said Allie Kelly, the Ray’s executive director. The solar panels stand higher than most, so wildflowers also grow on what was once “wasted public land.” Someday, she hopes to see solar fields like this lining highways across the country.

Every little bit helps.

A teenager with aggressive leukaemia now has no detectable cancer cells after becoming the first person to receive a treatment for the condition that involves a new kind of CRISPR called base editing. However, it will not be clear for some years whether she will remain free of the condition. The 13-year-old girl, called Alyssa, hadn’t responded to other treatments. As part of a trial, she received a dose of immune cells from a donor that had been modified to attack the cancer. Twenty-eight days later, tests revealed she was in remission. “This is quite remarkable, although it is still a preliminary result, which needs to be monitored and confirmed over the next few months,” said Robert Chiesa, one of the doctors treating Alyssa, in a statement released by Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

Another victory in the war on Cancer, I wish that teenager the best going forward.

Here’s the basic problem for conservation at a global level: food production, biodiversity and carbon storage in ecosystems are competing for the same land. As humans demand more food, so more forests and other natural ecosystems are cleared, and farms intensify and become less hospitable to many wild animals and plants. Therefore global conservation, currently focused on the COP15 summit in Montreal, will fail unless it addresses the underlying issue of food production. Fortunately, a whole raft of new technologies is being developed that make a system-wide revolution in food production feasible. According to recent research by one of us (Chris), this transformation could meet increased global food demands by a growing human population on less than 20% of the world’s existing farmland. Or in other words, these technologies could release at least 80% of existing farmland from agriculture in about a century. Around four-fifths of the land used for human food production is allocated to meat and dairy, including both range lands and crops specifically grown to feed livestock. Add up the whole of India, South Africa, France and Spain and you have the amount of land devoted to crops that are then fed to livestock.

I love farming, but its good to know that we can make a change for the better, hope this works out.

The product of my research is a new report, out today, called “Housing Abundance as a Condition for Ending Homelessness: Lessons From Houston, Texas.” The title gives it away: Houston’s success was predicated on a vast supply of low-cost housing. As in much of California, Houston’s homeless services system follows the Housing First model. But because housing in Houston is cheaper and more plentiful, the city’s Housing First efforts are far more successful.

Here’s hoping California can replicate Houston’s success.

EU legislators reached an agreement in the early hours of Tuesday (6 December) to pass a new law guaranteeing that products sold in the EU are not linked to the destruction or degradation of forests. Between 1990 and 2020, an area larger than the EU was lost to deforestation, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. EU consumption is a big driver of this, causing around 10% of the losses, according to the FAO. “The EU is a large consumer and trader of commodities that play a substantial part in deforestation – like beef, cocoa, soy and timber,” said Marian Jurečka the environment minister from the Czech Republic, which negotiated on behalf of the 27 EU countries.

Good news for the trees, which is good news for the whole world.

s Americans prepare for another busy holiday shopping season, many may opt to spend extra on products from companies with a reputation for doing good. New data from the Force for Good Study, carried out by Bentley University and Gallup, show at least 60 percent of consumers are willing to pay extra for something as simple as a T-shirt if the company making it has a positive impact on its community, treats its employees well, has a positive environmental impact, or contributes to charities. “The conscious consumption movement is growing, with a majority of Americans now willing to pay more for products and to support companies with clear intentions to do good for people and planet,” said Jonathan White, an associate professor of sociology at Bentley University, in the report.

Yeah, as it turns out, people don’t want to give their money to assholes. Which is why I wont play games made by Activision Blizzard.

WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Workers at a General Motors-LG Energy (GM.N), (373220.KS) battery cell factory in northeast Ohio overwhelmingly voted to join the United Auto Workers, a big win for the union seeking to organize the growing electric vehicle supply chain sector. The National Labor Relations Board said hourly employees at the Ultium Cells LLC plant near Cleveland voted 710 to 16 in favor of joining the union. Ultium said it respected "the decision of our Ohio workforce supporting representation by the UAW. We look forward to a positive working relationship with the UAW."

When workers unionize we all win. Unions are what made this country great, it was the source of our grandparents prosperity, then Ronald Reagan effed it up for my generation, time to bring the unions back.

Sign-ups for plans on the Affordable Care Act's exchanges reached 5.5 million during the first five weeks of open enrollment, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). The CMS said Wednesday that figure includes 1.2 million people who have newly signed up for coverage through the exchanges as well as 4.3 million people who have returned to the exchanges to renew or select a new plan for 2023. That represents an 18% increase year over year; in 2021, 4.6 million people had signed up for plans through the first five weeks of the enrollment period.

They tried to kill it, but it persisted, and now its stronger than ever.

While most cities start with reducing parking mandates in a central business district, like Hartford, Connecticut, did (see Part 2 in this series), planners in Fayetteville were fielding requests about properties throughout the city, and opted against defining a smaller boundary. At 44 square miles, Fayetteville is a fairly spread-out city of 95,000 people. “As a city planner, you receive phone calls about what’s possible with this property,” Fayetteville planner Quin Thompson explained. “What I began to see was the same properties over and over again. Some of those properties were downtown, but a lot weren’t.” None of the parcels had enough space to meet the parking requirements in place at the time. The planning staff approached the city council with the idea of eliminating commercial requirements citywide. Some of these properties were so constrained, they explained, it was impossible to imagine how they could be redeveloped under the current rules. They also said investors taking on the financial risk of a project were best suited to determine their own parking needs, and would act as a backstop even when the city was no longer regulating off-street parking spaces. In October 2015, Fayetteville’s city council agreed.

I’ve seen this problem elsewhere. In the Tops I worked at in Arcade, we were next door to a former Blockbuster that was going to be turned into an advanced automotive, but then they found a clause in the lease forbidding them from putting an automotive shop in the place. As far as I know that place is still empty.

The authority of the University of California (UC) is being challenged at an unprecedented scale, as the largest academic worker strike in US history enters its fifth week. Systematic organizing by thousands of workers across the state has resulted in the widespread suspension of cutting-edge research projects and thousands of class cancellations and ungraded assessments. After multiple volleys at the bargaining table, as well as in the streets, the UC continues to stonewall on all the major demands put forth by UAW Local 2865 and Student Researchers United–UAW (SRU-UAW), the unions representing graduate student workers and student researchers –– including a substantive wage increase, adequately expansive health care coverage, and the remission of both extra tuition paid by non-California residents and a xenophobic fee exacted from primarily international student workers. (Postdoctoral and academic researchers, represented by UAW Local 5810, ratified their own contracts on Friday, December 9, the end of the fourth week of the strike.)

Go get em gang.

Stonyfield isn’t the only food company betting big on meeting its carbon reduction pledge by shifting its farmers toward regenerative agriculture practices that sequester carbon in soil, among other benefits. General Mills, Cargill, Danone, Walmart and others have made similar ambitious pledges, and for good reason. Like other food companies, their agricultural supply chains are responsible for a huge portion of their carbon emissions. In fact, researchers recently concluded in Science that world climate goals cannot be achieved without fundamental changes to our food system. Regenerative farming, which centers on building soil health, is one promising pathway for decreasing agriculture’s carbon footprint. But how does a large food company motivate the multitude of farmers in its supply chain to adopt farming practices that bind carbon in the soil? And how do we know that these agricultural practices are truly sequestering carbon, and for how long?

Nice to hear about companies doing something positive for a change. I hope this continues.

LGBTQ activists and allies in San Antonio, Texas, turned a far-right attack on a drag show into an open-air party. On Tuesday night, armed members of “This Is Texas Freedom Force,” which the FBI calls an “extremist militia group,” protested outside San Antonio’s Aztec Theatre as it hosted a drag show. The protesters carried signs reading “Stop Groomers and Pedos,” while members of the San Antonio Family Association were also in attendance, waving signs reading “Marriage = Husband + Wife,” and “Honk for Marriage.” But counterprotesters showed up in even bigger numbers on Tuesday, and according to Texas Observer reporter Steven Monacelli, they turned the night into a giant party.

Resistance is not just about fighting. Surviving is resistance, thriving is resistance, finding joy in the dark times is resistance. They want us to be afraid, alone, and miserable, so when we come together and create joy and beauty we are winning and they are losing. Love is a riot!

These efforts are succeeding. The bravery and determination of the Ukrainian people, aided by tens of billions of dollars in security and economic assistance from the United States and its allies and partners, have been paramount in Ukraine’s valiant defense against Russia. But economic sanctions have played a critical supporting role, as well. Over the course of the last ten months, Washington and its allies and partners have denied Russia’s key financial institutions access to the infrastructure that powers the global financial system and cut Russia off from the imports and advanced technologies that are essential to modern economic production. Multilateralism has been decisive for the effectiveness of these economic measures. After the United States imposed sanctions on Russia for the 2014 invasion of Crimea, Moscow spent eight years working to limit its exposure to the U.S. financial system, hoping to insulate Russia’s economy from the impact of future U.S. sanctions. But although Russia was able to reduce its exposure to the United States and the dollar, it could not avoid the international economic system and the other major freely convertible currencies that form its core—leaving Moscow deeply vulnerable.

Despite opinions to the contrary, sanctions work, we’re helping the Ukraine regain its independence, and making the Russians look like fools. Lets keep it up.

That does it for this week, see you next Monday for the post Christmas GNR. Until then, have a happy holiday.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/19/2142670/-From-the-GNR-Newsroom-its-the-Monday-Good-News-Roundup

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