Happy Valentines day everyone! Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, where we bring you the news of the world (And I’m not just talking Freddy Mercury) to get your week off to a good start.
Its Valentines day, a holiday I’ve never really celebrated too much myself, being Ace, I don’t really feel attraction to other people like that, but that doesn’t mean I’m not full of love in my heart for my fellow men (or that I’m not a fan of romance, love me some romantic fluff). So this Valentines day I wish all of you all the love you want and deserve out of the world.
Anyway, with the preamble out the way, lets move on to business.
n a handful of cities across the country, interactions between police and communities have grown so tense that municipal leaders have turned to conflict resolution sessions, where residents and the cops work with mediators to hash out differences. Los Angeles and Baltimore have operated complaint mediation programs since 2014 and 2016 respectively, allowing residents who file complaints to sit down with a mediator and the cops they have accused to work through the dispute.
Trauma to Trust is Newark’s spin on such a program, an attempt to get the two sides to better understand each other’s stress and trauma.
The city agreed to pilot the practice in the hopes it would help cool decades of conflict, tension, and strife. In 1967, Newark exploded in civil unrest after the police beat a taxi driver. Since then, the Newark Police Department has had routine brushes with controversy, from questionable shootings, to beatings, to discriminatory traffic and pedestrian stops. In 2016, Equal Justice USA, a national criminal justice reform nonprofit, partnered with the city to create the program. Trauma to Trust is fully funded through grants, and the city has not spent any of its municipal budget on the training. Organizers of the project encourage participants to confront the ways in which police contribute to the collective trauma of a community and understand the stress police officers endure on the job.
Like I said last week, the police in the US need to learn to dial it back on the stormtrooper stuff, and this seems to be a good step in this. Police are suppose to protect the people, ALL THE PEOPLE, and until they do then things will never get better.
A team of researchers—Wilton Olver, Yonah Freemark and Yipeng Su—at the Urban Institute published findings of an examination of the Final Mile Program, launched in 2018 with philanthropic funding to jump-start municipal bike infrastructure improvements. According to the source article, the program "supported a combination of advocacy, communications, and engineering support in Austin, Denver, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and Providence."
According to the research, cities involved in the program built more, higher quality bike infrastructure than other cities. "By the end of 2021, all Final Mile cities except New Orleans reached the ambitious cycling infrastructure mileage goals set by local officials: Austin and Denver completed at least 100 miles of improved bikeways during the program, significant expansions in investment compared with previous years," according to the article.
In a few months, I am going to be moving to a new apartment in my town (hopefully) and wherever I move its going to be further from my work than just “literally right next door.” So I’m considering my options for transportation, which has got me to thinking of getting a bike (I don’t drive, and even if I did I could not afford a car). Glad to see other people are thinking about bikes too.
The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen.
If nuclear fusion can be successfully recreated on Earth it holds out the potential of virtually unlimited supplies of low-carbon, low-radiation energy.
The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power).
This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997.
It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France.
Nuclear fusion, the holy grail of energy initiatives, and we’re getting closer to mastering it. Imagine, the power of the sun in the palm of our hands.
What Louisiana doesn’t conjure up are images of big solar power installations and a populace in favor of renewable energy. But that’s changing.
Last month, Lightsource bp started construction on Ventress Solar, the largest solar farm in Louisiana, which it will own and operate on 1,800 acres of land in Pointe Coupée Parish.
Louisiana had about 200 megawatts of solar installed as of Q3 of last year, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, so adding 345 megawatts in one fell swoop dramatically changes the state’s solar landscape.
It also indicates a sea change in the way some states that are historically rooted in the oil and gas industry are opening up to new energy sources.
Speaking of the power of the sun, Solar power comes to Louisiana, and people love it. This is good news since Louisiana has been fossil fuel town for a long time, so it seems like the times are a changing.
An Arizona Republican state senator broke with his party this week, blocking legislation that would have banned gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
State Sen. Tyler Pace voted Wednesday with three Democrats on the Arizona Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee, splitting the vote 4-4 and effectively killing the bill. Pace said that while he sees "both sides," he was ultimately swayed by personal stories from LGBTQ youths and their families.
"The testimonies we heard today about the many people who are using these avenues of medical treatments to save lives, to improve lives," he said during the committee hearing, "I don't want my vote to stop those great things."
Nice to see there are a few GOPer’s who have hearts, and who realize they don’t want to be on the wrong side of history. The far right have fought this war many times, against civil rights, against gay marriage, and they always lose, and they’ll lose this fight as well.
A federal judge reversed a Trump administration decision that removed the gray wolf from the endangered species list in the continental United States after a coalition of wildlife organizations argued the move seriously threatened the animal's population.
On Thursday, US District Judge Jeffrey S. White in Northern California ruled in favor of a lawsuit brought by the Humane Society of the United States and other wildlife organizations against the US Department of the Interior in January 2021.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) "failed to adequately analyze and consider the impacts of partial delisting and of historical range loss on the already-listed species," White wrote in his decision, which restored gray wolf protections in 45 states.
Oh another day, another terrible Trump era decision reversed. I live for the day when the stain of his presidency is wiped out forever.
proposed law in Wisconsin to ban public schools from teaching about the harms of racism was vetoed on Feb. 4 by Gov. Tony Evers, along with three other bills that had been passed by the Legislature’s Republican majority but without significant bipartisan support.
Evers also vetoed a bill allowing employers to assign younger teenagers to work longer hours both on school nights as well as on weekends and in the summer.
Education is the best weapon against racism, so its easy to see why the far right wants to prevent it from being taught so they can cultivate the next generation of racist assholes to vote for them. Luckily people are fighting back against their ignorance.
And with that, another Monday GNR comes to a close. Have a good week all, and we’ll catch you next Monday.