Welcome to the Monday GNR. Its Memorial Day again. A time for reverence, a time for reflection, a time to think of those who gave their lives in the defense of democracy and our nation.
But its more than that. Its a time of barbecues, of putting fans in windows and switching on the AC, it is, for many people, the official beginning of summer. In the past, I have been criticized for wishing people a Happy Memorial Day, and I can see where they come from. So this year I decided I would split the difference, by wishing everyone a respectful Memorial Day, and also a happy beginning of Summer.
And in that spirit, we got ourselves a jam packed GNR, so lets get right to it.
In the city of Woburn, Massachusetts, a suburb just north of Boston, a cadre of engineers and scientists in white coats inspected an orderly stack of brick-sized, gunmetal-gray steel ingots on a desk inside a neon-illuminated lab space.
What they were looking at was a batch of steel created using an innovative manufacturing method, one that Boston Metal, a company that spun out a decade ago from MIT, hopes will dramatically reshape the way the alloy has been made for centuries. By using electricity to separate iron from its ore, the firm claims it can make steel without releasing carbon dioxide, offering a path to cleaning up one of the world’s worst industries for greenhouse gas emissions.
Across the business world companies are working hard to reduce their carbon footprints. It may not be perfect but its a good start.
A U.S. appeals court on Monday blocked a controversial Florida law that would ban Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites from moderating political speech, kicking political candidates off their platforms, and removing posts from so-called journalistic enterprises.
In an order issued on Monday, a three-judge panel for 11th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a Florida judge's injunction that blocked application of the law passed last year. The court let stand part of the law that requires social media companies to disclose their content moderation criteria. Enforcement of the statute, known as SB 7072, has been on hold pending challenges from Big Tech lobbyist NetChoice.
Once again: Freedom of speech means the government can’t tell you to shut up. Doesn’t mean Facebook and Twitter can’t.
President Biden is expected to sign an executive order on federal policing Wednesday at the White House, multiple sources tell CBS News, two years after George Floyd died at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
The executive order comes after bipartisan negotiations in Congress to reform policing failed last year. The effort, which was sparked by Floyd's death, was spearheaded by Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Democratic Sen. Cory Booker and Democratic Rep. Karen Bass.
Scott declined to comment on the pending executive action, but Booker called it "very strong."
Biden once again doing great things, and after the tragedy in Texas the police need a serious wake up call.
The Supreme Court’s decisions on mandatory arbitration typically range from bad to atrocious. For decades, conservative justices have routinely used this tactic to stop workers and consumers from vindicating their rights in court while crushing class actions, leaving victims of corporate malfeasance without any meaningful remedy. So it was a bit gobsmacking when, on Monday, the court issued a unanimous decision against mandatory arbitration, overturning an absurdly unfair rule that stacked the deck against plaintiffs. The court’s ruling in Morgan v. Sundance won’t heal all the wounds inflicted by awful precedents. But it does bring real justice to an otherwise perverse area of the law.
Monday’s case started when a Taco Bell franchise allegedly began engaging in wage theft to deny overtime pay for its employees. One worker, Robyn Morgan, accused the franchise manager of recording extra hours under the wrong week to avoid triggering overtime. Morgan filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of herself and other wronged employees, and Sundance, the franchise owner, defended itself in court for nearly eight months. Then, suddenly, the company announced that it would force Morgan to arbitrate her claim individually. As it turned out, her employment contract had a mandatory arbitration clause, which Sundance had ignored until the parties and the judge were already deep into the litigation.
The SCOTUS needs fixing, make no mistake about that, but once in a while we can manage to get a good ruling out of them. And this is a big win for workers rights.
The Buffalo shooter wrote racist screeds online before targeting and killing people in a majority-Black neighborhood. We look at the incident’s similarities to other white supremacist killings, particularly the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Amy Spitalnick is the executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonprofit organization that successfully sued the white supremacist organizers of Unite the Right. Spitalnick says tactics such as live-streaming are characteristic of previous acts of white supremacist terrorism, and calls for systemic change and preventative measures amid a clear pattern of violence. “This is precisely part of a cycle of white supremacist violence in which each attack inspires the next one,”
If we sue these monsters, we can discourage them from hurting more people possibly.
Since the Amazon Labor Union’s stunning win in April, much of the media analysis around the victory has been centered on Smalls. Just as important, however, is the collective story of the workers who charted their own path against one of the world’s biggest companies.
What became the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) brought together an organic group of leaders demanding safety and dignity at Amazon — some with prior union experience — and a diverse, roving band of socialists in their 20s seeking to join a righteous labor fight. After setting their sights on a union election at the JFK8 warehouse, the group was joined by veteran warehouse workers who brought a deep bench of experience and relationships to the campaign. All of them were essential to the ALU’s upset win to represent more than 8,000 warehouse workers.
We can defeat the billionaires. All we need do is work together.
It is now illegal in Russia to call the war a “war” or protest it in any way. Violators can face up to 15 years in jail. According to the Russian government Lexus, what is happening is a “military operation.” Even people who go out on the streets with empty hands (pretending they hold a poster) have been detained. It is also prohibited to write anything anti-war in public spaces and on social media.
However, a lot of people in Russia continue to defy the authorities. Apart from individual protests when people oppose knowing in advance they would be detained, other forms of public dissent have emerged. People draw graffiti, leave objects on the streets, and find other ways to show their opposition under the constant threat of punishment.
The rare independent sources, for instance, student journal DOXA and the Telegram channel of journalist Roman Super, publish collections of protest photos every day showing readers that within Russian society there is more than the “unified” around the lies of propaganda.
The harder Putin tries to stomp out dissent, the harder they will fight back.
(Also today at work I saw a bumper sticker that said “Fuck Putin” in Ukraine flag colors. Sometimes you see something that restores your faith in humanity).
New efforts by federal and state authorities to encourage the construction of housing in walkable and transit-rich communities suggests that many cities’ best chance at progressive zoning reform will come from the top down, rather than the grass roots.
On May 16, the Biden administration announced a slate of new initiatives aimed at increasing housing production in dense U.S. cities, including a promise to immediately “reward jurisdictions that have put in place land-use policies to promote density and rural main street revitalization.” The White House also explicitly highlighted “transit-oriented development” as one of its primary goals, signaling a rare willingness to exercise federal influence over city-building policies that are typically left up to local policymakers alone.
Sustainable transportation and affordable housing advocates heralded the news, though some cautioned the feds need to think more deeply about what zoning reforms, specifically, will have the biggest impact — before they start writing checks.
I might be using a bus to get to and from work in the very near future, so this is especially good news for me.
We’re making a little progress on a couple of suggestions from these lists, including developing smart guns and a bipartisan effort around revamped mental health legislation.
And Illinois just became the first Midwest state to pass a ban on ghost guns, which is a term for guns assembled at home from unserialized, and thus untraceable, gun parts bought online. Eleven other states and DC already have laws in place around ghost guns.
One of TPN’s slogans is “progress is still possible.” Even in this tragic mess, we believe that. To stop believing is to give
Sometimes it seems like its hopeless, sometimes it seems like things will never get better, that things will never change. That the cowardly and cruel will always get their way.
But don’t you believe it. Things can get better, change can happen. We just have to be brave enough to stand up and fight for it.
American workers have the upper hand over their employers right now — and there are tentative signs it could last, even as economic storm clouds gather.
Why it matters: Put simply, your boss needs you more than you need her. And it might stay that way, at least for some workers, particularly those on the lower end of the wage scale.
The big picture: There just aren't as many workers these days, as demographic forces were supercharged by the pandemic.
- "The labor supply has shrunk, which gives workers more leverage, more bargaining power and pushes employers to compete harder and improve job quality," Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist at the University of Minnesota, tells Axios.
The era of big corporations bullying us and treating us as serfs is slowly coming to an end. We just have to come together and be strong.
Cutting greenhouse gas emissions at the source should be the main goal when tackling climate change, but the most recent IPCC report also recommends carbon capture and storage technologies as key parts of the effort to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
The startup Heimdal is well aware of the need for such technologies, which is why it developed an innovative carbon removal machine that can store CO2 while helping reduce the ocean’s acidity.
Working with the ocean to capture CO2
Heimdal’s process involves pumping saltwater into the machine, which uses electricity to tweak molecular bonds in the water, removing acid. The resulting acid comes in the form of hydrochloric acid, which can then be used in many different industrial applications. The acid-free seawater is then pumped back into the ocean, where it will naturally capture CO2.
“When the excess acidity is removed from the ocean, it shifts how CO2 exists back to how it was pre-Industrial Revolution,” says Heimdal co-founder Erik Millar. “This moves it away from being carbonic acid, which causes ocean acidification, and toward bicarbonate and carbonate. These are stable forms of mineralized carbon dioxide that make their way down to the ocean floor, where they are stored for more than 100,000 years.”
Every day we are working hard to build a future which is greener than the one before.
Interestingly, many of the people like you who are so close to solutions understand that all is not lost. And that’s key — being able to have eyes on the solution, not just what we’re fighting against, but what we’re working for. And being able to have that within reach is so important for the way that we’re modeling our climate communications, giving people robust, meaningful pathways to think through and imagine that are inherently hopeful. And to get away from the misinformation, which often a depressive mindset can kind of cling to.
A lot of people feel powerless about Climate Change, but that only makes the problem worse. We CAN fix this, and we will.
A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll asking voters which party they’d back in the upcoming midterm Congressional elections found Democrats in the lead by 5 percent, suggesting — per these results — that Democrats are gearing up to surge to the polls. The poll found a majority — 66 percent — of Democrats say the Supreme Court embarking on a “redirection” regarding abortion grows how likely they are to vote this year.
I can’t think of a better story to end on, because we need some good news looking forward to the midterms. Of course, if the 2020 election taught us anything its not to trust polls, and to make sure to be ready for a tough fight, but I have a good feeling about the midterms, and so should you. This is a fight we will win.
That does it for another Good News roundup. And whether you spend today remembering those brave Americans who gave their lives, or if you spend it barbecuing and setting off fireworks, know that we at the GNR wish you all of the best.