Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup. Where our crack team brings you the good news to start your week off right.
I’m on vacation! Yes, its my birthday vacation, but its also the last time I will work at the Tops of Arcade. In two weeks I will be moving to my new apartment in Perry. Hopefully things will go smoothly I have a few things to smooth out yet. So fingers crossed!
But enough of all that, its time for good news! Lets get to it.
The tide is turning on in-city freeways—but the movement to reverse course on these thoroughfares is just gaining momentum. In recent weeks, three highway expansion projects across the US have run into roadblocks or ended entirely.
Oregon DOT (ODOT) declined to defend its environmental review to widen I-5 through Portland’s growing Eastside neighborhood.
I-5 in Portland made CNU’s Freeways Without Futures list in 2019, in support of a proposal to remove I-5 completely through the city, rerouting its traffic on I-405. The current victory against I-5 does not go that far, only making the expansion less likely.
Yeah, this is good news. Less freeways, more public transport. I hope the horrible gas price gouging on gas will encourage public transport to become popular again.
The United States is undergoing a severe shortage of baby formula, leaving millions of parents in a difficult spot. Breastfeeding isn’t an option for many parents, including those who cannot lactate, don’t produce enough milk, or have certain medical conditions. Even for parents who can breastfeed, it is a costly affair, as the task takes up as much time as a full-time job.
Naturally, parents are looking for alternatives such as plant-based milk, some going as far as to concoct them at home. Alternatives are not always harmful, but none of them meet the nutritional requirements of a baby. And while preventing future shortages of baby formula will require fixing supply chains, cellular agriculture startups are also developing a potential solution. Their answer, albeit a few years down the road, is cell-cultured human milk.
Science is always an amazing thing. Lets make that fake milk! Good for the bones, good for the kids.
Berwyn noticed a need for community-centered places in their city and took thoughtful, incremental actions in filling it. Berwyn Shops: A Homegrown Project, is a nest of twelve 12-by-15-foot cottage-style shops designed to be a personable incubator spot for beginning businesses. This simple design gives business owners the opportunity to experiment with the local market before making a large investment into a full-blown storefront operation.
Its always good news when small businesses get a chance to shine.
But eminent domain has become an issue around which an “unlikely alliance” of farmers, ranchers, Indigenous tribes, scientists, and environmentalists have rallied, said Mahmud Fitil, an organizer with the Great Plains Action Society, an Indigenous activist network. The legal tactic was used to complete previous oil pipeline projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline, which “left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths,” Fitil said. Now, rural conservatives and environmental groups are fighting the same battle against carbon pipelines.
People are coming together to fight the pollution threatening our planet.
djunct faculty and lecturers at Santa Clara University, a private Jesuit university in Silicon Valley, have been working to organize a non-tenure track (NTT) faculty union for five years. Along with navigating the particular challenges that come with worker organizing in higher education, theirs is a historic campaign because it is taking place at a religious institution, which the National Labor Relations Board does not exercise jurisdiction over.
Looks like everyone is unionizing these days, even religious institutions, and that is great news.
It all began three years ago, with a tragedy on the outskirts of Nur-Sultan. Five daughters of the Siter family died in a fire in their home, a coal-fired temporary shelter, while their parents were at work. The oldest was 12, the youngest nine months. The funeral drew hundreds of people, while thousands turned out to protest against a system that fails to provide adequate housing and child benefits for large families in need. Several thousand Kazakhstani mothers united in rage and grief on Telegram and WhatsApp.
Since then, large families have been holding regular protest rallies, which are almost always unsanctioned and generally end with the involvement of riot police. When the women refuse to leave the protests, the police carry them away. The protesters have also besieged government offices and picketed official events. Once, they even occupied the Kazakhstani capital’s animal shelter.
The fierce resistance marks out the “mothers of many children”, as they are called, among Kazakhstan’s protest movements.
“We have a way of doing things: when they try to detain one of us, we all run to her together, and [the security forces] also run in a crowd to protect their people,” says Bayan Miras, an entrepreneur and mother of six.
Its always inspiring to see people rising up to protest against injustice and oppression.
These horrifying outcomes — coupled with ample evidence that the way officers police streets, sidewalks, bike lanes, and crosswalks is marred by racism and largely ineffective — led Transportation Alternatives to call for major reductions in the role of armed police traffic enforcement last year. That report — The Case for Self-Enforcing Streets How Reallocating a Portion of the NYPD Budget to the DOT Can Reduce the Harm of Racial Bias and Improve Safety for All New Yorkers — argued that police traffic enforcement budgets would be better used to redesign streets and install automated safety cameras, reducing the role of armed police officers in traffic safety. Transportation Alternatives also demanded major changes to how traffic crashes are investigated.
Good news, the police need to be remade to be less violent and more focused on actually protecting people and not just being bullies.
Video break!
New battery technology that could help technology advance.
But Solarcycle, a startup that launched earlier this year, says it has found a way to tackle the problem. The solar panel recycling company claims that its technology allows it to extract 95 percent of the high-value metals contained in solar photovoltaic panels such as silver, silicon, copper and aluminum and to either repurpose them or return them to the supply chain.
So basically they are gonna recycle old solar panels to make new ones. That is excellent news.
Fortunately, many climate activists are recognizing that, as in a host of other crises, it is both necessary and possible to focus on more immediate targets — from state and local governments to fossil-fuel giants that can be confronted with disinvestment as well as physical blockages of pipelines and other climate-destroying projects. Such actions, if multiplied around the world, have the potential for their own cumulative impact as well as for catalyzing action by national governments.
Examples of such initiatives abound even though they may not be featured in global headlines.
Even with the GOP (and Manchin and Sienma) dragging their feet on climate change, the people are making sure they know we haven’t forgotten.
When we posted news of the agreement on social media, many of the comments expressed disappointment that the legislation would not include the kinds of reforms certain European countries passed in the wake of their own shootings, like an all-out ban on handguns or assault rifles. Many wrote that the deal was “not enough.”
We understand this point of view. But we’d also like to point out that despite all the comparisons, the United States is not Europe. The United States is unlike any other nation when it comes to guns, actually, because no other country protects the right to bear arms in its founding document. The dialogue gets paralyzed when it isn’t properly understood that banning guns, for many, many American constituents, is quite simply a no-go. So the deal may not be everything the Democrats wanted—and Republicans have their own concerns—but public support of many of the individual items included in it is high and cuts across political affiliation. Why would we not cheer that on? Many of us decry polarization and the fact that our politicians can’t get anything done but then refuse to see when we are contributing to the problem. If we want more cooperation among our elected representatives, we should support them when they actually do it.
We may not always get everything but we want, but we should at least appreciate it when we get some things. Of course we still have a lot of work to do, but this is a start.
Once again Dems are kicking ass and taking names in special elections. It bodes well for us in November. Lets make another blue wave happen.
“With more mail-in ballots counted, the notion that California voters had resoundingly embraced a more carceral approach to governance started to fall apart.”
And by the following week, with more mail-in ballots counted, the notion that California voters had resoundingly embraced a more carceral approach to governance started to fall apart. This wasn’t surprising in a state where every registered voter receives a mail-in ballot. People who vote by mail tend to lean progressive and because they have until Election Day to put their ballot in the mail, many of their votes will not be counted until days or even weeks later. County election officials have until July 8 to report official results to the Secretary of State.
Never count your chickens before they hatch.
A Dallas County judge granted a motion Friday to strike the Texas Attorney General’s intervention in a case where a doctor is fighting to continue providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth at Children’s Medical Center, a decision which essentially removes Ken Paxton’s office from the case.
The decision was another victory for Dr. Ximena Lopez and her lawyers, who argued Paxton’s office had no authority to intervene in a case about a doctor’s judgment in providing treatment that falls within the medical standard of care.
Once again the GOP’s monstrous treatment of trans youth is getting slapped down in the courts. Good job judges.
I think that’s a good sampling of articles for this week, Next week will be doubly special as it will be my birthday, and will be the last GNR I make from my current abode. We’ll see you then!