Welcome back friends to the Good News Roundup, where me and my associates Killer300 and Bhu compile a selection of good stories throughout the previous week to bring a smile to your face and help you start your week off right. Nothing in particular to report this week, so lets get to the good stuff.
The European Union has agreed on a partial ban on Russian oil imports, according to European Council chief Charles Michel.
“Agreement to ban export of Russian oil to the EU. This immediately covers more than 2/3 of oil imports from Russia, cutting a huge source of financing for its war machine,” Michel announced in a tweet on Monday evening.
Michel’s announcement followed an extraordinary European Council summit attended by EU leaders in Brussels on Monday to discuss a sixth package of sanctions against Russia.
“This sanctions package includes other hard-hitting measures: de-Swifting the largest Russian bank Sberbank, banning 3 more Russian state-owned broadcasters, and sanctioning individuals responsible for war crimes in Ukraine,” Michel added.
Where is a Kleptocracy most vulnerable? In their checkbook. Keep up the pressure and the oligarchs will crumble.
“People getting fired during a union organizing campaign isn’t having the same impact it had in the past,” Hanson says. “Most of these workers are moving from one shitty job to another anyway, so they figure that they might as well organize to make them better while they are there.”
Union Kitchen workers are just one small part of a much larger organizing wave that is being spurred on by workers all across the country, including at Starbucks, Dollar General, Verizon Retail stores, Trader Joe’s and Apple retail stores. According to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), union elections were up 57% in the first half of 2022.
We’ve seen a similar level of energy for a few years in media organizing, where the NewsGuild-CWA, the union I work for, has organized 7,486 new workers at 160 workplaces since the beginning of 2018, according to the union’s president, Jon Schleuss.
The bosses have noticed the rising organizing wave as well. In a recent earnings call with Starbucks investors, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz noted, “There is a movement in the media and across multiple industries, including the service sector, whereby fellow citizens have begun turning to labor unions as a means of gaining voice, representation and improved working conditions.”
As I have said before, the time of companies being able to bully people into servitude is coming to an end. Unions are coming back and they are coming hard.
The Highways to Boulevards movement has been advocating for freeway removal for decades and has had success in the US and worldwide. The eight highway transformation featured below illustrate the historical precedent of these projects and the potential impacts and benefits of removing highways from cities.
The face of America is changing; less highways, more places to live.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked a Texas law requiring social media sites to post all content that expresses a "viewpoint," in at least a temporary victory for sites like Meta’s (FB) Facebook and Instagram.
The high court handed down the decision that grants an emergency request from tech industry lobbyists to block the law HB 20, which would hinder the sites' ability to take down content as they see fit. Justice Elena Kagan voted to deny the application to vacate stay, though separately from Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch who joined in a dissenting opinion.
Social media companies are not obligated to give platforms to liars and hate mongers. No matter how much the GOP may whine about it.
Some of the world’s biggest mining companies have withdrawn requests to research and extract minerals on Indigenous land in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, and have repudiated Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s efforts to legalize mining activity in the areas.
A big win for Brazil. Of course it will be a bigger when when they finally throw out that snake Bolsonaro.
Not only has it been scientifically proven that urban gardens, woodlands and parks reduce depression, in a study by the University of Leeds for example, they are immensely valuable for preserving the environment.
Urban gardens and vertical farms are starting to pop up all over the world, as the UN predicts 68 per cent of the world population will live in towns and cities by 2050. With the building of ‘urban forests’ around Paris, in a bid to decrease air pollution, and Singapore confronting the food crisis with sky farms and lab-grown shrimp, the trend is catching on.
When it comes to green architecture, the results are stunning. But what makes a building sustainable?
It's all about minimising the environmental impact of the structure. This could be through energy efficiency, eco-friendly materials or a deliberate awareness of its surroundings, aiming to conserve the biodiversity of the area.
Oh my god these places are beautiful I would love to live there.
Vietnam is planning an aggressive switch from coal to wind andsolar power from now through 2045, and industry analysts believegrid enhancements and policy incentives are required for thecountry to reach the ambitious goal amid rising domesticelectricity demand.
Earlier in April, the Ministry of Industry and Trade briefedindustry on the latest—and possibly the last—draft of theNational Power Development Plan for the 2021-2030 period, with avision to 2045 (PDP8), government-run Vietnam News Agencyreported.
Every year more and more countries are going green and its amazing.
he first time molecular biologist Doris Taylor saw heart stem cells beat in unison in a petri dish, she was spellbound.
“It actually changed my life,” said Taylor, who directed regenerative medicine research at Texas Heart Institute in Houston until 2020. “I said to myself, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s life.’ I wanted to figure out the how and why, and re-create that to save lives.”
That goal has become reality. On Wednesday at the Life Itself conference, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN, Taylor showed the audience the scaffolding of a pig’s heart infused with human stem cells – creating a viable, beating human heart the body will not reject. Why? Because it’s made from that person’s own tissues.
“Now we can truly imagine building a personalized human heart, taking heart transplants from an emergency procedure where you’re so sick, to a planned procedure,” Taylor told the audience.
Sometimes its really cool that we live in the future.
The Department of Education announced Wednesday that it will cancel $5.8 billion in student loan debt for 560,000 borrowers who attended the now-defunct network of for-profit schools known as Corinthian Colleges.
The cancellation amounts to the largest one-time discharge ever made by the Department of Education.
Some of Corinthian’s former students were already eligible for debt cancellation, but the new action will ensure that all borrowers who attended from Corinthian’s founding in 1995 through its closure in April 2015 will get debt relief.
RELATED: Student loan forgiveness divides Americans more by party and age than by education
At its peak in 2010, Corinthian Colleges enrolled more than 110,000 students at 105 campuses, including some called Everest, Heald College or WyoTech. The Department of Education has found that Corinthian Colleges misled prospective students about the ability to transfer credits and falsified its job placement rate.
So basically they cancelled the debt of students who went to these shady for profit colleges. Good for them.
While scavenging through a compost heap at a Leipzig cemetery, Christian Sonnendecker and his research team found seven enzymes they had never seen before.
They were hunting for proteins that would eat PET plastic — the most highly produced plastic in the world. It is commonly used for bottled water and groceries like grapes.
The scientists weren't expecting much when they brought the samples back to the lab, said Sonnendecker when DW visited their Leipzig University laboratory.
It was only the second dump they had rummaged through and they thought PET-eating enzymes were rare.
But in one of the samples, they found an enzyme, or polyester hydrolase, called PHL7. And it shocked them. The PHL7 enzyme disintegrated an entire piece of plastic in less than a day.
Exactly what we need; a way to eat all that nasty plastic up. Go Enzymes! Kick it into overtime!
Last month, somewhere off the coast of Maine, a small group of researchers and engineers released a series of tiny, floating objects into the water. The team called them “buoys,” but they looked more like a packet of uncooked ramen noodles glued to a green party streamer than anything of the navigational or weather-observing variety. These odd jellyfish had one role in life: to go away and never be seen again. With any luck, their successors would soon be released into the open ocean, where they would float away, absorb a small amount of carbon from the atmosphere, then sink to the bottom of the seafloor, where their residue would remain for thousands of years.
Kelp, its not just for dinner anymore (can people eat kelp? I’m unsure on that).
Member dues payments to the National Rifle Association continue to crater, with the group collecting just $97 million in dues in 2021, according to an annual financial report released at the organization’s recent convention in Houston. That’s the lowest figure since 2006, when member revenue was $72 million, and a 43 percent drop from a recent high of $170 million in 2018.
At an NRA board meeting held on Memorial Day, participants discussed declining net member totals and membership renewals, according to an account by Frank Tait, a longtime active NRA member and critic of the organization’s leadership who was present. According to that account, CEO Wayne LaPierre said that “gas prices and inflation” were the primary reasons for people not joining the association, even though the recent declines in membership revenue began in 2018.
I wouldn’t even waste thoughts and prayers on the NRA. I wouldn’t even give them an NFT.
One final bit of reading. Not really good news, but a message to all those who support the GOP and vote for their terrible policy, provided by a friend of mine: Oscar was my editor for a series of Magic the Gathering articles I wrote for the website Medium. So I’ll turn it over to him.
Please spread this far and wide, show it to whoever you can. Its an important message to spread.
And on that note, I wish you all a good day and hope you all have a good week.