Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, where myself, Killer300 and Bhu go out and gather the good news of the past week to help start your week off right.
Its Labor day! If Memorial day is the unofficial beginning of Summer, than Labor day is the unofficial end of summer. I actually have Labor Day off this year because I an dependent on the bus to get to work and no buses run today. But just because I have the day off doesn’t mean I’m not gonna work hard for you guys, because we got plenty of good news to help you enjoy this Labor Day, whether you have to work on it or not.
The ways in which this pressure moved Biden from inaction to an executive order illustrates what activist scholars such as historian Howard Zinn long argued: One can’t be neutral on a moving train, and change only occurs through sustained protest and agitation from the citizenry. Indeed, Lawrence O’Donnell explained that when he worked for the Democratic Party, they ignored the demands from the Left because many were never willing to actually withhold their votes on election day—ultimately succumbing to the fear tactics of the party’s ongoing “vote blue no matter who” propaganda campaign. As Biden’s recent executive order illustrates, those seeking to codify abortion rights need to agitate and annoy Democratic leadership to take aggressive action.
Try saying that headline five times fast.
And once again, protesting works. Lets keep up that momentum and show them what happens when they come for our rights.
The Ukrainian language has endured centuries of repression, including outright bans by Imperial Russia and political persecution in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Now, in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, international interest in learning the language has surged.
Last week marked six months since Russia invaded Ukraine, and the toll has been heavy. Exact figures remain difficult to confirm, but civilian deaths are believed to be in the tens of thousands, more than 13 million people have been displaced, and some 6.6 million refugees have fled the country. Around 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 25,000 Russian ones are said to have been killed.
Amid these devastating losses, the rising global prominence of the Ukrainian language is a slim silver lining.
Learn to speak Ukranian. It will piss off Putin.
Mary Peltola is going to the US House. The former state House member will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress after winning the state’s first ranked choice election on Wednesday. Peltola will serve out the remainder of the term of former Representative Don Young, who passed away in March.
Peltola maintained her lead in Round 1 to beat out Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich with a final total of 91,206 votes, or a little over 51 percent. After Begich was eliminated in the first round of ranked-choice tabulations, the second-place votes on his voters’ ballots were redistributed. But they weren’t enough to grant victory to Palin, a former Alaska governor, vice presidential nominee, and far-right political celebrity. She captured 49 percent of the final vote. Alaska Division of Elections director Gail Fenumiai announced the results on a Facebook livestream.
Some good news moving forward to November. I was not expecting a Blue Alaska this year, but its a welcome surprise.
Renewable energy is set for an unprecedented boom in the US in the wake of its first ever climate bill, with the capacity of solar and wind projects expected to double by the end of the decade and providing the bulk of total American electricity supply, new analysis has shown.
The passage of the legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), will help propel the US towards the forefront of the clean energy economy, experts predict, helping it compete with China on the manufacturing and installation of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and emerging zero carbon technology.
I hope they are right, we definitely need it.
The name doesn’t make it obvious, but the Inflation Reduction Act is the most significant climate legislation ever to become law. It also does a lot of other important things. Here are 12 ways this bill benefits birds, people, and the places we need.
This is good because I was wondering “But what has Biden done for the birds lately?”
The natural phenomenon occurs twice a year on the Great Barrier Reef, usually between October and December.
But under controlled conditions in a Townsville lab, coral have reproduced in the middle of winter.
Australian Institute of Marine Science senior aquarist Lonidas Koukoumaftsis said the breakthrough was two years in the making.
This is good. If we want to rebuild the reef, spawning coral just twice a year wont cut it.
Clean energy accounted for more than two-thirds of the new US electrical generating capacity added during the first six months of 2022, according to data recently released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
Wind (5,722 megawatts) and solar (3,895 MW) provided 67.01% of the 14,352 MW in utility-scale (that is, greater than 1 MW) capacity that came online during the first half of 2022.
Additional capacity was provided by geothermal (26 MW), hydropower (7 MW), and biomass (2 MW). The balance came from natural gas (4,695 MW) and oil (5 MW). No new capacity was reported for 2022 from either nuclear power or coal.
And think, this was before the IRA dropped.
According to Euan McTurk, a consultant battery electrochemist at Plug Life Consulting, since technologies such as cell-to-pack, cell-to-body, and cell-to-chassis battery construction allow batteries to be more efficiently distributed inside the car, they get us much closer to a hypothetical perfect EV battery. “The ultimate battery pack would be one that consists of 100 percent active material. That is, every part of the battery pack stores and releases energy,” he says.
Traditionally, EV batteries have used cell modules that are then interconnected into packs. BYD pioneered cell-to-pack technology, which does away with the intermediate module stage and puts the cells directly into the pack. According to Richie Frost, the founder and CEO of Sprint Power, “standard modules may fit well within one pack but leave large areas of ‘wasted’ space in another pack. By removing the constraints of a module, the number of cells can be maximized within any enclosure.”
So cell-to-pack allows the module building blocks to be left out of a battery pack, meaning less wasted volume. BYD has also championed LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries, which have better chemical stability and are cheaper to produce. One problem is that the energy density of LFP cells isn’t that good compared to the NCM (nickel cobalt manganese) chemistry cells used in EVs like Hyundai’s Kona Electric, Jaguar’s I-Pace, and Volkswagen’s ID range. However, a cell-to-pack design enables the company to fit more cells into a given space and increase the density to a level closer to that achievable with NCM batteries.
Seems like the technology for EV’s is getting better by the day. This is definitely a good thing.
n the coming weeks, a volunteer in Boston, Massachusetts, will be the first to trial a new treatment that could end up creating a second liver in their body. And that’s just the start—in the months that follow, other volunteers will test doses that could leave them with up to six livers in their bodies.
The company behind the treatment, LyGenesis, hopes to save people with devastating liver diseases who are not eligible for transplants. Their approach is to inject liver cells from a donor into the lymph nodes of sick recipients, which can give rise to entirely new miniature organs. These mini livers should help compensate for an existing diseased one. The approach appears to work in mice, pigs, and dogs. Now we’ll find out if it works in people.
If it does work, the treatment could be revolutionary. Donor organs are in short supply, and many of those donated can’t be used—for example, sometimes the tissue is too damaged. The new approach can make use of organs that would otherwise have been discarded, and the researchers reckon they can get treatments for around 75 people from a single donated organ.
I’ve said this before, but I love living in the future.
he online reviews site Yelp said Tuesday it is rolling out a new feature to protect users seeking abortions from being misled about anti-abortion pregnancy centers listed on its platform.
Such centers are typically religiously affiliated and deter clients from having an abortion. On Tuesday, Yelp said it will place a consumer notice on the listings informing users that the centers “typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.”
In 2018, moderators for the San Francisco-based company began recategorizing listings for such organizations as “crisis pregnancy centers” or “faith-based crisis pregnancy centers.” The organizations had previously categorized themselves as reproductive health services, medical centers and other health and medical categories.
Those anti Abortionists never miss a trick, luckily we got their number.
Sudanese journalists have formed the country’s first independent union in more than three decades.
Abdulmoniem Abu Idrees, 58, Khartoum correspondent for the Agence France-Presse news agency, was elected the union’s first president in a vote on Sunday.
“It’s historic,” he said. “It will be a notable day for the unions, a day in which we exercise our democracy under a military rule and despite all the manacles that prevent[ed] us from doing so. I believe that other professions will follow suit.”
The last independent journalists’ union was dissolved in 1989 when Omar al-Bashir came to power. Under Bashir, journalists experienced imprisonment and torture. Hundreds were arrested, some spending years behind bars for covering stories the government didn’t like.
Its good to see people fighting back against oppression and taking back what was stolen from them. Keep it up.
(Trigger warning for child death in this story)
Colorful crosswalks may reduce vehicular violence one intersection at a time, but the broader problem is more difficult to tackle: most US cities prioritize cars. Even costly new projects, such as the 6th Street Bridge in Los Angeles, come up short in regards to pedestrian and bicyclist safety. Contrast this with many European countries, particularly in Scandinavia, that have redesigned their streets by taking space away from cars and designating lanes exclusively for people and bikes. Since Sweden implemented “Vision Zero,” an initiative that has since been adopted by other cities in Europe and the US, traffic fatalities there have fallen by half. Likewise in Norway, where, after five years of committing to safe traffic strategies, Oslo, a city of over 600,000, marked its first full year with no pedestrian or cyclist fatalities in 2019.
“Good design keeps people safe,” says Mikael Colville-Andersen, a Danish-Canadian city planner, in Boyd’s documentary. An avid bicyclist, Colville-Andersen has a suggestion: “City planners should be forced to ride their bikes to work every day for at least a month before planning a city.”
Just a way we might be able to help make our streets safer from drivers.
Even just a decade ago, the state of Richmond’s transit was a sorry affair. The same city that constructed the world’s first electric streetcar system burned it to the ground 60 years later. Richmond then razed Black neighborhoods with interstate highways, and became a de-facto transit wasteland by the early 21st century.
In 2011, the policy think-tank Brookings Institute found that out of the top 100 metro areas, Richmond ranked 92nd for transit access, a dismal finding even in a country not known for its public transportation. Thanks to segregation, redlining, and other racist policies, many of Richmond’s, carless, Black, and poor residents were dependent on a woefully inadequate transportation system well into the 21st century.
But then things started to shift by 2018. Richmond overhauled the Greater Richmond Transit Company (GRTC)’s bus network, streamlining routes and connecting residents to employment centers with an emphasis on frequent service and equitable mobility. Concurrently, Richmond constructed the first bus rapid transit line in Central Virginia along the region’s busiest corridor, Broad Street, thanks to a federal grant. As a result, ridership immediately increased 17%, and over 5 million people have ridden the Pulse since it opened for service just three and a half years ago.
We definitely need to improve mass transit, and this is a good start.
The program enables participants to get licensed as teachers through an apprenticeship, instead of paying out of pocket for the degree. Many apprentices work in a school, gradually taking on more teaching responsibilities, while studying for an education degree at night. Other students, like high schoolers and college students, work as student teachers in their local districts, while taking working toward their bachelor’s degree. The tuition and fees are paid for through the program, but in addition student apprentices get tutoring and coaching.
I think giving teachers funding and respect and not censoring them would help with the shortage, but this works too.
The Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) on Friday said that it will provide access to abortions to pregnant veterans in limited circumstances.
In a statement, the department said it submitted an interim final rule in the federal register to allow it to provide access to abortion counseling, as well as the procedure itself for people who became pregnant as a result of rape or incest, or if carrying a pregnancy to term endangers the life of the mother.
The department said the services would be authorized immediately after the final rule is published, and it will be made available for public comment for 30 days following publication.
The VA is going to war against Anti abortionists. Good for them.
Every household in the group contributes the renewable energy it collects — for instance, through solar panels or thermal power stations — to the virtual power plant. At any given time, every group member can see how much energy is available in this virtual plant, as well as how much they are producing and using, individually and collectively. They can then adjust their own energy consumption accordingly, first using as much green energy as they’re producing themselves; then, as much as has been made available by the other members; and finally, selling any left over back to the grid. If every member of the group chooses to do this, they are effectively drawing no electricity from the grid.
For now, the group is regional — the closest member lives just a few houses down from Falger — but there’s no reason the model couldn’t extend to anybody who wants to participate. A Hamburg homeowner could “share” the surplus energy from her rooftop solar panels with a farmer in Bavaria whose electric tractor needs a charge.
“Think of it like you’re throwing a cable over to your neighbor and saying, hey, my solar panels produce enough energy for both of us, but virtually,” explains Penski.
This seems like a neat concept. I hope it works and that it catches on.
Now 537 Gymnogyps californianus soar over North America again, 334 of them in the wild, with their characteristic rumbling wing swoosh that earned them the nickname “thunderbird.” The iconic birds are slowly expanding their range again, from Big Sur to Arizona and Baja California, not least thanks to Wendt and his employer, the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. This year, 11 eggs have been laid at the “Condor-minium,” as Wendt and his colleagues playfully call the breeding station, a large facility in a quiet part of the 1,800-acre safari park where no visitors are allowed.
Hooray for the condors! They’re making a comeback.
Internet hosting and security services provider Cloudflare said Saturday that it would block Kiwi Farms, a website associated with harassment campaigns against transgender people.
The announcement puts the future of the fringe internet forum in doubt, though some of its members had already anticipated that Cloudflare could act and began to explore other options.
When attempting to visit Kiwi Farms’ website Saturday evening, an error message appeared that said: “Due to an imminent and emergency threat to human life, the content of this site is blocked from being accessed through Cloudflare’s infrastructure.”
Good job Cloudflare. Lets deplatform bigots at every turn. Tell the lot of them to shut up.
In the months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion bans have spread across the country, and as recently as last week, abortion is a felony in Texas punishable with life in prison. But on Monday, the Federal Trade Commission announced a tiny bit of encouraging news.
The FTC is suing major data broker Kochava Inc. for allegedly selling location data that could track people going to abortion clinics, fertility clinics, addiction recovery centers, domestic violence shelters, and a number of other sensitive locations. The company has denied any wrongdoing.
Good on the FTC for getting on this. Go forth and protect our data from those who would misuse it.
That does it for this week. A lot of good news from across the globe, and I hope you all have a good Labor day and the rest of September. I know I will.