Welcome back friends, to the Monday Good News Roundup, that time of the week where your GNR Newsroom (myself, Killer300 and Bhu) round up a lot of good news to start your week off right. So without further ado, lets get things going.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has become the latest state Republican to lash out at a fellow party member in another example of red-on-red attacks over the last year.
Abbott said that he does not "trust" state Representative DeWayne Burns on immigration issues, a key topic for Republicans who blame the border crisis on Democrats and President Joe Biden. The governor also said he did not support Burns on "any issue" and supported his party primary opponent Helen Kerwin for Texas' House District 58 seat
Once again, its a sign that the GOP is not doing so well that they are on each others throats like this.
University of Delaware professor Willett Kempton is a pioneer of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology. In fact, he and his team of EV researchers at the university have been turning electric vehicles into grid batteries since 2007, when they kicked off a first-of-a-kind experiment that’s since been replicated in V2G projects around the world.
But Kempton is well aware of the technology and policy gaps that are holding V2G back from mainstream adoption. That’s why he’s spent years working with colleagues and students on updates to a technology standard that he hopes will make mass-market V2G a realistic option for automakers, utilities and drivers alike.
The standard is called SAE J3068, and last month, automotive standards organization SAE International formally adopted key new V2G capabilities for it. Kempton calls them a “practical, low-cost and implementable” way to turn every EV into a roaming grid battery.
Say it with me now: I love living in the future.
Streetsblog Investigative Reporter Jesse Coburn has won a George Polk Award for his series on the black market for fraudulent paper license plates that exploded during the pandemic.
"Ghost Tags: Inside New York City’s Black Market for Temporary License Plates" was published over three days in April 2023 and has already led to legislative reforms in New Jersey, with additional bills pending in Georgia and New York.
"Jesse's hard work not only changed the law in New Jersey, but has now earned him one of the highest accolades in journalism," Streetsblog Editor Gersh Kuntzman said. "He put in seven months of reporting in three states to create a picture of a completely broken system that reckless drivers and shady car dealers exploited, creating unsafe streets for the rest of us. His reporting, frankly, makes New Yorkers safer. I'd be wrong if I didn't say I was damn proud, and very jealous, of him."
This is what real journalism looks like. We need more stuff like this in the media.
Why I Am Optimistic About Winning This November - Many of you have asked about the writing of the latest commentator to freak everyone out. I am hesitant to do it, for if I had to respond to everyone each day who said something I didn’t agree with that would be all I do, every day. But let’s dive in. First, please begin with all recent takes on why I am optimistic about why we will win this November. The three best right now are:
Hopium once again helping with staying calm for this years election cycle.
A clerk for the New York County Supreme Court enters in the judgment for former President Donald Trump’s financial fraud trial and New York Attorney General Letitia James submits paperwork that starts a 30-day countdown until Trump is forced to begin paying off the $464,576,230 civil judgment against him. Lawyers for Trump ask Judge Aileen Cannon to dismiss all criminal charges stemming from his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House on the grounds that he is “entitled to immunity” from being prosecuted. Here are the latest developments in the legal cases facing the former White House resident who is seeking to be reelected in 2024.
I’m amazed he actually wants to run for president again. It worked so well for him the first time.
WASHINGTON – Three Republicans who had their pay docked in 2021 for flouting a mask mandate on the floor of the House of Representatives during the COVID pandemic got no help from the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
The justices, without comment, declined an appeal from Reps. Tom Massie, Ralph Norman and Marjorie Taylor Greene in their suit against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Lower courts had said Pelosi could not be sued because courts don’t have jurisdiction over Congress’ internal rules.
Lawyers for the current House speaker, Republican Mike Johnson of Louisiana, agreed with that decision. Despite House GOP leaders' opposition to the mask rule, they told the Supreme Court, “this case is not about the wisdom of the rule or whether it was based on sound science.”
JUST WEAR THE MASKS YOU SPOILED BABIES.
On Wednesday, researchers from Princeton University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory reported in the journal Nature they found a way to use AI to forecast these potential instabilities and prevent them from happening in real time.
The team carried out their experiments at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, and found that their AI controller could forecast potential plasma tearing up to 300 milliseconds in advance. Without that intervention, the fusion reaction would have ended suddenly.
Still love living in the future.
The first lab-made diamonds were produced by General Electric (GE) in 1954. At .00075 carats—an average engagement ring diamond is one carat—they were about the size of a grain of sugar and used to cut and polish glass, metals, and teeth.
GE was also the first to produce gem-quality diamonds in 1971, although the quality wasn’t high enough to sell as jewelry. They were yellow, and the process trapped impurities in them.
These downsides were fixed by the 80s and 90s, when it became possible to create lab-grown diamonds that, to consumers and sometimes even to gemologists, were indistinguishable from natural ones. These lab-grown diamonds are created using “diamond seeds,” slivers of diamond as thin as hair. The results are real diamonds, not imitations like cubic zirconia.
For years, they were too expensive to be commercially viable, at tens of thousands of dollars to produce one stone, estimates the International Gem Society (IGS). By 2008, that had fallen to $4,000 per stone, to a mere couple of hundred today.
It’s no surprise, then, that the lab-grown diamond market has exploded. In early 2023, over 17 percent of diamond engagement rings sold in the United States were set with lab-grown stones. That may not seem like much until you see that in 2020, the share was less than two percent:
Lets hear it for Lab Grown diamonds!
Donald Trump and his senior staff are pointing fingers after a leak from his camp wound up on the front page of the New York Times.
The newspaper revealed that Trump had privately told allies he supports a 16-week national abortion plan, with some exceptions. The former president's campaign reportedly greeted the story with anger, frustration and paranoia that's left them scrambling to clean up the political fallout.
The Trump campaign initially called the newspaper report "fake news," but did not deny or dispute the reporting, but a campaign spokesman said Wednesday the story was "fake and untrue."
Seems like things are not going well at Camp Trump. Good, that guy is terrible (but you knew that).
Over the past decade or so, study after study has shown the potential for “grid-enhancing technologies” to improve the capacity and reliability of existing transmission grids without needing to deal with the difficult task of building new power lines.
Now, a new report shows how these technologies — called “GETs” for short — could clear the way for gigawatts’ worth of clean energy projects to connect to the 84,000-mile transmission network linking states from Illinois to Virginia and deliver billions of dollars of savings in the process.
That’s an important set of findings for grid operators, utilities, regulators and policymakers trying to solve the biggest challenge to adding new clean energy to U.S. power grids: the massive interconnection backlogs and expensive grid upgrades that are holding back hundreds of gigawatts of wind, solar and energy storage projects.
The report, which was funded by Amazon and conducted by decarbonization think tank RMI and grid-planning and engineering firm Quanta Technology, is the first “to look at GETs in an interconnection process,” said Katie Siegner, a manager in RMI’s Carbon-Free Electricity practice. (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)
A lot of exciting news from the future of green energy.
ussia sanctions have hit yacht owners hard. But they have impacted people who travel by more modest means as well. In February 2022, Moscow commuters crowded behind subway turnstiles, searching for coins when their Apple and Google Pay access was cut off.
The sanctions and export controls imposed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were swift and sweeping. Yet since then, key parts manufactured in the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Japan have been found in Russian drones, missiles, radios, and armored vehicles. As Russia engages in serial evasion, the question arises: Are sanctions working?
The gains achieved by the sanctions against Russia have not been as dramatic as some imagined they would be. But that does not mean they are not worth the effort to implement and enforce. The sanctions have reduced the amount of funds available to Russia to fight its war, placed pressure on the Russian domestic economy that might make a continued war increasingly politically inconvenient for President Vladimir Putin, and helped prevent the sanctioning nations from themselves funding Putin’s attacks on Ukraine directly. In these respects, the sanctions have indeed been effective.
More can, and should, be done. Increased enforcement activities will enhance the potency of existing sanctions, while new targets and new secondary sanctions can further shape Russia’s calculus.
Despite what some claim, Sanctions do work, lets keep the screws on Russia.
Lawmakers are sick of serving in the 118th Congress halfway through their term, and many Republicans are heading for the exits.
Five GOP committee chairs – Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Mike Gallagher, Mark Green, Patrick McHenry and Kay Granger – are retiring, and 10 other Republicans and 11 Democrats are leaving Congress.
What's more, ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who retired early at the end of last year, blames Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for the exodus, reported NBC News.
It doesn’t surprise me, it must be exhausting to be in the GOP, being that awful and that cruel all the time must wear on the soul.
Four decades ago, at the start of 1984, Harold Washington was finishing his historic opening year in office as Chicago’s first Black mayor. An outsider candidate who had been persuaded to run by the city’s social movements, Washington represented a major break from the past, and his 1983 victory served as an important milestone in the efforts of civil rights activists to gain footholds in electoral politics. Today, as social movements increasingly take interest in running insurgent candidates for office, Washington provides a vital model for how grassroots forces can bring new constituencies into the electoral realm and upend the established practices of insider politics.
Once in office, the mayor — widely known in the city simply as “Harold” — faced entrenched opposition. And yet he was able to take significant strides in dismantling the city machine. Run for decades by Richard J. Daley, this machine long maintained a racist and inequitable system of distributing municipal resources.
Never underestimate how much difference one person can make.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are revisiting the campaign to Stop ShotSpotter in Chicago. Organizers have been working for the last few years to end the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, which rebranded itself as SoundThinking in 2023. Citing studies questioning the technology’s effectiveness and a groundswell of grassroots organizing, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson campaigned on a promise to end the ShotSpotter contract. On Tuesday, after months of uncertainty, news broke that Johnson would, in fact, end the city’s contract with SoundThinking. The Johnson administration said in a statement, “The City of Chicago will not renew its contract with SoundThinking that expires February 16, 2024, and will decommission the use of ShotSpotter technology on September 22, 2024.”
This is a tremendous victory for grassroots organizers in Chicago, and it also demonstrates that activists can take on Big Tech, as it relates to policing, and win. How did they do it? Well, we’re going to talk about that today.
I’m glad to see more people turning away from the police as a solution to community safety.
Politicians may dominate the narrative, as they gaslight the world with fake facts, but the voices of activists, amplified through social media, are making an indelible mark.
In the broader context of this fight, it is important to remember racism and apartheid’s origins in imperialism, colonialism and slavery, and to recognise the crucial contributions and indomitable spirits of those activists who fought the dehumanising forces that gave birth to such inequality.
Always remember to be aware of Where you are getting your news from.
Not long ago, people called wind, solar and batteries “alternative energy.” That old moniker has now lost its meaning: In 2024, the U.S. power industry is choosing clean energy for almost all its new capacity additions.
They aren’t alternative anymore, we’re mainstream baby.
ou can’t choke a dead horse. Anyone who has studied geopolitics, particularly in the context of energy, has learned that control over waterways — most notably the Suez Canal — translates into influence, as actors can threaten to disrupt energy supplies. But they also know that leverage is limited: Commerce invariably adjusts to disruptions and markets stabilize around a new normal. The crisis in the Red Sea demonstrates this effect, though in an unexpected way. Months of Houthi attacks on shipping, followed by a significant U.S. and British military response, has done little to move oil prices, while the impact on supply has been negligible. Markets, in effect, shrugged off the Red Sea disruption.
This is indicative of a broader shift. The geopolitics of energy have undergone a transformation, call it “the great de-risking,” brought on by progressive geopolitical shocks and shifts in the sources of supply over the last decade. Risk still exists. But dislocating events, compounded by the shift in oil production from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Mexico, have redrawn the energy map. Energy flows have now been forced into two distinct channels, centered on the Atlantic basin and Indo-Pacific region. These connect markets not just through commercial ties but through geopolitical relationships, improving the resilience of energy connections and, by extension, improving energy security in the midst of an expanding global energy transition.
Energy relationships that used to inject risk and volatility into the global economy — Europe’s dependence on Russia, or U.S. dependence on the Middle East — have now largely been replaced by relationships tying like-minded states together, through channels that largely avoid strategic chokepoints. The Red Sea crisis, rather than the beginning of a new era of instability, could mark such an era’s end, and the transition to a new — and perhaps more stable — normal.
Its a changing world to be certain.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former longtime National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre mismanaged the gun rights group and cost it millions of dollars through wasteful spending to support a lavish lifestyle, a jury found on Friday, recommending that he repay $4.35 million.
In a civil corruption case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, the six-person jury in Manhattan also recommended that former NRA treasurer and chief financial officer Wilson Phillips repay the group $2 million for his own mismanagement.
Another defendant, NRA current secretary and general counsel John Frazer, did not harm the group financially, the jury found.
Yeah it doesn’t surprise me in the least that this gun obsessed Putin asset was also cooking the books. As I often say people who are terrible in one way tend to be terrible in other ways as well.
In Buffalo, NY a pioneering urban experiment has unfolded over the past several years, fundamentally reshaping the city's landscape and setting a precedent for municipalities nationwide. The Buffalo Green Code, officially called the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) and adopted in 2017, promised a departure from traditional zoning practices, aiming to foster a more vibrant, sustainable, and inclusive urban environment. As we dive into the impacts of this landmark policy, it's clear that while Buffalo has found a strong path toward equitable urban revival, but the journey is far from over, and the blueprint it offers is both a model and provides a look at the ways that similar efforts across the US can be improved.
The abolition of minimum parking requirements stands out as a particularly transformative policy, freeing developers from the costly burden of providing excessive parking. This has facilitated projects that would have been economically unfeasible under the old regime, allowing for the construction of affordable housing units downtown without the stipulation of dedicated parking spaces.
This is actually cool for me specifically because Buffalo is close to where I live relatively speaking. I hope I can see the new and improved city someday.
And on that cheerful note we are done for the day. See you next week with even more good news.