Hey everybody, welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, where your intrepid GNR newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) bring you all the good news to start your week off right.
Its April Fools day, a day when you can’t trust anything on the internet. But worry not, you’ll find the Monday GNR free of pranks and shenanigans (Goodness knows we have enough fools running around: Trump, DeSantis, Greene, the list goes on). So lets get right into the good news.
Let’s get the archaic perception-baggage that comes with bus riding out of the way. The deterrents are well-documented. You have to know where to catch the bus, know where it goes, which historically has not exactly been immediately apparent. And this is if, by chance, you’re in walking distance of a bus line that connects you to your job, or other destinations and resources.
If you can get past this, there’s still the awkwardness of standing (most bus stops don’t have seating) in the elements (freezing cold, blazing heat, rain, snow and wind can make even the shortest waits unbearable) and watching people drive by in their comfortable bubbles on four wheels.
When you board the bus, you never quite know what you’re gonna get. There’s the person shouting with their speaker phones blaring. Maybe you sit adjacent from someone who is talking to themselves. The bus can face delays and even if it doesn’t, it can turn a 10-minute car ride into a 40 minute bus ride.
Then when you disembark, you are once again faced with the elements while crossing busy streets to reach your destination.
No, I’m not trying to discourage people from riding public transit with the paragraphs above. I’m simply acknowledging the sea of deterrents that dissuade people from even considering the transit option. Case in point, I have a friend who is living in the city and can’t afford a car. As a result, she laments having to pay for an Uber or rely on friends for rides to work and elsewhere. I discovered a workable bus solution, but a mutual friend said “Arian, she’s not taking the bus,” as if my far more fiscally responsible mobility solution was beneath her.
What people don’t yet grasp is that technology has completely changed the transit experience. Here are 5 examples that might surprise you.
I’m not gonna lie, I love riding the bus, you meet a lot of interesting people, and it gives you a chance to catch up on your sleep if you need it.
It’s the 1990s, and you’re examining the past—and future—of your midsize, post-industrial American city. Like many of your peers, you have a downtown in decline. Also like many of your peers, there’s an urban highway cleaving your city, a remnant of an era of planning decisions that usurped productive land and hastened the city’s depopulation and disinvestment.
Facing a slew of transportation and economic development challenges in 1990, the city of Rochester, New York, decided to reclaim its urban expressway. Called the Inner Loop, it occupied a 2.68-mile belt around downtown Rochester, cutting off historic neighborhoods and resulting in the destruction of 1,300 homes and businesses. The highway was considered overbuilt almost as soon as it was finished in 1965, with excess capacity for a metropolitan area whose decline led to a diminishing number of inbound commuters and residents.
To reclaim the land and replace the sunken expressway with surface streets, the city broke the project up into two phases. Phase one, called Inner Loop East, broke ground in 2014 and was completed in 2017. Inner Loop North, which will complete the reclamation of the former highway, is in the final planning stages.
I actually live right next door to Rochester so this is big news for me.
On Friday, after Republicans repeatedly threatened to shut down the government, the House passed a budget bill without disabling cuts. The vote beautifully fragmented the Republicans.
The successful passage was the result of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) working with Democrats, keeping funding at the level agreed to in the debt limit deal. In the final roll call, the vote was 286 to 134, with 101 Republicans—not even half the caucus—joining 185 Democrats to pass the measure.Just after midnight Friday, the bill then went to the Senate, where unanimous consent was required to expedite passage. Four far-right senators threatened to hold the bill hostage for further cuts.
But the four, Ted Budd (NC), Mike Lee (UT), Ted Cruz (TX), and Rand Paul (KY), immediately caved and settled for quickie token votes on deeper cuts that they knew would lose, and then allowed the measure to come to the floor. There was no filibuster. By 2 a.m. Saturday morning, the bill had passed the Senate, 74-24, again dividing the GOP caucus almost in half, and was on President Biden’s desk for signature.
The GOP death spiral continues.
In a stunning upset in Alabama, Democrat Marilyn Lands has defeated Republican Teddy Powell in the Special Election for Alabama State House District 10 to fill the seat last held by Republican Rep. David Cole, who was indicted for voter fraud. With 99% of precincts reporting, Lands is beating Powell by 25 points in the solid red district. Lands lost the election to Cole in 2022 by 7 points, making Tuesday's results a 32-point swing in a Trump +1 district.
Internal polling by both campaigns showed a virtual dead heat, with Lands' campaign showing her with only a 3 point lead over Powell in a poll conducted from December 16th-20th. Powell's campaign showed the Republican with an 11 point lead. Another case of polling completely missing the mark in the post-Roe electoral reality.
Lands ran primarily on abortion and IVF rights in the state of Alabama following the Alabama Supreme Court ruling effectively banning IFV in that state.
Probably the biggest news of the past week; Marilyn Land brings the pain against the GOP in another upset victory. November is looking better all the time innit?
The Biden administration’s latest initiative to clean up heavy industries could usher in a new era for one of the dirtiest sectors of all: iron and steel.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Energy announced up to $6 billion for commercial-scale projects that aim to demonstrate technologies for slashing greenhouse gas emissions at an array of U.S. factories. Two of the winners — the steelmakers Cleveland-Cliffs and SSAB — were each selected to receive up to $500 million for “green steel” projects that could transform how America turns iron ore into the ubiquitous high-strength metal.
Both companies are proposing to build low-emissions ironmaking facilities that run on clean hydrogen instead of coal or fossil gas. No such facilities exist yet in the United States, and only one worldwide is operating at a meaningful scale today: the Hybrit project in Sweden, in which SSAB is a partner. Before this week’s announcement, the only other hydrogen-focused projects in the works were based in Europe and China.
More great environmental news.
t the high school where Kevin Moore has taught social studies for seven years, there is no way to separate Chicago’s housing crisis from teachers’ working conditions—or students’ learning conditions. Of the roughly 1,500 students at George Washington High School, on the far southeast side of the city, about 60 students are housing insecure, he said. But that number is expected to rise this year, with an increasing number of migrant newcomers temporarily staying with family or friends, deprived permanent residence, a status referred to as “doubling up.”
“If you’re a child and you don’t know what your living situation is going to be by the end of the week, much less by the end of the day, school is not going to be your top priority,” Moore, 45, said of the high school, which is 88 percent Latino. “We want to give our students the most joyful day possible,” he said, adding that it’s “difficult to do our jobs when a child is struggling, when their attention is elsewhere.”
Now, as chair of the Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU) housing committee, Moore is trying to change that. The union, officially AFT-IFT Local 1, has made a national name for its willingness to fight—and strike—for demands that consider the broader good of the communities where teachers work and often live. With the contract representing roughly 26,000 educators in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) set to expire on June 30, the union is including bargaining proposals that address the crisis of homelessness among Chicago’s children.
Teachers are really the best aren’t they?
We might be a step closer to curing HIV, as researchers have developed a way to knock out a version of the virus lurking in the body.
Using something called an HIV-like particle (HLP)—which are dead HIV particles containing HIV proteins that trigger an immune response in a patient—may help treat the disease, scientists from the University of Western Ontario's Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry and the U.K.'s University of Bristol reveal in a paper in the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections.
HLP was found to be 100 times more effective at treating the virus in people living with chronic HIV while on combined antiretroviral therapy (cART) than other candidate HIV cure therapeutics.
Amazing news. I love living in the future.
In a 128-page opinion handed down on Wednesday, California Bar Court judge Yvette Roland recommends that Ex-Trump lawyer John Eastman have his law license revoked, highlighting his part in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election as being a major ethics violation.
"In view of the circumstances surrounding Eastman's misconduct and balancing the aggravation and mitigation, the court recommends that Eastman be disbarred," Roland writes, with the State Bar alleging that he "engaged in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist" Trump in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, per Axios.
Whaaat? a Trump laywer turned out to be a corrupt piece of shit? The devil you say!
An Alabama Democrat who campaigned aggressively on abortion access won a special election in the state Legislature on Tuesday, sending a message that abortion remains a winning issue for Democrats, even in the deep South.
Marilyn Lands won a state House seat in a rare competitive race to represent a district that includes parts of Huntsville. Lands, a mental health professional, centered her bid on reproductive rights and criticized the state’s near-total abortion ban along with a recent state Supreme Court ruling that temporarily banned in vitro fertilization.
“Today, Alabama women and families sent a clear message that will be heard in Montgomery and across the nation,” Lands said in a statement. “Our legislature must repeal Alabama’s no-exceptions abortion ban, fully restore access to IVF, and protect the right to contraception.”
I really want this to be the thing that ruins the GOP. I want this to be the stake in their heart, the albatross around their neck, the ultimate ruination of them. I want McConnell to realize that by stuffing the Supreme court he was tying the noose around his own party’s neck.
In Capitola, California, residents erupted in protest after Debra Towne, a beloved local senior, was hit and killed walking across a dangerous stroad. Towne’s sudden death was not the first to occur along Bay Avenue, but this tragic crash was the final straw for locals. They showed up en masse to a city meeting asking traffic-calming measures be implemented. After a few months, the city responded with plans for a quick-build project that will reduce the nine-lane intersection to seven lanes. With this change, the most dangerous intersection in Capitola will become safer.
The new, temporary design will use paint and plastic bollards to extend the sidewalk curb and create wider bicycle lanes. These changes at the Bay Avenue and Hill Street intersection will simplify the route for drivers and reduce exposure time for people walking in the road. According to recent studies, design measures like this save lives.
The city says that, beginning spring 2024, once school is out, the temporary design will be in place for nearly a year for a traffic study. Permanent additions will then be decided and implemented.
These changes wouldn’t be happening if not for the voices of locals and the city’s willingness to listen and act.
Lets make cities safer, friendlier, and more beautiful for everyone.
On the drizzly first Tuesday in March, voters crammed into a historic white clapboard meeting house on a hill in Stockbridge, Vermont. It was Town Meeting Day, when Vermonters across the state gather to debate and vote on local government. And the election for the next member of Stockbridge’s three-person select board, the main governing body of this town of just over 700 people, had drawn record turnout.
As voters waited to cast handwritten ballots in a long queue that snaked around wooden benches, University of Vermont sophomore Sarah Andrews approached locals, notebook in hand. Andrews and two classmates were not just there for course work: They were there as part of UVM’s Community News Service, reporting for the White River Valley Herald, the weekly newspaper that covers 16 towns in this rural region.
Small newspapers like the Herald have long been the main way of recording and distributing information about community happenings. But local news outlets are disappearing. The 2023 State of Local News report found that about half of all counties across the country have only one local news outlet, and more than 200 counties have none.
Good, honest, reliable journalism is the key to a healthy society. We need them now more than ever, so thank you to these young student journalists who are stepping up.
Last month, The Guardian ran an article titled “Is democracy dying in Africa? Senegal’s slide into chaos bodes ill in a year of key elections.”
Senegal had just been rocked by mass protests after Macky Sall, whose second and final term as president was due to end in April, postponed a presidential election scheduled for the end of February by 10 months. (Imagine what would happen if Joe Biden postponed the upcoming November election until the following September.) It was the first election postponement in the country’s history.
Protestors lit stores, cars, and other property on fire. The police met them with tear gas and rubber bullets, killing three, including a 16-year-old boy. In response, the government temporarily shut down mobile access to the internet as well as cut the signal of a major independent TV network that was broadcasting footage of the protests.
The February protests were only the latest reaction to President Sall’s flirtation with an illegal third term. Since 2019, Sall had jailed hundreds of political opponents, including major presidential rivals such as Ousmane Sonko, who was arrested and found guilty of libel after he alleged that Senegal’s tourism minister had stolen millions from a government agency. The libel charge was only the latest in a string of charges against him—including a rape charge that he was cleared of—that Sall’s critics say were trumped up to prevent Sonko from running.
These developments were especially concerning given that Senegal’s democracy bona fides are a rarity in the region. Since its independence from France in 1960, Senegal has seen only peaceful transfers of power, unlike its neighbors in the “coup belt,” a stretch of countries across Africa where coup d’états and coup attempts are frequent.
In mid-February, Senegal’s top court ruled that a presidential election must occur before April, when Sall’s term was set to end, setting up a potential fight over executive versus judicial legitimacy.
Big shout out to the people of Senegal for rescuing their democracy. Way to go guys.
Former President Donald Trump is officially selling a patriotic copy of the Christian Bible themed to Lee Greenwood’s famous song, “God Bless the USA.”
“Happy Holy Week!” Trump announced on social media Tuesday, during the most solemn period of the Christian calendar, the last week of the Lenten season marking the suffering and death of Jesus. “As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible.”
The concept of a Bible covered in the American flag, as well as a former president’s endorsement of a text Christians consider to be sacred, has raised concern among religious circles. It’s also raised questions about Trump’s motivations, as the former president finds himself in the middle of several expensive legal battles.
‘Sacrilege,’ theology, and the shadow of Christian nationalism
The $59.99 Bible, which was first published in 2021, features an American flag and the words “God Bless the USA” printed on the cover. Inside, it has the words to “God Bless the USA” and the text of The Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance and other historic American documents. Promotional material for the Bible shows the former president alongside country singer Lee Greenwood.
Responses to Trump’s social media announcement called the endorsement “sacrilege,” “heresy” and “borderline offensive” and cite lessons directly from the Bible that suggest taking advantage of people’s faith for money should be condemned.
“It is a bankrupt Christianity that sees a demagogue co-opting our faith and even our holy scriptures for the sake of his own pursuit of power and praise him for it rather than insist that we refuse to allow our sacred faith and scriptures to become a mouthpiece for an empire,” said Rev. Benjamin Cremer on X.
Jason Cornwall, a pastor from South Carolina, said on X that Trump’s Bible endorsement was a violation of one of the Ten Commandments of the Hebrew Testament that forbids taking God’s name in vain.
Yeah people aren’t exactly pleased about Trumps latest stunt (Also on top of all that, there are reports of people ordering the Trump bible and never receiving them).
The Biden administration on Thursday strengthened protections of the Endangered Species Act, repealing Trump-era rules that had stripped safeguards for plants and animals that are threatened by human development and the climate crisis.
The newly finalized regulations will reinstate so-called blanket rule protections for species listed as threatened with extinction in addition to those listed as endangered. In 2019, the Trump administration removed protections for threatened species, a specification that falls below endangered.
The Biden administration rules also finalized a provision that agencies can’t consider the economic impact of listing certain species as threatened or endangered – another Trump-era provision. The new rules will also consider the threat of climate change.
“As species face new and daunting challenges, including climate change, degraded and fragmented habitat, invasive species, and wildlife disease, the Endangered Species Act is more important than ever to conserve and recover imperiled species now and for generations to come,” US Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams said in a statement.
Its amazing that four years later we are still cleaning up Trumps messes. Lets not give him the chance to make anymore.
And on that note this weeks Good News Roundup comes to a close, here’s hoping things warm up for us soon.