Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, that magical time of the week where your intrepid GNR Newsroom (Myself, Killer300, Bhu, and the fine folk at the GNR Discord) Bring you the good news to start your week off right.
This past week…. was a lot. I’m not gonna lie. For everyone but for some stuff that happened to me personally. First the good news, I got my apartment, its gonna be 513 a month plus some other stuff but I got it, so very excited about that. In less cool news, I got the flu this past week. so I was pretty sick the last few days. I’m mostly over it now (Honestly my dad got hit way worse by it, but he’s doing fine as well). So yeah, kind of a stressful week if I’m being totally honest, lets hope the next week is a little better.
So lets get to the good news, but first some music. 10 years Wasteland
The people of New York have spoken. In electing Zohran Mamdani mayor, they voted for generational change, Democratic socialism, and a joyful pop-culture politics. The historical significance of Mamdani’s victory will be parsed for days and weeks and years to come.
But the people of New York did not just elect a mayor, they also voted to change the way housing gets built in one of the tightest housing markets in the United States. Voters passed three ballot initiatives designed to speed up and increase housing production by an even greater margin than Mamdani’s victory.
I hope this is the indicator that big things are coming.
CHICAGO (AP) — Baltazar Enriquez starts most mornings with street patrols, leaving his home in Chicago’s Little Village on foot or by car to find immigration agents that have repeatedly targeted his largely Mexican neighborhood.
Wearing an orange whistle around his neck, the activist broadcasts his plans on Facebook.
“We don’t know if they’re going to come back. All we know is we’ve got to get ready,” he tells thousands of followers. “Give us any tips if you see any suspicious cars.”
Moments later, his phone buzzes.
As an unprecedented immigration crackdown enters a third month, a growing number of Chicago residents are fighting back against what they deem a racist and aggressive overreach of the federal government. The Democratic stronghold’s response has tapped established activists and everyday residents from wealthy suburbs to working class neighborhoods.
Everywhere people are standing up to Trumps goon squad and protecting their neighbors from being carted away.
I feel like there’s this meteorite that’s landing on earth every day and killing people, and we are just watching it fall,” Professor Sarah Blagden says. By 2040, half a million patients a year in the UK could be diagnosed with cancer. The disease terrifies everyone, killing without prejudice. We can play safe, eat well, smoke and drink less and try to dodge it, but that’s not always enough — about 167,000 people in the UK died last year from this silent assassin. “Wouldn’t it be amazing to stop cancer starting at all?” the mild-mannered Oxford academic says.
The 56-year-old is determined to find a way to prevent cancer. “This has stalked us for millennia,” she explains. “If we could find vaccines to stop it, we could change the world.”
I am very happy that, in my lifetime, I might see the end of cancer as a concern for people. That would be absolutely magical.
Six months on from the local elections – after which Reform was unable to form an administration, leaving the Liberal Democrats and independents to set up a ruling coalition – the party’s presence in the county is in disarray following weeks of resignations, suspensions and infighting that mean Reform UK no longer holds the highest number of seats in the authority.
Critics say that along with the chaos in the Reform-led council of Kent, the farcical scenes in Cornwall, where Reform act as the official opposition are further evidence that the party is not capable of delivering beyond a protest vote.
All over the world the far right is losing steam and losing ground.
The Vatican has returned 62 indigenous artefacts to Canada, 100 years after they were taken from tribes to appear in a missionary museum in Rome.
The items were given by Pope Leo XIV on Saturday to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), which says it plans to return them to their original native communities.
The move comes three years after Pope Francis issued a historic apology to Canada's First Nations for the church's role in the "genocide" and suppression of indigenous identity through the residential schools programme.
Pope Leo really going above and beyond to try and atone for the past sins of the Catholic Church.
Last week, the law firm McCarter and English sent out an advisory memo warning senior living and nursing home operators that they need to be on the lookout for new laws and court cases aimed at algorithmic pricing tools. “Build a record showing that your pricing remains independent and that your software can’t serve as the conduit for competitor coordination,” the firm said.
If nursing homes and senior centers are using similar technology to that employed in several industries to set common prices among supposed competitors, then that warning is apt. States and local policymakers, as well as private plaintiffs, are increasingly waging war on the use of opaque algorithms that have become an avenue for good old-fashioned price fixing.
Technology has brought us a wealth of information and the means to connect closer than ever before, its also given corporations the opportunity to screw us over. But now we are starting to fight back.
President Trump pulled his support for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Friday, ending a years-long alliance after weeks of Greene publicly breaking with her party.
Why it matters: Greene was once considered one of Trump's fiercest allies and a brand ambassador for the MAGA movement. But Trump accused her of veering "too far to the left" and said he'd back a primary challenger "if the right person runs."
- "I am withdrawing my support and Endorsement of "Congresswoman" Marjorie Taylor Greene," Trump wrote in a lengthy Truth Social post late Friday evening.
- "All I see "Wacky" Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!" Trump wrote.
So it looks like yet another one of Trumps enablers has learned that all the effort they put into propping him up and serving him earned them fucking nothing in return. They never learn do they?
In Democratic circles, a new doom narrative has emerged: Young Americans, especially white men, are being red-pilled into racial animosity, jeopardizing years of racial progress and Democratic gains among young people. Strategists are scrambling to find a “Joe Rogan of the left” to forestall this disaster, as well as holding awkward livestreams about “Connecting With Young Men.”
But this past Tuesday, we saw Gen Z vote overwhelmingly for Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City, as well as for other Democrats, such as Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. These Gen Z landslides for Democrats may have been a surprise to some, but not for us. Well before the election, the data was already telling a different—and far more hopeful—story about the politics of Gen Z. In surveys from over 60,000 Americans in the 2024 Cooperative Election Study, the gold standard for political research, a clear pattern emerges: Racial resentment is collapsing among young people.
I’ve said it before, but the kids are alright.
AURORA | In early returns, Aurora voters appeared poised to repeal a years-old ban on pit bull dogs.
Measure 3A, which would repeal the 20-year-old ban, led by about 53% of the vote in Arapahoe County and 59% in Adams County.
The pit bull ban in Aurora was initially enacted in 2005 with some leniency for people the city had previously issued a license. In 2014, voters approved a referendum to keep the ban. In 2021, however, Aurora City Council approved the removal of dog breed restrictions from the city ordinance — without going back to voters for permission.
Yay! Protect the puppies.
It was a foggy October afternoon on the central California coast when the Marine Mammal Center got a call on their public hotline: there were distressed cries coming from the frigid waters in Morro Bay.
The center’s experts were able to determine that the calls – which sounded almost like a human baby screeching – were coming from a roughly two-week-old sea otter pup that had been separated from its mother.
That could be deadly for young sea otters, according to Shayla Zink, who works at the center in Morro Bay.
And Save little Caterpillar too.
Now for a music break: Eat me up alive by Ratt
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from withholding federal funding and threatening hefty fines against the University of California amid the administration’s attempts to coerce elite US universities into adopting and promoting conservative ideals.
US district judge Rita Lin of San Francisco issued the preliminary injunction late Friday, saying the government was not allowed to demand payments from the California school system over the administration’s claims that it violates civil rights by allowing antisemitism and practising affirmative action.
Yep, another Judge told Trump to stuff it. Always a welcome site.
Brazil is home to some of the planet’s largest areas of tropical forest, but they are under intense pressure. The Atlantic Forest, on the country’s eastern coast, once covered 350 million acres, but today only 12% of it remains, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The Amazon rainforest, which lies mostly in Brazil and is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, has lost almost 20% of forest cover in the last 50 years.
Re.green, a Brazilian ecological restoration company, wants to restore these lost forests in a financially viable way –– and it’s relying heavily on technology to do so. Last week, the company won the prestigious Earthshot Prize, founded by Prince Willliam, in the “protect and restore nature” category. Jason Knauf, CEO of the prize, told CNN via email, this was due to “the transformative way in which it harnesses cutting-edge technology to bring tropical forests back to life.”
Repairing these lost forests will take a lot of time and work, but I do believe we are up to the task.
A gel uses chemicals found in saliva to repair and regenerate tooth enamel, which could prevent people from developing cavities that require fillings.
Enamel – the hard, shiny layer on the surface of teeth – shields the sensitive inner layers from wear and tear, acids and bacteria. “Enamel is the first line of defence. Once that line of defence starts to break down, tooth decay becomes accelerated,” says Alvaro Mata at the University of Nottingham, UK. Enamel doesn’t naturally regenerate, and treatments such as fluoride varnishes and remineralisation solutions only prevent the situation from worsening.
Ooh I like this.
When stress creeps in while we’re at work, running errands, or waiting for dinner to finish cooking, we may turn to a social media scroll for a quick distraction. While this isn’t always the most effective strategy for finding our inner calm, a recent study says that our phones could help lessen our anxiety — because consuming a specific type of content may reduce stress just as effectively as meditation does.
Published by the American Psychological Association, the research found that watching short inspirational videos over a five-day period helped lower participants’ stress levels for up to 10 days afterward, and those who meditated for the same amount of time felt the same effects. The key to the anxiety reduction? Feeling hopeful.
See the internet is not just for Doomscrolling, there can be good, life affirming stuff on it too, and it can help you feel better.
The US House Oversight Committee on Wednesday announced a massive document dump from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, including thousands of emails discussing a wide range of topics, including women, blackmail, and spending the holidays with Donald Trump.
The 20,000 documents come in the form of poorly organized folders with unhelpful labels, screenshots of emails, and heavily redacted spreadsheets. Some of the files are devoid of context, such as a video in the NATIVES folder of a dog playing with plushies of Trump and Hillary Clinton, while others are broken up in confusing ways, like email chains split into several PDFs.
To make this massive data dump more accessible, COURIER has compiled the 20,000 documents from Epstein’s estate into an easily searchable repository via Google Pinpoint. Use the search tool here.
Oh this should get a LOT of traffic in the next few weeks.
And on that note, I think we can call it early this week on the good news, please enjoy some Pokemon.
And now the cute corner
Alright that does us for this week. See you guys next Monday
