Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, that time of the week when your intrepid GNR Newsroom (Powered by the GNR Discord) brings you good news to start your week off right.
It is presidents day today, and while our current President isn’t anyone worth celebrating, there are plenty who are: Biden, Obama, Carter, and also its world Social Justice day too today, so celebrate that as well. Anyway, lets get on with the news.
First some music: American Girls by Counting Crows and Sheryl Crow
Times Square's digital screens have nothing on the glaring warning signs for Republicans ahead of these upcoming midterm elections.
President Trump, his policies and actions are unpopular. The GOP continues to lose special elections. Republicans are retiring at faster rates than Democrats. And people are saying they'd rather Democrats control Congress.
At this point, all of it adds up to trouble for the party in power.
Make no mistake, this isn’t a certain thing, but I think the wind is to our back on this one, we just have to not mess up on the follow through.
On Wednesday, the European Parliament voted to adopt a resolution establishing the European Union's priorities for negotiations at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the principal global body dedicated to gender equality, which convenes in New York next month. The resolution was progressive in many ways, including protections for abortion access and opposition to online hate speech targeting women. But perhaps its boldest provision was a call for the full recognition of transgender women as women—a statement that has already drawn ire from the global right, which has fought to roll back transgender rights both in the United States and abroad, and one that may signal the European bloc is increasingly willing to defend transgender people on the world stage.
Great news for Transgender people out of Europe.
In a move that is perhaps less surprising than you might think, Microsoft seems to be readying up to dump OpenAI.
Right now, Microsoft's entire AI operation is powered by ChatGPT and other OpenAI models, including DALLE 3. Microsoft has shown impressive growth and demand for its enterprise-grade AI tools, including things like Microsoft 365 Copilot and Github Copilot, even if its consumer-level efforts have largely fallen flat.
Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for this AI nonsense.
fter four years of war in Ukraine, it may seem like there is little space for art or fun. But in the eastern city of Kharkiv, there is a small corner where children can learn the grace, discipline and joy of theater. Special correspondent Jack Hewson takes us there for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Sometimes its just the little things that help you keep faith in humanity; the small acts of kindness that can sometimes be overlooked. Those are the moments I live for.
Look, I get it. There’s a lot of doom and fear in the news headlines these days. It has worn me down covering it daily, and I’ve had to take breaks from my feeds and tabs just to stay sane. The doom cycle can so reshape our perceptions and outlook that when objectively good news pops up, it’s tempting to discount or even dismiss it.
But we shouldn’t. When there are positive developments, we need to highlight and celebrate them. It is not only important to give credit and thanks where they are due, but also, from a strategic standpoint, to understand why they succeeded so that they can be replicated and scaled going forward.
So on this Friday of yet another long week, let’s take the wins.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
As of this writing there have been 87 state legislative and U.S. House special elections contested by both parties across the United States in 2025 and 2026.
In these special elections, Democrats have performed much better in purple and— especially—red states than they have in blue ones. You can see this in the chart below, which I created with data from The Downballot:
Things are looking bad for Trump. I guess it only took a year for people to remember why we voted him out in 2020.
A federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump dismissed the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) efforts to obtain Michigan’s unredacted voter rolls, a bruising setback for the department’s sweeping national effort to force states to disclose sensitive voter data.
The DOJ filed the lawsuit in September after Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) refused to hand over voter list maintenance information and an unredacted copy of the state’s voter registration list.
Once again the judicial branch slaps Trumps hand and tell him to fuck off.
Shortly after the Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny finished performing in Spanish at Super Bowl LX last Sunday in Santa Clara, Calif., President Trump took to Truth Social to deliver his verdict.
“The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” Trump wrote. “It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence. Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.”
But the American people seem to disagree.
I have to admit I’ve never listened to Bad Bunny, but he seems to be on everyone’s lips at the moment, so lets take that dive together.
For our musical break: Bad Bunny, Baile Inolvidable
As writers for a web site largely focused on human artistic endeavors and cultural criticism of the same, we here at The A.V. Club are, at least in a general sense, well-disposed toward artists. (Even the ones who do not make things that can be immediately fed into the gears of capitalism, producing the all-important, deliciously ground-up gruel known as “profits.”) As such, we can’t help but feel equally warm toward news out of Ireland this week, as the BBC reports that the country has just launched a full-time, permanent program to provide weekly universal basic income, for a period of three years, to 2,000 artists in the country.
I think I may need to move to Ireland you guys.
After 10 weeks, the federal surge of immigration enforcement officers in Minnesota is ending.
White House “border czar” Tom Homan announced on Thursday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol officers have already started to leave the state and will continue to do so over the next week.
“I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this operation conclude. A significant drawdown has already been underway this week and will continue through the next week,” Homan said.
His announcement came days after Gov. Tim Walz said he expected such news in the coming days, and less than a week after Homan said in an exclusive interview with 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that he hoped it could be done in “a couple weeks.”
I know, we should probably save the celebrating until after they are actually gone, but color me cautiously optimistic.
A manatee that got stuck in a Florida storm drain while seeking warmer waters is now on the mend at SeaWorld Orlando after a large effort to rescue it.
Multiple fire rescue units and officials from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the University of Florida and even Jack's Wrecker Service were brought in Tuesday to get the 410-pound (186-kilogram) sea cow out of the storm drain in Melbourne Beach.
The crews convened on the scene after a worker with Melbourne Beach spotted the manatee, the city's Vice Mayor Terry Cronin told WESH-TV in Orlando.
Glad to hear the big guy is doing okay.
- Six House Republicans joined House Democrats to vote down proposed Canadian tariffs, blocking a key part of President Trump's tariff agenda.
- Constituents' complaints pressured some Republicans, and the business community warned it was afraid to invest amid economic uncertainty.
Trumps control over the GOP is waning by the day.
"One of the worst, EVER… nobody understands a word this guy is saying," President Donald Trump fumed on Truth Social after Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. His
allies even built a rival: Turning Point USA’s "All-American Halftime Show," which peaked at a little over 5 million concurrent YouTube viewers, about 4 percent of a typical Super Bowl halftime audience.
The same fight is erupting in other traditionally apolitical arenas, and many of them can't be policed. JD Vance was booed at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony and British-American competitor Gus Kenworthy
posted a profane anti-ICE message (in urine) on his personal social feed; kids on Roblox staged virtual anti-ICE marches and fictional raids; creators on Facebook and Instagram pumped out AI "resistance" fan-fiction or bizarre, viral "no queso, no cheese" protest clips; and Portland’s inflatable-costumed Frog Brigade leaned into "tactical frivolity" to lampoon militarized enforcement.
The pattern is hard to miss: when culture moves to platforms and feeds, MAGA’s counter-programming keeps drawing slivers of the audience while the bigger stages—and the internet's weirder ones—talk back on their own terms.
The resistance is alive and well, and cropping up in the strangest places.
He stormed the stage yelling “My name is KIDDDDD ROCKKKKKK” — but some viewers joked Kid Rock looked more like Ashlee Simpson and Milli Vanilli because of his “horrible” lip syncing during Turning Point USA’s “All-American” halftime show on Super Bowl Sunday.
The veteran rocker/rapper/country crooner was the headliner and last performer of the event, and he hit the stage with plenty of energy. He launched into his 1998 hit “Bawitdaba,” but the wheels came off from there, with close-up camera shots making it obvious that Kid Rock was lip syncing his way through most of the song. And having a difficult time keeping the facade going.
Kid Rock is with the far right for the same reason Trump is: He’s a grifter going where the rubes are. And he’s about as phony as you can get.
Late Thursday night, President Donald Trump posted a short video which included a horrifically racist image portraying former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes.
This was ugly and inexcusable, but not exactly a surprise. Trump has been a vile racist for his entire adult life and has said and promoted vile racism over his last 10 years in and out of the White House. This time, though, was different — not really because of the content, but because of the backlash from within his own party.
The video and its racism were denounced by a wide range of Republicans, including staunch Trump allies. As far as the GOP is concerned, the disgusting video seems to be the worst thing Trump has done since the 2021 insurrection.
Oh right this happened last week too. Trump decided to just show his whole ass to the country, No dignity, no respectability, the political equivalent of making fart noises in a church. I’m sure you think yourself a wry wit Donny, but no one is laughing, we’re not even shocked or offended really, we just roll our eyes and shake our heads.
And on that note I think we are done for the week. Time to duel.
And now the cute corner
And that does it for this week. See you next Monday
