Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, that magical time of the week where your GNR Newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) bring you the good news to start your week off right.
As I mentioned before, I hurt my arm a few weeks ago, so the GNR will be a little light these next few weeks. Sorry about that. So, without further ado lets hop right in.
Republican Rep. Nancy Mace has experienced significant staff turnover, with her entire Capitol Hill team leaving since November 1, 2023. The resignation of multiple staff members from the office of Rep. Nancy Mace in South Carolina has drawn significant attention.
Her former chief of staff, Dan Hanlon, who was fired in December 2023, is now running against her in the congressional primary.
Reports have surfaced citing a “toxic” and “abusive” environment within Mace’s office, with former staffers expressing dissatisfaction with unrealistic expectations, long hours, and a focus on media appearances over legislating.
Daniel Hanlon, who previously served as Rep. Nancy Mace’s chief of staff, has taken a bold step by filing paperwork to run against Mace in South Carolina’s first district congressional primary. This move is unprecedented as it’s rare for a former congressional aide to run against his or her old boss.
The current crop of GOP politicians are unfit to serve, they’re just the worst. And people are beginning to realize that.
What happens in Congress stays in Congress, the Supreme Court signaled on Monday, as it turned away an appeal by three Republican congressmen who were fined $5,000 each by the House for dodging security scanners installed after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The court’s decision comes months after justices snubbed the case of three other GOP members of Congress who had their pay docked in 2021 for flouting a mask mandate on the House floor during the COVID pandemic.
Looks like even the Supreme court is getting tired of GOP shenanigans.
Democratic Gov. Janet Mills let a bill become law without her signature that adds Maine's four Electoral College votes to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, under which member states would collectively award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Importantly, the compact would come into force only once states with a majority of electoral votes have joined to ensure the popular vote winner becomes president.
Currently, the winner of the statewide vote in Maine earns electoral votes, while whichever candidate wins in either of the state's two congressional districts gets one additional vote per district. That system will remain in place until the compact is activated, meaning Donald Trump will likely win an electoral vote in the red-leaning 2nd District this year while Joe Biden secures Maine's other three electoral votes, just as in 2020.
Big news, if we get enough people to join, then the chances of someone like Trump ever winning the Presidency again will decrease significantly.
On March 27, Granite Shore Power, or GSP, announced that it will “voluntarily” stop burning coal at its Merrimack and Schiller Stations in New Hampshire by 2028. Major news outlets have been hailing the news as the “end of coal in New England” and casting GSP as a leader in the transition to clean, renewable energy.
Insofar as media have acknowledged the role of outside pressure on GSP at all, they have mainly cited a lawsuit by the Sierra Club and Conservation Law Foundation for alleged violations of the Clean Water Act. But activists know better: Nonviolent direct action gets the goods.
Those of us who have participated in the No Coal No Gas campaign, or NCNG, have been anticipating Merrimack Station’s closure for some time. (Schiller Station has not run since May 2020.) In fact, in June 2023, we threw a festive retirement party outside Merrimack Station’s gates, complete with cake and surveillance by the New Hampshire Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. Then, just three weeks before GSP’s own press release, we held a weekend retreat to reflect on everything our campaign has accomplished, plan for the future and strategize when, how and whether to declare victory.
Great news out of New England. Its long past due for coal to come to an end as a power source.
On February 13, 2024, eight tenants met with three representatives from their new corporate landlord in a conference room at the office of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco (HRC). The parties, who were joined by organizers from HRC, convened for a joint bargaining session over issues brought forward by tenants at two buildings belonging to an extensive portfolio that their landlord had recently acquired: 434 Leavenworth Street and 709 Geary Street.
Imagine a labor contract negotiation, but instead of bosses and workers, the two sides are tenants and landlords. In the private US housing market, such face-to-face negotiating sessions are rare. This one, however, which lasted for two hours, resulted in huge wins for the tenants.
Tenants left the negotiation having scored victories on issues ranging from improved language access, transparency of maintenance contracts, firing of a building manager, resolving of code and maintenance issues, lowering of monthly rents to their July 2022 and May 2023 levels (when the landlord was first notified of the buildings’ respective habitability issues), and a 90 percent rent refund for all tenants from those dates totaling more than $1 million across the two buildings.
Unions, they aren’t just for jobs anymore.
Why are activists, who are so passionate about their social justice work, so often burned out by those very causes? We don’t often think about activism as a form of labour, but it is. Research on the activists that make up social justice movements suggests that the pressures of activist work, can cause them to experience serious consequences to their own mental well-being.
In some cases they might be driven to leave activism altogether, hurting their activist movements as a whole.
To understand how activists can better manage the challenges of their work, our research examines how self-compassion could be used to help them alleviate stress and avoid burnout.
When taking care of the world, its important to also take care of ourselves as well.
One Uninterrupted Decline
How much did worldwide mortality drop between 1950 and 2019? Most of us won’t have a ready concept of the numbers. Was it 20 percent? Thirty-five? Fifty?
The answer, according to the latest edition of The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors (GBD) study, is 62.8 percent, to be exact. The GBD study, which pulls data from 204 countries, is a regularly released series that takes a look at macro-level health trends; the latest release has a special focus on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The drop would have continued if not for the pandemic, which shaved about two years of life expectancy off in 2020–21. Better management would have limited the damage.
Still, the long-run numbers are impressive. Global life expectancy at birth went from 49 years in 1950 to 71.7 years in 2021, with notable increases in South Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. The authors call this health progress “profound.”
Despite everything, people are living longer.
How can the U.S. plug more solar and wind power into the grid and meet fast-growing electricity demand when it doesn’t have enough power lines to handle all those tasks?
A good start would be to adopt technologies that help get more mileage out of existing power grids, according to a new report from the Department of Energy.
The DOE’s three-to-five-year roadmap starts with directing billions of dollars into “innovative grid deployments,” featuring technologies ranging from advanced grid equipment to next-generation grid-control software platforms, that can serve as templates for utilities across the nation.
You know Biden, he never misses a trick. Lets make sure he has four more years to keep doing good.
- Volkswagen workers in Tennessee have voted to join the United Auto Workers — marking the union's first successful organizing drive of a foreign automaker.
- UAW leaders and supporters are expected to use the win as a launching point for the union's unprecedented organizing campaign of 13 automakers in the U.S.
- The UAW previously failed to organize the Volkswagen plant amid greater outside political pressure and worker opposition in 2014 and 2019.
A big win for unions and for the UAW in particular.
The new Title IX rules – first proposed in 2022 – mean that the rights of LGBTQ+ students will be protected by federal law, and in addition, victims of campus sexual assault will gain new safeguards.
And Biden does it again.
University of Queensland scientists had a remarkable eureka moment when they accidentally turned the most common greenhouse gas into electricity.
By using positive and negative ions of different sizes, the team created electricity from CO2, and now believes that their ‘nanogenerators’ could help improve the reputation of the simple molecule.
Now thoroughly demonized, it pays to remember that carbon dioxide contains two oxygen molecules and one carbon molecule, which rank among the most fundamental building blocks of the universe and are used in human society for thousands of processes and purposes.
Science is awesome.
Cannabis and its derivatives have already been shown to relieve short-term chronic pain, reduce inflammation 30x more robustly than aspirin, improve symptoms of Crohn’s disease, and show some efficacy in killing lung and pancreatic cancer cells, but a recent epidemiological look at cannabis use has linked it to dramatically lower rates of cognitive decline and dementia.
A new study published in the journal Current Alzheimer Research that looked at 4,744 American adults over 45 using self-reporting methods of calculating cognitive decline found those who used cannabis recreationally had a 96% lower chance of developing what they called ‘subjective cognitive decline.’
And one final story because 4/20 was Saturday. And here I thought smoking Pot made you dumb.
And on that note, that’s all for this week. We’ll be back next week with more good news. See you then.