Yes its that time again, time for the Monday Good news roundup, where your GNR newsroom (myself, Killer300 and Bhu) bring you good news to start your week off right.
I’m still off from work, although my arm is feeling much better. I start physical therapy this week as well, so we will see how that goes. But for now lets get right to the news.
In a watershed victory, workers at the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted “UAW, yes!” on Friday.
The company’s sole non-union plant will finally join the rest of the world.
“If Volkswagen workers at plants in Germany and Mexico have unions, why not us?” equipment operator Briam Calderon said in Spanish ahead of the vote.
Another victory for unionization.
he United Auto Workers won many of their demands in their groundbreaking, six-week strike in 2023, but one of them — despite not making it into their new contracts with the Big Three automakers — has the potential to radically shift organized labor’s priorities and unify an often fractious movement in ways not seen in decades.
The demand is for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay. From the beginning of the strike, the audacious proposal captured public attention beyond the usual labor watchers because it upends decades-old expectations of what unions should want, signaling the working class has priorities beyond simply holding onto jobs.
Amazing things are happening in the labor world right now, and we are making them happen.
The growing “YIGBY”—Yes in God’s Back Yard—movement, which originated in California a few years ago and has recently reached Maryland and Virginia—seeks to get churches, religious nonprofits, and higher-education institutions back into the affordable-housing game. A lot of the advocacy for these YIGBY bills is coming from these institutions themselves. These bills typically simplify or relax zoning specifically for supportive or affordable (i.e. income-restricted) housing.
I can imagine two objections. One is that churches are spiritual enterprises and shouldn’t be in the real-estate industry. The other is that…churches are spiritual enterprises and shouldn’t be in the real-estate industry. This could come from the “left,” with concerns over things like discrimination or the question of tax exemption. Or it could come from the “right,” going something like, “churches need to dispense sacraments and offer worship services and not get caught up in the things of the world.”
It appears that most of the churches and denominations involved in YIGBY advocacy are progressive and/or mainline churches with a “Social Gospel” orientation. It might be the case that those churches which place the most weight on worship and sacraments—like the LCMS Lutherans or the Catholics—will be less interested in this sort of thing. Churches which are already stretched thin clerically or administratively may not have the capacity. But as church-led housing projects become more common, there will no doubt start to arise a body of best practices, and intermediators who simplify the extent to which anybody in the church itself has to be involved in the process.
More good news in the housing department. Keep up the good fight.
Patients have a right to privacy when it comes to their medical information, even when they travel to another state for an abortion, IVF, birth control or other types of reproductive health care, federal officials declared in a new rule.
The final rule, called HIPAA Privacy Rule to Support Reproductive Health Care Privacy, was announced Monday and prohibits the disclosure of a patient’s health information as it relates to reproductive health care, as well as strengthens privacy protections for that patient, their family and their doctors who are providing or facilitating the care.
This means that the rule prevents medical records from being used against people for providing or receiving certain types of reproductive health care — even if a patient traveled to another state for that care, Melanie Fontes Rainer, director of the Office for Civil Rights, said in a news conference Monday.
Another stunning win from the Biden administration
This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”
Traditionally, vaccines contain either a dead or modified, live version of a virus. The body’s immune system recognizes a protein in the virus and mounts an immune response. This response produces T-cells that attack the virus and stop it from spreading. It also produces “memory” B-cells that train your immune system to protect you from future attacks.
And in this weeks edition of “Science is awesome, we find new and exciting ways to make vaccines.
On Thursday, the Biden administration issued rules to dramatically reduce carbon emissions and pollution from U.S. power plants, while top officials weighed in with an important message: Clean energy is more than ready to supplant the fossil-fueled power plants the new regulations are intended to curb.
The long-awaited rules, the result of nearly a year of work at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, will require individual states to craft plans for ensuring that coal-fired plants slated to stay open past 2039 control 90 percent of their carbon pollution from 2032 onward. Newly built “baseload” fossil-gas-fired power plants that operate more than 40 percent of the year must do the same.
These mandates would help slash emissions from the power sector, which currently accounts for about one-quarter of the country’s carbon footprint. EPA estimates the rules will avoid nearly 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon pollution through 2047, equivalent to the annual emissions of 328 million gas cars.
More good news from the Biden administration
Making the jump to an electric heat pump can be one of the most challenging home-electrification projects. The Internet teems with information about the tech, but it’s not easy to navigate — or to apply to your own unique situation, said Stile, who lives in Falls Church, Virginia. So last November, before he committed to an installation that would cost at least $10,000, Stile reached out to his local climate group and asked if anyone could help him figure out this HVAC transition. “I wanted to understand what I was getting myself into,” said the 38-year-old.
The person who answered his call was electrification coach Bob Soule, 69. He’s been concerned about the climate crisis since the 1990s, when he first learned about its dire implications for his field of national security. Now retired from his 40-year career, Soule has installed solar panels on his roof, done an electric road trip to all the national parks in the lower 48 states, and electrified almost everything in his home. He delights in passing on his hard-won knowledge to others looking to ditch fossil fuels.
Soule is part of a growing network of home-electrification coaches who are appearing across the country like blazes on a trail. The volunteers, trained by nonprofit Rewiring America, not only raise local awareness about home clean-energy solutions but also help neighbors navigate the sometimes daunting process of switching to heat pumps, heat-pump water heaters, induction stoves, EVs, and more.
Sounds like a real nice guy doing his part to help the earth.
As you may have heard, mainstream news organizations are facing a financial crisis. Many liberal publications have taken an even more severe beating. But the most dramatic declines over the past few years belong to conservative and right-wing sites. The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing.
This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media. (February is the most recent month with available Comscore data.) Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent. (The site’s CEO and co-founder, Sean Davis, called that figure “laughably inaccurate” in an email but offered no further explanation.) FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing “only” 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago.
Good, Fox news is a blight on the American people and I hope for the day it dies so we can put a stake in its heart and bury it at the crossroads.
Today, the Federal Trade Commission, led by Chair Lina Khan, voted 3-2 to eliminate contracts that stop people from switching jobs, contracts known as ‘non-compete agreements.’ The rule goes into effect in 120 days, and prohibits nearly all non-competes. There are a few exceptions; the FTC rule can’t touch non-competes with certain nonprofits and within few regulated industries. But by and large, this rule, unless conservative judges step in aggressively, means that American employers will no longer be able to use non-compete provisions.
It’s a big win. And yet, within a few hours of the vote, well-known conservative lawyer Eugene Scalia, the son of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, sued the FTC over its non-compete ban, with the goal of getting the judiciary to strike the rule down, and perhaps even declare the commission itself unconstitutional. So what happened? What are the legal arguments? What are the stakes? And who is likely to prevail? That’s what I’m writing about today.
An amazing bit of news, good for them.
The roughly four dozen migrants that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis helped fly from Texas to Martha's Vineyard about a year and a half ago have been granted legal designations due to the Republican's crimes against the "victims."
On September 14, 2022, DeSantis emulated immigration policies enforced by Texas Governor Greg Abbott—who has become known for busing migrants to liberal, sanctuary cities like New York and Chicago—and sent two planes of about 50 migrants, including children, from San Antonio to the small, liberal island south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Critics of DeSantis said that sending the migrants, mostly from Venezuela, to the popular vacationing spot was a political stunt that cost Florida taxpayers about $615,000 in total, or about $12,300 per migrant paid out of a $12 million fund to relocate unauthorized immigrants from Florida. Days after they touched down, the migrants—aided by civil rights attorneys—filed a class action lawsuit demanding financial compensation for "economic, emotional and constitutional harms."
Good for them, and I hope that this is the last time I have to talk about that infected bunion that walks like a man Ron DeSantis.
pril 24 (UPI) -- Gradually improved nutrition standards for school meals will help promote the health of the nation's schoolchildren, the United States Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday.
USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said the nutrition standards gradually will be updated to lessen the amount of sugar in school meals and provide more flexible menu planning beginning during the start of the 2025-2026 school year.
Vilsack said the USDA determined the changes to be made after hearing public feedback and reviewing science-based recommendations from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
"We all share the goal of helping children reach their full potential," Vilsack said. "Nutritious school meals are an essential part of the school environment."
Great news, I remember how terrible the food was in grade and high school, definite need for improvement there.
Before Brexit actually happened, Grexit almost did.
Many readers will remember how close Greece came to exiting the eurozone at the height of its decade-long financial crisis that began in 2009.
The situation was so precarious in the summer of 2015 that all the country’s banks were closed in order to prevent a run. This was after negotiations between Greece and its creditors broke down when the then-leftist government skipped a loan payment and subsequently held a national referendum on bailout conditions. At that time, many wondered if Grexit would lead to the end of the entire eurozone project.
Contrast that with today. Instead of the eurozone, Greece exited its bailout program in 2018, and paid off its entire debt of 28 billion euro to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2022, two years early.
That same year, Greece reached male single-digit unemployment for the first time since the crisis. It’s still one of the highest unemployment rates in the European Union, but it’s down from a peak of almost 30 percent and continues to drop for both men and women. (Substacker The Greek Analyst writes a little here on why this is such a significant marker for Greece.)
Great news for Greece.
Doctors have begun trialling in hundreds of patients the world’s first personalised mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma, as experts hailed its “gamechanging” potential to permanently cure cancer.
Melanoma affects about 132,000 people a year globally and is the biggest skin cancer killer. Currently, surgery is the main treatment although radiotherapy, medicines and chemotherapy are also sometimes used.
Now experts are testing new jabs that are custom-built for each patient and tell their body to hunt down cancer cells to prevent the disease ever coming back.
This really is a game changer. We may see the end of cancer in our lifetime if this works.
esterday the FTC banned non-competes for workers, which is an earthquake in employment law. As conservative Congressman Matt Gaetz put it, the move is a “vindication of economic freedom and free enterprise.”
And yet, when I was composing the piece describing what happened, I was struck by how many other important policy choices this week I had not been able to cover. Last night, for instance, the Senate passed a bill to force the divestment of TikTok from Chinese ownership and control, which is the most significant governance of a communications market since the Cable Act of 1992. The legislation also included our first national privacy law, a mild measure that prohibits the sale of sensitive personal data by brokers to China or Russia. Biden also announced tariffs on Chinese steel and solar panels to protect domestic production. Altogether, these actions are a way of moving away from the assumption that globalization is an inevitable force, and a return to the governance choices that America explicitly made for most of its history.
There’s so much more, of course. On Monday, the Antitrust Division forced a giant insulation company called TopBuild to abandon its acquisition of SPI Parent Holding Company, and the Federal Trade Commission challenged an $8.5 billion fashion merger which would have put Coach, Kate Spade, and Michael Kors all under one roof, alleging that the deal will raise prices and harm workers. Additionally, Kroger/Albertsons announced they would be selling 166 more stores than originally intended to placate antitrust enforcers. It will not work, because no divestment will restore competition, but it shows that corporations are feeling the effects of deterrence.
Its great when we have a government that does what its supposed to. Now we have to make sure the GOP doesn’t foul it up again.
That does it for this week, we’ll be back next week with more good news.