(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . From the GNR Newsroom, its the Monday Good News Roundup [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-01-23 Welcome back to the Monday Good News roundup, where me, Killer300 and Bhu bring you the good news to good news articles to start your week off right. I had a longer intro written but for some reason my mouse went wild and everything got deleted, so lets just get on with the stories. Voters largely don’t want Congress to punish companies for speaking out on certain social and political issues, according to a Morning Consult poll commissioned by the tech industry-backed Chamber of Progress and released on Monday. The survey found that a majority of voters wouldn’t want lawmakers to punish companies for speaking out against discrimination, openly supporting abortion rights or withholding campaign donations from Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. People are really getting tired of this whole “cruelty is the point” bullcrap. The GOP need to stop being a bunch of petty little jerks and actually learn how to run a country. There is a widespread belief that Western sanctions on Russia have fallen flat. Proponents of this theory point to macroeconomic indicators suggesting that the Russian economy has proved resilient. Critics also highlight how sanctions haven’t had their desired effect: after all, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not moved to end his disastrous war against Ukraine. These arguments, however, are misguided. It is important to note that Russia had the opportunity to cushion its economy against Western sanctions before Putin declared war. For starters, Russia accumulated substantial financial reserves. Since 2014, Russia has increased trade to Asia, which has allowed it to weather a reduction of commerce with the West. Most important, Putin aggressively strengthened his repressive machine to deter mass protests against deteriorating living standards. For all those reasons, expectations that Western sanctions would cause the Russian economy—and Putin’s regime—to quickly disintegrate were unrealistic. Putin has invested significant resources in a disinformation campaign aimed at misleading Western policymakers about the real effects of sanctions. But make no mistake: they are, in fact, hobbling the Russian economy. And propagating the myth that they are not effective could nudge policymakers to drop them, giving Putin a lifeline. Despite the popular belief, sanctions DO work, and we are slowly but surely bleeding Putin dry. We just need to keep at it. From the angry mob’s chants about a stolen election to the physical desecration of edifices of democracy to a shaken national political class trying to make sense of how things descended into mayhem, seeming parallels between the violent attack on the Brazilian Presidential Palace and the Supreme Court and Congress buildings by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro this January 8 and the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, abound. But appearances can be deceiving. Unlike January 6—which delayed the peaceful transfer of power in the United States for the first time in the country’s history—nothing of substance was interrupted in Brazil. The rioting in Brasília unfolded after the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had taken place, on January 1. The rioters stormed empty public buildings in Brasília, as Brazilian politicians enjoyed the weekend elsewhere. As for Bolsonaro, the so-called Trump of the Tropics, he had already decamped for Florida. Yeah despite the dollar store Trump ripoff and his cronies best efforts, Brazil is still going strong with their democracy (and really how sad is it when you’re the dollar store knockoff to Trump. Hey, I wonder if this means Trump will flee to Brazil when the walls finally close in on him). King believed in the power of listening and dialogue to humanize, educate, persuade and build alliances across differences. At the same time, he understood that only by shifting power dynamics and raising the costs of violent extremism and institutional racism — through petitions, boycotts, walk-outs, sit-ins, strikes and countless other forms of protest and noncooperation — would harmful practices come to an end. Working for change within institutions like courts and legislatures required mobilizing pressure and changing incentives from outside those institutions. Multiple approaches were necessary to educate people about the injustices of Jim Crow segregation, to raise the social, political and economic costs of maintaining the status quo, and to build the broad-based coalitions needed to change laws and policies. At the time, King’s embrace of boycotts, strikes and other forms of nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation policies in the South was criticized by white clergy and others, who insisted that he reject confrontational tactics in favor of dialogue. For King, both approaches were necessary. As he wrote in the Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” A bit late I know, but its never not a good time to share Dr. King’s teachings. Lets hope they can make it, definitely a laudable goal to be sure. Fortunately, the Strikes Bill has garnered massive opposition. The International Labour Organization and the U.S. labor secretary have come out against the U.K.’s clampdown on workers’ rights. Even the Labour Party, which failed to properly support any of the strikes in 2022, has vowed to repeal the Bill if they win the next election. And most importantly, unions have fought back against the bill, with many refusing to accept labor law designed to shackle the movement. Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union struck a defiant tone outside the prime minister’s residence on Monday, telling workers to not rely on the law. ​“We will not accept your laws and we will not comply with them,” he announced. Wrack’s approach signals a break from the trade unionism of recent decades, which has looked to the law rather than the street. Instead, Wrack and his fellow unionists seem to be drawing lessons from the union struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s — the last defining period of working-class advancement — when 95% of all strike action was ​“unofficial.” The labor movement’s challenge has long been to emulate these militant predecessors, and hundreds of thousands of workers in the U.K. are rising to the occasion. You can try and outlaw protests and strikes, but guess what? It will just make the people protest HARDER. One, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has lifted the requirement for new medicines to be tested on animals before moving to human trials, a rule that has been in place since 1938. This won’t mean that testing on animals will stop overnight, but it does signal a willingness from the FDA to consider a slow fade-out of it. Concurrently, the FDA is spending $5 million this year to “develop methods to replace, reduce, and refine animal testing.” These “nonanimal methods” include options like tissue-lined chips that are designed to respond like human organs. This move from the FDA is a thumbs up for those concerned with animal welfare as well as those concerned with getting life-saving drugs more quickly and cheaply to market. Indeed, the idea came from Senator Rand Paul (R–KY) and Senator Cory Booker (D–NJ) on the back of blooming public sentiment. More and more Americans view medical testing on animals to be “morally wrong”—43 percent in 2022, up from 26 percent in 2001. Science has the whole scoop, including how the FDA will continue to ensure the safety of new products, here. Great news for the little animals who have to put up with getting tested on (also I re watched Secret of NIMH last week, so that’s relevant). A unique CRISPR system that destroys infected cells is unlike anything scientists have ever seen before — and it could revolutionize how we use the powerful gene editing technology in the future. CRISPR 101: While bacteria can infect humans, they can also be infected — a virus can inject its DNA in a bacterial cell and then use the cell like a virus factory, creating more and more copies of itself inside the cell until it bursts. Just like we have an immune system to protect us against infections, some bacteria have a defense system called CRISPR. CRISPR lets bacteria collect short DNA sequences from viruses it has seen before. Once it has a new DNA sequence, the CRISPR system creates CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins, which contain copies of the sequence written in RNA. This sounds very promising, hopefully it works out as intended. Eco-anxiety, climate doom, environmental existential dread - as green journalists, we see these terms used a lot - and often feel them ourselves. While there's a lot to be worried about when it comes to the climate and nature crises, we must not lose hope - because hopelessness breeds apathy. The media has an important role to play in combatting climate doom. It's our job to be truthful and accurate in our reporting, not trying to downplay or greenwash the situation. But it's also our job to show that there is hope. In 2022, as part of our ongoing effort to tackle eco-anxiety (both that of our readers and our own), we kept track of all the positive environmental news throughout the year - racking up over 100 stories of eco-innovation, green breakthroughs and climate wins. In 2023, we're confident the good news will keep on coming, as renewable power soars, vulnerable ecosystems gain rights, and climate protocols start to pay dividends. A lot of good environmental new so far this year, and its just getting started! Negativity is by now so deeply ingrained in American media culture that it’s become the default frame imposed on reality. In large part, this is because since the dawn of the internet age, the surest way to build an audience is to write stories that make people terrified or furious. This is not rocket science: Evolution designed humans to pay special attention to threats. So, unsurprisingly, the share of American headlines denoting anger increased by 104 percent from 2000 to 2019. The share of headlines evoking fear surged by 150 percent. If any event deserves negative coverage, the terrible coronavirus pandemic is it. And in the international media, 51 percent of stories in the first year of the pandemic were indeed negative, according to a 2020 study. But in the United States, a stunning 87 percent of the coverage was negative. The stories were negative even when good things were happening, such as schools reopening and vaccine trials. The American media have a particularly strong bad-news bias. This permanent cloud of negativity has a powerful effect on how Americans see their country. When Gallup recently asked Americans if they were satisfied with their personal life, 85 percent said they were, a number that has remained remarkably stable over the past 40 years. But when Gallup asked Americans in January 2022 if they were satisfied with the direction of the country, only 17 percent said they were, down from 69 percent in 2000. In other words, there was a 68-percentage-point gap between the reality people directly experienced in their daily life and the reality they perceived through the media filter. Short version: Things are never as bad as they seem. But then, pointing that out is the whole point of the GNR isn’t it? ST. LOUIS (AP) — A group of religious leaders who support abortion rights filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging Missouri’s abortion ban, saying lawmakers openly invoked their religious beliefs while drafting the measure and thereby imposed those beliefs on others who don’t share them. The lawsuit filed in St. Louis is the latest of many to challenge restrictive abortion laws enacted by conservative states after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. That landmark ruling left abortion rights up to each state to decide. Since then, religious abortion rights supporters have increasingly used religious freedom lawsuits in seeking to protect abortion access. The religious freedom complaints are among nearly three dozen post-Roe lawsuits that have been filed against 19 states’ abortion bans, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Another in the long series of the ongoing saga of “The GOP seriously effed up royally when they killed Roe V. Wade.” A recurring theme of city life during the pandemic was that as streets emptied of regular traffic, people reclaimed them for life on a human scale. Washington, DC, was at the forefront of this trend, instituting lower speed limits and limited access on neighborhood streets that prioritized local residents’ activities and safety over through traffic. Outdoor dining stalls took over parking spaces. And walkers, runners, and cyclists got a boost when the National Park Service closed sections of road in Rock Creek Park, a national park that spans a large swath of the city with an urban forest, to car traffic. With a return to more regular economic activity, many of these changes are now on the chopping block, in DC and cities across the country. DC has backtracked on its “Slow Streets” initiative, removing barriers and allowing increased speeds again in some neighborhoods. But in a major victory for non-motorized users (and the organizations advocating for them), the road closure in Rock Creek Park was made permanent. In November, the National Park Service announced that the northern sections of Beach Drive, the road that runs the length of the park, will not reopen to through traffic. “A full-time closure of this section of Beach Drive will provide safer park experiences year-round by reducing conflicts between people who walk, bicycle, and drive. It also expands access for visitors with disabilities to areas of the park that lack separated pathways and accessible trails,” the National Park Service, which administers Rock Creek Park, said in its statement. Good news, parks should be for people to enjoy, not drive through. And that does it for this week. Gonna keep it short in case something else goes wrong with my mouse. Have a good week all! 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