(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.'] Date: 2023-10-02 Welcome back to the Monday good news roundup, that time of the week where your GNR Newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) find all the good news to get your week started off right. Its October! My favorite time of the year, because it means I’m binging horror movies all month. But what’s really scary is the Far Right’s extremism and their clear and present danger to our democracy. Thankfully we’re pretty scary ourselves, and in 2024 we’re gonna give the GOP a right good fright when we vote t hem out of office. 13 months down, mark the dates. But that’s later and this is now, and now its time for good news. So lets get to it. As fiscal year 2023 comes to a close at the end of September, the latest data from the State Department paints a clear picture: the U.S. refugee program is back. According to nearly all available program indicators, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) is likely operating from a stronger position today than at any point during the 21st century. After massive annual cuts by the Trump administration, the refugee program was further decimated during COVID-19 as international travel and coordination plummeted. Those steep cuts were gradually reversed, the pipeline was rebuilt, and the process improved dramatically. Today, days away from the start of a new fiscal year that will very likely set a record for 21st-century arrivals, the data gives a lot to celebrate as the Biden administration has officially restored the U.S. refugee program and is set to take it to new heights through exciting policy innovations, new technological breakthroughs, and significant investments in personnel. Another Trump Era (You know what is four years even an era? Its not even half a decade. The Trump period? The Trump embarrassment? Help me out people) mistake being corrected by the Biden administration. Its actually heartening how much of his crap we got fixed up in such a hurry. Happy Monday all. The big story of the week, as it has been for most weeks over the past 8 years, is the ongoing train wreck of the Trump-era Republican Party. Dangerous. Extremist. Cowardly. Illiberal. Pathetic. Unprecedented. Reckless. Utterly without virtue. Choose whatever words you want to describe what we’re in the midst of in the House right now. A shutdown is likely. We are far far away from a deal. The weak and battered Speaker probably survives only because they don’t have any one to replace him with (!!!!!). The American people, America’s standing, America’s economy, the West’s defense of Ukraine will be hurt by the shutdown - but why would MAGA care about that? As long as it they somehow believe it will hurt Biden, they are going to give it a go. Once again, despite what some sources will tell you, the Democrats are doing awesome this year, and we’re gonna do better next year too. Since its discovery in 2004, graphene has been heralded as a miracle material. Lighter and stronger than steel and as hard as a diamond, it’s also a robust and flexible conductor of electrical and thermal energy. These properties are why graphene holds great promise for a range of clean energy applications — as long as it can be built inexpensively and at scale. Lyten, a San Jose, California–based startup, aims to perfect advanced graphene production in order to harness its potential performance and cost benefits. Earlier this month, the company announced it had raised $200 million to scale manufacturing of its 3D graphene material with a range of initial applications and production, including next-gen batteries. Conventional 2D graphene is ​“pretty simple,” according to Dan Cook, Lyten’s co-founder and CEO — it’s a hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms in a flat layer. A number of companies aspire to produce the material with consistent commercial-grade quantity and quality, but it remains difficult to fabricate. In fact, much of what is sold as graphene today is actually just chunks of conventional bulk graphite. That’s good enough to be used in bicycle frames and other sports equipment, but it’s a far cry from the 1-atom-thick sheet of actual graphene needed to make, for example, a better battery. Once again I have to say it: I love living in the future. There’s only one way to know if electric trucks can really replace diesel-fueled trucks: load them up with cargo, put them on the road and collect the data to see how far they can go. That’s exactly what 10 freight depots in North America have been doing over the past two weeks. And so far, the data indicates that the latest electric medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks are increasingly ready to handle a lot of North America’s freight-hauling needs. The data comes from trucks participating in Run on Less – Electric Depot, a three-week-long test-drive event organized by the North American Council for Freight Efficiency, a nonprofit research group. Back in 2021, NACFE did its first electric truck test, and the findings showed that the vehicles available then were capable of handling the shorter-haul routes of about 100 miles or less that make up roughly half of all daily freight movement in the U.S. We got a great big convoy, and its all powered by electricity. CW McCall would be proud. European air quality activists have won a key victory in the European Parliament, which approved tough new air pollution rules that would require countries to meet stricter WHO air quality guidelines by 2035, and allow EU citizens to sue for financial compensation for air pollution-related health damage. But the draft legislation still faces an uphill battle for approval in the European Commission and European Council for it to become law. An air of uncertainty loomed over the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday as lawmakers prepared to vote on new air pollution rules that would set the bar for the European Union’s ambitions to tackle the unsafe air that 98% of its citizens breathe. The vote was seen by many as the latest test of the European Parliament’s commitment to the Green Deal, the EU’s flagship package of policies to fight climate change. Echoes of the highly politicized vote on biodiversity restoration in July, which passed by a razor-thin margin after an all-out push by right-wing parties to shoot it down, hung over Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union address before voting began. Great news out of Europe about new rules against air pollution. On a quiet Monday afternoon in June 2023, Ashok Tangde’s Whatsapp buzzed. A digital wedding card popped up, revealing the young faces of a bride and groom staring awkwardly into each other’s eyes. The card included the time and date of the wedding and the address of the wedding hall. But it wasn’t exactly an invitation. The sender was one of Tangde’s informants, who followed it up with the birth certificate of the girl getting married. She was underage, and the wedding was in an hour. Tangde phoned his colleague and friend Tatwasheel Kamble, and they rushed to the location, which was about half an hour away from where they live. “On our way, we WhatsApped the images to the local police station and the gram sevak [local government official] so we didn’t lose any time,” says Tangde. Like its horrific that this is happening at all (Like seriously? Child Marriages in 2023? WTF?) but good on Whatsapp helping the fight against that crap. Top Republican donors shopping for a candidate not named Donald Trump had high hopes that Ron DeSantis would be their savior. Then it was Tim Scott who caught their eye. More recently, Nikki Haley has left them optimistic they could avert their nightmare outcome. But increasingly, it’s become evident to a large segment of the donor class that salvation isn’t coming. And in a lopsided primary, their money matters less than ever. And so, many of these uber-wealthy donors are keeping their wallets closed. “Trump’s like 50 points ahead,” said one New York-based GOP fundraiser, granted anonymity to speak freely about the state of play. “Who wants to get involved and waste money?” Good. Keep those wallets closed. You guys have messed up this country enough throwing y our money around to get your way and look where its gotten us. Now sit down, shut up, and let the people actually choose their leaders for a change. n Friday, September 22, United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain announced that the union would be expanding its “stand-up strike” against the Big Three automakers to thirty-eight parts distribution centers owned by General Motors (GM) or Stellantis. The five thousand workers at those sites are joining the thirteen thousand autoworkers at three assembly plants who walked out when the strike began on September 15. The UAW’s strategy — striking all of the Big Three at once, but escalating gradually by beginning at a few worksites and calling out more over time to ramp up pressure — is unprecedented in the union’s history. The strike represents a dramatic departure from the union’s recent history in other ways as well, with leadership actively working to involve members in the contract campaign, and President Fain declaring that the union is fighting “for the good of the entire working class.” The leadership’s new approach is due in large part to the election of Fain and other officers associated with Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a union reform caucus that earlier this year swept out the corrupt old guard that had dominated UAW for over seventy years. Jacobin contributor Teddy Ostrow recently sat down with Barry Eidlin, associate professor of sociology at McGill University, to talk about the stand-up strike’s precedents in the 1936–37 sit-downs, the long history of efforts to reform the UAW, and the current strike’s implications for the broader labor movement in the United States and Canada. Slowly but surely the working class is taking back their power from the executive class and I am here for it. Oh and look whose there too! On Tuesday, Joe Biden became the first sitting U.S. president to join a picket line when he visited striking United Auto Workers (UAW) members outside a GM parts facility in Belleville, Michigan. “You guys, UAW, you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before. You made a lot of sacrifices, gave up a lot when the companies were in trouble,” the president said to picketing workers. ​“But now they’re doing incredibly well, and guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too.” I’ve seen people accuse Biden of being too conservative. I ask if people are looking at the same guy. he Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected Alabama Republicans' request to block the redrawing of the state's congressional districts by a special master. Driving the news: The Alabama GOP asked SCOTUS to consider an emergency request blocking a lower court's determination that the state's legislature had failed to comply with the Voting Rights Act while drawing congressional districts. The Voting Right Act requires that minority voters are provided with "an equal opportunity to participate in the political process." No, go and draw the map up fairly you cheaters. We are tired of your crap. A federal judge on Tuesday struck down a Texas law that LGBTQ advocates feared would ban drag shows in the state and imprison performers. The law, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed in June, expanded existing state law to prevent children from exposure to sexually explicit performances. While the legislation, Senate Bill 12, does not cite drag specifically, drag performers feared that it was passed with the intention of criminalizing the art form, which has deep ties to the LGBTQ community, and that it would repress their freedom of expression. People, and especially legitimate lawmakers, are getting tired of the GOP and their performative cruelty. You see it everywhere, people standing up to this nonsense and saying “No more”. Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here. Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states filed an antitrust suit against Amazon, one of the biggest companies in the world, for monopolization and unfair methods of competition. This piece is about what this case means, the government’s claims, and whether the legal arguments are strong. Ha! Get wrecked Amazon! In a major breakthrough, scientists have proved that antimatter, an ultra-rare counterpart to regular matter, obeys the same laws of gravity as other masses in the universe. The discovery validates Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and resolves a longstanding mystery about the motion of antimatter in gravitational fields, reports a new study. Again, I love the future. A New York judge’s finding that former President Donald Trump, his adult sons, his business associates and his eponymous company for years committed fraud could spell the end of Trump’s business career in his former home state. “The equivalent of the corporate death penalty for the Trump Organization in New York state,” is how the Trump critic and attorney George Conway described the ruling during an appearance Tuesday on CNN. It was a much-repeated phrase after the surprise ruling. New York Judge Arthur Engoron canceled the Trump Organization’s business certification and ordered that a receiver be appointed to dissolve Trump’s properties. A trial is supposed to get under way next week at which Engoron could decide to “disgorge” Trump of profits amassed by inflating his wealth. Its amazing how being president has cost Trump everything; his credibility, his reputation, his health, possibly his freedom, and now his business. Trump is going to lose everything he cares about. And he STILL wants to run for a second term. I just… I…. Have a Lightning Round while I process the stupidity. What could go right? Three mega trends Peru signs 20 million debt for nature swap Texas building bridges to help endangered animals French company designs battery free E bike Carnivorous plants return to Lancashire peatlands Implant could lead to injection free diabetes control states and cities eye stronger protections for gig economy workers What Americans can learn from Canadian 10 dollar a day child care system White House aiming to scrub people’s medical debt Britain more liberal minded than 40 years ago Small business owners feeling more confident End of poverty in Canada should be bigger news than it is And now back to our regularly scheduled good news. A new cohort is forcefully pushing back on the doubters who don’t think rapid utility-sector decarbonization is feasible: the utilities themselves. A decade after the utility industry balked at the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan regulations, just about every large utility in the U.S. has promised to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by midcentury. But a growing subset of the industry isn’t waiting a couple of decades to act: They’re pushing for 80% carbon reductions by 2030. Twenty-five utility companies have entered the ​“2030 Club” by enacting ambitious, voluntary goals for that timeframe, above and beyond any state-level mandates that apply to them. The Smart Electric Power Alliance coined the term in a recent analysis, intended to recognize that higher level of ambition and help those utilities achieve their goals. After all, there’s no way to know who will be in charge by the time 2050 rolls around, but to cut emissions by 80% or secure 80% clean generation portfolios by the end of this decade requires action and investment right now. We need all hands on deck to fight climate change, so this is indeed great news. There is no longer any inflation going on. If we were going to have a soft landing, this is exactly how it would look like. That is the current-data reality. So it looks like inflation is just about over. Good, hopefully that means food prices will start going down. to receive issues over email, you can do so here. Before the Biden administration, antitrust was mostly dead. It had picked up a bit under Trump, but mostly no one thought much about this area of law. And the reason was pretty simple. Nothing was happening. The FTC was using its authority to go after powerless actors, such as Uber drivers, church organists, bull semen traders, and ice skating teachers. The changeover has been absolutely stark, and it’s accelerating. Many of my sources in the competition policy world are giving me the same message, which is that this is the most extraordinary month they have ever seen in antitrust. There are the big fights, the cases against Google and Amazon, the suits against private equity and meat price-fixing. There is also smaller stuff, the behind-the-scenes institutional changes, like funding levels for antitrust enforcers and newly populist conservative nominees for regulatory agencies that could make a more assertive competition agenda part of a new bipartisan consensus. The rearguard opposition to change is immensely powerful, but the forces of the status quo are actually losing. Oh hey, Antitrusts are making a comeback That’s pretty awesome. Lets break up all them big companies. WASHINGTON _ Black historians read passages from banned books last week in a local park in Florida. In Washington, D.C., Black congressional lawmakers that same week hosted panels on preserving Black history at a conference. And in Pennsylvania, a 91-year-old pastor reached out to an expert in South Carolina to help his church set up Black history lessons. They are part of a growing movement across the country of educators, lawmakers, civil rights activists and church leaders who say there is a renewed urgency to teach Black history in the wake of a crackdown on Black scholars and inclusive lesson plans. The effort has seen historians share ways others can teach Black history, churches hold history classes during Bible Study, film festivals showcase Black history work, and Black leaders in Congress ask museums and local institutions to help in the campaign to preserve that history. “There’s a movement across the country to suppress the teaching of Black history,’’ Marvin Dulaney, president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, said. “We have to meet that challenge head-on.” Wherever tyranny raises its head there will always be people to oppose it. Always. Oh, and if you are wondering what the Underground Railroad is, you can read about it in books. The kind of books DeSantis and his ilk are banning. And on that note this week’s GNR draws to a close. Have a good week, and look forward to more good news next week. 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