Citizen Cartwright

Good news on health, energy, planets

It seems you can read the first 15 of this Fix the News edition without a password. And I’ve got tears of exhilaration as I go through them. For example:

"The world has made remarkable progress in reducing child mortality," says UNICEF. Since 2000, the global mortality rate of children under five has dropped by 52 percent. Clicking through to the UNICEF article and seeing the photo of the baby — whose eyes show such excited intelligence — could not be a better way to start my day.

And congratulations, California, on your win-win effort to generate energy while combatting drought. A pilot project is covering canals with solar panels, simultaneously generating clean energy and preventing water evaporation, says PV Magazine. 

Among the 28 items behind Fix the News’ paywall:

— A tiny magnetic robot that can take 3D scans deep inside the body could revolutionize early cancer detection. Researchers at Britain’s University of Leeds say they’ve generated the first high-resolution three-dimensional ultrasound images taken by a probe moving through the colon. 

— In 1990, there wasn’t a single planet known beyond our solar system. We’ve now discovered nearly 6,000 confirmed exoplanets. And a proposed telescope could find Earth-like exoplanets using just one pixel of data, says BigThink.

— California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania have joined in a Clean Rides Network. The group is working on environmentally friendly transportation projects it says the federal government has abandoned, The Associated Press reports.

Good news on energy, climate, communications

As usual, I hope you'll have time to scroll through Fix the News' 20 good-news items that are free to read. Among the items that apparently are behind the paywall:

— A California startup has developed new carbon-fiber transmission cables that can be retrofitted on old steel power lines, tripling their electricity-carrying capacity. This enables utilities to upgrade grid connections without lengthy permitting processes for new routes. The Tennessee Valley Authority already is testing the technology on its aging infrastructure, Fix the News says, citing a Bloomberg article that, sigh, requires a subscription.

— Northwestern University engineering scientists have developed a way to store carbon dioxide permanently, turning it into materials that can be used to manufacture concrete, cement, plaster and paint. This offers more benefits than carbon sequestration methods such as capturing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it underground. The process to generate the carbon-negative materials also releases hydrogen gas — a clean fuel with a variety of applications, including in transportation. 

— Researchers have broken a distance record in quantum communication by sending a secret encryption key from China to South Africa, using a cheap, lightweight ‘microsatellite,’ according to a Nature magazine article that’s republished without a paywall in Scientific American.

The accomplishment — a kind of encryption known as quantum key distribution — is a step toward being able to send ultra-secure messages between any two locations, however distant. QKD currently is used by banks and governments to transmit keys over fiber optics.

Good news on women’s rights, North America’s largest bird, food waste

Our friends at Fix the News missed a week of publishing because Angus’ wife had a baby. He says she was born “en caul,” which is explained in this article.

 

The article also says, “in ancient Greece, en caul births were revered as signs of divine favor, believed to herald the birth of future leaders or heroes destined for greatness.”   

 

I emailed Angus with our collective congratulations on the birth of his great little girl, along with ongoing thanks for Fix the News’ counterpoint to what’s happening here. 

 

And I mentioned to him that my father’s older brother was born with the caul. My grandmother believed in the folk tradition that it portended greatness and raised him differently from his siblings. He became by far the most successful member of the family. When he died, his colleagues at the World Meteorological Organization wrote about him, "Although his contributions were seldom outwardly visible, virtually every advance in international environmental collaboration in a half a century bore his fingerprints.”

 

I’m not sure where this issue of Fix the News becomes available only with a subscription. Here are items that may be behind the paywall:

 

— "The last five years have seen lasting global progress on women's rights,” says Fix the News. One hundred sixty-two countries now have laws prohibiting gender-based discrimination in employment, 140 nations have laws to eliminate violence against women and girls, and 60 countries have measures in place to address violence against women in public life — more than double the number in 2019, Fix the News says, citing a United Nations report.

 

— The California condor — which has a 10-foot wingspan and 60-year lifespan — has rebounded from two dozen in 1987 to 561, with 344 living in the wild, according to Knowable Magazine.

 

— The European Union has set its first-ever legally binding targets for member nations to cut food waste, with lawmakers agreeing on a 30 percent cut for retailers, restaurants, caterers and households by 2030, says Euronews.

Trump’s speech to Congress

“President Trump, in his address to Congress Tuesday, celebrated the whirlwind of changes he has brought to the federal government. His success from this point on will depend largely on whether Americans believe the unease caused by his speedy actions — an unsettled stock market, a trade war with allies and uncertainty over the extent of federal job and spending cuts — will lead to the American renewal he promised,” says The Wall Street Journal.

 

Much of the 100-minute speech — the longest presidential address to Congress in modern history — “was filled with grievances about his treatment by Democrats and exaggerations about his accomplishments,” says The New York Times.

 

AP says the speech “added up to a defiant sales pitch for the policies that Trump promised during his campaign and leaned into during his first weeks back in office. Trump pledged to keep delivering sweeping change to rescue the nation from what he described as destruction and mistakes left by his predecessor. He seldom addressed his comments directly to the American people, who are trying to keep up with the recent upheaval, while repeatedly needling the Democratic lawmakers seated before him.”

 

Republicans chanted “USA! USA!” as Trump stepped to the lectern.

 

Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, who pushed to impeach Trump dating to his previous term in office, stood and shook his cane toward the president in the opening minutes of his speech and subsequently was removed from the chamber.

 

Some Democrats held black signs that read “save Medicaid,” “protect veterans,” “Musk steals” and “false."

 

Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who delivered the Democratic response after Trump’s speech, said “America wants change, but there’s a responsible way to make change and a reckless way, and we can make that change without forgetting who we are as a country and as a democracy.”

 

Here is reaction to the speech from experts at the Atlantic Council.

 

My thanks to my husband for compiling fact checks of Trump's speech:

 

AP

 

NYTimes

 

Washington Post

 

PolitiFact

 

ABC News

 

CBS News

 

NBC News

 

NPR

 

CNN

 

BBC News

Good news on the unstoppable rise in solar energy, in context

As always, please at least scroll through the good news that's free to see at Fix the News. Behind the paywall in the Feb. 20 edition, our friends in Australia say:

 

“How do you make sense of what's happening with the energy transition? We recommend spending an hour listening to this conversation between one of our favorite journalists, Derek Thompson, and one of the world's top energy analysts, Nat Bullard. It's very rare for us to recommend podcasts but we're making an exception here because it's the best snapshot you're going to get of where things sit as of early 2025.”

 

Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic; Bullard is an independent energy analyst who spent 15 years at BloombergNEF, which Bloomberg says is its primary research service.

How Musk’s businesses benefit from government shrinkage

President Trump and Elon Musk took questions from reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, and Trump signed an order directing federal agencies to work closely with Musk's effort to shrink the federal workforce.

The order sets forth rules requiring government agencies to hire no more than one employee for every four workers who leave, and it compels agencies to work with Musk's team to identify large-scale reductions in force and determine which agency components can be eliminated outright, Reuters reports.

 

“Trump resisted the suggestion by Democrats and other critics that Musk's role presents a conflict of interest,” Reuters says.

“If we thought that, we would not let him do that segment or look in that area, if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest,” said Trump.

 

Meanwhile, a New York Times article by two reporters who’ve spent the past year investigating Musk’s business with the federal government says many of the federal employees who’ve been pushed out were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Musk’s companies.

 

At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by those moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Musk’s six companies, according to the Times.

 

Among them:

 

— Federal Aviation Administration fines of Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, for safety violations

 

— Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit pressing Musk to pay the federal government perhaps as much as $150 million, accusing him of having violated federal securities law

 

— The National Labor Relations Board, an independent watchdog agency for workers’ rights, has 24 investigations into Musk’s companies

 

— At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a public database shows hundreds of complaints about Musk's electric car company Tesla, mostly about debt collection or loan problems. The agency also would have regulated Musk’s new efforts to bring a payments service to X.

 

None of the investigations or lawsuits involving Musk and his companies, at least so far, have formally been dropped since the start of the new administration, according to more than a dozen current and former federal officials interviewed by the Times.

 

And the Times found no evidence that Musk directly ordered that an investigation into one of his companies be shut down or stalled.

“The shifts at the agencies in many cases reflect changes in national priorities that come with a president who has long complained that government regulation has been too aggressive, a view widely held in the business community,” says the Times.

“But the upheaval at federal agencies represents one of the first tests of a wide range of conflicts of interest Mr. Musk has brought to the White House, including 100 contracts with 17 federal agencies,” the Times says.

 

Musk controls Tesla, which is publicly traded. He's the founder of SpaceX; the artificial intelligence start-up xAI; the Boring Company, a tunneling venture; and Neuralink, which is developing brain computer implants. All of those are private companies. Musk also owns the social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

 

Musk’s companies secured $13 billion in contracts over the past five years, making SpaceX, which collects most of that money, one of the largest government contractors, the Times says. And there's already talk in the Trump administration of expanding these deals, especially at the Air Force.

 

On Monday, Trump fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics, an independent agency. The office had pending requests to investigate Musk based on allegations raised by Democrats in Congress last week that Musk’s role as a federal government official creates an unavoidable conflict of interest.

The letter from 12 House Democrats said, “The American people deserve assurances that no individual, regardless of stature, is permitted to influence policy for personal gain.”

Good news on recycling, ocean protection, health care

Australia’s Fix the News begins this week’s issue saying, “The best thing we can do at this point is to remind all of our readers that the madness going down in Washington DC right now is not the only news story in the world.” 

Well, I’m ready; how about you?!

 

I believe the first 19 items are accessible without a subscription. So I’ll leave those to you to scroll through yourself and will note three of the remaining 30 items that are available only to subscribers:

 

— Fast fashion is causing a big increase in textile waste, but textile recycling mostly has been limited to re-using old clothes as cleaning cloths or turning them into upholstery fillers, says the nonprofit online magazine Reasons to be Cheerful. But now a Swedish company has found a way to process old textiles and fabric to produce a material that can be used to manufacture brand new clothing.

 

Reasons to be Cheerful was founded by musician David Byrne to provide “news for when you’ve had too much news.”

 

— Researchers have engineered a miniaturized version of the CRISPR gene-editing tool that may be able to reach more of the body's tissues to treat more diseases, reports Science.

 

— The first marine sanctuary has been announced for the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific Ocean, reports Oceanographic Magazine. 

 

Enric Sala, National Geographic's explorer in residence, says the coral reefs around the two northernmost islands “are a time machine, like diving in the ocean of 1,000 years ago. They are our best baselines for what the ocean could look like if we truly let it be.” 

Good news on aid arriving in Gaza, climate, global wage equality

Now that I’ve subscribed to Fix the News, I’m seeing this morning that there apparently are 14 items in this issue that are free to view. The items I’ve headlined are among those.

 

Another 32 items seem to be password protected by Fix the News, so I’ll summarize three of those that link to articles that don’t require a subscription:

 

— The Guardian has a series called "The Alternatives" that documents ways local communities and governments around the world are implementing ideas for a low-carbon way of life. 

 

— A new storage technique can keep protein-based drugs and vaccines stable without keeping them cold, potentially eliminating the need for refrigeration for hundreds of medicines, Reuters reports, citing a study in the journal Nature Communications.

 

— In Bangladesh, access to basic electricity increased from 14 percent in 1991 to 99 percent in 2021, according to Our World in Data.

Trump is inaugurated, issues promised deluge of executive orders

The president, flanked by his family and tech billionaires, delivered a second inaugural address on Monday that “promised massive national success, pledging an expansion of U.S. territory and an end to foreign wars, with a sweeping indictment of the status quo,” as The Associated Press puts it.

 

Trump’s aides had said the speech would focus on unity.

 

But with his presidential predecessors sitting nearby, by the third paragraph Trump was referring to “the vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government.”

 

In paragraph five: “For many years, the radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens. While the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair, we now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad.”

 

Shortly afterward, Trump spoke to supporters in another area of the Capitol and said he’d toned down his speech at the urging of his wife and his vice president.

 

The first of Trump’s executive orders rescinded 78 Biden actions, on topics including racial equity, gender discrimination, climate change, the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, additional ethics requirements for political appointees, lowering prescription drug costs, sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and the withdrawal of offshore drilling from some areas, according to The Washington Post.

 

Other orders include:

 

— Ending birthright citizenship

— Declaring a “national emergency” on the southern border, among other things directing the military to make it priority to “seal the borders”

— Addressing the “cost-of-living crisis”

— Requiring federal workers to return to the office

— Freezing federal hiring

— Establishing the “Department of Government Efficiency”

— Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement

— Ending the “weaponization” of the federal government

— Delaying the ban on TikTok for 75 days

— Pardoning 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 others

— Officially recognizing two sexes

— Expanding energy production and temporarily stopping wind leasing, ending the “electric vehicle mandate”

— Withdrawing from the World Health Organization

— Starting the process to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America

— Declaring drug cartels terrorist organizations

 

Congress and the courts potentially can block executive orders, says a separate AP explainer.

 

Here is a transcript of Trump’s inaugural address, by AP.

 

Here is the text of the executive orders, from the White House.

Biden’s legacy: Credit where credit is due

As Joe Biden leaves political life, his record shows once again that every leader, like every human, makes mistakes. But I want to take a minute to celebrate his skill in enacting laws that will benefit Americans into the future.

During the last Trump administration, it was noted that the U.S. government was being run by people who didn’t value government or governing. Lawmakers who didn’t value lawmaking had no motivation to become skilled at it.

In an earlier time, during my 14 years as a congressional staffer, I saw close-up the value of lawmaking. I saw lawmakers of both parties — including then-Sen. Biden and future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who modeled the skills of crafting and enacting legislation.

 
And during the first two years of the Biden administration, with Biden in the White House and Pelosi the House speaker, I was heartened to see those skills again being used skillfully.

Biden talked about his economic legacy in a speech last month at the Brookings Institution. He said his administration had embraced a different approach after trickle-down economics that benefited wealthy Americans first. He focused on growing the economy from "the middle out and the bottom up," to the advantage of the middle class.

Biden was able to enact, despite narrow majorities in the House and Senate, major legislation including:

— The $1 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to repair America's roads, bridges and railways; bring high-speed internet to rural communities; increase the resilience of the electric grid; and upgrade drinking water, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure 

— The most significant gun safety legislation in 30 years
— The $53 billion CHIPS and Science Act to bring back manufacture of semiconductor chips to the United States from China
— The Inflation Reduction Act, which included the most significant climate change legislation in U.S. history, as well as a cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for people on Medicare

A more complete list of Biden’s accomplishments in those first two years is here.

But despite headlines such as The Wall Street Journal’s on Oct. 22 that the "U.S. economy again leads the world, IMF says," and inflation of 2.4 percent, voters put Republicans in control of the White House and both the Senate and House.

In his speech at Brookings, Biden highlighted the creation of 16 million jobs, the most in any single presidential term and the lowest average unemployment in 50 years.

 

In a CBS News article published this morning, Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, says: "He should have a strong legacy when it comes to the economy. He inherited an economy that was flat on its back because of the COVID pandemic, and he's leaving an economy that's flying high, at least in the aggregate."

"How much he can take credit for that, it's a reasonable debate, but I think he deserves a lot of credit," Zandi says.

Biden has noted that most of the positive effects of his policies will be felt over the next 10 years.

Biden aides have privately told The Associated Press that they expect President Trump to continue Biden's planned projects and take credit for Biden’s accomplishments, just like the Republicans in Congress who’ve celebrated plant openings and infrastructure developments in their districts after having voted against them.