Swordsage Dachshund

July 24, 2026 - Anti-imperialist Venezuelan workers took to the streets this week in protest against the government's renewed ties with Israel, which the people condemned as a betrayal of the revolution and the Palestinian people, as well as the continued US occupation of Venezuela.

Hey there, it’s Erica! Welcome to another edition of Feel Good News — here’s your weekly dose of uplifting stories.

1. ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic Turned Down Million-Dollar Offer to Perform in Saudi Arabia: ‘I Don’t Need to Take Any Money if It Makes Me Feel Icky’

“Weird Al” Yankovic recently disclosed that he declined an offer of at least $1 million to perform at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia last year, expressing discomfort with participating in the event. He emphasized his decision by stating that he wished for offers he could accept without feeling bad. The festival, which featured several prominent American comedians, faced criticism due to its ties to the regime of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and human rights violations, including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Several comedians, like Atsuko Okatsuka and Shane Gillis, also turned down offers due to similar ethical concerns, while others defended their participation, suggesting that comedy could promote openness in the region. The future of the Riyadh Comedy Festival remains uncertain.

2. Illinois has erased more than $2 billion in medical debt for over 1 million residents across all 102 counties, and recipients don’t apply, they simply receive a letter saying their debt is gone.

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker announced the elimination of $2.6 billion in medical debt during a meeting with Cook County health officials. Of this, $1.5 billion was erased through a Cook County program. The initiative provides relief to over a million residents across the state, averaging $1,200 in debt relief per patient. The state’s Medical Debt Relief Program was established in July 2024, partnering with the nonprofit Undue Medical Debt, which committed $10 million to address these debts. CEO Allison Sesso explained that they buy debts from collections agencies at low prices and notify individuals of their debt relief. Cook County Health’s Erik Mikaitis emphasized that the relief could support families financially amid potential Medicaid cuts. However, a 2024 study suggested that the relief’s impact on financial wellbeing and healthcare usage was minimal and may harm the repayment of other medical bills. Despite losing federal stimulus funding, Cook County plans to continue the debt relief program.

3. Trained rats that sniff out landmines have destroyed more than 31,700 landmines, cleared an area the size of Paris, helped make Mozambique mine free, are clearing land in Cambodia, and are now helping 33,000 displaced families return home in Azerbaijan

In December 2023, APOPO celebrated a significant achievement in humanitarian mine action by clearing 100 million square meters of land since its inception. This area is comparable to the size of Paris and was previously contaminated by landmines and explosive remnants of war, threatening local communities. By the end of 2023, APOPO had removed 31,739 landmines, 90,140 explosive remnants, 36,205 small arms, and 2,731 cluster munitions, benefitting over 2 million people in affected regions. Their programs also emphasize mine risk education, victim assistance, and community support for socio-economic development. APOPO employs trained animals, such as HeroRATs and HeroDOGs, alongside traditional manual demining techniques for effective mine detection and clearance. Their operations have restored land for productive use, aiding community recovery. Key contributions include: - Angola: 8.2 million sqm cleared, supporting post-civil war recovery. - Azerbaijan: 1.3 million sqm cleared, focusing on landmine issues from the 2020 Karabakh conflict. - Cambodia: Nearly 50 million sqm cleared, contributing to safety and cultural heritage protection. - Laos: Over 22 million sqm cleared, addressing WWII-era unexploded ordnance. - Mozambique: 11.5 million sqm cleared, aiding the country’s path to becoming mine-free. - South Sudan: 1.7 million sqm cleared, enhancing safety in conflict regions. - Türkiye: 641,029 sqm cleared to improve safety along borders. APOPO remains dedicated to eliminating landmine threats and enhancing community safety, expressing gratitude to its donors and partners who support its mission.

4. Cambodia has become the first country in Asia and the Pacific to meet the UN’s toughest HIV targets, with 95% of people living with HIV now knowing their status, receiving treatment, and achieving viral suppression

The announcement jointly made by the Royal Government of Cambodia and Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS marks a major step in Cambodia’s progress towards ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. It also comes as 2026 marks 30 years of Joint United Nations Programme support to Cambodia’s HIV response - three decades of partnership with the Royal Government of Cambodia, communities, civil society, development partners and people living with and affected by HIV.

5. A brain injury left a Seattle man unable to remember the career he’d spent 20 years building, but he still remembered how to fix bicycles. Now he repairs broken bikes for free and gives them away to people who need them.

Rob P. spends hours restoring a broken bicycle shifter instead of replacing it for $10. He repairs bikes for free and gives them away to reduce waste and find purpose after a traumatic brain injury from a car accident in 2017. This injury led to cognitive and physical challenges, including memory loss and partial blindness. Previously a computer programmer, Rob revived his bike repair skills from youth to engage in meaningful work, slowly overcoming depression. He began fixing bikes for friends and expanded his efforts through an online group, making hundreds of repairs. Rob’s meticulous approach, supported by his wife Becky, has helped him regain a sense of identity and accomplishment, offering joy to both donors and recipients of the bikes. Experts note that fixing bicycles taps into procedural memory, enhancing recovery possibilities. Rob, focused on his abilities rather than his limitations, finds fulfillment in helping others while navigating the challenges of life after injury.

6. Hawaii just signed healthcare measures that could erase up to $91 million in medical debt for 50,000 residents, with qualified people simply getting a letter saying their debt has been canceled, while also expanding fertility preservation coverage and colorectal cancer screening access

Gov. Josh Green signed three health measures into law on July 9 aimed at expanding care and creating a state program to forgive medical debt. The package includes new insurance rules for fertility preservation, financial help for colorectal cancer screenings, and a Medical Debt Acquisition and Forgiveness Program to cancel qualifying bills. One bill (Act 218) requires insurers to cover standard fertility preservation for patients facing medically necessary treatments that could cause infertility — think chemo, radiation or certain surgeries — and applies to policies issued or renewed after Dec. 31, 2026; Hawaii will be the 22nd state with this requirement. Another (Act 219) directs the Department of Human Services to provide financial assistance for colorectal screening for people who are uninsured, underinsured or ineligible for Medicaid, and forces some plans to cover necessary follow-up colonoscopies after a positive screen with no deductibles, copays, or coinsurance; colorectal cancer is the state’s second-leading cancer killer, about 260 deaths a year. The debt bill (Act 220) sets up a program under the Office of Wellness and Resilience to partner with nonprofits to buy outstanding medical debt for a fraction of its value and cancel it, potentially wiping out as much as $91 million for up to 50,000 residents, though it’s subject to available funding. Officials say about 1 in 20 Hawaiians has medical debt on their credit report; people won’t apply — if their debt is purchased and erased they’ll just get a notice. Supporters called it a major step to prevent medical bills from wrecking families’ finances, noting estimates that a relatively small state investment could cancel huge amounts of debt.

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That’s it for last week :)

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The Ocean is Teeming with Critical Minerals: Here’s How We Could Get Them

PNNL researchers are studying ways to use seawater and seawater-generated chemicals to acquire magnesium, lithium, and other critical materials

Newswise — Mining usually brings to mind mountains, heavy machinery, and piles of gravel. However, during World War II, scientists harnessed a new mining frontier in the ocean—not its rocky floor, but the water itself. The United States mined magnesium directly from seawater for 50 years before shifting to imports in the late 1990s.  Now, through funding from the Department of Energy’s Hydropower and Hydrokinetic Office, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are returning to the deep blue—not just for magnesium, but for many of the critical minerals drifting in Earth’s vast seas.   “Just 0.1 percent of seawater contains enough critical minerals like magnesium and lithium, if we can fully extract them, to meet humanity’s needs for the next 50,000 years or more,” said Jessica Cross, a chemical oceanographer at PNNL. 

Dharna Noor at The Guardian:

A group of 25 Democratic attorneys general led by California’s Rob Bonta are taking the Trump administration to court for imposing “unlawful” conditions on federal grants for disaster preparedness and response. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) have been placing stipulations on federal grants that amount to a “campaign of coercion” designed to force states to adopt the White House’s preferred voting and immigration policies says the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Rhode Island on Thursday.

Those requirements, which have been imposed on more than $740m in combined funding for disaster preparedness and counter-terrorism, include mandating states employ a federal system to verify the citizenship of all voters and conduct post-election audits. The lawsuit also targets agencies’ attempt to withhold funds to states who do not agree to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in conducting raids and deportations – a mandate that a federal court struck down last year. And it calls out a new condition giving Fema the ability to cancel state grants if they are found to be out of alignment with the agency’s priorities. “President Trump has little support for both his mass deportation agenda and his baseless claims of election fraud, so instead, he’s trying to bully state and local governments into adopting his preferred policies in exchange for much-needed funding,” Bonta said in a statement.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Polynesians did also rely on a form of a physical map called a stick chart, illustrating the specific wave and swell patterns surrounding different island chains. These were particularly helpful during cloudy conditions when the sun and stars were less useful. To navigate the Marshall Islands, the Marshallese represented ocean swell patterns using parts of coconut fronds and shells as islands. Like a subway map, they don’t so much represent distances as they do relationships. The complex and decorative stick charts were often only understood by the person who made them. They were memorised before a voyage by the pilot who would lie on the floor of a canoe to get a sense of swell movement and often lead a squadron of 15 or more boats.

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