Author Archives: MNgranny

About MNgranny

MNgranny has been an activist since the age of 17. After earning a BA in Mass Communications and enjoying a 30 year career, she is now disabled and dedicates her life to that activism. Her experiences include volunteering in community service organizations and taking leadership roles throughout her academic and professional life. She is also a survivor of rape and domestic violence, a published author and a master naturalist. She is also a professional member of the United States Press Association. She has focused for the last several years and specializes in Kurdish history, culture and politics.

‘North Sea Fossil Free’: Activists in 6 Countries Protest ‘Unhinged’ Oil and Gas Development

“Going full steam ahead with new North Sea oil and gas is a sure fire route to the worst climate scenarios,” one campaigner said.

By Olivia Rosane. Published 3-16-2024 by Common Dreams

The “oil slicks” performance artist group demonstrates the impacts of a potential oil spill on Scotland’s Moray Firth as part of a North Sea-wide day of action on March 16, 2024. Photo: Extinction Rebellion Scotland/X

Climate activists in six North Sea countries came together on Saturday to carry out acts of civil disobedience in protest of their governments’ continued fossil fuel development.

Demonstrators in the United KingdomNorway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands blockaded roads, ports, and refineries; dropped banners; and held solidarity concerts as part of the North Sea Fossil Free campaign to demand that their governments align their plans for the shared body of water with the Paris agreement goal of limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.

Continue reading

Share Button

GOP Leaders Push Judiciary to Ignore Policy Designed to End ‘Judge Shopping’

“Look who just came out and said it: We’re against the fair and impartial administration of justice,” said one civil rights attorney.

BY Julia Conley. Published 3-15-2024 by Common Dreams

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky speaking at CPAC in 2014. Photo: Gage Skidmore/flickr/CC

Republican lawmakers on Thursday signaled they want to stop judges from following a new judicial policy unveiled this week that’s aimed at curbing what one journalist called “one of the most outrageous aspects of the American legal system.”

In a letter to the chief justices of U.S. district courts across the country on a new rule regarding the practice of “judge shopping,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joined Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) in advising the judges that “Judicial Conference policy is not legislation.”

Continue reading
Share Button

Report Exposes US Corporations That Pay Their Execs More Than They Pay in Taxes

“Both kinds of corporate misbehavior—underpaying taxes and overpaying executives—ultimately make working families the victim through smaller paychecks and diminished public services.”

By Jake Johnson. Published 3-13-2024 by Common Dreams

Elon Musk at TED2013: The Young, The Wise, The Undiscovered. Wednesday, February 27, 2013, Long Beach, CA. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Top executives at dozens of major, profitable U.S. businesses received more in total compensation in recent years than their companies paid in federal taxes, underscoring the twin outrages of skyrocketing CEO pay and rampant corporate tax dodging.

report published Wednesday by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) identifies 35 profitable U.S. corporations that paid their top executives more than they paid the federal government in taxes between 2018 and 2022. The list of companies includes Ford, Netflix, NextEra Energy, and Tesla—whose CEO, Elon Musk, is the richest man in the world.

Continue reading
Share Button

Biden 2025 Budget Would Offer ‘Welcome Relief,’ But Not Enough

One expert said that enacting his reforms “will begin to reverse the 40-year one-way ratchet of falling taxes for the wealthy and corporations and instead invest in workers and families.”

By Jessica Corbett. Published 3-11-2024 by Common Dreams

Photto: U.S. Secretary of Defense/flickr/CC

On the heels of delivering the latest State of the Union speech and signing a package of funding bills, U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday unveiled his budget blueprint for fiscal year 2025, a proposal praised by congressional Democrats and progressive advocates who want him to go even further.

The $7.3 trillion budget comes as the divided Congress is still sorting out funding for the current fiscal year. Given those divisions—and that the Republican House majority is already advancing its own budget resolution for the fiscal year that begins in October—the Democratic president’s plan is widely seen as a statement of priorities going into the November election.

Continue reading
Share Button

Migrant Drownings in Pacific Soared 3,200% After Trump Raised Border Wall: Study

The Trump administration nearly doubled the height of the border barrier as part of its “zero tolerance” immigration agenda.

By Brett Wilkins. Published 3-8-2024 by Common Dreams

Border Field State Park / Imperial Beach, San Diego, California. Photo: Tony Webster/Wikimedia Commons/CC

The number of migrants drowning in the Pacific Ocean while attempting to enter the United States from Tijuana, Mexico skyrocketed by 3,200% after the Trump administration dramatically increased the height of the border barrier extending into the southern California sea, a study published Thursday revealed.

The study—published in JAMA, the American Medical Association’s journal—found that 33 people drowned while trying to swim across the southern border between 2020-23, compared with just one death in the previous four years. Researchers tied the soaring fatalities to the Trump administration’s decision to raise the height of the border wall from 17 feet to 30 feet as part of its “zero tolerance” immigration agenda.

Continue reading
Share Button

‘Bombshell’ Memo Shows Open Chemical Burn in East Palestine Violated EPA Rules

“It’s inconceivable that there wouldn’t have been someone from the enforcement office, or general counsel, saying, ‘Oh, Norfolk Southern wants to do an uncontrolled burn—that’s illegal, you cannot do that,” said a former EPA official.

By Julia Conley. Published 3-7-2024 by Common Dreams

NTSB photograph of the 2023 Ohio train derailment. Photo: NTSB/Public domain

A day after the head of the National Transportation Safety Board told Congress that the deliberate burning of toxic chemicals in five crashed train cars in East Palestine, Ohio last year was unnecessary, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said the so-called “controlled burn” also likely went against EPA regulations.

Kevin Garrahan, who worked for the agency for 40 years and focused on environmental risk assessment and hazardous waste cleanup, told HuffPost that soon after a Norfolk Southern train derailed in the town of 4,700 people, he alerted a former EPA colleague to a 2022 memo on the open burning and open detonation of waste explosives.

Continue reading
Share Button

Scientists Won’t Classify Anthropocene as ‘Epoch’ Yet, But Say Human Impact Undeniable

The Anthropocene is classified as a geological “event” at this point—as are mass extinctions and rapid expansions of biodiversity.

By Julia Conley Published 3-5-2024 by Common Dreams

Pollution in New Delhi India. Photo: Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier/flickr/CC

The idea underpinning scientists’ push to recognize the current time period as a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene dates back more than 100 years, but on Tuesday, a committee of experts voted down the proposal to officially declare a new age defined by human beings’ impact on the Earth.

The panel, organized by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), was tasked with weighing whether the Holocene—the epoch that began at the close of the last ice age, more than 11,000 years ago—has ended, and if so, when precisely the Anthropocene began.

Continue reading
Share Button

What does a state’s secretary of state do? Most run elections, a once-routine job facing increasing scrutiny

By John J. Martin, University of Virginia. Published 2-29-2024 by The Conversation

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger with Governor Brian Kemp. Photo: Brad Raffensperger/Facebook

They may be the most important government officials you can’t name. Their decisions have the potential to alter election results. Scholars have referred to them as the “guardians of the democratic process.”

Who are these unknown, but essential, officials?

State secretaries of state.

Continue reading
Share Button

Florida House Republicans Advance Bill to ‘Deny the Legal Existence’ of Trans People

“Rest assured that the passage of this discriminatory bill would have a detrimental and real-life impact on the trans community,” said one Florida ACLU leader.

By Brett Wilkins. Published 3-1-2024 by Common Dreams

Capital Pride Parade in, Washington, DC 2018. Photo: Ted Eytan/CC

The ACLU of Florida on Friday led condemnation of a bill passed by the Republican-controlled lower chamber of the state Legislature that “seeks to deny the legal existence of transgender individuals by requiring individuals to identify as their sex assigned at birth instead of their gender on their driver’s licenses and ID cards.”

Dubbed the Trans Erasure Bill by opponents, H.B. 1639 passed by a vote of 75-33. The ACLU notes that the legislation “also requires health plans to cover the widely discredited practice of conversion therapy and creates additional obstacles for health plans to cover gender-affirming care.”

Continue reading
Share Button

Senate GOP Blocks Effort to Federally Protect IVF Access

“Remember this the next time they claim to care about freedom and family,” said one Democratic lawmaker.

By Brett Wilkins. Published 2-28-2024 by Common Dreams

Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. (Official U.S. Senate photo by Karsyn Meyerson)

Democratic U.S. lawmakers and reproductive rights defenders on Wednesday blasted congressional Republicans and former U.S. President Donald Trump after a GOP senator blocked a bill to protect access to in vitro fertilization a week after Alabama’s right-wing Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children.

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) objected to a request to pass by unanimous consent a bill introduced by Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) to federally protect IVF access, claiming that the bill is “a vast overreach that is full of poison pills that go way too far.”

Continue reading
Share Button