Good News Headlines 11/4/2024
Dino Ambrosi speaks at a school assembly. Photo courtesy Dino Ambrosi
Technology Expert Shares The One Message That Can Get Teens To Rethink Their Screentime
by Tod Perry, Upworthy
In a 2023 TEDx Talk at Laguna Blanca School, Dino Ambrosi made a startling revelation that perfectly underlines the big question of the smartphone era: What is my time worth? Ambrosi is the founder of Project Reboot and an expert at guiding teens and young adults to develop more empowering relationships with technology. Assuming the average person now lives to 90, after calculating the average time they spend sleeping, going to school, working, cooking, eating, doing chores, sleeping, and taking care of personal hygiene, today’s 18-year-olds have only 334 months of their adult lives to themselves.
Maine Nonprofit Cancels $1.9 Million In Medical Debt For 1,500 People
by Edward Carver, Common Dreams
Mainers For Working Families, an advocacy group, announced on Thursday that it had partnered with a larger nonprofit to relieve $1.85 million worth of medical debt for 1,508 low-income people who live in Maine. MFWF furnished a donation of $12,740 to Undue Medical Debt, a 501(c)(3) group formed by former collections executives, which bought the $1.85 million in debts; such debt is sold at pennies on the dollar. The recipients, spread all over Maine, were people who live four times below the Federal Poverty Level or for whom medical debt totals more than 5% of their annual income.
Solar-Powered Generators Are Fueling Hurricane Relief In North Carolina
by Elizabeth Ouzts, Reasons to Be Cheerful
Seventeen days after Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina, tearing down power lines, destroying water mains and disabling cell phone towers, the signs of relief were hard to miss. Trucks formed a caravan along Interstate 40, filled with camouflaged soldiers, large square tanks of water and essentials from pet food to diapers. In towns, roadside signs — official versions emblazoned with nonprofit relief logos and wooden makeshift ones scrawled with paint — advertised free food and water. And then there were the generators. The noisy machines powered the trailers where Asheville residents sought showers, weeks after the city’s water system failed.
Tool Kit To Make Limb-Saving Devices Set To Transform Treatment In Crisis Zones
by Robin McKie, The Guardian
Two shattering events played a critical role in British scientists’ efforts to develop technology that could transform the treatment of people who suffer traumatic injuries in wars or disasters. The first was the blast that devastated Beirut on 4 August 2020, when a vast store of ammonium nitrate exploded in the city, killing more than 200 people and injuring 7,000. The second was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has left hundreds of thousands of casualties have been inflicted since war erupted there in February 2022. “Both the Beirut blast and the battles in Ukraine have caused thousands of dreadful extremity wounds and crush injuries.
Grants Nearly Doubled For Deadly Rural Roads After USA TODAY Investigated
by Austin Fast, USA TODAY
Rural towns plagued by deadly roads have won nearly $350 million this year to make them safer, a dramatic turnaround for communities that a USA TODAY investigation found had been left out of earlier rounds of federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grants. That’s according to a USA TODAY analysis of more than $1 billion in new grants the U.S. Department of Transportation announced last month. It’s a sharp departure from the first two years of the program, during which most of the cash awarded in the Safe Streets program landed in more affluent counties with lower fatality rates, the investigation found.
