Hard working individuals and families across southeast Michigan have been adversely impacted by DTE Energy's continued failure as our sole electrical service provider for far too long. From frequent brownouts to complete power outages – citizens are left without much needed power and often significant financial loss resulting from damaged appliances and spoiled food with no compensation. DTE Energy continues to respond to outages with only promises made for improved infrastructure investment and maintenance that simply does not take place or produce lasting results. DTE Energy must be held accountable for the poor state of their system and make real financial investment to provide lasting and sustainable improvements that greatly reduce the frequency and duration of power outages.

FROM COMMON CAUSE: " The two bills really depend on each other. While the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act will protect the right to vote, which is absolutely crucial as state legislatures across the country are creating new barriers to voting, the For the People Act will also move the ball forward by creating new national standards that expands the freedom to vote and makes our elections more accessible. Without the For the People Act, the Voting Rights Act would only combat current voter suppression efforts. Both the For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act can combat efforts by Republican state legislators to restrict the right to vote (like the outrageous bill recently passed in Georgia). The For the People Act sets national standards so that every voter, regardless of our zip code, race, or background, has equal access to the ballot box. Likewise, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act includes checks and balances on state efforts that may suppress voting rights. The reason Congress may pass the For the People Act first is because in order for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to be effective, Congress needs more time to hold more hearings and gather evidence of contemporaneous voter suppression for the record to back up the provisions in the bill. This will put the bill on the soundest footing. We need both to protect the right to vote and expand it to make our elections more accessible, safe, and fair with national standards for all voters. That’s why Congress needs to pass both the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act."

Mississippians deserve to be protected by their elected officials. A mask mandate would help the public realize the dire circumstances occurring in our hospitals.

Student and teacher mask mandates are proven effective at minimizing the transmission of COVID-19. However, mask enforcement is difficult, and students and teachers remove masks when eating and drinking throughout the school day. Therefore, the mask mandate must be supplemented by COVID-19 vaccination among those teachers, students, and visitors eligible to receive the vaccination. This mandate should extend to COVID-19 booster eligibility. Proof of vaccination must be enforced and should not be self-reported. If proof of vaccination and a mask mandate are not implemented, not only will students, teachers, and their families experience needless deaths and disabilities, but our courts will also become clogged with families litigating against school districts over their alleged negligence during this time. Juries will not be forgiving to negligent school districts, and taxpayers will pay compensation to victims and victim families. Implementing a proof of vaccination check is far less costly than years of litigation resulting from unnecessary and preventable death and disability. Prevent needless death and disability by implementing best practices already being implemented by other organizations in Washington State, including Google, Microsoft, the University of Washington, Washington State University, the Seattle Theatre Group, and others.

To slow the spread of Covid-19 in Palm Beach County Public Schools

The lives of Arkansas children and families are in jeopardy. We can not afford to not delay the start of our schools until these measures are in place.

In June 2020—the day before my 75th birthday—I was approved for home confinement under a provision in the to limit the spread of COVID in American federal prisons. It was a very strict criteria: people had to have completed more than 50 percent of their sentence, never engaged in violence, committed no disciplinary infractions in the past year and received the lowest score on the department’s risk-assessment tool. We are being incarcerated for low level offenses, and President Biden can act now to keep us with our families. I was fitted with an ankle monitor that tracked every move I made, and I could not go anywhere without permission from my case manager. But I was aware of the restrictions and grateful to be at home with my 95-year-old mother and family. I had signed up for a computer class administered by the Maryland Justice Project, which was being held in a building owned by the Baltimore City Police Department. I didn’t know the building was designed to prevent GPS and other signals as a security measure, so the ankle monitor I was required to wear lost its signal. My case manager called me, but I’d turned off my phone so I could focus in class—I’d been labeled an escapee, and had to return to prison over this minor misunderstanding. Luckily, I was released after three weeks, and was given a compassionate release by a judge—but this was only after national media coverage and public pressure. Thousands of other people are continuing to live in constant fear, worried that at any given moment, they’ll be ripped away from their families, homes, and communities, and sent back to prison. And in fact, there’s a chance that all of the people currently serving out their sentences in home confinement will have to return to prison once the federal COVID emergency order ends—this was the Trump DoJ’s order, and the Biden administration has shown no signs of changing that. President Biden, please act now to keep these people home. They are doing everything right, yet they wake up every day not knowing where they will be in a few months, and that uncertainty makes it impossible to plan for their futures. Please remove that cloud. Commute their sentences now. I wrote about my experience for the Washington Post in July, and you can read the full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/15/gwen-levi-home-confinement-prison-biden/

Apple recently announced an important new step in the fight against child sexual abuse: they’ll scan all new iPhones for CSAM and report it. This change means abuse can be discovered much sooner -- not days or weeks after when images are uploaded or shared -- and could save child victims and protect their privacy. These scans are done entirely by machines that exclusively look for a “digital fingerprint” of abusive material and flag it as potentially illegal -- a solution that balances the welfare and privacy of kids with that of iPhone users. Android phones, owned and operated by Google, don’t have the same device scanning in place. Users must upload photos to a service for abusive images to be detected -- allowing millions of images to be shared stealthily and victims to go undetected for longer. Google, stop failing kids and start scanning for CSAM on Android devices.

On Thursday, July 29, 69-year-old Florencio Gueta Vargas, a Washington State farm worker, collapsed and died while working in the hops fields of Yakima County. He was found slumped beside his tractor when he did not show up at the end of his 2:30 shift. The average hourly temperature was reported as 100.8° at 2 pm on the day he died. For decades, Florencio went to work in all conditions. This time he did not come home. Florencio leaves behind a wife and 6 children who are filled with questions, grief and anger. Heat death is entirely preventable. Farm workers are as much as 35 times more likely to die from heat than any other civilian occupation. Currently, the Department of Labor has included rulemaking on heat illness prevention in outdoor and indoor settings in its Spring 2021 regulatory agenda, but permanent regulations take time. Workers' lives are in danger now. They don't have time to wait. Florencio is the 2nd farm worker to die of heat-related causes in the Pacific NorthWest in the last month. Record high temperatures are being seen across the country. The Department of Labor must institute immediate emergency heat regulations to protect the hard working people who put food on our tables, as well as outdoor and indoor workers in the building trades, warehouses, steel mills, and others whose lives are threatened by extreme heat.

We don’t have the luxury of hanging up on reality. There is so much at stake: Healthcare, poverty, racial equity, public safety, housing, social programs — the list goes on. We cannot let the Conservative party win and implement policies that sow hate and division and take away what we have worked so hard for. The party that embraces Trump and all that he stands for — xenophobia, racism, classism, white supremacy, extremism, snd so much more. Their top candidate is a Trump Republican who will unravel all that is good in our State, including the progress that we have made. The struggle for equity and dismantling of hate will be under attack. If you still aren’t feeling the pressure — remember that the power of a governor is immense. Imagine meaningful legislation that we have advocated for never being signed into law. Our hands will be tied. The poll results are in and show that if we don’t show up to vote, the recall will 100% happen. If you do nothing else in this stressful year, please make it voting and reaching out to others to VOTE NO on the recall. Please contact the author of this petition for details on how to GET INVOLVED and SPRED THE WORD. And vote. Vote. VOTE. Kimberly Adams [email protected] 714-325-5303

Experts in fields ranging from public health to meteorology agree that we are in the middle of a global climate disaster which is hurting and killing millions of people annually and it will only get worse. Without immediate action, it will upend life as we know it for hundreds of millions of people. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report outlines how many of the changes we are experiencing globally "are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years." The U.S. should acknowledge the damage the fossil fuel industry causes and be a global leader. Tell President Biden, Congress, and federal climate leaders to stop giving billions of dollars in subsidies to companies that are destroying the planet and killing people. The fossil fuel industry is one of the biggest contributors to rising temperatures globally. The US must immediately end the $20 billion in government subsidies we give to these massive corporations like Exxon and Shell—and we can encourage US-based companies and our global allies to invest in a sustainable future. This global problem requires a global solution. Sign the petition demanding an end to fossil fuel subsidies.

The world's climate scientists just sounded a "red alert for humanity." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Nobel Prize-winning body that synthesizes and summarizes the state of climate science, released a report today, and their assessment could not be clearer: 1) we are changing the climate in ways that threaten hundreds of millions of lives and are already causing irreversible damage; 2) "the worst is yet to come"; and 3) we must act immediately and on a massive scale to save lives and species from a planet set to spiral out of control. With so much that needs to change, where do we start? We start by cutting off warming at the root: We must get off of fossil fuels. Burning coal, oil, and fossil fuels is the top ingredient in the blanket of pollution warming our planet. And right now our tax dollars are actually paying companies like Exxon and Shell to destroy the planet. Today's IPCC report lays out in brutally meticulous detail what so many of us already know through our daily experience: climate change is here, and it is a life-and-death emergency. Just hours before the report was released, the Dixie fire tearing through California became the state's largest wildfire in history, blanketing the sky with smoke so thick that people in Colorado and beyond had to stay indoors to avoid dangerous air. The report is a survey of lots of specific climate studies, giving us a view of the whole forest instead of the individual trees in it. So while their findings are startling, they're not surprising to people following along. And it should be no surprise to the companies fueling our warming planet—They've known about their contribution to climate change for decades, but have chosen to pursue a coverup over a makeover. If we're going to address climate change–and we must—then we have to immediately stop giving taxpayer handouts to fossil fuel companies like Exxon. Sign the petition: end Fossil Fuel subsidies, invest in climate solutions.