Good stuff happened last week, check it out!

Abby Brockman
3 min readMay 22, 2017

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  • After intense pressure, U.S. Bank became the first major bank to stop all financing of pipeline construction!
  • The Supreme Court refused to revive a restrictive North Carolina voter ID law that a federal appeals court had struck down as unconstitutional because it would “ target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
  • New Orleans took down the last of four monuments considered homages to white supremacy.
  • The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission blocked new drilling on a major natural-gas pipeline after the owner, Energy Transfer Partners, reported 18 leaks and spilled more than 2 million gallons of drilling materials. Energy Transfer Partners also built the Dakota Access pipeline.
  • North Carolina’s Democratic governor vowed to issue an executive order to increase protections for LGBTQ people in the state.
  • Philadelphia set the national example in the fight against mass incarceration by choosing progressive Larry Krasner as the Democratic candidate for district attorney. Krasner has sued law enforcement and government agencies more than 75 times, worked for Black Lives Matter and Occupy Philly, and campaigned on promises to end mass incarceration, and never ask for cash bail for nonviolent offenders, pursue the death penalty, or bring cases based on illegal searches. This is a huge step towards criminal justice reform!
  • Three French gay rights groups filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court in the Hague that accuses Chechnya of a policy of genocide against gay people in an attempt to get a real investigation.
  • Jason Chaffetz, the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee who has continually refused to adequately investigate the Trump administration due to his own personal career aspirations announced that he will resign from Congress on June 30. Good riddance!
  • Puerto Rican independence leader Oscar Lopez Rivera was released from house arrest after 36 years in prison. President Obama had commuted his sentence in January.
  • Chelsea Manning is free!
  • Students walked out of Mike Pence’s commencement address at Notre Dame. Pence was invited after thousands of students and faculty petitioned the school’s president not to invite President Trump.
  • Rep. Robert Fisher resigned from the New Hampshire legislature after outcry over his woman-hating Reddit site.
  • Louis Mavrakis, a small-town mayor who made a big splash last year with his outspoken support for Trump, was defeated in the Monessen, PA, Democratic primary by a 26-year-old assistant band director at the local high school.
  • Nearly a quarter of young people who identified as Republicans in 2015 now lean towards Democrats, according to a Pew Research study about party loyalty.
  • Attorney General Maura Healey issued guidelines to healthcare providers and public schools to allay immigrants’ fears of being deported at school or when seeking health care.
  • A U.S. judge issued a temporary restraining order to block the Justice Department’s efforts to prevent lawyers from advising clients who can’t afford full representation in immigration court.
  • We did it! When the EPA asked for comments about which regulations to repeal, replace, or modify their regulations, they got over 55,000, and the majority supported regulatory protections and described how they’ve improved our quality of life.
  • Richard Mueller was appointed Special Counsel to oversee a criminal investigation into links and coordination between Russia and members of the Trump campaign — as well as “any matters” that arise from the investigation, including perjury and obstruction of justice.
  • Three Waltham High School students organized an all-day sit-in protest at the school in response to a number of incidents of discriminatory at the school; roughly 600 students missed classes to participate.

Compiled and written with the help of the *incredible* Mary Wasmuth.

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Abby Brockman
Abby Brockman

Written by Abby Brockman

Hospital chaplain, community organizer, writer. Shamelessly laughs at the same jokes over and over and believes there are gateways to holiness everywhere.