Wade Milyard heard the voice from “out of nowhere” and knew he needed to listen—he thought it was God, or some other higher power. The former canine officer for the Frederick Police Department in Maryland was responding to a domestic dispute at a homeless camp. Soon after he investigated the disturbance, the voice rang out. “Ask them about their laundry.” Milyard heeded the voice, asked the question, and unknowingly set the course for a prayer-fulfilling future. The homeless couple he interviewed told him they typically washed their laundry in a nearby creek. The cop never forgot that response, nor his call to service. He pooled multiple donations with some of his own money and went to work creating a full service laundromat on wheels. Fresh Step Laundry was born—with a mission “to help restore dignity to the unhoused community by providing free, accessible, and hygienic laundry.” Since retiring from the police force in January, the 45-year-old has been traveling around his Maryland city, which is near D.C., making a difference—one load of wash at a time. He’s set a schedule so people can meet him to take advantage of his laundry service, and his email is at the bottom of the web page. In the last several weeks alone, Fresh Step has washed more than 2,000 pounds of laundry and his next goal is to add a second vehicle so he can double the number of people he can serve. Note: Explore more positive stories like this in on human interest stories and healing social division. - Good News Network

“These plants are the winners, the ones that get to pass their genes on [to future generations],” says Lee DeHaan of the Land Institute, an agricultural non-profit based in Salina, Kansas. If DeHaan’s breeding programme maintains its current progress, the descendant of these young perennial crop plants could one day usher in a wholesale revolution in agriculture. The plants are intermediate wheatgrass. Since 2010, DeHaan has been transforming this small-seeded, wild species into a high-yielding, domesticated grain crop called Kernza. He believes it will eventually be a viable – and far more sustainable – alternative to annual wheat, the world’s most widely grown crop and the source of one in five of all calories consumed by humanity. Remarkably, DeHaan does not paint the current agricultural-industrial complex as the enemy. “Every disruptive technology is always opposed by those being disrupted,” he says. “But if the companies [that make up] the current system can adjust to the disruption, they can play in that new world just the same.” The Land Institute’s strategy is redirection rather than replacement. “Our trajectory is to eventually get the resources that are currently dedicated to annual grain crops directed to developing varieties of perennials,” says DeHaan. “That’s our [route to] success.” There are signs that this is already working, with the food firm General Mills now incorporating Kernza into its breakfast cereals. Note: Explore more positive stories like this in on healing the Earth and technology for good. - The Guardian

New York State's Bedford Hills Correctional facility, Illinois' Pontiac Correctional Center and Albion Correctional Facility in New York State are the three U.S. prisons with the highest reported rates of sexual victimization. These are the findings of a new Department of Justice (DOJ) report about sexual victimization in state and federal prisons, as reported by inmates. The Justice Department carried out a National Inmate Survey in 177 federal prisons. The annual survey is required by the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). The survey of 27,541 state and federal inmates found that some 4.1 percent of adult prison inmates reported being sexually victimized in state and federal prisons during the prior 12 months. Furthermore, 2.3 percent of inmates reported sexual victimization by another inmate while 2.2 percent reported sexual victimization by facility staff. Meanwhile, 17 prisons had rates defined as high compared to other facilities. The data pertains to prisons that participated in the survey so the data may not accurately capture those with the highest sexual victimization in America. The prison with the highest proportion of prison inmates reporting sexual victimization was Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a female prison in New York where 18.6 percent of inmates reported sexual victimization. Pontiac Correctional Center, a men's prison in Illinois was second, with 15.9 percent of inmates reporting sexual victimization. Note: These numbers represent a small number of institutions that voluntarily provided survey data for this study. The actual incidence of sexual violence in correctional facilities may be much higher. To understand how disturbing and common sexual abuse in prison is, read this Human Rights Watch report that documents dozens of first-hand accounts of rape and sexual slavery in prison systems across 34 states. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals. - Newsweek

To understand how risky drugs could end up in your medicine cabinet, ProPublica spent more than a year and a half investigating the Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of the foreign factories that make generic medications and have been cited for violating critical quality standards. It quickly became clear through our reporting that patients and doctors don’t reliably have the information they need to make informed decisions about the medicines they take or prescribe. ProPublica has created Rx Inspector, a tool that aims to help. You can look up your generic prescription drugs, and we’ll guide you to the specific facility that made them. We were able to link more than 80% of generic prescription drug products in our database to a factory that made them using databases of label information, manufacturing facilities and location data that we sued the FDA for. Additionally, we included the history of FDA actions at those facilities based on a trove of inspection records we assembled. The FDA publishes warning letters that detail “significant violation(s) of federal requirement(s).” We obtained these from the FDA’s website going back to 2020. We used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to find hundreds of import alert lists published by the FDA over more than 15 years. The lists identified factories banned from shipping drugs to the United States because the FDA found manufacturing violations. Note: Try this tool for yourself here. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Pharma corruption. - ProPublica

On November 26, soldiers of the Presidential Guard took power in yet another West African country. This time, it was Guinea-Bissau — the tiny country on the Atlantic coast better known to the world as the region’s first “narco-state.” Since its independence in 1974, the former Portuguese colony has endured nine coups, making it one of West Africa’s most fragile states. [The country] acts as a key transit point for the cocaine trade between the northern tier of South America and Europe. The latest coup is the second successful military takeover this year in Africa’s rapidly expanding coup belt. According to the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), “Politics and cocaine in Guinea-Bissau have gone hand in hand for decades. Upheavals in one cause ripples in the other.” The United States established diplomatic relations with Guinea-Bissau in 1975. Guinea-Bissau’s importance as the key transshipment point for cocaine between Colombia and the fast-growing market in Europe grew steadily over the years since. In 2013, Gen. Antonio Indjai, Guinea-Bissau’s senior military official at the time, was charged for conspiring to traffic drugs and procure military-grade weapons including surface-to-air missiles for Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia (the “FARC”). In 2019, one of two large cocaine shipments seized in Guinea-Bissau was linked to ... the Al-Mourabitoun terrorist group, which is affiliated with Al-Qaeda. Note: Many of the recent coups in Africa have been carried out by people affiliated with US intelligence or military interests. Read our Substack investigation into the dark truths behind the US War on Drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the War on Drugs. - Quincy Center for Responsible Statecraft

Even as US beef prices have continued to surge, American cattle ranchers have come under increased financial pressure—and a new report from More Perfect Union claims that this is due in part to industry consolidation in the meat-packing industry. Bill Bullard, the CEO of the trade association R-CALF USA, explained to More Perfect Union that cattle ranchers are essentially at the bottom of the pyramid in the beef-producing process, while the top is occupied by “four meat packers controlling 80% of the market.” “It’s there that the meat packers are able to exert their market power in order to leverage down the price that the cattle feeder receives for the animals,” Bullard said. To illustrate the impact this has had on farmers, Bullard pointed out that cattle producers in 1980 received 63 cents for every dollar paid by consumers for beef, whereas four decades later they were receiving just 37 cents for every dollar. “That allocation has flipped on its head because the marketplace is fundamentally broken,” Bullard [said]. Angela Huffman, president of Farm Action, recently highlighted the role played by the four big meatpacking companies—Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS—in hurting US ranchers. Dan Osborn, an independent US Senate candidate running in Nebraska, has made the dangers of corporate consolidation a central theme of his campaign. “If you’re a farmer, your inputs, your seed, your chemicals, you have to buy from monopolies,” he said. Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on food system corruption. - Common Dreams

Every year millions of people cycle through America’s prisons and jails. Many of them never make it home. Using information from a federal government database of more than 21,000 deaths, The Marshall Project is now able to show how people are dying in America’s prisons and jails. For incarcerated people under the age of 55, just under half of the deaths we could identify were from largely preventable causes — like suicide or drug overdoses. Older incarcerated people tended to die from natural causes. In more than a third of cases, we simply could not determine a cause of death, because there was not enough information. Our analysis is based on data collected by the Justice Department under the Death In Custody Reporting Act, which Congress passed a quarter-century ago with the intention of creating a record of everyone who dies in law enforcement custody. The data contained information like names, dates and brief descriptions of the circumstances surrounding each person who died in prisons, jails and during the course of arrest between Oct. 1, 2019 and Sept. 30, 2023. The government’s data is riddled with errors. Not only did we find hundreds of deaths missing from the dataset, but the majority of the descriptions detailing how each person died didn’t meet the government’s own minimum quality standards. Almost one-in-10 of the deaths in the dataset were suicides — making it the third most common way people of all ages died. Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption. - The Marshall Project

The 2018 legalization of sports betting gave rise to a host of apps making it ever easier to gamble on games. Kalshi and Polymarket offer that service, but also much more. They’ll take your bets, for instance, on the presidential and midterm elections, the next Israeli bombing campaign, or whether Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will get divorced. Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, laid it out simply at a conference held by Citadel Securities in October. “The long-term vision,” Mansour said, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” It’s as dystopian as it sounds. Betting apps have at times delivered better accuracy than polling results. For example, while pollsters clocked last year’s presidential race as deadlocked in the days before the election, Polymarket gave Trump an edge at 58 percent. But whether they are consistently better is a whole other story. Consider the 2022 midterm elections: Up until election night, the major prediction markets “failed spectacularly” and “projected outcomes for key races that turned out to be completely wrong,” according to one expert analysis. Prediction markets are also more prone to manipulation than they’d have you believe. And this can give deep-pocketed political actors another vessel for information warfare. Kalshi was even embroiled in a legal battle with federal regulators as recently as this summer for this very reason. Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and financial industry corruption. - The Intercept

A French ban on the production and sale of cosmetics and most clothing containing polluting and health-threatening "forever chemicals" goes into force on Thursday. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are human-made chemicals used since the late 1940s to mass produce the non-stick, waterproof and stain-resistant treatments that coat everything from frying pans to umbrellas, carpets and dental floss. Because PFAS take an extremely long time to break down – earning them their "forever" nickname – they have seeped into the soil and groundwater, and from there into the food chain and drinking water. The French law, approved by lawmakers in February, bans the production, import or sale from January 2026 of any product for which an alternative to PFAS already exists. These include cosmetics and ski wax, as well as clothing containing the chemicals, except certain "essential" industrial textiles. It will also make French authorities regularly test drinking water for all kinds of PFAS. A handful of US states, including California, implemented a ban on the intentional use of PFAS in cosmetics beginning in 2025, and several other states are slated to follow in 2026. Denmark has banned the use of PFAS in food packaging since 2020. The European Union has been studying a possible ban on the use of PFAS in consumer products, but has not yet presented or implemented such a regulation. Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing our bodies and healing the Earth. - France 24

The police department in Heber City, Utah, was forced to explain why a police report software declared that an officer had somehow shapeshifted into a frog. As Salt Lake City-based Fox 13 reports, the flawed tool seems to have picked up on some unrelated background chatter to devise its fantastical fairy tale ending. “The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'” police sergeant Rick Keel told the broadcaster, referring to Disney’s 2009 musical comedy. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.” The department had begun testing an AI-powered software called Draft One to automatically generate police reports from body camera footage. The goal was to reduce the amount of paperwork — but considering that immense mistakes are falling through the cracks, results clearly vary. Draft One was first announced by police tech company Axon — the same firm behind the Taser, a popular electroshock weapon — last year. The software makes use of OpenAI’s GPT large language models to generate entire police reports from body camera audio. Experts quickly warned that hallucinations could fall through the cracks in these important documents. Critics also argue that the tool could be used to introduce deniability and make officers less accountable in case mistakes were to fall through the cracks. Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and police corruption. - Futurism