Last April, at the James Beard Foundation’s Chef Action Summit, food industry leaders gathered to discuss the political and economic landscape with one concern hanging grimly in the air: undocumented and immigrant workers were increasingly afraid to come into work after ICE raids ramped up at the outset of Trump’s second term.  But it just so happened the summit took place in Asheville, North Carolina, where activists had already asked, “What would it take to make this the safest state for immigrants in the south?” as Andrew Willis Garcés, senior strategist with the immigrant justice organization Siembra NC, puts it. A North Carolina business displaying its 4th Amendment Workplace signage. Courtesy of Siembra NC One answer: 4th Amendment Workplaces, a framework developed by Siembra NC and launched at the summit to help restaurants and other businesses train up on legally vetted protocols to defend employees against ICE. The idea quickly took hold — there are now over 1,000 4th Amendment Workplaces across North Carolina, with 4th Amendment Workplace resolutions passed in three cities and similar efforts underway across 12 states.  It’s emerged as perhaps the most powerful workforce training to help businesses prepare for ICE raids, but it is not the only one. Across the country, training, resources and hotlines have been developed for workplaces, alongside an effort to harness the wider labor movement as a force against ICE.  Weighed down by negative news? Our smart, bright, weekly newsletter is the uplift you’ve been looking for. [contact-form-7] Though the ICE raids that make the news often take place on the street, workplaces are in fact a frequent target. “We’ve seen ICE this year go into workplaces more than a lot of other kinds of places where people are gathered,” Willis Garcés explains. “With workplaces, there’s usually an open door you can walk through.”  There are over 1,000 4th Amendment Workplaces across North Carolina. Courtesy of Siembra NC According to the American Immigration Council, ICE publicly reported at least 40 worksite enforcement actions resulting in over 1,100 arrests within the first seven months of the current Trump administration. Businesses employing noncitizen workers — restaurants, car washes, automotive shops, bakeries, nail salons — are typically targeted. ICE has also scaled up large raids at workplaces like meatpacking and manufacturing plants.  These raids often represent legal violations, which 4th Amendment Workplaces raise awareness around. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” without a warrant based on probable cause — that is, reason to believe that a crime may have been committed. In North Carolina, volunteers canvas businesses across the state to share what it means to be a 4th Amendment Workplace: identify invalid ICE warrants, secure private employee areas, document unconstitutional actions and defend all workers, no matter their immigration status. Resources include a workplace guide, organizing toolkit, posters signaling opposition to unconstitutional search and seizures, employee handouts and tips for designating private employee areas.  Workplaces can request dedicated training, in which organizers help business owners and employees develop workplace-specific protocol, and lead them through roleplaying scenarios. “We help you think through … what would you do right after the fact? What would you do to preserve footage, how do you support families left behind, what’s the immediate triage that needs to happen [after a raid]?” explains Willis Garcés. Scuppernong Books published a book on how to resist ICE. Courtesy of Scuppernong Books Scuppernong Books of Greensboro was an early adopter, participating in training, promoting itself as a 4th Amendment Workplace, hiring a lawyer, regularly keeping staff informed of ICE response protocol, even publishing a book on how to resist ICE. Co-owner Steve Mitchell says it is “absolutely essential” for business owners to step up on behalf of employees, especially if the owners are white and legally protected residents: “It’s important for people like us to say that this isn’t right, and we’re going to stand on this side of the issue.” Even though there hasn’t been a heavy ICE presence in Greensboro, the bookstore’s work with Siembra NC “gives us some sense of confidence,” Mitchell says. “Whether that’s misplaced or not, it at least helps us know what our rights are in that situation.” He adds that using Siembra’s model has made the business feel connected to a broader network of activists. Willis Garcés describes that model as “plug and play,” easily adaptable outside the state and across a variety of workplaces. Siembra NC recruited small businesses first, with the goal of expansion into higher-targer workplaces like factories and farms. The 4th Amendment Workplaces framework has emerged as perhaps the most powerful workforce training to help businesses prepare for ICE raids. Courtesy of Siembra NC Today, some North Carolina farmers display giant vinyl banners about their constitutional rights, a riff on Siembra NC’s signage. In Oregon, organizers dubbed themselves “Baddies for the Fourth.” In Minneapolis, the 4th Amendment Workplace was a central demand in a public-pressure campaign around Target.  There have been other efforts to develop localized training. In New York, Nonviolent Peaceforce trains mostly within the city’s Asian American community, which it has worked with since the pandemic. Last year, ICE raids erupted across the city’s Chinatown. Nonviolent Peaceforce’s in-person training happens with trusted community partners and focuses on de-escalation and self-regulation tactics, alongside scenario and role-playing. “We came to develop scenarios really at the request of community members who felt that they really needed to know what it was like to be in the moment,” says Roz Lee, head of the organization’s U.S. efforts. She says simple tactics to slow things down — like introducing yourself, asking ICE agents their name, asking for a warrant and taking time to inspect it — can shift a potentially intense and traumatic interaction.  Other groups have tied the urgency around ICE to larger labor organizing efforts. Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) emerged to help non-unionized labor organize in response to COVID-19. More recently, EWOC developed resources for resisting ICE, which are tied to broader workplace organizing tactics like facilitating conversation among employees, building a committee and planning collective action together.  “These steps are very universal, whether you work in an office, in a kitchen, at a nonprofit,” says Wes Holing, an EWOC organizer. “If you’re talking about bread-and-butter issues, or you’re talking about a workplace that’s safe from ICE, you’re still ultimately fighting for a place that respects you as a person.”  Resources for 4th Amendment Workplaces include a workplace guide, organizing toolkit, posters signaling opposition to unconstitutional search and seizures, employee handouts and tips for designating private employee areas. Courtesy of Siembra NC This January, EWOC partnered with Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America to hold a No-Work Workshop to train workers on their rights and protections to participate in the Anti-ICE General Strike. It was part of a much larger mobilization among Minneapolis residents and businesses responding to Operation Metro Surge. The city mobilized far beyond one-off trainings; instead, an entire ecosystem emerged. “The sheer volume, the sheer magnitude of mobilization … it felt like every single person I knew was extremely active,” says Mike Urbanski, who helps lead legal observer training with Monarca. Monarca is a project under the immigrant justice organization Unidos MN, which canvassed businesses in Twin Cities’ immigrant communities. They’d then direct people to Monarca’s ICE hotline as well as its two-hour, in-person training, which focuses on “upstander” legal observation tactics. Monarca’s trainings were also shared through social media, word of mouth and within community spaces and houses of worship. “We could post a training with 1,000 people in Minneapolis and fill it within four or five days,” Urbanski says, “And most of those people would come, and another 100 people would just show up.”  The Workers Solidarity Circle also canvassed and shared resources among Twin Cities businesses, channeling that energy into the Minneapolis Worker’s Assembly this February, which brought together over 300 unionized and non-unionized workers across sectors. “It was about building working class power and coordinated strike action, to really push people into action and not wait on managers, bosses or labor officials to save us,” says organizer Aminah Sheik. Wait, you're not a member yet? Join the Reasons to be Cheerful community by supporting our nonprofit publication and giving what you can. Join Cancel anytime Now that Operation Metrosurge has wound down, organizers have turned their attention to this upcoming May Day: organizing strike committees, holding strike trainings, conducting labor education and committing unions and community organizations to strike on May 1st. Sheik says there is a growing realization that workers must build political power far beyond their workplace.  “Listen, in order for us to really stop — abolish — ICE, like people are saying, from the grassroots,” she says, “then we need to do economic disruption.”  The post When ICE Shows Up, These Businesses Will Be Ready appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade did not simply write a letter. For 58 days, CAFT ran protests at Etsy offices and affiliates across 17 cities, including a disruption of Etsy’s own presentation at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco in March. The campaign worked. From August 2026, Etsy will ban the sale of all products made from or containing natural fur from animals killed for their pelts, regardless of age or origin, covering raw pelts, finished garments, and accessories made with real fur from animals such as mink, fox, and rabbit. “Etsy’s policy sets a new standard for online retailers,” said Suzie Stork, executive director of CAFT. “Fur is losing. Designers are dropping it, publications are not promoting it, and now, Etsy, one of the world’s largest e-commerce marketplaces, is banning it. The industry has nowhere left to hide.” One ban in a cascade of them Etsy’s decision is the latest in a year of industry movement that accelerated faster than most observers expected. In May 2025, Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein Marketplace banned fur and exotic skins, while Australian Fashion Week removed all wildlife-derived materials from its runway shows, and Asics committed to phasing out kangaroo skin from its footwear. Condé Nast pledged in October 2025 to remove fur from its publications. By December 2025, the moves were coming in clusters. Poland enacted a national fur farming ban. The Council of Fashion Designers of America prohibited fur at New York Fashion Week. Hearst Magazines committed to no longer promoting animal fur across its titles. US designer Rick Owens announced he would remove fur from future collections. Sweden had already introduced an import ban on fur products linked to animal cruelty the previous June, and the European Food Safety Authority recommended cage-free fur farming in July 2025. The shift reflects a longer arc. Since the 1980s, global awareness of the environmental and public health impacts of fur farming has grown alongside mounting evidence of animal suffering across the industry. The EU is still deciding The political picture in Europe is complicated. The European Commission has been expected to issue a proposal on the future of fur farming across the region, but has remained internally divided: some commissioners favour an outright ban in response to a 1.5-million-signature citizens’ initiative, while others prefer tightening existing welfare standards. Only five EU member states still permit fur farming, and the European Food Safety Authority has concluded that welfare problems in the sector cannot be resolved through regulation alone. Not everyone is moving in the same direction Across the Atlantic, parts of the fur industry are reporting something different entirely. Canada’s Fur Institute recently cited surging demand and record-breaking auction prices, with Canadian bobcat pelts rising more than 300 percent year over year at a recent sale in North Bay, drawing buyers from Europe and Asia. “There’s a growing interest in quality, long-lasting fur and seal products,” said Doug Chiasson, executive director of the Fur Institute of Canada. “Canada is known for the resilience and dedication of its industry, which is rooted in the tireless efforts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous trappers throughout these lands over the centuries. The good that comes out of their work and the work of all in this industry has withstood the test of time.” Who is next CAFT has already named its next targets. “CAFT’s attention is now fully directed at Milan Fashion Week and LVMH,” Stork said. “All designers and affiliates who work with Milan Fashion Week should be paying close attention.” Milan has been an ongoing site of anti-fur protests, and LVMH, whose portfolio includes Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, and Christian Dior, remains one of the most prominent holdouts in the luxury sector. Whether the campaign’s momentum translates from marketplace policy to haute couture remains to be seen. The Etsy result does show that sustained, coordinated pressure on specific institutional targets can move faster than broad awareness campaigns working alone.     Did this solution stand out? Share it with a friend or support our mission by becoming an Emissary.The post A 58-day protest campaign just convinced Etsy to ban fur first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Most people who try meditation for the first time expect their mind to go quiet. Instead, it does the opposite: replaying conversations, drafting grocery lists, or wondering whether the oven is still on. This is not failure. According to Kirat Randhawa, a meditation instructor for Alo Moves, the moment your attention drifts and you bring it back is where the real work lives. “The healing of the practice occurs when the attention is brought back to the breath or the body every time it wanders off. This is where the growth happens,” she says. Meditation is not the absence of thought. It is the practice of noticing your thoughts and returning, again and again, without judgment. “Meditation is a way of transforming your life from the inside out by transforming your mind,” Randhawa says. What regular practice actually builds Over time, consistent sitting builds what Randhawa describes as inner resourcefulness. “We access an internal resourcefulness that can help us meet a wide range of goals, like sleeping better, feeling less stressed and anxious, focusing better, making intuitive decisions, igniting creative flow, noticing how we contribute to our own distress, and learning to trust our own experience,” she says. The benefits go beyond mood. Research has linked meditation to lower blood pressure and reduced cardiovascular mortality risk. Mindfulness training has also been connected to improved athletic performance, suggesting that a few minutes of stillness before a workout may carry over into it. A quick guide to the main types The most common form of meditation is mindfulness. “Mindfulness is the practice of creating a clear, spacious mind through sustained concentration,” Randhawa says. “In turn, this allows for greater behavioral and emotional flexibility, allowing us to think, speak, and move in more desirable ways.” Its instructions are simple enough to begin without a teacher, which makes it the natural starting point for most people. Vedic meditation is a different approach: typically practiced twice daily for 20 minutes using a personal mantra to reach a state of expanded awareness. Unlike mindfulness, it generally benefits from working with an instructor, at least at the start. Visualization meditation is exactly what the name suggests. “Visualization is a creative technique that inspires behavioral change by igniting hopeful imagery and emotional expansion through reflection,” Randhawa says. One form, called inner-child meditation, invites you to picture yourself as a younger version of yourself, building self-compassion and creating space to process earlier experiences. How to start: the basics of a session A basic mindfulness session does not require much. Find a comfortable but upright position, whether in a chair, on a cushion, or on a stool. Set a timer. Close your eyes and turn your attention to your breathing. If it helps, count your breaths: inhale one, exhale two, inhale three, exhale four. When your mind wanders, which it will, draw your attention back to the breath without criticism. When the timer goes off, take your time returning to the room and notice how you feel. That is the whole structure. What varies is the duration. Randhawa notes that “completing 10 minutes of meditation daily when the mind is more relaxed and alert is far more beneficial than trying to complete 30 minutes of meditation daily when the mind is distracted.” One minute, done with intention, is a real place to start. What helps beginners stay with it Before sitting down, name why you are doing it. An intention gives the session direction. Randhawa describes it as something that “can act as a ‘mover’ of the mind and support close affiliation with internal states that resemble ease, relaxed presence, and alertness.” If you want to decompress after a hard day, say that to yourself before you close your eyes. From there, the most important variable is timing. “It’s important to identify what our current capacity for mind training is so that we can move in accordance with that truth,” Randhawa says. Early morning, right after coffee, just before bed: what matters is that the time is realistic and protected. A few minutes you actually take will outperform a half-hour you keep postponing. The harder part is resisting the urge to evaluate. “Recognize that it’s a practice,” Randhawa says. “Just as we would train for months in advance before embarking on a marathon, the same level of precise training is necessary for developing stability of mind.” Sitting down and expecting immediate calm is like signing up for a race and expecting to run it without preparation. The practice is the preparation. Randhawa also suggests pausing, before or after each session, to acknowledge that you have carved out time for this. “Embodying reverence for the practice, the teachings, and the capacity for developing compassionate awareness invites us to extend appreciation to those who have practiced before and to those who will follow behind,” she says. It is a small shift in orientation, but it tends to change how the session feels. Finally, keep it flexible. “Let yourself be guided by what your body and mind genuinely need,” Randhawa says. “Perhaps it’s inviting more silence, or it’s inviting some background sound. You might wish to lie down, sit upright, or even try a walking meditation. By resting in a creative space, you’ll be able to show up for yourself in consistent and flexible ways each day.” A practice shaped around your actual life is far more likely to persist than one modeled on someone else’s ideal conditions. The point is to return. Every time you bring your attention back to your breath, whether it wanders once or a hundred times in a session, the practice is doing what it is supposed to do.     Did this solution stand out? Share it with a friend or support our mission by becoming an Emissary.The post Why your wandering mind is exactly what meditation is for first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

Richard Bernstein walked around barefoot a lot at home, so when his right toe started hurting in 2017, he assumed he’d stubbed it. A visit to his podiatrist confirmed nothing was broken and nothing was wrong. He moved on. But the pain didn’t. Five years of pain that no one could explain Over the next few years it crept upward from his toe to his ankle, then to his knee. A sports medicine doctor suggested stenosis and recommended physical therapy. That didn’t help either. Walking became gradually harder. On a trip to Greece, Bernstein had to sit out while his friends climbed to hilltop monasteries. He took his dog to the park less and less. In March 2022, his right leg swelled noticeably. His doctor ordered an abdominal scan. What it found changed everything. What they found when they finally looked Bernstein had a massive cancerous kidney tumor that had grown into his vena cava, the main vein that returns blood from the lower body to the heart. The tumor and tumor thrombus were a foot long and weighed around two and a half pounds. Because the vena cava was almost completely blocked, blood was backing up in his lower extremities, which explained the years of unexplained pain creeping up his right side. His two main coronary arteries had also been compromised, with 99 percent of their function lost. He was referred to Dr. Michael Grasso, chair of urology at Phelps Hospital. Grasso’s assessment was direct. “He told me I had four days to live,” Bernstein said. A 12-hour surgery, three specialists, one chance The surgery required three specialists working simultaneously over 12 hours at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. Dr. Grasso handled the kidney and tumor removal. Cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Jonathan Hemli performed a double bypass on the coronary arteries, which had been discovered only once Bernstein was already admitted, an unexpected complication that Hemli said they couldn’t ignore. “It would have been really disappointing to cure him of his kidney cancer only to learn in six months, nine months, a year that the poor man had a heart attack and didn’t survive,” Hemli told TODAY. Vascular surgeon Dr. Alfio Carroccio opened the vena cava to remove the tumor thrombus, which extended all the way into the heart. To do the work safely, the team had to cool Bernstein’s body, stop his heart, and run him on a heart-lung bypass machine while they operated. Then they slowly warmed him back up and restarted his heart. Bernstein spent three days sedated afterward, a week in intensive care, and nearly three weeks in cardiac rehab relearning to walk. He lost around 30 pounds. He gained it back. He’s now on ongoing immunotherapy and doing twice-yearly scans. Dr. Grasso’s update: “The cancer hasn’t spread anywhere else, which is amazing, considering where he came from.” Bernstein’s own assessment of how he got through it: “My attitude is ‘it is what it is, and there’s not much we can do about it.’ That got me through.” His advice for anyone else in a similar situation: “If something is wrong and they can’t find it, don’t give up looking. Trust your feelings about your own body.” And on the swollen leg that finally triggered the scan that saved him: “If my whole leg hadn’t swollen up, I would have dropped dead.” The post His mysterious toe pain lasted five years. The scan that finally caught it gave him four days to live. appeared first on Upworthy.

Every time NASA releases a stunning image from space of something like the Earth glowing against blackness, or the Moon’s cratered surface in sharp detail, the same question follows: where are the stars? It happened again when NASA’s Artemis II crew, which launched April 1, 2026 and flew around the Moon before splashing down in the Pacific on April 10, began beaming back photos from their historic 10-day mission. The images were breathtaking. The backgrounds were pitch black. And the conspiracy theories started almost immediately. The camera can only do so much NASA’s answer, as explained in an Instagram post, is straightforward: it’s just how cameras work. View this post on Instagram A camera captures a limited range between the brightest and darkest parts of a scene. When you’re photographing the Moon or the Earth from space, you’re dealing with an enormous difference in brightness. The sunlit surface of the Moon is extraordinarily bright, while stars are extraordinarily dim. To expose correctly for the bright object in the foreground, the camera’s settings have to be adjusted in a way that makes the faint stars in the background vanish into black. Three settings control this. Shutter speed determines how long the camera’s sensor is exposed to light. ISO controls how sensitive that sensor is to light. And aperture determines how wide the lens opens. Getting the Moon in sharp, detailed focus means tuning all three for brightness, which is the opposite of what you’d need to pick up the faint glow of distant stars. You could technically try to capture both, but the result would be a blurry, overexposed mess where neither looks right. The same thing happens on Earth. Try taking a photo of the night sky next to a bright streetlight. The stars disappear. The light itself isn’t unusual. It’s physics. The photo that proves both sides The most remarkable image from the Artemis II mission accidentally became the perfect illustration of exactly this phenomenon. On April 6, during their seven-hour flyby of the Moon’s far side, the crew captured a total solar eclipse. The Moon completely blocked the Sun for nearly 54 minutes of totality, far longer than any eclipse visible from Earth’s surface. In that image, stars are clearly visible. Dozens of them, scattered across the frame around the dark disk of the Moon with its glowing halo of light. Venus appears as a bright silver glint on the edge. It’s one of the most striking photographs ever taken by humans in deep space. The reason the stars appear is the same reason they normally don’t: the object in the foreground is dark. With the Moon blocking the Sun, there’s no blinding bright surface to expose for. The camera settings could be adjusted to capture the dim light of distant stars, and they showed up exactly as they should. As NASA noted in the image description, stars are “typically too faint to see when imaging the Moon, but with the Moon in darkness stars are readily imaged.” A historic mission The Artemis II mission marked humanity’s return to the Moon’s vicinity for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. The crew included commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency. They set multiple records. Koch became the first woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit. Glover became the first person of color to witness the lunar far side. Hansen became the first person from a nation other than the United States to go to the Moon. And the mission broke the all-time crewed distance record, reaching 406,771 kilometers from Earth, surpassing the mark set by Apollo 13 in 1970. The crew also captured an Earthset, with Earth sinking below the Moon’s horizon, that deliberately echoed the iconic Earthrise photo from Apollo 8 in 1968. They photographed ancient lava flows, impact craters, and surface fractures on the far side. They witnessed six meteoroid impact flashes on the darkened lunar surface. Koch described the experience with characteristic simplicity: “The Moon really is its own unique body in the Universe. It’s not just a poster in the sky that goes by. It’s a real place.” And it turns out space is full of stars. You just need the right conditions and the right camera settings to see them. The post Why don’t space photos ever show stars? NASA’s explanation is simpler than you’d think and a photo from Artemis II proves it. appeared first on Upworthy.