Good News Friday

Last night I was awakened at 3 am by a bright flash of light. We keep our blinds closed at night but I looked out the window anyway, thinking it might be a flash of lightning. But the sky was clear, with a big moon.

As I looked out the window I saw the flash of light again, but I still couldn’t tell where it was coming from. So I looked out a different window towards a utility pole, thinking the transformer was blowing. Nope, the flash of light came again, from inside the house! I was afraid we had fuses blowing in the house but thankfully, I was wrong.

Can anyone guess what it was? Let me know in comments!

ANSWER: Okay, nobody was even close! The answer is …. there was a firefly in our bedroom! And dang, in a completely pitch dark room, those suckers are bright!

And here’s your weekly progress report:

• Ding-dong DOMA’s dead. Prop 8, too.

• Tunisia has freed three European feminist activists who were jailed for staging a topless protest.

• The NIH announced that it will permanently retire most of the chimpanzees used in biomedical research.

• Wendy Davis’ electrifying filibuster has had one unintended consequence: meet the #1 selling shoe on Amazon.com, the hot-pink Mizuno Women’s Wave Rider. Hit the link for some hilarious and uplifting customer reviews.

• Here’s your underreported story of the week. Attention American CEOs: you might want to rethink that whole “China factories are so much cheaper” business:

It’s a story to give an American manufacturing executive nightmares: He arrives at his Beijing factory to lay off 30 people, and instead is taken prisoner by his employees while they demand compensation.

That’s what happened to Charles Starnes, a co-owner of Coral Gables, Fla.-based Specialty Medical Supplies, who visited the factory last week to wind down the company’s plastics division and move it to Mumbai. What exactly the workers wanted is a matter of some dispute.

Starnes told the Associated Press that they expected higher wages and severance packages, and brought local government officials to back them up. A union representative said they were just asking for unpaid wages before the factory shut down. Either way, it made for striking imagery, with photos of Starnes trapped behind bars.

“I feel like a trapped animal,” Starnes told the AP on Monday. “I think it’s inhumane what is going on right now. I have been in this area for 10 years and created a lot of jobs and I would never have thought in my wildest imagination something like this would happen.”

Awww, my heart bleeds for you, dude.

• A federal appeals court has allowed ex-Dept. of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod’s defamation lawsuit against the late Andrew Breitbart to continue.

• Los Angeles becomes the largest city in America to ban plastic shopping bags.

Thirty years ago when I traveled around Europe, the idea that you’d get a free plastic shopping bag at the grocery store was unheard of. Everyone brought a cloth bag, and if you forgot yours, you’d buy a plastic one for 10 or 15 cents. But America’s waste disease has spread across the pond and in recent years I’ve noticed the free plastic bag popping up at stores all across Europe.

I find it really ironic that American cities are starting to do what European cities have always done.

• SCOTUS blocked a challenge from the oil and gas industry to the EPA’s increase in renewable fuel standards.

• In the wake of the horrific factory collapse back in April, the Obama Administration has suspended trade privileges with Bangladesh.

• NASA’s latest class of eight astronaut trainees — its first in four years — includes four women.

• Drayson Racing Technologies’ Lola B12 69/EV vehicle has broken the world land speed record for a lightweight electric car, hitting a top speed of 204.2mph.

• The Obama Administration has unveiled its carbon emissions plan which, thankfully, bypasses our dysfunctional, do-nothing Congress.

• Related: in a major shift, the U.S. will stop subsidizing coal plants abroad.

• But if we still screw the pooch on this planet, at least three habitable ones have been found in our neck of the woods, relatively speaking.

• Speaking of, Voyager is about to enter interstellar space. Scientists are already completely amazed at the data Voyager has sent back from the solar system’s edge, saying none of their models accurately predicted what they’re seeing. Kinda geeky but really cool.

• A new species of bird has been discovered in Cambodia.

• Judy Collins will be inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame.

• Electronic luggage tags that connect with your smartphone? Add a GPS to that sucker and I’m sold.

Good News, Tennessee Edition:

• Scientists believe they’ve discovered America’s oldest cave art here in Tennessee. Radio-carbon dating puts one painting at about 6,000 years old. That’s absolutely incredible, considering the earth is only 7,000 years old! I keed, I keed….

• The Nashville Symphony has been saved, though I have to wonder what Bank of America thought they’d do with a foreclosed symphony hall. I mean, it’s not like they were gonna turn it into condos.

• After 5 years and $1.1 billion, the last of the toxic ash from the Kingston coal ash spill is finally being cleaned up. Yes, DO remind me how “clean” and “cheap” coal is. I’m all ears.

• Collegedale, TN is poised to become the first municipality in the state to offer employee benefits to domestic partners.

This week’s cool video: remember that Cheerios commercial featuring an interracial couple that got trolled by racists in the YouTube comments? It was a kinda big story a couple weeks ago. Well, here’s a parody of that commercial which is just wonderful: