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Work, Reimagined: Detroit Gets Creative. How residents of America’s most famously down and out city are building livelihoods that also rebuild their communities.

And so began We Want Green Too, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to “re-educate, re-train and re-build a 21st-century, sustainable Detroit.” [Former Ford Motor Company employee] Gloria [Lowe] is working to assemble various teams with all the basic skills to make crumbling homes liveable: dry walling, painting, floor repair, and so on.

In addition to veterans, she’s finding craftsmen among former prison inmates, recovering addicts, and other un- or underemployed Detroiters. “You have people who are challenged, they don’t have jobs. Why not make their jobs re-structuring their own communities?” says Gloria.

Nicaragua’s push to generate 94 percent of its own electricity from renewable resources by 2016 without damaging the environment has united the country.

“The energy issue is an essential component for our sustainable development to assure the wellbeing and progress of the current and future generations,” says Emilio Rappaccioli, Nicaragua’s minister of energy and mines.

Ortega worked with Nicaragua’s private sector and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez to fix its immediate energy problem by installing an additional capacity of 343 megawatts of power – 41 percent more power than Nicaragua was producing five years ago.

That means that for the first time in more than a decade, Nicaragua is producing a comfortable surplus of energy.

People who gather seafood from underneath the ice when the tide goes out.

Vote for the phenomenon you’d like to serve as the ruling symbol for this week:

Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable. 7 signs the corporatocracy is losing its
legitimacy — and 7 populist tools to help shut it down.

In a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans said too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations. In a poll by Time Magazine, 86 percent of Americans said Wall Street and its lobbyists have too much influence in Washington.

And 80 percent of Americans oppose Citizens United, the pro-corporate Supreme Court ruling that turns two years old today. Eighty percent — that’s among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.

Some say corporations have such a strong grip on politicians and big media that it is impossible to challenge them, no matter how many of us there are.

But I believe we can do it. In the past few months, YES! Magazine has been researching ways that ordinary people can challenge corporate power (look for strategies in our spring issue, out in February). And we found that there are actually a lot of tools at our disposal..

Bottlenose dolphins playing with humpback whales

I’d like to introduce a paper published last year in the journal Aquatic Mammals, which reports on two separate playful and – as you’ll see – uplifting encounters between bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae).

The first took place on a January afternoon off the northwest coast of Kauai, when a group of eight bottlenose dolphins met up with a pair of humpback whales. Two of the dolphins — apparently adults — approached one of the whales, first appearing to surf the pressure wave created by the whale’s head as it swam, and later taking turns lying perpendicularly across the whale’s rostrum when it surfaced to breathe. Then, while one of the dolphins lay balanced over the end of its rostrum, the whale stopped and slowly lifted the dolphin high into the air. The dolphin maintained an arched position and made no effort to escape, allowing the whale to continue lifting until it was nearly vertical in the water, at which point the dolphin slid down the whale’s rostrum, dove into the water, and porpoised back to its fellow dolphins.

Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was asked “What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?” This is his answer.

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