Small Towns Work to Protect Abortion Rights • Storing Nuclear Secrets at Your Golf Club • Announcing OptOut Climate!
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This is the newsletter of OptOut, a free news aggregation app for exclusively independent media that's available for Apple and Android devices. Find out more about the app at optout.news.
Today's newsletter will take you through independent reporting and analysis on abortion rights, Trump's legal woes, LGBTQ+ issues, U.S. media, and more. But first, we have a special announcement.
Announcing OptOut Climate: Our First Issue-Based Program!
Today we are thrilled to announce that we have hired New York City-based journalist Cristian Salazar to lead OptOut's first issue-based program, OptOut Climate!
Cristian works at the intersection of journalism and technology. Having previously been executive editor of the Gotham Gazette, his writing has been published by The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and other publications. Cristian also oversees FloodHelpNY.org, an online platform created to help New Yorkers understand how climate change is increasing their flood risk, and is currently working on a project to amplify Latino voices in the climate justice movement. Besides his newsroom experience, he has worked in nonprofit communications, digital marketing, and social media. He was born in Mexico and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
In the coming days, Cristian will send out the first edition of our new, biweekly climate newsletter, which includes original reporting, a roundup of climate, environmental, and energy news from around the independent OptOut network, and helpful resources. He will also manage a networking community for climate journalists around the world, work to expand the OptOut roster to include more climate-focused publications, and join the curation team for our news aggregation app.
Sign up now to get our new climate newsletter in your inbox! Sign into your account and click "Manage" to subscribe to OptOut Climate.
Are you a climate journalist? If so, apply to join our networking community!
To help us expand our nascent climate program, you can make a tax-deductible donation. We rely on your support, not corporate owners or ads, to run all of OptOut's programs.
Feel free to send us your questions, ideas, tips, or anything else that could help our climate program: cristian@optout.news.
Your Independent News Roundup
Abortion Rights
"With reproductive rights now in states’ hands, local governments are challenging state statutes’ power and taking steps to protect abortion," reports BOLTS.
Camille Squires
Meanwhile, in Idaho, things are about to get rough, reports the IDAHO CAPITAL SUN.
Idaho’s trigger law banning abortion in nearly all cases will go into effect on Aug. 25, and the heartbeat law allowing civil lawsuits against medical providers will go into effect immediately following an opinion from the Idaho Supreme Court on Friday evening.
Kelcie Moseley-Morris
'Ladies and Gentlemen, We Got Him?'
Another day, another crime Trump likely committed. The FBI raided the ex-president's Mar-a-Lago home this week to determine if he violated the Espionage Act by illegally holding classified documents there. From STATES NEWSROOM:
Jennifer Shutt
The feds were looking for nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago, explains MEANS MORNING NEWS.
In another inquiry, Trump pled the Fifth hundreds of times in his deposition with the New York Attorney General in a civil probe of him and his company for potential tax-related crimes. THE HUMANIST REPORT:
LGBTQ+
THE BAFFLER analyzes the government's response to the monkeypox emergency and the criticism of that response.
TRANSLASH's latest article in its News & Narrative series comes from an incarcerated trans woman.
My name is Jessica Phoenix Sylvia. I am a trans woman who has spent the last eighteen years locked up for a domestic violence-related crime. Whenever I transfer to a new men’s prison things get wild.
TransLash Media
The PENNSYLVANIA CAPITAL-STAR republished an article showing that meth addiction is especially prevalent among gay and bisexual men.
Special to the Capital-Star
The Media
The reactionary Wall Street Journal editorial board recently continued its tradition of opposing tax breaks for non-wealthy Americans, reports FAIR.
Elias Khoury
In JACOBIN, a local reporter from Massachusetts writes about her experience at a paper that, after being bought by wealthy landlords, censored her reporting on the real estate industry. If public, not private, money funded journalism, the industry would be far better off, she argues.
I’d learned just how easy it is to buy the narrative for a couple million dollars — pocket change to the landlords, developers, and corporations who use local newspapers as free public relations machines.
Guthrie Scrimgeour
In Other News
Get the full analysis of the Inflation Reduction Act from THE AMERICAN PROSPECT executive editor and policy wonk David Dayen on the LEFT ANCHOR podcast.
PodBean Development
Marianne Williamson joins THE GRAVEL INSTITUTE to explain widespread depression in the U.S., arguing that it is a social, not individual, problem.
Despite strongly supporting a single-payer option in his presidential campaign—saying it would be "the first thing I would do as president"—Biden has totally abandoned the idea, writes THE LEVER.
The idea of creating a government-run health insurance plan that people could buy into has completely disappeared from the political conversation in Washington. Instead, Democrats have opted to deliver tens of billions of dollars of new government subsidies demanded by private health insurers that have funneled millions of dollars into Democratic campaign coffers.
Aditi Ramaswami
Some good labor news: the MINNESOTA INFORMER reports that workers at a second Starbucks store overwhelmingly voted to unionize.
Max Nesterak
Thanks as always for following the work of the independent news outlets in the OptOut network! See you soon.
The OptOut Media Foundation (EIN: 85-2348079) is a nonprofit charity with a mission to educate the public about current events and help sustain a diverse media ecosystem by promoting and assisting independent news outlets and, in doing so, advance democracy and social justice.
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