An estimated three million people turned out for a celebration on the super highway in western Germany where cars were forbidden Sunday. Bicycles and roller blades glided along the famed Autobahn between Dortmund and Duisburg with dancing and music along the way.

Germany’s Ruhr region was named this year’s European Capital of Culture, which entails a year’s worth of celebration and arts events.

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Autobahn photo by alphafux, via flickr under CC license

80 percent of orangutans live in Indonesia, which now has offered the species more another safe haven there. Government officials agreed to reserve 332 square miles of forest (86,000 hectares) on Borneo island for some 200 captive orangutans waiting to be released into the wild.

Forestry ministry officials in Jakarta have okayed a permit submitted by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation to refurbish the forested land, formerly used for logging, and release the endangered great apes by 2015.

At an international meeting on orangutan conservation in Bali on Thursday, the government announced its decision calling it a win-win-win for great apes, forest biodiversity, and the battle against climate change, referring to thevast tracts of Indonesian jungle that have been cleared for plantations and logging.

(READ the AFP story in Yahoo News)

Coinciding with President Obama’s trip to Holland, MI last week for the official groundbreaking of a new electric car battery plant, a federal report was released detailing the economic impact of Recovery Act investments in advanced batteries and electric vehicles. Before the Recovery Act grants, the report says, there were no domestic factories producing high-volumes of batteries for electric vehicles, but with the federal investments, the U.S. will have the capacity to produce up to 40 percent of the world’s batteries by 2015.  

The Department of Energy report, “Recovery Act Investments: Transforming America’s Transportation Sector,” documents how $2.4 billion in Recovery Act funds are being matched with private capital to create new jobs, construct new plants, add new manufacturing lines, install electric vehicle charging stations across the country and help build the emerging domestic electric vehicle industry from the ground up.

In a follow-up article for the Good News Network, Cristina Frick, having just completed her Master’s degree in Clinical and Community Psychology, compiles a slew of good news about campaigns that help women and young girls build confidence in their own bodies.

A  Mental Health Minute

Against the backdrop of 10 million women dealing with eating disorders in the US alone, the Delta Delta Delta sorority helped launch the Reflections Body Image Program to focus on the health, wellness, and positive body image of young women in sororities across the United States. As a research-based program designed to prevent eating disorders, the campaign’s effectiveness was proven quite successful in empirical research.

In fact, the statistics of this program, created in collaboration with Dr. Carolyn Becker, professor of psychology at Trinity University, are truly amazing. For example, at one college, 48 percent of participants said they felt fat almost every day. Eight months later, the Reflections program had reduced by more than half the number of times these same participants felt that way, and some of the young women never had negative thoughts about themselves again — pretty powerful statistics.