“Believe in me; believe in us,” was his hopeful campaign message five years ago when he first ran for mayor of Newark.

But it was Cory Booker’s success at turning that inspiration into effective governance in New Jersey that led last week to his reelection for a second term. The young and optimistic African-American had plenty to boast about.

Newark’s Star-Ledger newspaper wrote in their endorsement: “Under Booker, gun violence in Newark has been cut in half. The city payroll has shrunk by 17 percent. New parks have sprouted up across the city. The Housing Authority has been brought back from the dead, and the pace of new construction of affordable housing has picked up. New programs have helped hundreds of released prisoners find jobs, arranged financing for small businesses and helped families combat foreclosure. The list of innovative programs goes on.”

(READ the article online at Newsweek)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that it is an unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment to lock up teenagers for life without any chance of parole — if they didn’t kill anybody.

The 6-to-3 ruling could open the prison doors for at least some of the 129 people serving life terms without parole for non-homicide crimes committed when they were under 18.

(READ more from NPR.org)

Housed in a refurbished 19th-century brick silk mill, the Seven Generations Charter School, a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade elementary school in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, is one of many green charter schools popping up across the country.
 
Seven Generations offers its nearly 200 students a research-based curriculum called EIC, or Environment as an Integrating Context for learning. The idea involves using nature and the environment as a teaching tool for everything from math to reading to history. A nearby pond, for instance, offers not only science lessons on the lifecycles of pond creatures, but also serves as a muse for creative-writing exercises

Nationwide, there are now at least 200 green charter schools and dozens more looking to move in that direction, says Jim McGrath, president of the two-year-old Green Charter Schools Network in Madison, Wisconsin.

(READ more of the story in Good Magazine)

In what is surely the most promising news of the decade for the nation’s burgeoning wind energy industry, the Pentagon has withdrawn its objection to the Shepherds Flat wind project near Arlington, Oregon.

The Shepherds Flat wind project, nine years in the making, valued at US$2 billion, with 845 megawatts of rated capacity, promised to deliver not only huge amounts of clean, renewable electricity to a nation mired in fossil fuel production, but a lifeline to financially beleaguered GE, which has a contract to make the turbines. This contract was GE’s largest for 2009 fiscal year.

(READ the story at EnergyBoom.com)