Via New York Daily News Online

Two of the most dynamic forces behind the groundbreaking creative platform FENIX360—Allan Klepfitsz and Andrew Eborn—were featured on the acclaimed Good News Broadcast with host Paul Sladkus, engaging in a forward-looking conversation about technology, empowerment, and the next chapter of content creation.

Click Here to Listen to this Episode as a Podcast on Spreaker!

Paul Sladkus, a longtime television executive and producer with a career spanning CBS, PBS, and beyond, is known for highlighting stories that uplift, educate, and inspire. Through Good News Broadcast, Sladkus shines a light on individuals and innovations that bring positive change to the world. His guests on this episode, Allan Klepfitsz and Andrew Eborn, fit that mission perfectly.

Paul Sladkus, founder of Good News Broadcast, is the visionary behind the global initiative “Pause for Peace,” created in honor of International Peace Day on September 21. The movement invites people around the world to take one minute at noon—wherever they are—to pause, reflect, and focus on peace. With decades of experience in uplifting media, Sladkus uses this powerful moment of unity to promote global harmony and encourage people of all backgrounds to join together in a simple yet impactful act of collective consciousness.

Allan Klepfitsz, global CEO of FENIX360, spoke about the company’s revolutionary approach to reshaping how artists and content creators control, distribute, and monetize their work. Under his leadership, FENIX360 has developed into a robust platform that gives creatives the power to manage their careers without relying on outdated gatekeeping systems. The platform is rooted in transparency and built to serve independent artists of every discipline.

Andrew Eborn, a media strategist, futurist, and recently appointed global advisor to FENIX360, joined the conversation to share his vision for expanding the company’s global footprint and enhancing its technological framework. Known for his ability to bridge creativity with business innovation, Eborn emphasized the need for platforms that place ownership back into the hands of creators while opening up new pathways for global engagement.

Together, Klepfitsz and Eborn offered insight into how FENIX360 is not only disrupting traditional industry models but doing so in a way that empowers artists and fans alike. Their appearance on Good News Broadcast marked an important moment for the company as it continues to grow its reach and influence within the entertainment and tech landscapes.

The interview offered viewers a unique opportunity to hear from three thought leaders who share a common goal: building a future where technology, creativity, and purpose align. The synergy between Sladkus’s mission to spread optimism, Klepfitsz’s trailblazing leadership, and Eborn’s strategic foresight made for a compelling and hopeful conversation that resonated with artists, innovators, and audiences around the world.

The official website for FENIX360 may be found at https://www.fenix360.com

For interviews, appearances, or more information about FENIX360, please contact worldstarpublicrelations@gmail.com

The post Allan Klepfitsz and Andrew Eborn Appear on Paul Sladkus’s Good News Broadcast to Discuss FENIX360 appeared first on Good News!.

Click Here to Listen to this Episode as a Podcast on Spreaker!

The post Faith And The City: A Conversation with Mayor Eric Adams appeared first on Good News!.

On August 2, 2027, the skies over parts of southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East will darken as the Moon moves directly in front of the Sun. This total solar eclipse will last up to 6 minutes and 23 seconds in some places, making it the longest visible from land between 1991 and 2114.

This isn’t just another eclipse. According to Space.com, “It may seem like hyperbole, but the total solar eclipse on Aug. 2, 2027, is being dubbed the ‘eclipse of the century’ for good reason.”

The path of totality — the narrow track where the Sun is completely covered — will cross highly populated areas, increasing visibility and interest.

Despite rumours swirling on social media, this event is not taking place in 2025. There is no solar eclipse, total or partial, on August 2 this year.
NASA and other observatories have confirmed this. The buzz about a “six-minute global blackout” on August 2, 2025, is simply misinformation. “The world will not go dark this August,” writes Space.com. “If the century’s longest total solar eclipse appeals, circle Aug. 2, 2027, on your calendar and book a trip right now.”

This eclipse will be unusually long because of the Moon’s proximity and the Earth’s position. On that day, the Moon will be at perigee — its closest point to Earth — which makes it appear slightly larger in the sky. Meanwhile, Earth will be at aphelion, its farthest point from the Sun, making the Sun appear smaller.
This perfect alignment allows the Moon to fully cover the Sun for an extended period. Additionally, the eclipse passes near the equator, where the Moon’s shadow moves more slowly across the surface, further increasing the duration.

The path of totality will stretch across parts of eleven countries: Southern Spain (including Cádiz and Tarifa), Gibraltar, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt
Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and Somalia. Luxor, in Egypt, will enjoy the longest totality at 6 minutes and 23 seconds. Outside this path, many regions — including most of Europe, North Africa and western Asia — will experience a partial eclipse. Parts of India will catch only a partial eclipse. The western and northwestern states — Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa — will witness the Sun partially obscured between 10 to 30 percent.

In India, the eclipse will likely occur between 4 PM and 6 PM IST. In some areas, particularly coastal cities like Mumbai and Goa, sunset may limit visibility. Because the Moon will be at perigee and the Earth at aphelion, the apparent sizes of both bodies align to produce a longer total eclipse — 6 minutes and 23 seconds at its peak.Since India lies outside the path of totality, eclipse glasses will be required throughout the event. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Vigyan Prasar and the Planetary Society of India are expected to organise public viewings and live streams.

The extended duration makes this eclipse invaluable for scientists. With more time in totality, researchers will be able to: Observe the solar corona in detail, track solar flares and coronal mass ejections, use spectroscopy to study the Sun’s outer layers, measure temperature shifts and magnetic fields, monitor atmospheric and environmental changes on Earth. These observations will help calibrate instruments for future missions like NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and ESA’s Solar Orbiter.

A solar eclipse is an astronomical coincidence. The Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun, but also about 400 times closer to Earth, making them appear roughly the same size in the sky. When they align perfectly, as they will on August 2, 2027, the result is temporary darkness in daytime. But only if you’re standing in the right place.

For most of the planet, life will go on as usual. For those in the path of totality, it may be a once-in-a-lifetime sight.

The post Longest solar eclipse of the century will happen on August 2: Six minutes of darkness in the afternoon; What’s really happening? appeared first on Good News!.

GNB stops into Butterflied Chicken and chats with Cofounder George Charokopos, who shares all about Butterflied’s fantastic food and locally sourced ingredients.

Find out more at: butterfliedchicken.com

Click here to Listen to this Episode as a Podcast on Spreaker!

The post Butterflied Chicken: the Best of the Best Greek Food in Manhattan appeared first on Good News!.

The High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF)  convened from Monday, 14 July, to Wednesday, 23 July 2025, under the auspices of the Economic and Social Council. This includes the three-day ministerial segment of the forum from Monday, 21 July, to Wednesday, 23 July 2025, as part of the High-level Segment of ECOSOC.

The theme of the HLPF is “Advancing sustainable, inclusive, science- and evidence-based solutions for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals for leaving no one behind”.

The 2025 HLPF with full appreciation for the integrated, indivisible and interlinked nature of the Sustainable Development Goals, conduct in-depth reviews of: SDG 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages; SDG 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls; SDG 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all; SDG 14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development; and SDG 17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.

The 2025 HLPF brought together ministerial and high-level representatives of governments, as well as a wide range of expertise and stakeholders, including heads of UN entities, academics and other experts, and representatives of major groups and other stakeholders. The countries presenting voluntary national reviews (VNRs) of their 2030 Agenda implementation at the national level can be found here.

Additional platforms, including side events, VNR Labs, special events, and exhibitions will be organized around the 2025 HLPF.

Click here to get more information on the 2025 HLPF and it’s other events.

The post UN ECOSEC Wraps Up its High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development appeared first on Good News!.

By David Sassoon

for Inside Climate News – 07/23/25

Recently I was on a Zoom call with a philanthropic advisor who toward the end of our conversation asked me an open-ended question: What do you think is missing from climate communications today? He regarded journalism to be a branch of communications—perhaps I didn’t agree with that characterization, he wondered?

For context he provided a quick review of communications strategies that have failed to move enough voters to action over recent decades. First came the notion of scaring people, his example being Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”; that gave way to the notion of providing the public with sober, high-quality information, but a knowledge deficit proved not to be the problem either; and so now the prevailing wisdom has become to give people hope, which is why philanthropic support is flowing into solutions journalism, he said.

In his brief survey, he didn’t mention a large part of the problem—that since the 1980s, climate science has been up against formidable opposition. The oil industry and its fellow travelers, aiming to preserve the economic supremacy of carbon energy, have poured more than a billion dollars into erecting a powerful infrastructure of misinformation. They have built a false climate narrative to discredit the scientific consensus, abetted by the parallel ascension of Fox News.

The industry’s communications playbook, developed to undermine environmental concern, has like the monster escaped from the lab and infected public discourse in almost every sphere. Their techniques of kneecapping facts have proven so effective that agnotology has become a subject of growing academic attention—agnotology being the study of the deliberate creation of ignorance.

Also of tragic and consequential relevance to the philanthropic advisor’s question: Journalism itself has suffered its greatest contraction since the founding of the republic—especially local journalism, and with it, environmental reporting.

The Zoom call was nearing its end. My thoughts were exploding. I could only begin to answer his question. It deserves broad and open discussion. This brief essay is a contribution to that end.

A Persistent Illusion

Indeed, the advisor surmised correctly: I do not consider journalism to be a branch of communications.

Certainly, journalism communicates; many colleges and universities lump the two fields together in their degree programs, and the ranks of public relations agencies are filled with former journalists. They appear to be on the same spectrum of activity and are widely regarded to be. But it’s a persistent illusion that does damage to democracy.

Methodologically, the communications paradigm starts with an agenda, frequently of a paying customer. It crafts messages, often perfected in focus groups, aimed at specific targets in pursuit of a predetermined outcome. It stages events and deploys materials and spokespeople across multiple platforms in coordinated campaigns whose results are carefully measured. It’s worth adding that it regards the free press as something to be instrumentalized to serve its ends, “earned media” being one of the most valuable coins of its realm.

Now imagine a newsroom. Not a cable news channel, or the opinion desk of a major national daily, but a local outlet, with reporters and editors covering their communities. They are on the receiving end of communications campaigns and fold the flood of incoming spin into their work, which is to find out what is really happening and determine what is newsworthy. Their job is not to tell their readers what to do or think, but to bear witness, listen to all stakeholders, consult experts, follow the evidence wherever it leads and craft stories that reflect what they learn with fairness and accuracy for community benefit.

These are simplifications, but they suggest a sobering re-classification: communications as a form of propaganda, given its techniques of manipulation, its arrogation of power. And journalism, a discipline peculiar to democracy, as a form of education, which through daily acts of original discovery and persistent disclosure—exercising the right to know—serves as a check on power and wrongdoing.

This is not to say that communications cannot beneficially educate; or that journalism cannot become propaganda. The point here is about methods and goals: whether the endgame is to manipulate a desired behavior or the goal is to build enduring public understanding. The fundamental difference is perhaps best summed up by a familiar adage: Give a person a fish, feed them for a day. Teach a person to fish, feed them for life. The first action might buy you a vote, or even an election. The second will build you a civilization.

Flooding the Zone

We tend to celebrate the origins of American journalism (Founding Fathers, First Amendment, Fourth Estate) but ignore the genesis and development of America’s propaganda culture. Since the dawn of the 20^th century, it has been deeply interwoven into the fabric of our commerce and politics.

The birth of public relations and its associated techniques of persuasion can be traced back to a man named Edward Bernays. He was, significantly, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and helped to popularize his uncle’s ideas in America. He also put them to work on behalf of government and corporations. His first major success was selling the public on U.S. entry into World War I, right after American voters had put Woodrow Wilson in the White House on a peace platform. In 1928, Bernays wrote a slim volume about the theory and technique of shaping public opinion. He didn’t call his book Public Relations. He called it, simply, Propaganda, a word which had yet to acquire its pernicious connotations.

Here is his book’s first sentence: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

It’s hardly an ode to America’s democratic experiment, built around an educated citizenry that elects a government of the people, by the people, for the people. It’s more a manifesto that foreshadows the authoritarianism of the 1930s—Stalin, Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao—and of the present era. We do not think much about what it means that publicists now outnumber journalists six to one.

American journalism at the local level especially has probably never been in such a weakened condition. It remains a dire national emergency. Yet this emergency is largely being treated as a business story, a form of “creative destruction,” a trend to adapt to rather than the existential threat to democracy that it is, even by many of those who are trying to rescue it.

In 2018, we opened our first state bureaus at Inside Climate News, and not long afterwards, I found myself on a phone call with the representative of a large funder in the climate arena. I made my pitch. He responded politely, encouragingly even, but declined to support our nascent local work, explaining that they were looking into making investments in communications capacities that mimicked Cambridge Analytica’s.

News of that scandal had recently attracted global attention: The company had secured thousands of data points on tens of millions of Facebook users and deployed psychographic analysis and behavioral microtargeting in a bid to influence the 2016 election. The funder was placing their bets on building a parallel propaganda capacity.

ICN had better luck elsewhere, and since then we have opened bureaus in states across the country, more than doubling in size. We are poised to double in size again. But since then, too, technology has only amplified the arms race for hearts and minds with exponentially more powerful tools of persuasion and distraction. We are already reaping the whirlwind, even as AI daily gathers more ground and formidable force.

The public square has acquiesced to the notion of a “post-fact world” far too easily and thoughtlessly, without a fight. Yet facts govern our lives, and will continue to do so, even if we lose the ability to recognize them.

In the case of climate change, what we refuse to know is already killing us. What’s missing from climate communications? Maybe that’s not the right question. Maybe the right question is how to flood the zone with truth.

For our part at ICN, we have been developing some answers by opening bureaus around the country. We have found that with just two reporters in a state—sometimes with only one, sometimes with a strong cohort of freelancers—we can work with partner newsrooms and dispel silence and counter misinformation. We can revive and elevate the local environmental conversation and have it revolve around the facts people care deeply about: what is happening to the water they drink, to the air they breathe, to the land they inhabit—right where they live—while holding leaders and polluters accountable.

Our work is free for anyone to read. Our work is free for our media partners to publish—we have hundreds. In this way, with every story, our newsroom reliably examines our relationship to the natural world and participates in the noble work of maintaining a republic of knowledge. Our daily work has now come to stand as one counterweight to the almost complete dismantling of the federal architecture of environment protection now underway.

Our democracy is being sorely tested. Under assault are the institutions that guard the integrity of facts and extend the power of rational discourse, which produce understanding and preserve the rule of law: The legal profession and the courts. Universities, institutes and labs. The free press.

These are the bulwarks of accountability that are still standing in the way of the cynical attempt to usher in a republic of ignorance. Our democracy would be so much stronger right now if our country had six times as many journalists as we do.

——————————————————————————————-

Click here to read more from David Sassoon and Inside Climate News

The post Journalism, Propaganda and Climate Change appeared first on Good News!.

The post Comedy gold: Johnny Carson vs. unpredictable guests! appeared first on Good News!.

David Ippolito (aka That Guitar Man) has shared his talent of love of music free of cost in Central Park every Saturday for 34 years running.

For more information on David, visit his website: www.ThatGuitarMan.com

The post David “That Guitar Man” Ippolito performs live in Central Park for his 34th Summer Season appeared first on Good News!.

Click Here to Listen to the Podcast Version of this Episode on Spreaker!

Follow GNB as we visit the United Nations headquarters to attend the 2025 World Leader Summit of Peace and Love, celebrating the first ever International Day of Hope. Hosted by our friends at the Federation of World Peace and Love (FOWPAL)

www.fowpal.org

The post The UN International Day of HOPE, created by our FOWPAL friends appeared first on Good News!.

The post Paul Parrot at Times Square…Earth Day April 22, 2024 appeared first on Good News!.