Category: Petition

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Shiba inu surges 38% to record high as a petition count for Robinhood to list the dogecoin-inspired token tops 330,000

Shiba inu dog

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  • Shiba inu hit an all-time high Wednesday after a petition urging Robinhood to list the coin topped 330,000.
  • Robinhood is waiting for regulatory clarity to add more coins, CEO Vlad Tenev said Tuesday.
  • The meme token’s value fell on Monday after Elon Musk revealed he doesn’t hold shiba inu.
  • Sign up here for our daily newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell.

Shiba inu hit a fresh record Wednesday on growing calls for trading app Robinhood to add the coin to its roster of cryptocurrencies.

The token surged 38% to $0.00005763 as of 3:30 a.m. ET, according to data from CoinGecko, taking its gains over the past month to nearly 710%. With a market value of $28 billion, it is now the 11th biggest crypto asset.

An online petition, created by Change.org user called Tristan Luke in May, requests people to sign up to “encourage Robinhood to be the first traditional brokerage” to list the shiba inu coin.

The petition’s goal is to reach 500,000 people. At the time of writing, at least 332,698 had signed up.

Shiba inu is already available to trade on other platforms including Coinbase, Binance, eToro, Crypto.com, Atomic Wallet, and KuCoin. Meanwhile, users have only seven cryptocurrency options on Robinhood, including bitcoin, dogecoin, and ether.

“We feel very, very good about the coins that we’re currently listing on our platform,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in a Q3 earnings call on Tuesday. “And for any new coins that we add, we want to feel equally, if not more, good. So we’re going to be very careful. We’re a regulated entity, and we’re hopeful to get some clarity soon on coins.”

Shiba inu, which is a dogecoin spin-off, rose more than 20% on Tuesday after an anonymous crypto whale bought 276.6 billion tokens for about $11.5 million. As the third most Googled cryptocurrency in 2021, it’s become impossible to ignore.

An Elon Musk tweet about his Shiba Inu puppy Floki supercharged the meme token’s run higher this month. But the coin’s value slid briefly after Musk revealed he doesn’t in fact have any personal investment in it.

Read More: SIGN UP FOR OUR EVENT ON NOVEMBER 17: The future of crypto and its path to mass adoption

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Italy could hold a referendum on voluntary euthanasia after a petition collected more than 750,000 signatures

:The Italian politician and activist Marco Cappato (L) with the Mayor of Arzachena Roberto Ragnedda (2L) and other activists speaking about a campaign to legalize euthanasia.
Italian politician and activist Marco Cappato (L) with the Mayor of Arzachena Roberto Ragnedda (2L) and other activists speaking about a campaign to legalize euthanasia.

Emanuele Perrone/Getty Images

  • Italy could hold a referendum on voluntary euthanasia after a petition gained over 750,000 signatures.
  • “Just as I have the right to treatment, I have the right to end my suffering,” a spinal-injury patient said.
  • The Vatican opposes the move, calling assisted suicide an “intrinsically evil act.”
  • See more stories on Insider’s business page.

Italy has become one step closer to holding a referendum on legalizing voluntary euthanasia after a petition in favor gained over 750,000 signatures, Euro News reported.

Petitions in Italy are required to meet a threshold of 500,000 signatures to trigger a public vote.

Voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide are currently illegal in the country.

Campaigners have been petitioning to abolish a law that says the homicide of a consenting person should be punished with up to 15 years in jail.

In 2019 a constitutional court in Italy added an exception for “patients kept alive by treatment […] and affected by an incurable disease that causes physical and psychological suffering they find intolerable.”

Activists say that a successful referendum on assisted suicide would be the first step towards putting forward a bill legalizing voluntary euthanasia, according to Catholic News Agency.

Currently, Italian law punishes assisted suicide with a sentence ranging from 5 to 12 years in prison.

The movement to legalize voluntary euthanasia gained national traction because of the case of a 43-year-old spinal-injury patient, identified only as Mario, POLITICO said.

Mario was paralyzed in a car accident ten years ago, and in a letter to Italy’s health minister Roberto Speranza, Mario said he lived “in constantly increasing pain.”

“Just as I have the right to treatment, I have the right to end my suffering,” he wrote.

Speranza, who leads the left-wing party Article One, said that he favored changing the law and that he hoped parliament “would find a consensus,” POLITICO reported.

Although polls suggest that as many as 9 in 10 Italians back the legalization of euthanasia, the move has faced fierce opposition from conservative religious figures in the country.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia has called euthanasia a “form of eugenics,” and the Vatican previously said euthanasia is an “intrinsically evil act.”

Instead of legalizing voluntary euthanasia, she said more should be done to improve palliative care and treat depression and loneliness.

Voluntary euthanasia, where a doctor deliberately administers fatal drugs to a patient, is currently legal in several European countries, including Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Spain became the fifth European country to legalize it in March of this year.

Estimates suggest that up to 50 Italians travel to right-to-die clinics in Switzerland every year, according to POLITICO.

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Stimulus-check petitions calling for a 4th round of $2,000 monthly payments surpasses 3 million signatures

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Petitioners continue to call for more financial assistance for Americans.

Eva Hambach/Getty Images

More than 3 million people have collectively signed online petitions calling for at least one more round of direct payments for Americans.

Stephanie Bonin, one of the larger petitions’ creators, posted an update on the Change.org site. It said: “Our country is still deeply struggling. The recovery hasn’t reached many Americans – the true unemployment rate for low-wage workers is estimated at over 20% and many people face large debts from last year for things like utilities, rent and child care.”

It added: “These are all reasons that checks need to be targeted to people who are still struggling and that Congress needs to learn from this past year.”

Bonin, a restaurant owner in Denver, used her petition to call for immediate $2,000 payments for adults and a $1,000 payment for children, along with regular payments for the duration of the pandemic.

The petition is directed at the House and the Senate. Some Democrats in Congress have urged the Biden administration to push for a fourth round of payments.

Aside from Bonin’s, five smaller petitions on Change.org have also gained traction in recent months, as Newsweek previously reported.

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said on June 3 that President Joe Biden was most focused on creating jobs but “happy to hear” other ideas of ways to stimulate the economy.

Since then, some states have already made moves to further financially support residents. California, for example, agreed to send up to $1,000 monthly checks to residents as part of the US’ first guaranteed income program.

The pandemic has increased food insufficiency for households across the US, according to a recent blog post coauthored by Cecilia Rouse, the chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Brandon Restrepo, an economist in the Diet, Safety, and Health Economics Branch of the Food Economics Division.

Direct payments have helped, according to the White House.

“After the pandemic struck and hunger went up dramatically, there were temporary reductions in food insecurity rates following the passage of the CARES Act in March 2020 – when the first round of stimulus checks were released to many Americans,” the economists wrote.

The pattern repeated itself with each of the subsequent rounds of stimulus, according to the blog post. Food-insecurity rates rose but then dropped as the payments were sent out.

By mid-April, the total rate of food insufficiency in the US dropped to 8%, the lowest rate of the pandemic, according to Rouse and Restrepo. For families with children, the rate fell to 11% in mid-April, down from 18% in mid-December.

“With Federal aid payments now decreasing, however, it is not surprising that food insecurity is again on the rise,” Rouse and Restrepo wrote.

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More than 41,000 people have signed petitions to stop Jeff Bezos from returning to Earth after his trip to space next month

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Jeff Bezos is set to launch aboard the New Shepard rocket on July 20.

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images; Blue Origin

  • Petitions to stop Jeff Bezos’ Earth re-entry collected more than 41,000 signatures between them.
  • The one with the most signatures is entitled: “Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth.”
  • Bezos will fly into space on July 20 for Blue Origin’s first human flight of New Shepard rocket.
  • See more stories on Insider’s business page.

More than 41,000 people have signed petitions calling to stop Jeff Bezos from returning to Earth after he blasts into space next month.

Bezos, founder of space-exploration firm Blue Origin, said on June 7 that he and his brother Mark Bezos will fly into space aboard the New Shepard rocket on July 20 – the company’s first human flight.

Three days after Bezos’ announcement, two petitions were launched to try and prevent the billionaire’s re-entry to Earth. They have both garnered thousands of followers in just 10 days.

More than 23,000 people have signed one Change.org petition titled: “Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth.”

“Billionaire’s should not exist…on earth, or in space, but should they decide the latter they should stay there,” the petition’s description said.

Some signatories gave a reason for signing the petition, which included comments such as “being let back into Earth is a privilege – not a right,” and “Earth don’t want people like Jeff, Bill [Gates], Elon [Musk] and other such billionaires.”

Another petition, called “Petition To Not Allow Jeff Bezos Re-Entry To Earth,” has accumulated more than 18,000 signatures and is quickly increasing.

Jose Ortiz, who set up the petition, said in the description that Bezos is “an evil overlord hellbent on global domination.”

“The fate of humanity is in your hands,” Ortiz also wrote.

Both petitions are aiming to get 25,000 signatures, making them two of the top signed petitions on Change.org, according to the website.

Bezos will take an 11-minute flight to the edge of space alongside his brother and the winner of the Blue Origin auction for a seat in the New Shepard spacecraft, which sold for $28 million. They’ll be strapped into a dome-shaped capsule, which sits on top of the rocket booster.

Once New Shepard reaches the Kármán line – an imaginary boundary 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface – the capsule will separate from the booster, reenter the atmosphere, and float back down to Earth with the help of parachutes.

“I want to go on this flight because it’s a thing I wanted to do all my life. It’s an adventure – it’s a big deal for me,” Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram on June 7.

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A petition urging the government to give $2,000 monthly stimulus checks to every American has surpassed 2 million signatures

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Protesters rally demanding economic relief during the coronavirus pandemic in New York City on August 5, 2020.

Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

  • A petition calling for $2,000 monthly stimulus checks has reached more than 2 million signatures.
  • The petition argues the three stimulus checks released over the course of a year have not been sufficient to deal with the financial repercussions brought on by the pandemic.
  • Senate Democrats have been urging both Congress to pass recurring relief checks to stave off financial difficulty.
  • See more stories on Insider’s business page.

More than 2 million people have so far signed a petition calling for monthly stimulus checks in the amount of $2,000 to support Americans as the pandemic continues.

The petition, which was first posted on Change.org last year, was started by Colorado restaurant owner Stephanie Bonin.

“I’m calling on Congress to support families with a $2,000 payment for adults and a $1,000 payment for kids immediately, and continuing regular checks for the duration of the crisis,” Bonin wrote on the petition. “Otherwise, laid-off workers, furloughed workers, the self-employed, and workers dealing with reduced hours will struggle to pay their rent or put food on the table.”

In the petition, Bonin urges Congress to issue “immediate checks and recurring payments.”

“Congress needs to make sure that we won’t be financially ruined for doing our part to keep the country healthy,” she wrote.

There have been three rounds of stimulus checks in the last 15 months since the onset of the pandemic.

The last stimulus check was passed under President Joe Biden in the amount of $1,400 to eligible Americans. Congress has been slow to issue stimulus checks because of partisan disagreements between Republicans and Democrats. Each party has had different visions of the amount allocated per check and other relief measures the overall spending package would include.

The Trump administration issued two stimulus checks – the first in the amount of $1,200 and the second in the amount of $600. Nine months passed between both rounds.

Bonin criticized the amount of time it took Congress to come to an agreement.

“Another single check won’t solve our problems – people are just too far behind,” Bonin wrote on the petition. “Like we’ve been saying from the beginning of this pandemic, people need to know when the next check is coming. And the best thing our government can do right now is send emergency money to the people on a monthly basis.”

Bonin’s petition has garnered so much support that Change.org recognized it in its list of top 10 petitions that changed 2020.

Senate Democrats have been urging both Congress and the Biden administration to pass recurring relief checks to help stave off the financial devastation brought on by the coronavirus.

“Supplying Americans with monthly support until they can get back on their feet can save our communities from financial ruin,” Bonin wrote.

Read the original article on Business Insider