Want to make America healthy again? Stop fueling climate change

Bobby Kennedy Jr. used to believe in climate change, but his master King Donald doesn't

Jonathan Levy, Boston University; Howard Frumkin, University of Washington; Jonathan Patz, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Vijay Limaye, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Bobby's co-authored book is still on Amazon but
he's out of the climate fight

If you’ve been following recent debates about health, you’ve been hearing a lot about vaccines, diet, measles, Medicaid cuts and health insurance costs – but much less about one of the greatest threats to global public health: climate change.

Anybody who’s fallen ill during a heat wave, struggled while breathing wildfire smoke or been injured cleaning up from a hurricane knows that climate change can threaten human health. Studies show that heat, air pollution, disease spread and food insecurity linked to climate change are worsening and costing millions of lives around the world each year.

The U.S. government formally recognized these risks in 2009 when it determined that climate change endangers public health and welfare.

However, the Trump administration is now moving to rescind that 2009 endangerment finding so it can reverse U.S. climate progress and help boost fossil fuel industries, including lifting limits on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and power plants. The administration’s arguments for doing so are not only factually wrong, they’re deeply dangerous to Americans’ health and safety.

Health risks and outcomes related to climate change. World Health Organization

As physicians, epidemiologists and environmental health scientists who study these effects, we’ve seen growing evidence of the connections between climate change and harm to people’s health. More importantly, we see ways humanity can improve health by tackling climate change.

Here’s a look at the risks and some of the steps individuals and governments can take to reduce them.

Study challenges advice to avoid coffee for those with atrial fibrillation

Coffee may help protect against A-Fib

by University of California, San Francisco

Edited by Andrew Zinin

Drinking coffee can protect against atrial fibrillation (A-Fib), a common heart rhythm disorder that causes rapid, irregular heartbeat and can lead to stroke and heart failure.

Doctors typically recommend that people with heart issues like A-Fib avoid caffeine out of fear that it will trigger symptoms. But a study by UC San Francisco and the University of Adelaide has concluded that drinking a cup of caffeinated coffee a day reduced A-Fib by 39%.

"Coffee increases physical activity which is known to reduce atrial fibrillation," said Gregory M. Marcus, MD, MAS, who holds the Endowed Professorship in Atrial Fibrillation Research and is an electrophysiologist at UCSF Health. Marcus is the senior author of the paper, which appears Nov. 9 in JAMA. "Caffeine is also a diuretic, which could potentially reduce blood pressure and in turn lessen A-Fib risk. Several other ingredients in coffee also have anti-inflammatory properties that could have positive effects."

A-Fib has been increasing in recent years along with obesity and the aging population. A-Fib, which has been diagnosed in more than 10 million U.S. adults, is estimated to affect up to 1 in 3 people.

Researchers named their study DECAF for Does Eliminating Coffee Avoid Fibrillation? It is the first randomized clinical trial to investigate the link between caffeinated coffee and A-Fib.

Mass Deportations Aren’t Helping Workers. They’re Tanking The Economy.

But Trump himself is hiring immigrants as waiters, kitchen staff and farm workers

By A.J. Schumann

Trump companies are
hiring 566 immigrant workers in 2025
at their hotels, golf courses and vineyards 

Donald Trump rode back into office by leaning on the same faux populist refrain he weaponized a decade ago: immigrants are “taking your jobs!”

Since then, Trump has launched an immigration crackdown of historic proportions. Yet rather than turning things around for American workers, we’re seeing the weakest labor market in years.

The Department of Homeland Security claims that 1.6 million undocumented immigrants have left the country voluntarily since Trump took office. Another 527,000 have been deported as a result of sweeping and often brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.

That should mean more job openings for U.S.-born workers, right? Wrong. Over the same period, employers announced more than 946,000 job cuts — the highest year-to-date total since 2020 — while hiring plans have fallen to a 14-year low.

The forced removal of so many workers is projected to shrink the nation’s gross domestic product by as much as 6.8 percent — a deeper hit than the one sustained during the Great Recession.

In key industries, the results will be even worse.

For instance, with immigrants accounting for nearly a third of long-term care workers, half of all nursing homes have stopped taking new residents. Meanwhile, family farms, already thinly staffed, have been watching their immigrant workforce dwindle — a trend with worrying implications for food production.

Trump’s brand of right-wing populism twists economic pain into a national grievance. It insists that ordinary people struggle not because of billionaires, lobbyists, and political insiders — all of whom the president golfs alongside — but because of migrants.

It’s a narrative that’s gotten global mileage.

For Trump, There Is No Rock Bottom

The regime’s depravity will continue to shock the world until it is removed.

Paul Street for Common Dreams

“For anyone holding their breath,” someone said online a couple weeks ago, “waiting for this fascist Trump regime to hit rock bottom: There is no rock bottom. Their depravity will continue to shock the world, week after week, for as long as they hold power.”

It is a good time to reflect on how true this statement is as we approach the one-year anniversary of Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump’s second presidential election.

Mad “king” Trump is now blowing up random boats, slaughtering innocents in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, claiming without a hint of a wisp of a scent of evidence that the people he is massacring in cold violation of international and national law and basic decency are “enemy combatant” narco traffickers “at war with the United States.”

Trump is gathering major military forces off the coast of Venezuela in preparation for a likely regime-change war on that nation. He may also attack Colombia, whose president has angered him by criticizing his extrajudicial executions in international waters.

Trump and the key people around him... are dedicated sociopathic fascists eager to stamp out the last embers of American democracy, decency, deliberation, and rule of law by any and all means “necessary.”

He is sending $20 billion to Argentina to back his fellow far-right president there as 42 million US Americans face hunger because he is cutting off their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

Former SNAP recipients will join masses of federal workers Trump has thrown out of work on food lines as Trump demands $230 million from his Department of Justice as “compensation” for its (badly belated) indictment (under former President Joe Biden) of Trump for… you know, trying to overthrow electoral democracy and the rule of law at the end of his first horrific administration (and for absconding with classified documents and obstructing efforts to retrieve them).

Trump has just maniacally torn down the East Wing of the White House, planning to replace that former historic landmark with a gargantuan, gaudy ballroom funded by some of his favorite capitulating corporations, including the tech giants Google, Meta, and Palantir and the leading “defense” firm Lockheed Martin.

Where the Epstein files went

How ICE’s plan to monitor social media 24/7 threatens privacy and civic participation

The end of even the pretense of online privacy

Nicole M. Bennett, Indiana University

When most people think about immigration enforcement, they picture border crossings and airport checkpoints. But the new front line may be your social media feed.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has published a request for information for private-sector contractors to launch a round-the-clock social media monitoring program. The request states that private contractors will be paid to comb through “Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Myspace, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.,” turning public posts into enforcement leads that feed directly into ICE’s databases.

The request for information reads like something out of a cyber thriller: dozens of analysts working in shifts, strict deadlines measured in minutes, a tiered system of prioritizing high-risk individuals, and the latest software keeping constant watch.

I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. I believe that the ICE request for information also signals a concerning if logical next step in a longer trend, one that moves the U.S. border from the physical world into the digital.

Here's a surprise: New research finds no clear link between acetaminophen (Tylenol) and autism debunking Trump and Bobby Jr. false statements

DO NOT take medical advice from Trump or Bobby Jr.

BMJ Group

An extensive review of existing studies, published in The BMJ on November 10, finds no clear evidence that using acetaminophen (Tylenol) during pregnancy increases the risk of autism or ADHD in children. The new analysis was conducted in response to growing public debate about the safety of acetaminophen use while pregnant.

Researchers reported that the reliability of earlier studies and reviews on this topic is rated as low to critically low. They noted that any apparent associations observed in past studies may be influenced by factors shared within families, such as genetics and environmental conditions, rather than by the medication itself.

Community health centers provide care for 1 in 10 Americans, but funding cuts threaten their survival

Groups like our local Wood River Health Center provide vital service

Jennifer Spinghart, University of South Carolina

Editor's Note: Group like 49-year-old Wood River are chronically underfunded and, in these times, face harsh cutbacks. 

That makes them even more dependent on community support, which is a lot of work. Recently, Wood River held its major annual fundraiser and raised $125,000. But it takes a lot more than that to stay open, so please give them your generous support.  - Will Collette

Affordable health care was the primary point of contention in the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, which hit 43 days on Nov. 12, 2025.

This fight highlights a persistent concern for Americans despite passage of the landmark Affordable Care Act 15 years ago.

In 2024, 27.2 million Americans, or 8.2% of the population, lacked health insurance entirely. A significant number of Americans have trouble affording health care, even if they do have insurance. The tax and spending package signed by President Donald Trump into law in July 2025 puts a further 16 million Americans at risk of losing their health care insurance by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Many people who lack or have insufficient health insurance seek health care from a network of safety net clinics called community health centers. Even though community health centers provide care for 1 in 10 people in the U.S. – and 1 in 5 in rural areas – many people are unaware of their role in the country’s medical system.

As an emergency physician and the director of the student-led community health program at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in Greenville, I collaborate with the community health center in Greenville and am closely familiar with how these types of providers function.

These clinics often operate on razor-thin margins and already function under continual demands to do more with less. Slated cuts to health care spending from the tax and spending bill and funding uncertainties that were driven by the shutdown threaten to destabilize them further.

Bannon Tells GOP: ‘Seize the Institutions’ of Government Now or We’re ‘Going to Prison’ After 2028

Trump advisor calls for MAGA to mount fascist takeover

Jon Queally for Common Dreams

Far-right podcaster and former top presidential advisor Steve Bannon told a crowd of aspiring conservative staffers on Capitol Hill this week that the job of Republicans between now and the midterm election next year is to seize complete control of government institutions and turn as many of Donald Trump’s executive orders as possible into law as a way to avoid politic defeat in the coming years and, ultimately, keep MAGA loyalists from being tried and sent to jail.

“I’ll tell you right, as God as my witness, if we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison,” Bannon told the crowd Wednesday at an awards event hosted by the Conservative Partnership Academy. This group offers training and certifications to aspiring right-wing ideologues working in politics and government.

Bannon, who has already served time in prison for refusing to submit to a congressional subpoena related to his role as a top aide to Trump during his first term, included himself among those who might be targeted if Republicans lost power.

In his remarks, Bannon said Tuesday’s election results in New York City, Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere—where Democrats swept the GOP—should be seen as a warning to Trump’s MAGA base, but called for an intensification of the agenda, not a retreat.

Ready, set, GO!

Trump's economic fantasies

Now he wants to give every American a $2000 payment from the trillions of dollars he has imagined the US has collected in tariffs charged to American companies for imported foreign goods...
 

South County Hospital used to be consistently rated "A" for patient safety - rating drops to "C"

South County, Roger Williams hospitals slip in new national ranking while Westerly Hospital continues its "A" streak

By Alexander Castro, Rhode Island Current

Four of Rhode Island’s nine acute care hospitals earned the highest marks in the latest report by a national nonprofit that ranks patient safety. But three slipped one grade.

Rhode Island Hospital and the Miriam Hospital in Providence, Newport Hospital, and Westerly Hospital all earned an A grade from the Leapfrog Group in results published Thursday.

Landmark Medical Center in Woonsocket received a B. Kent Hospital, South County Hospital in South Kingstown and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital in North Providence all received a C. Roger Williams Medical Center in Providence received a D.

None of the Ocean State’s hospitals received the lowest grade of F. 

VA hospitals, children’s hospitals, psychiatric hospitals are excluded from the report.

The Washington, D.C.-based Leapfrog Group assigns letter grades to hospitals based on its surveys plus safety data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). The ratings are updated twice a year, in spring and fall, and calculated across over 30 measures related to errors in care, infections, injuries, and how effectively hospitals minimize and prevent harm to patients.

Rhode Island hemp industry faces uncertainty amid federal crackdown on THC products

Republicans snuck surprise ban into bill to reopen the government

By Christopher Shea, Rhode Island Current

Mike Simpson is one of Rhode Island’s biggest cheerleaders for hemp cultivation and the plant’s derivative products — remedies, he believes, that may help where pharmaceutical medicines cannot. 

It’s that very reason Simpson helped co-found Rhode Island’s only outdoor hemp farm, where he says many of the business’ products ship all across the country.

But Lovewell Farms’ may cease operations now that Congress has approved reopening the federal government under legislation that would effectively ban hemp products containing more than 0.4 milligrams of THC. If approved by President Donald Trump, the ban will go into effect in a year.

“This might be the final straw,” Simpson said in an interview Wednesday. “I may have to shut my whole company down.” 

Simpson doesn’t sell intoxicating products, but said crops grown at his Hopkinton farm can contain up to 1 milligram of THC in it, as is allowed under existing Rhode Island hemp regulations.

“I have 700 to 800 pounds of flower that I grew this year that under that law would not be legal,” he said.

Simpson said he would grow crops with lower concentrations, but as a USDA-certified organic farm, there aren’t that many seed suppliers he can buy from.

“We’re really at the whim of what those folks are providing,” he said.

The provision in the shutdown-ending appropriations bill was championed by GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky in order to close a loophole in the 2018 Farm Bill that legalized hemp but inadvertently paved the way for the proliferation of hemp-derived THC products like infused drinks — products which states have since scrambled to either regulate or ban.

THC drinks derived from hemp were illegal in Rhode Island until August 2024, when the state’s now-defunct Office of Cannabis Regulation began allowing the sale of products containing low levels of delta-9 THC at licensed retailers, including vape shops and liquor stores.

The presence of hemp-derived drinks has led to a debate on whether such drinks should even be legal in Rhode Island. Members of the state’s recreational cannabis industry for the most part have been against allowing THC products to be sold outside licensed pot shops. 

Since the start of the fiscal year on July 1, regulators in the newly-established Rhode Island Cannabis Office have crafted recommendations on dosage limits, packaging standards, labeling requirements, licensing conditions, and other ways to ensure children don’t accidentally consume the intoxicating drinks. 

Battle Over Westerly Beach Access Rages On Before CRMC

Fake fire district fights to restrict public beach access

By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff

Access to Weekapaug Beach in Westerly, R.I., is guarded by a security officer from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the summer. The Weekapaug Fire District, at least according to a group of concerned residents, is also illegally blocking a shoreline right of way known as the Spring Avenue Extension. (Frank Carini/ecoRI News)

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Weekapaug Fire District is actually just a homeowners' association not an fire-fighting entity. Ironically, the Fire District lost what little capacity it had when its own firehouse burned down in November 2017. They have a security force, as shown above, but no firefighters. Weekapaug is similar to Charlestown's two fake fire districts, Shady Harbor and Central Quonnie, who likewise lack the ability to fight fires but plenty of determination to keep outsiders off the beach.  - Will Collette

Observers hoping for a quick resolution to the Spring Avenue Extension coastal access point are sure to be disappointed.

The Coastal Resources Management Council’s right of way (ROW) subcommittee opened its first evidentiary hearing Nov. 4. It’s the first chance both sides have had to produce evidence that proves or disproves if the ROW is truly open to the public.

For two and a half hours — with a single 15-minute break — the subcommittee heard testimony from witnesses, including title attorney Joseph Priestly, as attorneys representing the town of Westerly tried to prove to council members using decades-old plat maps the public status of the ROW.

“It’s a public highway open for access by the public and will remain so until abandoned by the town of Westerly,” Priestly testified. “Assuming that it has not been, it remains a public highway.”

Priestly added he had seen no evidence indicating the town had abandoned the ROW, either formally or informally, but noted he had not specifically looked for evidence of abandonment either. He also testified to subcommittee members that he saw no maintenance obligation by Westerly in the land evidence records.

A key point of evidence for supporters of the right of way is a 1939 plat map that has the ROW labeled. Westerly solicitor William Conley said for the ROW to be accepted under common law jurisprudence was a plat map depicting the ROW, and proof that it was open to the public historically, which would count as the town “accepting” the ROW without formally adopting it.

They're tough guys in the streets and delicate little babies in court.

The softest Nazis you ever did see

Lisa Needham

The Trump administration only wants the most formidable warriors, real stone-cold-killer types, to join his war on immigrants.

They should be white, of course, and ideally ‘roided up. These guys are the sort that can take a punch and not even blink, the hardest MFers you’re ever going to see. 

Just look at all the sizzle reels DHS is putting out, and you can feel the toughness through the screen, right? And you just know that if those dudes want to take you down, you’re going down.

Now, it’s not at all unusual for authoritarians to treat even the smallest pushback on law enforcement officers as an attack on their authority and an excuse to be rabidly violent. But that’s not quite what the administration is doing. In public, they want everyone to know that these thugs they’ve deployed to terrorize cities are battle-hardened and impervious to pain. 

But on the other hand, they are also such delicate flowers that if they are, say, lightly grazed by a sandwich, they are entitled to justice because of the horrific assault they have suffered.

Call it tough guy in the streets and widdle guy in the sheets (of paper for court filings).