Will someone PLEASE go get the 25th Amendment!
Sunday, April 5, 2026
Save the Bay volunteers count nearly 600 seals along Rhode Island coastline
Seal population drops
By Christopher Shea, Rhode Island Current
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| Photo by Will Collette |
The nonprofit environmental advocacy group held its point-in-time count on Wednesday, March 18, when the high temperature reached into the mid-30s off Block Island and winds were between 5 to 10 mph.
Counts are typically held in March because that’s when the peak number of harbor seals are seen in the Narragansett Bay before they migrate further north, Save the Bay spokesperson Juan Espinoza said.
“They kind of thrive in spring,” Espinoza said in a phone interview.
How to contain avian flu H5N1 if human-to-human spread begins
With RFK Jr. in charge of the CDC, we are not prepared
By Sandra McLean, York University
Edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan
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| The Onion |
At this point, avian flu H5N1 is thought to have very
limited ability to transmit between humans, but a recent case in British
Columbia with an unknown source of transmission has piqued the curiosity and
concern of scientists, including York University Professor Seyed Moghadas. Did
this lone case come about through transmission from an animal or another
person, and if it was via human transmission, what methods would control its
spread in the human population?
Director of York's Agent-Based Modeling Laboratory in the Center of
Excellence in AI for Public Health Advancement, Moghadas and a group of
researchers used modeling to understand the best spread control measures should
human-to-human transmission become possible.
"The idea was, let's evaluate some of the interventions
that we usually implement at the very earliest stage of a disease outbreak or
emerging disease, which we know very little about," he says.
For the research, "Containment Scenarios for
Post-Spillover Transmission Chains of Avian Influenza H5N1 from Poultry to
Humans," published in Nature Health, various
scenarios from isolation to vaccination before or after a spillover event were
modeled.
It is one of only a few studies that have explicitly modeled
outbreak dynamics following spillover into humans or the effectiveness of
public health interventions in early and highly uncertain phases of virus
development.
VA Families Losing Homes After Trump Killed Loan Program
"The Most Anti-Veteran President in History"
Julia Conley for Common Dreams
As NPR reported Thursday, more than 10,000 have already lost
their homes, nearly a year after the Trump
administration abruptly did away with the VA Servicing Purchase (VASP)
program.
The program was rolled out during the Biden
administration, after the VA ended a pandemic-era assistance program that
had allowed VA home loan borrowers to gradually pay back mortgage payments that
they had needed to skip.
Under VASP, the VA purchases home loans that were in default
from mortgage services and then modified the loans.
In March 2025, a representative from the Mortgage Bankers
Association told the House Veterans Affairs Committee that widespread
foreclosures would result if the VASP program—which Republicans in
Congress said had been created by former President Joe Biden for
“political purposes... to undercut the VA Home Loan program—was not protected.
Despite the warning, the VASP program was halted two months
later.
Nearly a year after the program’s end, the VA is still
developing a replacement to help veterans—many of whom are struggling to afford
essentials just like the majority of other Americans as the cost of living
crisis intensifies with rising fuel prices due to Trump’s war on Iran.
Saturday, April 4, 2026
Pope to Hegseth: God disapproves
Pope tells Trump administration that God does not want their holy war
In 1962, the Supreme
Court ruled it unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause for
public school officials to sponsor or encourage prayer in school. State
regulations in New York required public schools to open each day with both the
Pledge of Allegiance and a nondenominational prayer in which the students
recognized their dependence upon an un-named and unspecified God. Under that
law, students could absent themselves from the prayer if they found it
objectionable. A parent sued.
The Court found that the recitation of a state-composed,
non-denominational prayer in public schools was a form of religious
indoctrination, even if the prayer was not specific to one denomination, even
if it was optional.
The rub then and now is that “optional” participation in a
setting controlled by the government is never completely optional.
The Jewish kid, the Muslim kid, the Buddhist kid, or the child taught to love
God as nature instead of a vindictive
creep in the sky has to set themselves apart from the other kids in
order not to participate in the prayer. Even standing there silently while the
popular kids mouth the prayer all around you can signal difference— defiance
against the norm, even. Given stigma and peer pressure, the Court acknowledged
that there are social ‘costs’ for not adhering to the group norm. That’s why
reinforcing religion as a norm is a form of government indoctrination prohibited
under the First Amendment.
Hegseth: First Amendment Who???
Despite the decades-long smacking clarity of the law, Pete
Hegseth, the former Fox News bobblehead who renamed the Department of Defense
the Department of War without permission from Congress, can’t stop imposing his
own religion on the military.
Hegseth holds a monthly
Evangelical prayer service at the Pentagon. He announces and promotes
his monthly worship coven, what some have called “combative
Christianity,” through formal announcements to the troops, and by
encouraging attendees to spread the word.
Similar to the school prayer case, these
‘voluntary’ services aren’t entirely voluntary even though Hegseth
says they are. They are held in the official Pentagon auditorium, and are
broadcast on the Pentagon’s internal TV network, a
system designed for maximum saturation at military installations
available to over 1.4 million active duty personnel, 1.2 million National
Guard/Reserve, 650,000 civilian employees, and thousands of military residents.
OMG! Baby bunnies!
Wild, captive, to wild: Working to help save New England’s only native rabbit
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| URI faculty and students are working to help save New England’s only native rabbit; their work follows efforts started at the University by faculty emeriti Thomas Husband in the Department of Natural Resources Science. (Rabbit Photos/Courtesy Roger Williams Park Zoo) |
The elusive native New England cottontail rabbit is the subject of lore and literature. But over the last century, their numbers declined precipitously in our region due to development, landscape change, and the introduction of an invasive rabbit.
Now researchers at the University of Rhode Island are using
a two-pronged approach to improve the New England cottontail’s prospects,
combining genetic and behavioral approaches at two very different sites: busy
Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence and the aptly named Patience Island, off
of Warwick.
Breeding programs coupled with translocation form an increasingly important method for conserving imperiled species; the approach has been used in the United States to help conserve pygmy and Riparian brush rabbits, but U.S. islands have rarely been used to produce animals for translocation.
T.J.
McGreevy, Jr. in URI’s Department of Natural Resources Science is
hoping that islands will
help preserve the New England cottontail here.
McGreevey recently finished his 14th season of field trapping the New England cottontail on Patience Island; now his state wildlife biologist collaborators will release the rabbits in New Hampshire and Maine this spring. Each winter they move approximately 30 rabbits off island to the mainland; last winter it was 41.
He’s working with URI colleague Justin Richard; they
hope their combined efforts will give the native rabbit a better future,
preserving its numbers here for centuries to come.
COVID‑19 variant BA.3.2 is spreading quickly across US – a doctor explains what you need to know
Covid variant poses new risks
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As a pulmonary and critical care doctor, I see many patients who are at high risk for severe COVID-19 due to chronic lung disease, as well as patients living with long COVID. All of them ask me how worried they should be about new variants of the virus.
There’s no sign so far that BA.3.2, nicknamed Cicada, is any more dangerous or causes more severe disease than the variants that were circulating in the winter of 2025-26. But because it’s significantly different from them, the current COVID-19 vaccine may not be as effective against it.
Where did the BA.3.2 variant come from?
BA.3.2 is descended from the omicron variant, which emerged in late 2021.
Compared to the current predominant strains of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, BA.3.2 carries 70 to 75 genetic changes in its spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it get into cells. The spike protein is also the part of the virus that vaccines rely on to coax people’s immune systems into recognizing the virus.
Researchers first identified BA.3.2 in November 2024 in Africa. It started its global trek in 2025 and had made it to 23 countries as of February 2026.
The first U.S. case was detected in a traveler coming into the U.S. in June 2025. Since then, it has been detected in patients and the wastewater systems of 29 states.
Wastewater monitoring is one of the best early methods of detecting strain shift, though the number of states submitting wastewater data to the CDC has declined since around 2022, after the height of the pandemic.
New Trump Rule Would Let Private Equity, Crypto ‘Endanger Retirement Savings of Millions’
Money for tech bros
The proposed rule, now subject to a public comment period, was issued at the
direction of a Trump executive order from last year that was characterized at the time as “the holy grail for
private equity.”
In addition to giving employers a green light to include
private equity and crypto investments in 401(k) plans offered to workers, the new rule would
establish a “safe harbor” allowing retirement account administrators to avoid
legal action from employees who believe their funds were steered into
excessively risky products.
Friday, April 3, 2026
Trump's Magical Thinking
He says he's winning in Iran. He's losing bigly.
Bad enough for you to insist — in the face of all evidence
to the contrary — that you won the 2020 election.
But it’s another thing for you to pretend — in the face of
mounting deaths and injuries, ballooning expenses, and rising prices — that you
won, or are winning, the war with Iran you began on February 28.
“Let me say, we’ve won,” you told
a rally in Kentucky on March 11.
“I think we’ve won,” you said on the White House South Lawn
on March 20.
“We’ve won this war. The war has been won,” you said in the
Oval Office on March 24.
“We are winning so big,” you told a fundraising dinner on
March 25.
“We’ve had regime change,” you told
reporters three days ago. “The one regime was decimated, destroyed,
they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead.” Iran has now moved onto its
“third regime,” and American negotiators are now speaking to “a whole different
group of people” who have “been very reasonable,” you said.
You’re making all this up. In fact, you’re losing your war.
And so is America and much of the rest of the world.
Senator Gu posts new bill to protect you from identity theft
Sen. Gu, Rep. Carson bill would modernize identity theft protection laws
“In the wake of the RIBridges cyberattack, it’s important to
set clear expectations that state agencies, municipalities and companies should
be meeting current best practices of an industry-recognized cybersecurity
framework, such as NIST Cybersecurity Framework, to protect the personally
identifiable information of Rhode Islanders,” said Senator Gu (D-Dist. 38,
Westerly, Charlestown, South Kingstown) who chairs the Senate Committee on
Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies. “Our current laws governing
the protection of this information need updating to match the reality of our
increasingly digital world and its threats.”
The December 2024 breach of RIBridges, Rhode Island’s
online portal for social services, affected around 650,000 people in total,
releasing Social Security numbers, employment details, financial data and other
personal information to the dark web. Senator Gu and Representative Carson saw
this as a clear sign that Rhode Island needed to update its cybersecurity
standards.
How far can anti-vax craziness go?
More people requesting ‘unvaccinated’ blood for themselves or their children
These requests often delay care and, in some cases, harm
patients’ health, according to a report published late last week in Transfusion. Health
systems need to develop standardized policies, include counseling, to handle
these requests, the report’s authors wrote.
The US blood supply is incredibly safe, the authors wrote.
Donations are carefully screened for HIV and other potentially infectious
microbes. There’s no evidence that blood from unvaccinated people is any safer
than other blood.
The requests for “unvaccinated blood” increased after the release
of COVID-19 vaccines, which saved
an estimated 20 million lives in their first year of use, but
which have been the subject of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center received 15 requests
for unvaccinated blood from January 1, 2024, to December 31, 2025, according to
the new report. The median age of patients was 17 years old; more than half
were children.
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