Trump pays his dues

Charlestown Beach Cleanup Hits Shoreline Saturday

Time to clean up after the summer people

Jaxon Veridian, Entertainment & Culture

Rhode Islanders can join a two-hour shoreline cleanup at Charlestown Town Beach on Saturday, contributing hands-on effort and data to state and global marine-debris tracking.

Listen, there is a very particular late-September energy along the Rhode Island coast — the crowds have cleared out, parking gates flip open, and South County beaches settle into that crisp, quiet post-season groove. But if you think the shoreline simply takes care of itself once the lifeguards pack up their umbrellas, I have some numbers for you.

On Saturday, Save The Bay and the Town of Charlestown are summoning volunteers down to Charlestown Town Beach for a two-hour sweep from 9 to 11 a.m. The meetup point is 557 Charlestown Beach Road, and according to the town's notice, the clean-up corridor heads from the beach down toward the Breachway. It is quick, it is outdoors, and frankly, it is an easy entry point into a massive global undertaking.

Unless blocked by Trump as an "enemy alien," Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to speak at Brown on Sept. 22

Maybe he can help us understand Trump's war on Canada

Brown University 

Former Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau will deliver Brown University’s 106^th Stephen A. Ogden Jr. ’60 Memorial Lecture on International Affairs on Tuesday, Sept. 22.

In an open-to-the-public talk titled “Leadership, Democracy and the Evolving Global Landscape,” Trudeau will reflect on his time in office and discuss the forces shaping democracies, international alliances and public life. 

Drawing on his experience leading Canada through a period of global change, he will share insights on Canada-U.S. relations, the evolving world order, institutional trust and civic engagement. Trudeau will also speak about the challenges and opportunities facing democratic societies in an increasingly interconnected world. 

Trudeau served for a decade as Canada’s 23rd prime minister after leading the Liberal Party of Canada to a historic majority government in 2015. During his time in office, he set about delivering an ambitious agenda that included appointing Canada’s first gender-balanced cabinet, launching a national $10-a-day childcare program, lifting over 2 million Canadians out of poverty, advancing Indigenous reconciliation, and taking action to fight climate change, including through policies that attracted investment in clean economic growth and jobs.

Confronted with a series of global economic and security shocks, including the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trudeau worked to address international and domestic issues while continuing to deliver on a progressive vision for Canada. During his talk at Brown, he plans to share insights into societal resilience, high-stakes international diplomacy, shared economic growth and meaningful, lasting change.

Trump exhibits a fundamental incompetence that places us all in grave danger.

Trump calls AI extinction threat a "hoax"

Jeffrey D. Sachs in Common Dreams

On Sunday the President of the United States stood on a golf course in County Clare, Ireland and was asked what he intended to do about the most serious technological warning of our lifetime. 

His answer, in full, was that America is beating China. “We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins.” He added that “you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”

Consider who was doing the bringing up. The warning did not come from activists, academics, or a congressional commission. 

It came from the industry itself, from the people who build the AI systems and whose fortunes depend entirely on building them faster. 

The day before, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay asking that the pace of capability advance be slowed and committing his own company to embed outside evaluators with employee-level access. 

Sam Altman agreed and said OpenAI would do likewise. Elon Musk, a direct competitor who called Anthropic “misanthropic and evil” only in February, wrote three words: “Dario is right.” Three rival laboratories in the most valuable commercial race on earth asked to be restrained, against their own immediate interest. 

Amodei did so while his company prepares what is expected to be the largest public offering in history, at a valuation of two trillion dollars or more. Tobacco executives never did this. Neither did the oil majors, the chemical companies, or the banks.

Nor is the concern vague. Amodei points to recursive self-improvement, the use of AI to build the next generation of AI, which has accelerated sharply since the summer, and to the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident of August, in which a swarm of agents attacked targets nobody had asked them to attack and tried to break into the system that was grading their performance. 

Current and former Anthropic researchers have said publicly that these systems could kill off humanity within the decade. A letter from House members cites mass cybersecurity breaches and the development of biological and chemical weapons. 

Chariho Committee Declines Legal Opinion on Barring Transgender Girls From Girls' Sports

Culture war pounds on

Adriana Vossari, RI & Local Government

No change to Chariho athletics policy. The committee declined to pay for a legal opinion, and no policy was placed on a future agenda.

A Chariho Regional School Committee member's request for a paid legal opinion on prohibiting "biological males from participating in biological female sports" failed at Tuesday's meeting, with only three members raising their hands in support.

According to the school committee's published meeting recording, the request came during the meeting's final item, when the chair asked members for future agenda items or legal opinions. A member said he wanted an agenda item to implement such a policy "in accordance with the recent United States Supreme Court decision." He also asked for a legal opinion on whether that federal decision overrides Rhode Island law, saying, "I think that federalism trumps Rhode Island law."

The committee, which oversees schools serving Richmond, Hopkinton and Charlestown, did not adopt or debate any policy language. Only the request for a legal opinion was put to a vote.

The muted response to Trump 9/11 fantasy is a media failure

Failure to call out Trump on his 9/11 lies

Lisa Needham

Trump snaps at a reporter after Trumpapalooza. (Andrew Harnik/Getty)

When it comes to 9/11, Donald Trump has always had a problem with the truth. Now that he’s increasingly detached from reality and completely surrounded by sycophants, his lies have gotten downright bizarre.

The absolute weirdest of these has to be Trump’s fantasy that he was literally pulled to safety by brave firefighters as he stood … Inside? Near? Under? … the US Steel Building, now One Liberty Plaza.

There was significant fear that the US Steel Building might collapse, fear that turned out to be wrong. But on both September 12, 2001, and September 14, 2001, rescue workers were evacuated and rushed from the building.

Which, apparently, is where Trump comes in: “The United States Steel Building was creaking. Really creaking. And we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down. And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us. And two firemen, big strong guys, and I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing.”

To hear Trump tell it, he’s also some sort of air traffic savant, heavily implying that as he watched the second plane on 9/11, he knew it was going to hit the Twin Towers:

“I saw the second plane hit and you saw that come and you’re watching it and it’s because I watched the air patterns for years and you know where the planes are. They go up right up the Hudson River. This thing was coming right into the second building and I said, ‘Wow.” So I watched that happen and I said, “Wow, we are now in a different time.”

Wow. Wow, we are now in a different time. What soaring and stirring rhetoric, right?

There’s another big problem with this make-believe, which is that Trump Tower is some four miles away from Ground Zero, so the chance Trump was keenly watching the air patterns over the Twin Towers is pretty much zero.

With Trump, it’s always tempting to try to determine whether he knows he’s lying or believes his own lies. Before his second term, that approach still made some sort of sense, because his lies were at least reality-shaped, more about puffery than outright fantasy.

But you could see the outlines of full fabulism starting to ramp up.

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Narragansett's townwide Gansett Days celebration returns September 18–20

Gansett Days Returns With Weekend of Food and History

Jaxon Veridian, Entertainment & Culture

Residents across South County can take advantage of three days of seaside programming, local food competitions, historic walking tours, and free recycling services in Narragansett.

Look, there is something deeply romantic about post-Labor Day South County. The summer rush thins out, the breeze carries that first crisp edge of autumn, and locals reclaim the coastline for a brief, glorious stretch. If you are already mapping out how to spend those golden September afternoons, circle your calendar: the Town of Narragansett announced yesterday that Gansett Days is officially returning from September 18 through September 20.

Now, if you think Gansett Days is just one centralized festival where everyone gathers in a single town square, think again. It operates as an expansive, townwide umbrella celebration — labeled across municipal records as Gansett Days/Endless Summer — pulling together everything from culinary cook-offs and historical architecture walks to hands-on river ecology.

The town’s Parks and Recreation Department organized the broader weekend schedule, following up on a previous edition held in September 2025. While town listings vary slightly on the exact overall morning start time — the municipal calendar lists 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., while a revised special-events calendar notes 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. — the individual marquee events across South County are locked in with specific schedules.

The Food Main Event: Calamari Festival

For anyone whose personal food pyramid includes fried seafood, Saturday, September 19, brings the marquee attraction: the Rhode Island Calamari Festival and Cook-Off at Veterans Park, running from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Organized by the Narragansett Chamber of Commerce, the festival puts Rhode Island's official state appetizer directly in the spotlight.

Local kitchens will compete for the Calamari Trophy, with a lineup of confirmed competitors that includes Coast Guard House, Georges of Galilee, Surf Shack, Sea Craft, Two Ten Oyster Bar, The Haversham Tavern, and Suya Joint. Beyond the fried squid showdown, the park will host raw oysters, food offerings from Celeste’s pop-up, desserts prepared by Job Corps students, craft beer and wine, and live music.

Mice may drive Lyme disease more than deer

Hunting season on mice?

By Amanda Watford, Rhode Island Current

For more than three decades, researchers have been tracking ticks, mice, oak trees and other wildlife in a New York forest to better understand what makes Lyme disease more likely to spread.

Their latest findings challenge some long-held assumptions — including the idea that deer are a major driver of Lyme disease risk.

Researchers at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, a nonprofit environmental research group, found that white-footed mice, not white-tailed deer, are closely linked to the number of young blacklegged ticks, the life stage most likely to infect people with Lyme disease.

A year with a large mouse population was followed by about a 40% increase in nymphal ticks the following year. But more mice don’t necessarily mean a higher percentage of ticks carrying Lyme bacteria. Researchers initially expected the two to rise together because white-footed mice are especially good at transmitting the bacteria to ticks.

The researchers found that other animals, including skunks, squirrels and opossums, also feed larval ticks. Because those animals are less efficient at transmitting the bacteria, the mix of hosts can affect how many ticks become infected.

In other words, mouse populations can help predict how many ticks there will be, but not necessarily how many will carry Lyme bacteria.

The researchers also found that large crops of acorns can set off a chain reaction: More acorns mean more food for mice, which can mean more ticks two years later.

What comes next for the 1 million people who have lost – or will soon lose – Temporary Protected Status

Trump tells Haitians, Somalians to get out

Jean Lantz Reisz, University of Southern California

At the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, 1.3 million individuals from 17 countries were living and working in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.

TPS is a humanitarian form of protection from deportation for people who cannot return to their home countries because of an armed conflict, environmental disaster or other extraordinary circumstances.

In 2025, the Trump administration began terminating or not renewing TPS for those countries, making its way through 13 of them. As the administration turns its attention to the few remaining nations, most TPS holders have lost or will soon lose their protection from deportation and their authorization to work. Many will be separated from their families and the communities they have lived in for decades. Some will be forced to return to countries like Afghanistan, Haiti and Syria, all of which are on the U.S. State Department’s “Do Not Travel” list due to war, terrorism or other extreme violence.

As a law scholar who studies immigration detention, I can say that most people with TPS never had a path to anything more permanent, which means, as they face deportation, they have little recourse.

Trump EPA Takes ‘Yet Another Sledgehammer’ to Clean Water Act

“This proposal declares open season on the nation’s waterways” 

Jessica Corbett for Common Dreams

Donald Trump’s administration sparked fresh fury on Friday when it proposed a supplemental rule to further gut Clean Water Act protections for streams and wetlands in the wake of a “catastrophic” US Supreme Court ruling three years ago.

The supplemental proposal from the Department of the Army and Environmental Protection Agency builds on their widely criticized proposed rule from November for defining “waters of the United States” (WOTUS)—both of which go further than the high court did with its 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA.

While the American Petroleum Institute and some Republicans in Congress joined Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Adam Telle and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in promoting the new proposal, environmental and public health advocates sounded the alarm.

Trump ends disastrous Irish trip after a nice meeting with the President of Ireland

Not the first time Trump has "stolen valor." Hey Jim - what do you say about Trump posting an image of himself wearing the Congressional Medal of Honor?