Tuesday, August 25, 2026
How volunteers and researchers at URI work together to better understand our environment
Become a citizen scientist
By Jessica Minker, Rhode Island Current
They include Veronica Berounsky and Elise Torello, whose time and commitment helped researchers at the University of Rhode Island better understand our state’s unique environments.
The Ancient Mediterranean Diet Wasn’t What You Think
It wasn't as defined as it is today
By Konstantine Panegyres, University of Western Australia
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| This terracotta depiction of a baker sitting in front of an oven dates from the early 5th century BCE. Credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY |
For Roman emperor Julian (332–363 CE), bread occupied
a central place at the table. He described it as the food that “among us is
thought to be the most nourishing.”
That emphasis reflected everyday eating across much of the
ancient Mediterranean. Bread and other foods made from cereals formed the
foundation of many diets, supplemented by pulses, oil, wine, and whatever
seasonal produce was available.
The result looked quite different from the modern idea of
the “Mediterranean diet,” with its familiar emphasis on vegetables, olive oil,
and grilled fish.
Bread may have been indispensable in Julian’s Roman world,
but not everyone considered it desirable. Ethiopians who relied on meat and
milk regarded bread as poor food with little nutritional value.
They wondered how
Mediterranean peoples could survive on a “diet of dung.”
Federal Judge Blocks Trump and RFK Effort to Get More Teens Pregnant
Judge tells Trump and Bobby Jr. to leave teenage girls alone
Julia Conley for Common Dreams
Despite the best efforts of Donald Trump and Health and
Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy
Jr., a federal judge’s ruling on Wednesday sent the message that the push
to reduce teen pregnancy in the US will continue, with the administration’s
limits on the program’s federal grants paused.
Judge Christopher Cooper of the US District Court for the
District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction in the case of Hennepin
County, Minnesota v. US Department of Health and Human Services, in which
officials joined King County in Washington state, Planned Parenthood of the
Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS)
in challenging HHS’s changes to the program’s grant policy. The plaintiffs were
represented by Public
Citizen and Democracy Forward.
The changes, said Cooper, were “likely arbitrary and
capricious.”
Monday, August 24, 2026
US government is pushing to gain unprecedented access to your medical records – as data protections are weakening
Bobby Jr. wants your health records
Jennifer D. Oliva, Indiana University
.webp)
You might assume that what you tell a doctor stays between you, your physician and perhaps your insurer. But the reality is more complicated.
.webp)
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal privacy law that governs health information and is commonly known as HIPAA, is narrower than its reputation suggests. It regulates hospitals, physicians, insurers and their business associates, but not the health data you generate everywhere else: not the period-tracking application on your phone, the internet search you ran about a diagnosis, the DNA you mailed to a genealogy company or the wearable that counts your heartbeats.
Even the records HIPAA does cover can be shared, sold or handed to the government in ways that might surprise you.
This gap in protection matters more than ever because the U.S. government is pushing hard to gather health data domestically and abroad. This is happening even as a growing body of research shows that the safeguard which these efforts to collect data lean on – anonymizing data by removing identifying information to make it difficult to trace back to an individual – is far weaker than officials claim.
As a professor of law at Indiana University, I study health information privacy and medical data regulation, which includes tracing how sensitive health information moves among clinics, government agencies and law enforcement. As a co-investigator on a federally funded study about opioid prescribing, I rely on health data in my own research. I appreciate its value for science, and I also see the danger of collecting it without meaningful safeguards.
Meanwhile at the White House...
All perfectly normal
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| "I don't need no stinking security clearance..." |
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| ...just to change diapers..." |
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| "...or write the boss little notes." |
Burning Questions Confront Wildland Firefighters in Maine and Across New England
Can't count on the feds
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| New England’s dense populations amid vast forests mean that even a small, localized wildfire can threaten homes or lives. Credit: Maine Forest Service |
Wildfires in New England rarely make national news. The spotlight is more often on the catastrophic fires of Western states, but the Northeast’s fire season has been quietly heating up.
In 2025, severe drought quadrupled Maine’s late summer fire activity. In 2024, another drought quintupled Connecticut’s fall wildfires, and one firefighter died while controlling a blaze. It was also Massachusetts’ most active fall fire season in 40 years.
Across the border, Nova Scotia saw its largest wildfires in recorded history in 2023, and more than 10 million acres burned in Quebec, creating a smoky haze that spread thousands of miles southward. Canadian wildfires created haze on the East Coast again this July.
It can and does happen here. 2024 wildfire
“We think that the Northeast is an important place to have on the map when we’re talking about fire, and we often get ignored,” said Erin Lane, the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Northeast Climate Hub.
As forest managers and firefighters stretch their resources to respond to wildfires in a changing climate, they’re also dealing with new uncertainties from the Trump administration’s plans to radically alter the Forest Service and the new Wildland Fire Service.
Study ties COVID vaccine conspiracy theories to distrust of government, mainstream media
If you've been wondering "What's wrong with these people?"
Researchers surveyed people in Japan about their beliefs in
COVID-19 conspiracy theories to understand who adheres to such ideas. The findings were published last
week in Scientific Reports.
“When people think about conspiracy beliefs, attention often focuses on highly extreme claims,” lead author Hitoshi Yamamoto, PhD, of Rissho University in Tokyo, said in a university press release. “However, our findings suggest that more common forms of conspiracy-related thinking are associated with the persistent distrust of social institutions and the mainstream media.”
Catholic immigrant rights group wins major court battle against Trump ban on people from 75 countries
No discrimination based on national origin
Jon Queally for Common Dreams
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| Federal Judge Jeannette Vargas has struck down the Trump administration's suspension of immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries, ruling the State Department policy violates federal immigration law and exceeds Secretary Marco Rubio's authority. Judge Vargas ruled federal law expressly prohibits nationality discrimination in issuing immigrant visas. |
A federal judge in New York has ruled that Donald Trump and the US State Department overstepped their authority when they suspended the processing of visa applications for people from 75 nations earlier this year, a move that critics at the time called a “travesty,” cruel, and counter to the rule of law.
US District Judge Jeannette Vargas, a Biden appointee, ruled
Friday that the pause in visa applications—which Trump and Secretary of
State Marco Rubio claimed
was necessary to prevent immigrant visitors from freeloading on US taxpayer
dollars—was “contrary to law and in excess of statutory authority.”
Sunday, August 23, 2026
Beyond shock and outrage
Surviving a madman
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| Posted by Trump about himself. What kind of person does this? |
Trump claimed this past week that his job approval
ratings are “fabulous” — they’re “above 60%.”
He also asserted that the United States is enjoying “the
greatest economy we’ve ever had.”
And that the U.S. has “total control” over the Strait of
Hormuz. “I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT,” he wrote on his Truth
Social platform.
Trump’s braggadocio doesn’t just mask his failures. His
statements wildly contradict the calamities he’s created for America and the
world.
To be sure, since he first entered American politics, we’ve been shocked and outraged by his lack of morality, scruple, or shame. It’s been difficult to conceive of such a person because we’ve always been taught to distinguish right from wrong and to do the right thing.
Yet Trump has no
conception of right and wrong. He isn’t unethical. He’s non-ethical.
He isn’t immoral. He’s amoral.
But his latest fabrications are so contrary to the realities
of his monumental failures — his losing war with Iran, the near-collapsing U.S.
economy, and his underwater approval ratings — that they’re not merely
non-ethical or amoral. How can they be explained?
But this can’t explain the extreme dissonance; he reads the
same polls everyone else reads, and he knows the public isn’t buying.
Another possibility is that the sycophants surrounding him
are telling him he’s wildly successful and don’t want to inform him of the
depths of his failures for fear of his reaction.
Yet he constantly watches television, and even the networks
he favors — such as Fox News — have lately been broadcasting his cataclysmic
failures.
The only possible explanation is that he’s finally lost his
grasp on reality. He’s dangerously delusional. Trump is losing his mind.
It’s hard for most of us to take in the full import of this.
Even those of us who detest him find it difficult to accept the seriousness of
his dementia because we think of him as loathsome rather than oblivious.
We’ve spent so many years seething that no one has held him
accountable for all the awful things he’s done that we’re disoriented by the
possibility he’s now unaware. We don’t want to let him off the
moral hook by reason of insanity. Yet what moral compass do we use to judge a
president who is wildly and dangerously delusional?
This has become the wrong question. The problem is no longer
Trump’s lack of ethics or his amorality. The current challenge is how to
survive under a madman.
If he is no longer responsible for what he says or does, we
should move beyond shock and outrage to outright fear. He could blow the world
up. We must call on our elected representatives to remove him from office via
the 25th Amendment as soon as possible, by reason of insanity.
What do you think?
Trump’s 50% Tariffs Take Hold After US-Canada Trade Talks Collapse
We’re back to war with Canada, our oldest and closest ally, jacking up tariff taxes on US consumers
Jon
Queally for Common Dreams
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| While courting North Korea and Russia, Trump destroys ties with our historic allies and says this make US stronger and safer. |
That’s how one Canadian journalist described developments between the governments of the US and Canada after trade talks between the
two were suspended on Friday night without a deal in place to avoid the
imposition of 50% tariffs threatened
by Donald
Trump on a wide swath of Canadian goods.
Both nations accused the other of scuttling the deal, with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney citing “last-minute changes” by the Trump administration and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer pointing to “new demands and walk backs” by the Canadians.
Asked earlier on Friday if a deal was within reach, Trump
responded, “I think so, yeah, we’ll see.” But by late Friday night, it was
clear the talks had collapsed entirely as Carney summoned Canada’s
representatives back to Ottawa.
In his statement on Friday night, Carney said, “We have
recognized from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not
return to our old relationship. Our government understood, before many, that
America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest
allies and charging for access to its vast market.”
Here are Trump's demands on Canada:
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| "French language rules in Quebec?" WTF! |
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