Rhode Island nurses cancel vigil to honor Alex Pretti after threats of violence

"We believe the threats are credible and pose too great a risk to proceed”

By Christopher Shea, Rhode Island Current

A Pawtucket vigil planned Thursday night by Rhode Island nurses to honor the Minneapolis nurse shot and killed by federal agents last month was canceled three hours before it was supposed to start after organizers received threatening comments on social media.

A joint statement from the Rhode Island Nurses Association and SEIU 1199 New England issued at 3 p.m. claimed a Middletown resident allegedly posted threats raising the possibility of weapons being present at the vigil planned for 6 p.m.

“Our mission is to protect and advocate for nurses across the state, and with guidance from the Pawtucket and Middletown Police Departments, we believe the threats are credible and pose too great a risk to proceed,” the Rhode Island Nurses Association and SEIU 1199 New England said in a joint statement.

Chris Hunter, a spokesperson for the city of Pawtucket, confirmed the online threats. He said police in Middletown conducted a wellness check and found the man had weapons at his residence.

Tens of thousands of women are missing besides Savannah Guthrie’s mom – the Justice Dept. used to care

Shining a light on the crisis of missing or murdered black women and girls in the US

By Linda A. Seabrook, US Department of Justice, published November 22, 2024 two months before Ms. Seabrook left DOJ

NOTICE from the Trump Administration: This is an archive page that is no longer being updated. It may contain outdated information and links may no longer function as originally intended.

Screenshot from the New York Post

The United States faces a deeply troubling crisis that has not received the attention it deserves—the alarming number of missing or murdered Black women and girls. Despite the devastating impacts on families and communities throughout the country, the epidemic of missing or murdered Black women and girls has largely remained a silent one. It is time to confront this issue with the urgency and coordinated response it warrants.

On November 12, 2024, the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs held a national convening in Washington, D.C., focused on addressing the crisis of missing or murdered Black women and girls. The event brought together family members, survivors, law enforcement, advocates, journalists, and state leaders, along with federal agency colleagues, to raise awareness of the issue, inform potential future programming and resources, learn from state efforts, and encourage a more robust response to missing and murdered Black women and girls.

The Scale of the Crisis

Black women and girls are disproportionately affected by violence, trafficking, and systemic neglect, leading to high rates of their disappearance, and placing them at greater risk for homicide. Although they make up a significant portion of missing person cases in the U.S., their stories often go underreported and unnoticed by national media and law enforcement.

According to the National Crime Information Center, in 2022, of the 271,493 girls and women reported missing, 97,924, or over 36 percent, were Black, despite the fact that Black women and girls comprised only 14 percent of the U.S. female population at the time.

In addition, according to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed general medical journal The Lancet, Black women are six times more likely to be murdered than their white peers. These stark and tragic statistics reveal and underscore systemic issues of bias, neglect, and a lack of resources that hinder effective responses to this crisis.

Trump blames Canada

Trump tears up relationship with America's best friend

Paul Waldman

The 1999 film “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut” contains a rousing musical number called “Blame Canada,” in which parents of unruly children resolve to blame Canada for all their child-rearing problems.

The humor in the song derived from the fact that blaming Canada for anything seemed so absurd. They’re our kindly northern neighbor, a more polite version of ourselves! They gave us Michael J. Fox, and the Ryans Gosling and Reynolds, Bret “Hitman” Hart, and Shania Twain and Celine Dion! How could we ever be mad at them?

Today, our president is blaming Canada, in an escalating conflict driven by his most petty and vindictive impulses, doing nothing but harm to the citizenry of both countries. It’s not a complete breakup with our closest ally, but it’s drawing awfully close. And it isn’t hard to imagine it getting progressively worse as we slog through the next three years.

On January 20 in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a remarkable speech in which he all but declared the end of the post-war order that the United States and its allies created.

“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” he said. “Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security, that assumption is no longer valid.”

The “middle powers,” he went on, have no choice but to band together for their mutual interest, free of the delusion that they can rely on the great powers — or, more specifically, one great power. And rather than just lamenting what Donald Trump is destroying, he argued that it was always something of a lie.

“Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised,” he said. “Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion.”

Not surprisingly, Trump didn’t take it well. The day after Carney’s speech, he said, “I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn’t so grateful — they should be grateful to the US, Canada. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

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From the world's greatest business mind

Why the government is trying to make coal cute

Coal mining is bad for the environment and for its neighbors

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."

Can a lump of coal ever be … cute?

It’s a question no one was thinking about until January 22, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted a cartoon of himself on X kneeling next to “Coalie” — a combustible lump with giant eyes, an open-mouthed grin, and yellow boots, almost like a carbon-heavy Japanese video game character.

It might seem like a strange mascot to promote what Burgum calls the “American Energy Dominance Agenda.”

“Especially for this administration, I would have expected a little bit more macho twist to it,” said Joshua Paul Dale, a professor of literature and culture at Chuo University in Tokyo, and the author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World. 

In Japan, Dale said, seemingly everything gets a cute character attached to it — not just in TV shows and games, but also as part of government public relations efforts. This ultra-adorable aesthetic, associated with rounded shapes and huge eyes, is so common it has a name: kawaii. Even the Tokyo police department has an orange, mouselike mascot, with a disarming cuddliness that serves to make law enforcement feel softer and less threatening.  

Coalie appears to do something similar, countering Burgum’s “mine, baby, mine” message with a kawaii-style innocence. “You know, it makes us feel more familiar,” Dale said. “It makes us want to get closer.” Those warm, fuzzy feelings come from how our brains are wired to respond to babylike characteristics. Give a character a round body, big eyes, and chubby arms and legs, and you can even make a lump of coal look huggable. 

EDITOR'S NOTE: I take this story very personally. For nearly 10 years, I was staff director for the Citizens Coal Council, a federation of citizens' groups spread across the US from the Navajo Nation to Pennsylvania, from Alabama to Montana. These groups were fighting to prevent damage to drinking water, streams, farmland and homes from mining practices such as blasting, subsidence, mountaintop removal and strip mining. With help from whistleblower mine inspectors, we changed legislation and exposed corruption. Our main target was the Office of Surface Mining (OSM) featured in this Grist article. There was no "Coalie" on my watch.  - Will Collette

Statins may help almost everyone with type 2 diabetes live longer

Benefits outweigh risks

American College of Physicians

A large long-term study has found that statins, a widely used class of cholesterol-lowering medications, significantly reduce the risk of death and serious heart-related problems in adults with type 2 diabetes. 

Importantly, these benefits were seen even in people who were considered to have a low chance of developing heart disease within the next 10 years. 

This challenges a long-standing debate over whether preventive statin treatment is worthwhile for patients who appear to be at lower cardiovascular risk.

Statins are commonly prescribed to lower LDL cholesterol, what many people know as bad cholesterol. High LDL levels are linked to clogged arteries, heart attacks, and strokes. People with type 2 diabetes already face a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, but doctors have not always agreed on whether statins are necessary for those whose short-term heart risk appears minimal. The new findings suggest that statins may offer protective effects for a much wider group of diabetes patients than previously believed. The study was published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

The research team, led by scientists from the University of Hong Kong, examined health records from the IQVIA Medical Research Data (IMRD)-UK database. Their goal was to assess both the effectiveness and safety of starting statin therapy for primary prevention. Primary prevention refers to preventing a first heart attack or stroke before any such event has occurred.

The study focused on adults in the United Kingdom with type 2 diabetes between the ages of 25 and 84. Participants were followed for as long as 10 years. At the start of the study, none of the individuals had serious heart disease or significant liver problems, allowing researchers to more clearly assess the effects of statins without interference from existing severe conditions.

The wealthiest 15 billionaires in America saw their wealth grow over 30 percent in 2025.

America’s Wealthiest Are Getting Even Richer

By Chris Mills Rodrigo

The top 15 wealthiest people in America are part of a very, very exclusive club: those with over $100,000,000,000 in net worth. After double checking those zeroes, we can confidently say that yes, there are 15 centi-billionaires living among us.

And, according to a new Institute for Policy Studies analysis of data from the Forbes real time billionaire list, the combined wealth of that 12-figure club grew from $2.4 trillion to $3.1 trillion over the course of 2025.

For context, that 30.3 percent rate of growth outpaced both the S&P 500 (16 percent) and billionaires in general (20.8 percent) over the last year. To put it succinctly, the wealthiest Americans are accumulating capital faster than everyone else.

The top 15 wealthiest billionaires aren’t the only ones doing well for themselves. Our analysis found that found that the number of U.S. billionaires increased from 813 with combined wealth of $6.7 trillion at the end of 2024 to 935 U.S. billionaires with combined assets of $8.1 trillion.

Donald Trump vs. Donald Trump

The Art of the Self-Deal

Robert Reich

Trump has sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion.

In the suit, filed in Miami federal court on Thursday, Trump alleges that the IRS was responsible for the leak of some of Trump’s tax documents to press in September 2020. The leak occurred by an IRS contractor.

The leaked tax documents revealed that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he first won the presidency, and paid no taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years.

The lawsuit claims that the leak caused Trump and his family “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump.”

Oh please.

Trump has been unique among presidential candidates and presidents in refusing to release his tax documents to the public.

He’s also been unique among presidents in filing lawsuits against the government — his government, which is supposed to be our government.

He’s also been unique among presidents in turning the Justice Department into his own private law firm — at least unique since 1975, when Gerald Ford rescued the department from the clutches of Richard Nixon.

So how, exactly, is this $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS going to work? Who will represent the government — that is, you and I and every other taxpayer that would, in effect, have to shell out $10 billion if he wins?

How can the Justice Department represent us when Trump has directed the department to do whatever he wants it to do? If there are settlement negotiations with him, who’s going to negotiate the settlement with him? Who’s going to sign the final agreement with him?

This takes the “art of the deal” into a surreal new dimension. Trump will be making a deal with himself.

Forget hockey, Donald. Stick to golf

 

Join the RI Winter Reading Challenge!

The Rhode Island Winter Reading Challenge is in full swing! Sign up by clicking the link below to create a Beanstack account to track your progress online. Every reading day logged adds another chance to win! Prizes include gift baskets, gift cards to local bookstores, Stop&Shop, Dave’s, and the Providence Performing Arts Center; and a 4-pack of Providence Bruins tickets.

Sign up here: RI Winter Reading Challenge 2026

Things gotta change

Microbes under the snow: The hidden (and vulnerable) world that fuels spring

There's life under all that snow

By Anna Gray

New research by URI soil microbiologist Patrick Sorensen reveals the vulnerable process taking place as snowpacks shrink.

When snow blankets the landscape, it may seem like life slows down. But beneath the surface, an entire world of activity is unfolding. “Unlike many plants or some animals, which tend to go dormant or are much less active during winter, soil microbes are actually very active under winter snowpacks,” says Patrick Sorensen, a soil microbiologist and assistant professor of soil ecology and biogeochemistry in the University of Rhode Island’s Department of Natural Resources Science.

All winter, soil microbes decompose organic matter, releasing nutrients that are critical for plants. By spring, these nutrients are perfectly timed to fuel new growth. Warming winters and reduced snow cover can disrupt this timing, allowing nutrients to wash into streams, escape into the air, or leave plants short of what they need.

Bamboo isn’t just fast-growing, it may be a powerful new superfood hiding in plain sight.

Scientists are rethinking bamboo as a powerful new superfood

Anglia Ruskin University

Bamboo shoots may be far more than a crunchy side dish. A comprehensive review found they can help control blood sugar, support heart and gut health, and reduce inflammation and oxidative stress. Laboratory and human studies also suggest bamboo may promote beneficial gut bacteria and reduce toxic compounds in cooked foods. However, bamboo must be pre-boiled to avoid natural toxins.

The first-ever academic review focused on bamboo as a food has uncovered a wide range of possible health benefits. Researchers found evidence suggesting bamboo consumption may help regulate blood sugar, reduce inflammation, support digestive health, and provide antioxidant effects.

Bamboo is known as the fastest growing plant on the planet, with some species capable of growing up to 90cm in a single day. While China and India are the largest producers and bamboo shoots are already common in many Asian cuisines, the findings suggest bamboo could become an important food option for diets around the world.