Tonight, Charlestown Town Council Considers Banning Data Centers, Battery Storage Facilities

Prevention is better than damage control

By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff

Town officials are poised this month to make Charlestown the second municipality in the state to ban data center projects, as well as utility-scale battery storage facilities.

On Aug. 11 the Town Council is scheduled to hold a public hearing and potential vote on an ordinance that would prohibit both types of projects from being proposed and built in Charlestown. The ordinance was unanimously recommended for adoption by the town planning commission in July.

Data centers, even in little Rhode Island, have made waves and stirred controversy. Smithfield made headlines earlier this year when Revity Energy, a renewable energy developer based in Warwick, showed interest in potentially building a data center on the site of Hanton City, an abandoned Colonial-era village that to this day is still relatively untouched forestland.

Smithfield banned data center developments in early May, but the Hanton City development could still squeak through, since Revity Energy filed its application for it the day before the Town Council approved the ban.

“We have a lot of concerns about what’s going on in other towns,” said Deborah Carney, Charlestown’s council president, in a phone interview with ecoRI News. “We’d rather, and I’ll be blunt, nip it in the bud.”

Carney said the town is a poor choice for a data center. The massive computer facilities require huge amounts of electricity and large amounts of water to cool the systems. Charlestown, said Carney, relies mostly on septic systems and private wells.

“We have no public water, no public sewer, it would be a massive drain on local resources, the environment, the noise, the increase in utility bills, all the stuff that comes along with these data centers,” Carney said.

Included in the ordinance scheduled for consideration Tuesday is an additional prohibition on utility-scale battery storage systems. Battery storage, to date, is a little-used technology at utility scale in Rhode Island. The state only has a single 3-megawatt (MW) facility operating in Johnston, and state regulators have only recently begun drawing up regulations and tariffs to make the projects economical.

Like data centers, battery storage has found itself at the center of public controversy. It works by drawing power from the grid when people use less electricity, like at night, and discharges power back into the grid at peak times, like in the afternoon and early evening.

Earlier this year, Green Development LLC, a Cranston-based developer of ground-mounted solar arrays, proposed building a lithium-ion phosphate battery facility that could store up to 208 MW of power in North Kingstown.

The project was proposed on 10 acres on Callahan Road in the Quonset Business Park, a commercial and industrial development area operated by the Quonset Development Corporation (QDC), where state officials often exercise more control and authority than local officials.

Residents of North Kingstown have expressed repeated concerns over developments in Quonset, including an active asphalt plant that began operations last year. Residents also expressed concerns about the battery-storage facility and the possibility of fires from the lithium-ion batteries themselves.

Carney had originally floated the idea of banning battery storage systems back in May, after a resident sent her some information on the systems, and after another council member suggested the data center ban, the town solicitor merged the two bans into a single ordinance.

“After reading it, I said yeah this is something we should look at prohibiting in Charlestown,” Carney said.

The ordinance excludes batteries used by consumer products, electric vehicle batteries, and the battery packs that often come along with rooftop solar panel installations. If passed, it would be the first-of-its-kind ban for battery storage in Rhode Island.

The Town Council is scheduled to meet Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Town Hall.

RFK Jr.’s Cooking Show Continues Long Line of Trump’s Obsession With Reality TV

Here's an idea: let Bobby do this full-time and pick a new HHS director who isn't crazy

By Chris Walker

This article was originally published by Truthout

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has launched a new food show that focuses on the questionable dietary guidelines he issued earlier this year.

“The Real Food Show,” which can be watched on the HHS website, debuted last week. The meals presented on the program fall in line with Kennedy’s so-called “upside-down” food pyramid, which emphasizes eating meats, dairy products, and fatty foods. 

When that dietary guideline was launched in January, many critics noted that its focus on those foods could be harmful to many groups of people, as they are drivers of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and other health issues. 

Despite these concerns, Kennedy — who has neither a medical nor professional dietary-related background — stood by his version of the food pyramid.

Yet another example of the comeback of an
ancient disease on Bobby Jr.'s watch

“When we published the dietary guidelines, there was immediately sort of a good reaction, but also a little trepidation from the public and from critics saying that this food is a lot more expensive than the ultra-processed food that we’ve been eating. And that’s not true,” Kennedy said ahead of his first show.

Notably, food prices overall have increased under the Trump administration over the past year, with the most recent Consumer Price Index Report (CPI) indicating that costs overall have gone up by 3 percent — including an increase in milk by 6.6 percent and ground beef by 12.4 percent, two staples that are featured in Kennedy’s upside-down pyramid. 

Kennedy’s focus on an HHS-based reality TV show comes as the U.S. is dealing with a nationwide cyclospora outbreak, which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) stopped monitoring last year under his watch (the diarrhea-inducing parasitic endemic has spread to 45 states). 

It also comes as Kennedy has failed to address the rapid increase in measles cases over the past two years — after being deemed virtually eliminated since 2000 (with only 285 cases being identified in 2024), last year, there were 2,286 measles cases identified. So far, as of July this year, the U.S. has already surpassed the total number of cases seen in 2025. 

Six Supremes Put Elections up for Bid

They put their thumb on the scale for the 2026 election

By Gerald E. Scorse

Statistics suggest that our current Supreme Court justices have some of the highest IQs in America. It seems fair to conclude, then, that six of them knew exactly what they were doing when they effectively put for-sale signs on the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government—on the presidency, on the Senate, on the House of Representatives.

The deciding six were Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas. Definitely and positively, all six realized the message they were sending to candidates and their big-money organizational contributors: You can do whatever you want; the campaign spending limits of the past 55 years have become past history.

Their decision came on the last day of the Court’s term, in the case National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission. The ruling strikes down 1971 and 2001 decisions that limited how much money political parties could spend in coordination with candidates. The justices ruled that any cap on such spending violated the First Amendment’s free-speech rights.

Justice Kagan’s dissent underlined the decision’s gift to candidates. The ruling, she argued, “ushers in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the [prior] contribution limits were meant to check.”

“As a result,” she wrote, “a donor will be able to give a party as much as half a million dollars (as compared to the $7,000 he can give directly to the candidate) to cover the candidate’s bills. And the candidate can seek just such a donation.”

The public was all in for Kagan. By huge margins, Democrats and Republicans alike opposed the decision. Only 25 percent of GOPers approved, compared to 22 percent of Democrats. On every other decision this term, the approval difference between the major parties was over 30 percent.

An ecstatic Donald Trump responded in his over-the-top Truth Social style: “The Supreme Court just took restrictions off political spending! A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS and…the First Amendment!”

It absolutely was a major win for Republicans. While individual Democrats are out-raising their GOP rivals heading into the midterms, the Republicans have a $600 million advantage for the kind of campaign financing just greenlighted by the Court.

As for Trump’s First Amendment “WIN,” here’s a sharply different view from Michael Waldman, president and CEO at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law: “[The] campaign finance ruling is part of the Roberts Court’s 16-year drive to destroy anti-corruption laws. From Citizens United forward, these justices have ushered in an era of massive money in politics.” The court not only overrode Congress, it went “against the wishes of the vast majority.”

Lawyer and former Congressman Colin Allred was even more scornful: “The Supreme Court term that just ended was, in my considered legal opinion, one of the worst in modern history.”

Let’s finish up by circling back to the beginning, when six injudicious justices ignored an eternal political truth. That truth was glaringly obvious to two major figures from America’s past, Thomas Paine and George Washington.

Paine made tax proposals that would have limited income to the equivalent of about $27 million in today’s dollars. He saw the limit as a necessary guardrail; for him, extreme wealth gave the rich an “overgrown influence” and was “one of the principal sources of corruption at elections.” For Paine, money and politics made for a toxic mix.

It wasn’t big money that worried George Washington, it was anything at all. Washington “was always very reluctant to accept any kind of gift because he was afraid people might interpret it as a bribe.”

Conclusion: Six smart Supremes made a supremely stupid decision.

This article first appeared at www.nydailynews.com. Gerald E. Scorse helped pass the bill requiring basis reporting for capital gains. He writes on taxes. His articles have appeared often in Progressive Charlestown.

Solutions to US military's ammunition shortage

Charlestown blood drive on Aug. 13

Westerly Demo on Aug. 12

Why so many of us can’t let go of our old electronics, and what we can do about it

Lost in your junk drawer

Eric Williams, Rochester Institute of Technology; Payam Saeedi, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Stacey Watson, University of Waterloo

Think about the last smartphone, tablet or smartwatch you stopped using. Odds are it is not in a recycling bin or a new owner’s hands; it is sitting in a drawer.

From our survey of 4,000 American consumers, we found the single most common thing people did with a device they were finished with was nothing at all: 39% simply stored it. Recycling and reselling, outcomes better for the environment, each accounted for only about 1 in 10 devices. Throwing devices in the trash claimed another 9%.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, our multidisciplinary team blended our expertise in causal inference, sustainability and cybersecurity, to work on the tangled question of what people do with their consumer electronics when they’re done using them. We used statistical models to connect what people say – that is, their stated knowledge and attitudes – to what they actually did.

Why the drawer wins

Two main forces keep devices in the drawer. The first is anxiety about data. People who worried that recycling or reselling a device would compromise their data were 14% and 9% more likely to store it instead.

The second force is simply not knowing how to. People who did not know where to recycle were 10% more likely to hold onto a device, and many also kept old gadgets as a perceived data backup.

Recycling and reselling electronics are a lot easier than a lot of people think. In the U.S., the national chain Best Buy accepts devices for recycling; reselling online is convenient with vendors such as Back Market and Gazelle.

The Cyclospora outbreak was, and still is, a communications failure

Not to mention corruption

Jess Steier, DrPh

The response to the current large outbreak of food-related illnesses caused by a microscopic parasite is a communications failure, not a failure of the investigation. 

A few characteristics of Cyclospora make it tricky to chase down. Because it will not grow in culture, the standard playbook doesn't apply. With most foodborne bacteria, a lab grows the organism, sequences it, and uploads the genetic fingerprint to PulseNet, the national network that flags when a case in one state matches a case in another. 

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has instead been working from partial genotyping, because Cyclospora's genome is complicated enough to defeat the sequencing methods that work for bacteria. 

Cyclospora contamination on produce is often sparse and unevenly distributed, and it tends to sit close to the limit of what a test can detect, which is how contaminated lettuce ends up testing clean. Investigators were left with the oldest tools in the kit: interviews and shipping records.

Important early clues widely missed

Dr. Mike Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (which, of course, publishes my CIDRAP Op-Eds), taught me that when cases start rolling in, the demographics of who is getting sick can hand you an important early clue. 

These cases skewed heavily toward adults, with the CDC putting the median age at 44 across a range from 1 to 89 years, and the relative absence of young children pointed toward something green rather than something fruit. 

If you have young kids you know exactly why. They are devoted fruit eaters. (I used to joke that my daughter was going to turn into a strawberry.) But more spotty toward veggies.

That narrows things, but the hunt continues. There are other important factors, too, like understanding how a growing region is organized into blocks, when each produce item was cut and by whom, how product from different fields gets combined at a processor, how long it takes to move from a field in central Mexico to a restaurant in Michigan, and how fast a perishable product cycles off the shelf. 

RI Bug Alert: More West Nile, new detection of Jamestown Canyon virus

Pediatricians and Health Departments (including Rhode Island) Sidestep Trump’s CDC on Vaccine Guidance

Rational response to the breach of trust

By Karen Brown, New England Public Media

His brainworm ate his memory

For the last 30 years, whenever pediatrician John Snyder wanted to find the most up-to-date research on treating young patients, he would turn to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If he wanted to learn more about an outbreak of measles or hantavirus, he would pore over the weekly CDC report that came by email. If a patient’s family was traveling to Africa or Asia, he would check the latest CDC vaccine recommendations for overseas travel. 

And if a family was worried about potential side effects from a shot, he could always send them to the CDC’s website to bolster his argument to get the immunization.

Public trust in the CDC has hit bumps in the road during infectious disease outbreaks, but for medical professionals, Snyder said, “the CDC used to be, worldwide, the most trusted source of information pertaining to public health and infectious disease.”

Yet even doctors began losing trust, Snyder said, after Donald Trump was elected president again. Trump quickly tapped longtime anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC.

Within months of his confirmation as secretary, Kennedy had dismissed every member of the CDC’s vaccine advisory board and replaced them with new appointees, some of them prominent vaccine skeptics.

“It turned into a completely unreputable source of information,” Snyder said.

This rupture of scientific trust in the CDC has put many pediatricians like Snyder in a bind, as they no longer turn to the country’s preeminent public health agency and instead search for ways to fill the information gap. Some doctors are launching their own vaccine education efforts, sometimes in collaboration with local public health departments.

On Jan. 5, the CDC removed some vaccines from the recommended vaccine schedule for all children — against the advice of major medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics. The number of recommended vaccines shrank as the agency dropped rotavirus, covid-19, influenza, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and meningococcal disease from the list. The agency did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Rhode Island marks VJ Day as a state holiday tomorrow, the only state to do it. Here are some inconvenient truths

The Nuclear Age Began 81 Years Ago—With Lies; It Could End the Same Way

Mitchell Zimmerman for Common Dreams

The atomic age began with a lie.

Eighty-one years ago this week, a single American airplane, flying almost unnoticed over a Japanese city, dropped a single bomb that destroyed the entire city. Three days later another American plane destroyed a second city.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 killed 100,000 people outright. By the end of the year another 100,000 succumbed to radiation sickness, burns, and other injuries from the blasts. Over 90% were civilians.

The stated reason for killing all these people was a lie. The claim that we had to drop atomic bombs to avoid the horrific losses US troops would have been suffered in an invasion of the Japanese home islands was false—and American decision-makers knew it when they decided to drop the bombs.

Because the United States had broken Japanese military codes, American intelligence learned in July 1945 that the Japanese government had already contacted the Soviet Union, America’s World War II ally, to discuss surrender. The Japanese hoped, above all, to ensure that the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender did not require the Japanese Emperor to abdicate—a condition that US readily agreed to in the end.

As Gar Alperovitz convincingly explains in his book, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the destruction of the two Japanese cities had to do with emerging Cold War politics, not with avoiding an invasion of the Japanese islands.

Those who made the decision knew that Japan was seeking to end the war and believed that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, after the Allies’ victory in Europe, would likely be enough to precipitate Japan’s capitulation.

A long-hidden, top-secret US intelligence study in 1946 confirmed that the atomic blasts were not what ended the war—it was Russia’s August 8, 1945 declaration of war against Japan and Soviet troop movements.

Because Russia was preoccupied with the life-and-death struggle against Nazi Germany, they had not participated in the war against Japan until then. But in July 1945, at a conference in occupied Potsdam, Germany, President Harry Truman secured Joseph Stalin’s promise to join the war against Imperial Japan.

“Fini Japs when that occurs,” Truman observed in his war-time, hand-written journal in July 1945. “We’ll end the war a year sooner now,” Truman wrote in a letter around the same time. “Think of all the kids who won’t be killed.”

US war leaders confirmed the atomic bombing was not needed. The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces General Dwight D. Eisenhower (later President Eisenhower) concluded that “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary... no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”

Fleet Admiral William Leahy, then Truman’s chief of staff, agreed: “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender... The use of this this barbarous weapon... was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”

Truman did not hesitate to drop the bombs anyway. “The atom bomb was no ‘great decision,’” he said 15 years later.

The World War II era was an age of atrocity. The Second Sino-Japanese War—Japan’s war of conquest against China from 1937 to 1945—caused an estimated 10-20 million deaths. Nazi Germany murdered 6 million European Jews. The Germans also murdered 2 million captured Russian soldiers through starvation. And there was the rape of Nanking, the destruction of Dresden, the 1943 famine of Bengal, and the firebombing of Tokyo and 60 other Japanese cities.

In the face of these unspeakable horrors, the atomic death of 200,000 Japanese civilians stands out because they were the world’s first victims of nuclear warfare—and their unnecessary deaths, excused by a set of lies, ushered in an era of peril for all humanity.

The lies and the dangers did not stop with the end of World War II. As we should have learned, nuclear weapons have a way of spawning lies.

In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, in 2003 the Bush regime constructed the fiction that Iraq had nuclear weapons, as an excuse for invading and occupying the oil-rich nation. But Iraq had neither nukes nor other weapons of mass destruction. The neoconservatives who promoted the invasion of Iraq (and urged President George W. Bush to proceed to invade Iran as well) had manipulated dubious intelligence to promote fears of an imaginary threat.

The price of those lies was high. In the end, the US occupation of Iraq cost the United States trillions of dollars and thousands of US service members’ lives—and caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths.

This year Donald Trump returned to the right-wing dream of overthrowing the Iranian government, again lying about nuclear weapons to support a completely unnecessary war. Trump and his aides claimed that Iran was on the verge of building a nuclear bomb and was developing long-range missiles that could soon strike the United States. US intelligence agencies confirmed that these claims were both lies.

The persistence of presidential lies about fictional nuclear threats should not obscure the all-too-real dangers of nuclear proliferation.

Citizens who are concerned about threats to our existence on this planet have rightly focused on climate change. But a world increasingly subjected to the stresses of climate change and its impacts—extreme temperatures, sea-level rise, mega storms, uncontrollable fires, crop destruction, drought, famine, refugee flows, and xenophobic politics—is a world in which desperate and megalomaniacal rulers may feel tempted to use thermonuclear weapons. And the nuclear age could end, as it began, with lies.

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller "Mississippi Reckoning" (2019).

The best is yet to come

I support Dr. Fauci

An obscene example of Trump committing "stolen valor"

 

URI College of Pharmacy researcher harvests natural viruses to seek treatment for multidrug-resistant bacteria

‘Rhody Phage Cocktail’ aims to help control ‘superbugs’

Dawn Bergantino

URI College of Pharmacy Assistant Professor Callan
Bleik displays a phage plaque spot assay demonstrating
 bacteriophage activity against a methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection.

The discovery of antibiotics transformed modern medicine, turning once-deadly infections into treatable conditions and saving millions of lives. 

But decades of overuse and misuse have accelerated the rise of antibiotic resistance, allowing certain bacteria to evolve into dangerous “superbugs” that evade even the most powerful drugs. 

As multidrug-resistant infections become increasingly difficult to treat, researchers are urgently seeking new strategies to stay ahead of these evolving pathogens.

In the University of Rhode Island College of Pharmacy, Assistant Professor Callan Bleick is leading one such effort. Bleick’s research focuses on improving treatment for drug-resistant bacterial infections, particularly those caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), one of the most prevalent and challenging superbugs in hospitals and healthcare settings.