MAGA don't care

New hand's-on education program from Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association

 

All WPWA Events and Registration on Eventbrite.com, Click Here  Map and Compass Workshop Thursday April 30th 6-9pm, and Saturday, May 2nd 9am-3pm Do you like to get out and explore, but worry about your skills to find your way back? Join the Narragansett Chapter of the AMC and the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association for a two-part course to read and understand maps and use a compass correctly. Class will be on Thursday April 30, 2026 from 6:00 to 9:00 PM at Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association Campus, Hope Valley, RI. For Thursday class, dress for the weather, part of the class will be held outdoors, as conditions permit. Topics include reading map symbols and contour lines, matching the terrain to the map, taking and using bearings, orienting map and compass, declination, determining your location and planning your route. Field Practice will be on Saturday May 2, 9:00 AM - 3 PM at Arcadia Management Area in Exeter, RI. Information about Saturday’s field practice will be provided in the class notes. The morning session will allow participants to practice their new skills. After lunch they will plan and then execute a bushwhack route through the woods. Instructors include experienced AMC Narragansett Chapter Northern Hikes Leaders. Participants should bring a base-plate style compass with an adjustable declination feature and plan to attend both dates. Minors must be accompanied by a guardian. More details on Eventbrite link below. Register Prior to April 27th. There are 8 seats available this year.  Cost: $35.19 fee, payable on Eventbrite Register Here Paddle Day WPWA Annual Meeting and Open House Saturday, May 30th 11am - 6pm   Free Kayak Use, Environmental Education, Meet the Board and More!   The month of May brings bird songs and warmth. A wonderful time of year to celebrate WPWA and to bring friends and family to the Wood River. This year, on Saturday, May 30th the WPWA Board invites all to come meet the organization and enjoy both kayak adventures and on-land activities. Please share this invitation, plan to come and bring a friend.   River Trail Update Pawcatuck River between Rt 112 and Rt 91 Are you out kayaking already? Luck favors the well prepared. Please don't take spring kayaking lightly. Water flows (speed, and amount) plus temperatures is a risky business. Water flow information: https://waterdata.usgs.gov/state/Rhode-Island/ River Trail Update for the Pawcatuck, downriver of Rt 112 and upriver of Rt 91 / Jay Cronan Fishing Access. Reported on 3/24/2026: "The 112 bridge creates the mouse hole shoot from the old mill canal. At the end of that series of rapids/moving water there is a tree trunk that is completely covering the river. You don’t really see it coming and there’s no real portage on the sides. The water is moving quickly." The two kayakers flipped, but were prepared and came out fine. Another reported there is a dingy (not canoe or kayak) stuck along a down tree here, too.   If you have river trail reports, please inform WPWA via info@wpwa.org. Also, do what you can to inform other paddlers.

Our Contact Information Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association 203 Arcadia Road Hope Valley, RI 02832 401-539-9017 http://www.wpwa.org

Local Reps. Tina Spears and Megan Cotter introduce bills to protect kids from online harm

As legislators and moms, representatives offer bills to protect kids from digital harm

Three Rhode Island representatives — all mothers of children and teens — are taking action to protect kids in an increasingly digital world with a package of legislation aimed at improving online safety for children.

Representatives Tina L. Spears, Justine Caldwell and Megan L. Cotter have introduced a package of legislation to address growing concerns around social media use and digital technology use by establishing new safeguards designed to reduce risks such as exposure to harmful content, exploitation and adverse mental health impacts among young users.

The legislation holds technology companies accountable for the products they design and deploy, particularly when their platforms are used by children. By requiring clear safety standards, transparency and proactive risk mitigation, these measures ensure tech companies share responsibility for protecting young users from harm.

The three representatives highlighted the bills at State House event today to call attention to the necessity of ensuring that laws protecting kids evolve alongside the ever-changing challenges presented by technology. They were joined by two of the Senate sponsors of the bills —Sen. Louis P. DiPalma and Sen. Lori Urso — as well the Office of the Attorney General, community advocates and a mother who spoke about losing her son to suicide after he plunged into online activities and communication she was unaware of.

“As technology evolves, so does our responsibility to protect children,” said Representative Spears (D-Dist. 36, Charlestown, New Shoreham, South Kingstown, Westerly). “These bills are about putting common-sense guardrails in place to ensure kids can engage online more safely.”

Their effort reflects a broader commitment to meeting the needs of families and communities, while holding technology platforms accountable for the environments they create.

“These proposals recognize that online spaces are part of everyday life for kids,” said Representative Cotter (D-Dist. 39, Exeter, Richmond, Hopkinton). “Our goal is to make those spaces safer, healthier and more responsible.”

The legislation includes measures to strengthen protections for minors on social media, gaming and other online platforms as well as on school-provided devices and applications, and establish safety standards for AI companions.

Metformin’s long-hidden brain pathway may redefine how diabetes is treated.

Opening new doors for diabetes treatment

Baylor College of Medicine

For over 60 years, metformin has been a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes, yet scientists have not fully understood how it works. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, along with international collaborators, have now identified an unexpected factor behind the drug's effects: the brain. 

By uncovering a brain-based pathway involved in metformin's ability to lower blood sugar, the team has opened the door to more targeted and effective diabetes therapies. The findings were published in Science Advances.

"It's been widely accepted that metformin lowers blood glucose primarily by reducing glucose output in the liver. Other studies have found that it acts through the gut," said corresponding author Dr. Makoto Fukuda, associate professor of pediatrics -- nutrition at Baylor. "We looked into the brain as it is widely recognized as a key regulator of whole-body glucose metabolism. We investigated whether and how the brain contributes to the anti-diabetic effects of metformin."

A recent poll found that 80% of American respondents viewed wealth inequality as a problem

Yes, It’s Time to Tax the Rich

Lawrence Wittner for Common Dreams

With the deadline for paying federal income taxes fast approaching, the thoughts of American taxpayers turn naturally toward the age-old question: Why isn’t there a fairer tax system?

Currently, in fact, campaigns for state tax-the-rich legislation are flourishing in California, Colorado, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, and Virginia, and have already succeeded in getting such legislation adopted in Massachusetts and Washington. Similarly, in Congress, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) have introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Wash.) are sponsoring the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act. The tax-the-rich proposals range from increasing the tax rate for the very highest annual income earners, to instituting an annual wealth tax on the very richest Americans, to a combination of both.

Although the most affluent Americans, like other Americans, have always paid taxes to fund public services, the dispute has been over how much they should pay. Sales taxes and property taxes place a heavy burden on people of modest means, but a much lighter burden on the wealthy. Therefore, the wealthy have tended to favor these generators of public revenue and to oppose a progressive income tax, under which the rich would pay at a higher rate than the poor. A lengthy political battle for a tax system based upon ability to pay led to passage of the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution, which empowered Congress to levy an income tax.

Initially, the new income tax, though progressive, was rather small-scale. But as the federal government took on new and costly tasks―particularly funding US participation in two world wars and the Cold War―the federal income tax grew accordingly. By 1944, the official tax rate for the highest income earners stood at 94%―although, thanks to deductions, loopholes, and the rate’s confinement to the top increment of their income, the richest Americans actually paid at a much lower rate.

Reflections on Cesar Chavez Day 2026

How to change culture (for Dolores and all the others)

Cheryl Brown

The other day I listened to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 1996 recording of “Knoxville Girl,” a traditional ballad about a girl from my hometown who got pummeled to death with a stick by her lover and dumped into the Tennessee River. The lyrics are typical of many a handed-down English folk song in that it features the violent murder of a sweet, young, not-so-innocent thing. 

Scots-Irish and English immigrants (settlers who may have been indentured servants, religious and economic refugees, colonizers, possibly all of the above) brought the seeds of this song to the US and then unto Appalachia. Besides Nick Cave, the Louvin Brothers, Lemon Drops, BR549, Outlaws, and many others have covered “Knoxville Girl.” 

I suspect some don’t even think twice about singing from the point of view of the murderer who is sitting in jail feeling sorry for himself. Perhaps this song was once meant to scare young people off from fooling around before wedlock, but it often come across, at least to me, as more sympathetic to a man grieving for the loss of his freedom rather than the loss of a young woman’s life. Perspective means everything. Anyway the words are at the bottom of this post so see for yourself.

Although I grew up hearing a lot of folk music, I only really learned about the lineage of murder ballads my first year back in the States, when I spent my second semester at Friends World College doing an apprenticeship and self-guided study on urban Appalachians, migration, and culture. My advisor was an ethnomusicologist who supported my investigations of country music on juke boxes in downtown Cincinnati dive bars. Grandma Bonnie Blanton Vance kinda territory. I learned as much from the other patrons’ stories as I did from the lyrics we sang along to over shots and beers. 

For part of my apprenticeship at the Urban Appalachian Council, I put to good use skills I had honed organizing punk shows helping out with the musical and storytelling stages of the annual Appalachian Festival. Because I was once again behind the scenes and not in the audience, I got to meet the likes of the Dillards, Dry Branch Fire Squad, Rich Kirby, Sparky and Rhonda Rucker, and Sheila Kay Adams, whose version of “Knoxville Girl” is one of the best I’ve heard, sung in the true ol’ timey way. 

I got to work with some of the godfathers and godmothers of the Cincinnati hillbilly music scene, one of whom invited me to his house after the festival to confess he had fallen in love with me, a 22- year-old less than half his age. I went because a group of us had been meeting there to plan the thing. After that, I withdrew and was never involved with that group of people again.

A few years later, I went to grad school in Washington DC and wasted hours that should have been dedicated to writing about the impact of structural adjustment policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund on poor people in poor countries, instead browsing the library stacks which held rare books full of old songs collected by jobless artists dispatched by the Works Progress Administration to the Third World hollers of Southern Appalachia. 

I formed a band and found my voice while working out harmonies and writing lyrics that were basically revenge fantasies in which the fair maiden gets revenge on the man who led her down the proverbial path in the woods to a muddy, soon bloody riverbank. 

My songs weren’t nearly as good as Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard’s recordings of feminist folk songs from the 1960s and 70s, but can be seen as stemming from that tradition, with the addition of the electric guitars and distortion pedals of 1980s punk and 1990s shoegaze. Changing culture takes decades of work over many generations. 

I’ve often thought that by getting me out of Knoxville when I was a jaded and angry 15-year-old punk, my parents steered me off a bad trajectory. I was able to get a much better education and came to understand the world in ways that I simply could not had I stayed in my hometown. I gained perspectives that East Tennessee preachers and some of my schoolteachers tried to shield me from, because such knowledge liberates one from the narrow cultural, political, and religious grips in which they wanted to keep me and the other Knoxville girls.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Cheryl and I have been friends for 30 years, meeting early on in her organizing career and staying in touch through the years. What Cheryl doesn't mention is her deep family ties to Rhode Island and that she has moved back to Rhode Island after a long organizing stint in California.  - Will Collette

Elementary

Let's go!

Rhode Island Republicans introduce legislation to wipe out renewable energy programs

The Rhode Island GOP's anti-green agenda

By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff

There’s a debate in the General Assembly this year on how best to tackle electricity prices.

It’s no secret energy prices in Rhode Island have been high for years; state officials have little power over the price of natural gas used to run power plants and heat homes.

But a conservative faction within the General Assembly has been arguing that it’s time to roll back the state’s climate and renewable energy programs, which are funded via charges collected every month on residents’ electricity bills.

House Minority Leader Rep. Michael Chippendale, R-Foster, has introduced a package of legislation designed to eliminate many of the state-mandated charges on utility bills to deliver relief to ratepayers. He denied the legislation was meant to end renewable energy programs in Rhode Island.

“Each of these may have been created with good intentions,” Chippendale said during a House Corporation Committee bill hearing Thursday. “But each and every legislator in this building is hearing from our constituents that they cannot afford to pay their increasing electricity bills with good intentions. It requires money, and a lot of it.”

Smith Hill Republicans aren’t the only elected officials backing rollbacks to renewable energy and climate programs. Gov. Dan McKee proposed rollbacks to the programs as part of his budget, although the most optimistic savings Rhode Island households can expect is $15 a month, according to estimates from the state Office of Management and Budget.

McKee proposed capping the state’s energy efficiency programs to $75 million per year, capping net metering program costs, and pushing back the deadlines for Renewable Energy Standard requirements out to 2050. The governor in his budget announcement said it would save ratepayers $1 billion over five years.

Here’s a breakdown of rollback legislation:

H7139 would require all changes to the Renewable Energy Growth Program (sometimes referred to as RE Growth) be approved by the General Assembly, instead of the Public Utilities Commission.

H7174 would repeal the energy efficiency charge, which funds the program that allows Rhode Island Energy to offer rebates, free weatherization services, and other initiatives that help ratepayers use less energy, in its entirety.

H7176 would repeal the Renewable Energy Growth Program entirely.

H7177 would end the net metering program, used to finance solar arrays, and prohibit any state subsidies for consumer heat pump purchases.

H7523 would place a five-year moratorium on the Renewable Energy Growth and energy efficiency program charges.

Influencers promoting prescription drugs on social media pose public health risks

Don't listen to medical advice from internet idiots

By Sanjukta Mondal, Medical Xpress

Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan

In today's world, attention is increasingly focused on social media and its influencers, a shift reflected in the industry's rapid growth and a global market projected to surpass $32 billion. The marketing teams of pharmaceutical companies regularly partner with influencers who are guaranteed to grab the attention of hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions, to promote their medications—even prescription drugs. Researchers in a JAMA Network Open study warn that such advertisements might put public health at risk.

The researchers conducted a systematic scoping review, sifting through existing studies on influencers promoting prescription drugs to pinpoint the risks, evaluate current regulations, and explore how this fast-growing trend can be better managed.

They uncovered a worrying pattern. Influencer promotions carried a high risk of misinformation, as many shared health advice beyond their expertise, often exaggerating a drug's benefits while leaving out important side effects.

There's little people can do to prevent this, as current regulations, such as those from the FDA and FTC, are often vague and difficult to enforce on social media. On top of that, these promotions are written in so cleverly that they blur the line between a genuine personal story and a paid advertisement, making it hard for a regular person to tell the difference.

Demoralized CDC Workforce Reels From Year of Firings, Funding Cuts, and a Shooting

Once the world's greatest public health agency, gutted by Trump, Musk and Bobby Jr.

Jess Mador, WABE 

On the coffee table at her home in Atlanta, Sarah Boim has a pile of documents from her old job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They are printouts of her employment records.

Boim lost her job in the first big wave of CDC firings — more than 1,000 people were suddenly let go last February.

“This is the termination letter. I also printed off my performance review from 2024,” she said. “I knew I wouldn’t have access to it, and everything was so chaotic that I needed proof of what was happening.”

Boim worked in the National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, handling communications about radon, substances known as forever chemicals, lead poisoning, and other health threats.

Rereading her termination letter, she still can’t believe what it says.

“The agency finds you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge, and skills do not fit the agency’s current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the agency,” the emailed letter reads.

“And that floored me,” Boim said, “because my performance was rated outstanding, and I even got a raise. It was just deeply insulting. So I was more upset than I think I was prepared to be.”

The Trump administration later brought back some of the workers who were fired in the first round, but it has also cut more staff and funding.

The CDC has been without a permanent director for more than six months. Recently the Trump administration made Jay Bhattacharya the CDC’s interim director, while he also runs the National Institutes of Health.

The leadership uncertainty comes amid a year of disruption and dismissals at the Atlanta-based institution, from which more than 3,000 public health workers are now gone. That includes staffers the Trump administration terminated and workers who accepted early retirement.

Ripple effects of the turmoil are still hitting the Atlanta region.

By the end of 2025, the CDC had lost roughly a quarter of its workforce.

UPDATED: Legal problems could block Stefan Pryor's return to Rhode Island government

Secretary in name only?

By Nancy Lavin, Rhode Island Current

UPDATE: Despite the issues detailed below, Pryor was confirmed by the Rhode Island Senate on April 1. Not an April Fool's Joke even though Pryor's several prior appointments didn't do much to improve life in Rhode Island.   - Will Collette

Since August, Stefan Pryor has spearheaded the state’s economic development strategy, including distribution of millions of dollars in incentives for businesses, researchers and recent college graduates.

But the Rhode Island Senate has not yet confirmed Pryor as state commerce secretary, more than seven months after Gov. Dan McKee’s nomination. And questions linger over the legality of Pryor’s authority to act without legislative approval, including by the Senate’s own legal counsel.

“We don’t believe the statutory authority exists,” Greg Paré, a spokesperson for Senate President Valarie Lawson, said in an interview Wednesday. 

John Marion, executive director for Common Cause Rhode Island, a nonpartisan watchdog group, voiced similar doubts during an initial confirmation hearing for Pryor before the Senate Committee on Commerce Tuesday night.

“Many department directors can serve on an interim basis, but commerce is not one of them,” Marion told the panel. 

Marion referenced the state statute empowering the governor to fill cabinet-level vacancies on an interim basis until Senate confirmation. It lists 11 director roles as eligible for interim appointments, but not commerce secretary. And, it expressly prohibits anyone beyond the 11 named department directors from taking on the job on an interim basis. 

The law doesn’t lay out consequences for interim directors who take the job before Senate confirmation. In Pryor’s case, the Senate is expected to give its blessing next week following the commerce committee’s vote Tuesday to advance the nomination.

Paré said the initial confirmation hearing was delayed due to scheduling issues, noting the commerce committee has only met once before this year, on March 10. 

Concerns over Pryor’s ability to serve in the $238,597-a-year job before Senate confirmation surfaced in August, as first reported by Providence Business News. McKee’s office insisted, and still does, that the appointment was legitimate, pointing to past precedent and the governor’s constitutional authority.

Changed his mind for some reason

April 18: Fishing Moon Festival

What can dogs tell us about how robots can locate objects?

Gestures may be as important as words

Brown University

Whether in the kitchen or on a workshop floor, robot assistants that can fetch items for people could be extremely useful. Now, a team of Brown University researchers has developed a way of making robots better at figuring out exactly which items a user might want them to retrieve.

The new approach enables robots to use inputs from both human language and gesture as they reason about how to locate and retrieve target objects. In a study that will be presented on Tuesday, March 17, during the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Edinburgh, Scotland, the researchers show that the approach had an 89% success rate in finding the correct object in complex environments, outperforming other object retrieval approaches.

“Searching for things requires a robot to navigate large environments,” said Ivy He, a graduate student at Brown and the study’s lead author. “With current technology, robots are pretty good at identifying objects, but when the environment is cluttered, things are moving around or things are hidden by other objects, that makes things much more difficult. So this work is about using both language and gesture to help in that search task.”

The research makes use of an approach to robot planning called a POMDP (partially observable Markov decision process), a mathematical framework that allows a robot to reason under uncertainty. In the real world, robots rarely have a perfect understanding of the world. Different types of objects can look similar. There may be more than one of a particular object in a room. Items might be partially or completely hidden from view.