Legislation Would Fold CRMC into DEM, Remaking Controversial Executive Council Into an Advisory Board

One way to deal with a dysfunctional agency

By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff

Mergers and acquisitions isn’t usually a process that applies to the public sector, but under proposed legislation this year it is something that could happen with the state’s environmental agencies.

Rhode Island government splits environmental management and protection into two separate agencies. Broadly, the Department of Environmental Management handles much of the state’s interior, oversees air and water permits, and oversees the state’s food production.

The Coastal Resources Management Council has jurisdiction over developments within 200 feet of Rhode Island’s coastline and 3 miles out to sea, an area that covers all of Narragansett Bay and most of Block Island Sound.

New legislation (H7996/S3082) proposes to merge the two entities, with CRMC — as the smaller of the two agencies — becoming a bureau within DEM. CRMC’s director would become a deputy director within DEM, and the politically appointed board that oversees the coastal agency would be transformed into an advisory body with little decision-making power.

For advocates of the legislation, the bills kill two birds with one stone. The controversial 10-member CRMC board is nerfed, and the state’s two environmental agencies receive a synergistic boost by joining forces. CRMC’s executive director would go from a position confirmed by the Senate to one hired by DEM.

Why mosquitoes always find you and how they decide to attack

Mosquitoes aren’t following each other—they’re all zeroing in on the same deadly combination of breath and dark targets.

Georgia Institute of Technology

A picture of mosquito trajectories around a person
in a mosquito chamber. Credit: Georgia Tech/MIT

After closely tracking hundreds of mosquitoes swarming around a human subject and analyzing 20 million data points, researchers from Georgia Tech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a mathematical model that predicts how female mosquitoes fly toward people to feed.

This research offers the first detailed visualization of mosquito flight behavior and provides measurable data that could improve trapping and control methods. Beyond being irritating, mosquitoes spread dangerous diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and Zika, which together cause more than 700,000 deaths each year.

The team also launched an interactive public website that lets users explore mosquito movement and behavior.

What Trump's "reorganization" has done to the Interior Department

Chaos

By Jake Bolster, Peter Aldhous

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

One year into Donald Trump’s second term, the Department of the Interior is in turmoil, hobbling many of the agencies overseeing the country’s public lands and waters. 

Not only has Interior lost some 11,000 employees, or more than 17 percent of its workforce, it is also reeling from a drastic centralization of personnel: Last May, almost 5,500 staff from the department’s component agencies were moved into the office of the Interior secretary, Doug Burgum. 

That shift has created a hostile work culture, made staff less efficient and broken important lines of communication, former Interior employees say. According to an Inside Climate News analysis of federal workforce data released by the Office of Personnel Management, almost 1,800 workers have left Burgum’s office since the reorganization—the vast majority opting to retire or quit.

As a whole, the federal workforce shrank by about 12 percent in the first year of the second Trump administration. Some parts of the government, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, which shed 24 percent of its employees, have suffered bigger losses. But Burgum’s reorganization is unique, with wide ripple effects. 

Under an order signed on April 17, Burgum confirmed plans to absorb administrative staff from Interior’s component agencies, including workers responsible for human resources, training, information technology, contracting and communications. The Inside Climate News analysis shows sudden staff losses in the next month at agencies including the Bureau of Reclamation; the U.S. Geological Survey; the Bureau of Land Management; the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement; and the Fish and Wildlife Service that correspond to the swelling of Burgum’s own staff.

The stated goal was efficiency. “This unification effort will accelerate technology advancements and enhance the Department’s ability to deliver on our core mission,” Burgum’s order said. 

But Interior staff reorganized into Burgum’s office who later left say they encountered a hostile, inefficient work culture designed to push people out. Russell Vought, the powerful director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, said in a private speech between Trump’s two terms that “we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected” by going to work, ProPublica reported in 2024.

Why do Americans hate each other while Canadians love each other?

Could it have something to do with our politics? With the sociopath in the Oval?

Robert Reich

A survey released on March 5 by the Pew Research Center finds that 53 percent of American adults describe the morality and ethics of our fellow citizens as “bad” (ranging from “somewhat bad” to “very bad”).

This puts Americans way out front of other nations on the we-hate-our-compatriots scale. In the 24 other countries polled by Pew, most people called their fellow citizens somewhat good or very good.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the United States is Canada, where 92 percent say their fellow Canadians are good, while just 7 percent say they’re bad.

Why are we so down on our fellow citizens? It may have something to do with our politics.

Some 30 years ago, my dear friend the late Republican Senator Alan Simpson told me Democrats viewed Republicans as stupid and Republicans viewed Democrats as evil. “I’d rather be in the stupid party,” he chuckled.

I asked him why Republicans saw Democrats as evil.

He took a deep breath. “Religion.”

I said I didn’t understand.

“It’s the Christian right,” he said, as if talking to a five-year-old. “Since Reagan, my party has been a magnet for religious conservatives and Christian fundamentalists, where it’s all about good and evil. Too bad, pal. You’re on the evil side.”

That was 30 years ago. Since then, the divide has only sharpened.

In 2012, Mitt Romney told supporters that “47 percent” of Americans would vote for Obama no matter what because they’re “dependent upon government ... believe that they are victims ... believe the government has a responsibility to care for them ... [and] pay no income tax.”

Insulting 47 percent of Americans was no way to win an election. It was also no way to unite the country.

Then in 2016, Hillary Clinton described half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Also no way to win or to foster mutual trust.

Once Trump took office, dislike of our fellow citizens soared.

Before he entered the White House, 47 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Democrats said people in the opposing party were “immoral.”

By 2022, after years of Trump’s venom: 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats called people in the opposing party “immoral.”

Since he’s been back in the Oval, it’s gotten even worse. 

Welcome to the USA

Big Oil has moved on from ‘greenwashing.’

Here’s industry's new playbook.

Kate Yoder, Senior Staff Writer

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

Remember when the fossil fuel industry couldn’t stop talking about climate change? In 2020, when oil prices plunged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Big Oil promoted efforts to cut carbon emissions and trumpeted various energy “innovations”: transforming algae into fuel (Exxon Mobil), capturing carbon (Chevron), and producing green hydrogen (BP). 

Critics deemed it “greenwashing” — highlighting small sustainable investments to distract people from the pollution at the core of their business.

It didn’t take long for oil companies to move on from those old talking points. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, supply disruptions drove oil prices up, and oil giants switched to a new message: Fossil fuels are essential to “energy security,” and they’re here to stay. 

That’s according to a new report from Clean Creatives, an initiative pressuring PR companies and advertisers to stop working with fossil fuel clients, that analyzed more than 1,800 advertisements, press releases, and social media campaigns from BP, Shell, Exxon, and Chevron between 2020 and 2024. 

research shows government benefits help low‑income people find jobs

Food aid doesn’t make people loafers

Claudia Strauss, Pitzer College

Millie Morales believes in hard work.

“I feel that as an American citizen, we all have a great opportunity to be able to improve our life,” the 58-year-old woman explained in an interview I conducted with her in 2025. “Are you willing to put in the work, or are you not?”

Morales, whose name I changed to protect her privacy, was a stay-at-home mom devoted to caring for her large family. After her divorce, she worked at social service agencies and enrolled at a local college. Then her ex-husband stopped paying for child support, and she and her eight children faced eviction.

She said she is very grateful for the government benefits she received for the first time, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps low-income Americans buy groceries.

Those benefits made it possible for her to keep putting food on the table and remain housed until she earned a college degree and obtained jobs that could pay those bills. Now she assists families dealing with difficult medical decisions, a job that makes her feel she is able to help others through hard times in their lives.

Is the FBI Investigating Environmental Activists?

Anyone supporting issues disapproved by Trump is suspect

By Nicholas Kusnetz

FBI Director Kash Patel may have other priorities

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

The group in the Brooklyn studio seemed harmless. There was a graduate student, a Yiddish teacher, a hairdresser. Fifteen people had gathered on a Wednesday night for a training offered by Extinction Rebellion NYC and Climate Defiance, two climate activist groups that engage in nonviolent civil disobedience and theatrical protest.

They sat in metal folding chairs eating pizza, surrounded by banners and art supplies, discussing how to gain a crowd’s attention without prompting immediate boos.

Yet their actions have apparently drawn the attention of federal counterterror investigators. Last month, an FBI agent arrived at the door of a former member, who was not at the Brooklyn meeting, saying she had questions about Extinction Rebellion.

Environmental activists have long drawn scrutiny from the FBI. But the recent visit appeared to place this group on the leading edge of the Trump administration’s use of law enforcement against what many civil liberties advocates say are constitutionally protected acts of protest and free speech.

After last year’s killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump issued a national security memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” The memo asserted that the killing and other attacks, such as the attempted assassination of Trump and the slaying of a health care executive in 2024, were “a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns” designed to intimidate and influence public policy.

It linked these acts with “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” among other views, and directed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to “coordinate and supervise a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity or obstruct the rule of law.”

Many civil liberties advocates viewed the memorandum as an overly broad assault on political opposition, and it came as the Department of Homeland Security deployed increasingly aggressive tactics against people observing and protesting immigration raids.

Now, the FBI visit may be a sign the Department of Justice is broadening the administration’s scope, said Dana Fisher, director of the Center for Environment, Community and Equity at American University.

How Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Vaccine Agenda Risks a Resurgence of Deadly Childhood Plagues

Many children will die because of Bobby Jr.'s obsession
By Patricia Callahan

Dr. Adam Ratner hovered over a gravely ill infant in a New York City intensive care unit on a grim day in 2022. The 3-month-old girl spiked a fever two days earlier and had become lethargic. Soon she was having seizures and struggling to breathe.

She didn’t register Ratner’s towering frame or the bright hospital lights. Her eyes stared up and to the right, eerily frozen. 

He ran his hand over the soft spot on her head, which should have been flat. Instead, it bulged, a sign that too much fluid was building up inside her skull. 

The baby’s life was in danger, and Ratner needed to figure out why. He worried the culprit was bacterial meningitis, an infection of the membranes that protect the brain.

What came back on her lab tests was something out of the history books.

The infant’s meningitis was caused by invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, a type of bacteria that used to kill nearly 1,000 children a year in the U.S. A shot introduced in the late 1980s was so effective that Ratner, a veteran pediatric infectious disease doctor, was among the generations of physicians who had never seen a case. But the baby’s parents, Ratner learned, had chosen not to vaccinate her.

Disheartened, he told his colleagues, “This should be a never event.”

It wasn’t. The following year, Ratner treated another infant with Hib, then another, each of them unvaccinated. Two went home, but one had to be discharged to a rehabilitation facility. That 5-month-old boy had huge black pupils that didn’t respond to light, and he needed a ventilator to breathe. Ratner and his colleagues noted an “absence of brain stem reflexes,” indicating severe damage.

The U.S. government took a half century to build a vaccination system that shielded children from such a fate. Its success depended on two fundamental pillars: parents trusting in vaccines and children having access to them. Both are now in peril, thanks in no small part to the man steering America’s health policy.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccine group and once likened the immunization of children to a holocaust, is transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of shots into one that spreads doubts about their safety here and abroad. 

Kennedy is also considering changes that could prompt the few companies that make vaccines for American kids to abandon the U.S. market, leaving parents who want the shots unable to get them.

The threat to vaccine access reaches across the globe after Kennedy yanked the government’s $1.6 billion pledge to the aid group that provides shots for the world’s poorest children. For decades, the U.S. had funded such work not just as a humanitarian mission but as a way to keep Americans safe from unchecked contagions.

Use your imagination

Tomorrow!

RI Democratic Party hires former Magaziner aide as executive director

State Dems staff up going into the midterm elections

By Nancy Lavin, Rhode Island Current

Katherine Riordan, a former press assistant for U.S. Rep. Seth Magaziner, has been tapped as the Rhode Island Democratic Party’s new executive director.

The state’s Democratic party announced Riordan’s hiring in its weekly email newsletter on Friday. Riordan, who most recently worked in communications for Democratic congressman Magaziner, fills the full-time, paid leadership role left open after Sam Bader left in December 2025. 

Bader, who worked for three years for the Democratic party, including one year as its director, took a new job as campaign manager for Kim Ahern, a candidate for state attorney general.

Riordan, a Rhode Island native and University of Rhode Island graduate, was chosen through a nationwide search that drew candidates from across the country, Liz Beretta-Perik, party chair, said in an email.

“Katherine applied for and was offered the position because of her vast experience in communications, organization and public service,” Beretta-Perik said. “Her experience and energy will be critical as we begin a pivotal election season working to keep Rhode Island Blue.”

A job posting still up on the party’s website lists a $70,000 to $100,000 salary, with a minimum of four years of campaign or related work experience. 

Researchers develop biodegradable, plant‑based packaging from natural fibers – new research

The on-going search for a safe and practical plastic substitute

J. Carson Meredith, Georgia Institute of Technology

Jie Wu, an engineering graduate student, was studying a type of striking white beetle found in Southeast Asia and attempting to figure out how to mimic its brilliant color when an unexpected discovery upended the experiment.

Jie and I had been hoping to identify naturally occurring whitening pigments that could be used in paper and paints. The beetle’s white exoskeleton is made from a compound called chitin, which is a type of carbohydrate – one that is also commonly found in crab and lobster shells.

First, Jie extracted chitin nanofibers from crab shells obtained from food waste that are chemically the same as those found in the white beetles. But instead of creating a white material as intended, Jie produced dense, transparent films. The nanofibers more readily assembled in tightly packed films than in the porous structures Jie desired.

An attempt to mimic the striking white color
of Cyphochilus beetles led researchers to a
unique discovery. 
Olimpia1lli/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-ND

On a whim, Jie measured the rate at which oxygen passed through the film. The result was astonishing: The barrier allowed less oxygen through than many existing packaging plastics.

That serendipitous finding in 2014 shifted my team of engineering students’ focus from color to packaging. We asked whether natural materials could rival the performance of common plastics. In the years since, our team has used this discovery to create biodegradable films that offer a more sustainable and effective alternative to plastic packaging.

Challenges of plastic packaging

Plastic packaging is commonly used to protect food, pharmaceuticals and personal care products. These plastics keep out moisture and oxygen from the air, so products stay fresh and safe.

Most packaging has several layers that work together to keep air out, but these layers hinder reuse and recycling efforts. As a result, most of this plastic barrier packaging is discarded to landfills as single-use materials.

Many researchers have sought alternatives that are renewable, biodegradable or recyclable, yet just as effective. At Georgia Tech, my team of students and post-docs has spent more than a decade tackling this problem. This journey began with that beetle.

Pandemic deaths in the US were higher than previously reported

Why the early U.S. COVID-19 death toll may be 155,000 higher

By Mike Stobbe

Edited by Andrew Zinin

You will find more infographics at Statista

The COVID-19 pandemic's early death toll was much higher than the official U.S. count, according to a new study that spotlights dramatic disparities in the uncounted deaths.

About 840,000 COVID-19 deaths were reported on death certificates in 2020 and 2021. But a group of researchers—using a form of artificial intelligence—estimate that as many as 155,000 unrecognized additional deaths likely occurred in that time outside of hospitals. That would mean about 16% of COVID-19 deaths went uncounted in those years.

The overall findings, published Wednesday by the journal Science Advances, were close to estimates from other studies of pandemic deaths during that time. But the authors of the new study tried to determine exactly which deaths were more likely to be missing from the official tallies.

The answer: The undiagnosed dead were more likely to be Hispanic people and other people of color, who had died in the first few months of the pandemic, and who had been in certain states in the South and Southwest—including Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina.

Under Donald Trump, ‘Everything Is for Sale’

Trump Exploits 250th Anniversary of US Independence for Yet Another Grift

Jake Johnson for Common Dreams

Allies of the Trump administration, in partnership with the White House, are reportedly using the upcoming 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence as another opportunity to solicit deep-pocketed donors, enticing them with promises of access to the president and other rewards.

The New York Times reported Sunday that donors who give at least $1 million to Freedom 250—a group announced by Donald Trump in December—have been promised a path to “gain access to, and seek favor with, a president who has maintained a keen interest in fundraising, and a willingness to use the levers of government power to reward financial supporters,” including through his crypto scam and ballroom project.

Trump has described Freedom 250 as a “public-private partnership” dedicated to organizing “a celebration of America like no other” later this year. Listed as official corporate sponsors of the initiative are prominent corporate names, including ExxonMobil, Mastercard, and Palantir.

The Times obtained a donor solicitation document circulated by Meredith O’Rourke, Trump’s top fundraiser. Donors who give at least $1 million to Freedom 250 “will receive prominent logo placement at Freedom 250 events,” which are expected to include UFC fights and an IndyCar race.

Freedom 250 appears to have been created to dodge oversight that applies to America250, a bipartisan congressional commission formed to plan official celebrations of the nation’s semiquincentennial.