How to contain avian flu H5N1 if human-to-human spread begins

With RFK Jr. in charge of the CDC, we are not prepared

By Sandra McLean, York University

Edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan 

The Onion

At this point, avian flu H5N1 is thought to have very limited ability to transmit between humans, but a recent case in British Columbia with an unknown source of transmission has piqued the curiosity and concern of scientists, including York University Professor Seyed Moghadas. Did this lone case come about through transmission from an animal or another person, and if it was via human transmission, what methods would control its spread in the human population?

Director of York's Agent-Based Modeling Laboratory in the Center of Excellence in AI for Public Health Advancement, Moghadas and a group of researchers used modeling to understand the best spread control measures should human-to-human transmission become possible.

"The idea was, let's evaluate some of the interventions that we usually implement at the very earliest stage of a disease outbreak or emerging disease, which we know very little about," he says.

For the research, "Containment Scenarios for Post-Spillover Transmission Chains of Avian Influenza H5N1 from Poultry to Humans," published in Nature Health, various scenarios from isolation to vaccination before or after a spillover event were modeled.

It is one of only a few studies that have explicitly modeled outbreak dynamics following spillover into humans or the effectiveness of public health interventions in early and highly uncertain phases of virus development.

VA Families Losing Homes After Trump Killed Loan Program

"The Most Anti-Veteran President in History"

Julia Conley for Common Dreams

Just as Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress were warned would happen, close to 100,000 US veterans are currently behind on their mortgage payments or are in the process of foreclosure as a result of the White House’s decision to shut down a Department of Veterans Affairs program that helped people with VA-backed home loans when they were behind on their monthly payments.

As NPR reported Thursday, more than 10,000 have already lost their homes, nearly a year after the Trump administration abruptly did away with the VA Servicing Purchase (VASP) program.

The program was rolled out during the Biden administration, after the VA ended a pandemic-era assistance program that had allowed VA home loan borrowers to gradually pay back mortgage payments that they had needed to skip.

Under VASP, the VA purchases home loans that were in default from mortgage services and then modified the loans.

In March 2025, a representative from the Mortgage Bankers Association told the House Veterans Affairs Committee that widespread foreclosures would result if the VASP program—which Republicans in Congress said had been created by former President Joe Biden for “political purposes... to undercut the VA Home Loan program—was not protected.

Despite the warning, the VASP program was halted two months later.

Nearly a year after the program’s end, the VA is still developing a replacement to help veterans—many of whom are struggling to afford essentials just like the majority of other Americans as the cost of living crisis intensifies with rising fuel prices due to Trump’s war on Iran.

Pope to Hegseth: God disapproves

Pope tells Trump administration that God does not want their holy war

Sabrina Haake

The First Amendment strictly prohibits the government from favoring one faith over another, or from endorsing religion in general, whether through subtle or not-so-subtle means. As it evolved from Constitutional text into the canons of caselaw, that framework has protected the plurality for over 250 years by heeding our founders’ warnings to keep church and state separate.

In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause for public school officials to sponsor or encourage prayer in school. State regulations in New York required public schools to open each day with both the Pledge of Allegiance and a nondenominational prayer in which the students recognized their dependence upon an un-named and unspecified God. Under that law, students could absent themselves from the prayer if they found it objectionable. A parent sued.

The Court found that the recitation of a state-composed, non-denominational prayer in public schools was a form of religious indoctrination, even if the prayer was not specific to one denomination, even if it was optional.

The rub then and now is that “optional” participation in a setting controlled by the government is never completely optional. The Jewish kid, the Muslim kid, the Buddhist kid, or the child taught to love God as nature instead of a vindictive creep in the sky has to set themselves apart from the other kids in order not to participate in the prayer. Even standing there silently while the popular kids mouth the prayer all around you can signal difference— defiance against the norm, even. Given stigma and peer pressure, the Court acknowledged that there are social ‘costs’ for not adhering to the group norm. That’s why reinforcing religion as a norm is a form of government indoctrination prohibited under the First Amendment.

Hegseth: First Amendment Who???

Despite the decades-long smacking clarity of the law, Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News bobblehead who renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War without permission from Congress, can’t stop imposing his own religion on the military.

Hegseth holds a monthly Evangelical prayer service at the Pentagon. He announces and promotes his monthly worship coven, what some have called “combative Christianity,” through formal announcements to the troops, and by encouraging attendees to spread the word.

Similar to the school prayer case, these ‘voluntary’ services aren’t entirely voluntary even though Hegseth says they are. They are held in the official Pentagon auditorium, and are broadcast on the Pentagon’s internal TV network, a system designed for maximum saturation at military installations available to over 1.4 million active duty personnel, 1.2 million National Guard/Reserve, 650,000 civilian employees, and thousands of military residents.

How widespread is voter fraud?

Another win for Rhode Island against illegal Trump policies

OMG! Baby bunnies!

Wild, captive, to wild: Working to help save New England’s only native rabbit

Kristen Curry

URI faculty and students are working to help save New England’s only native rabbit; their work follows efforts started at the University by faculty emeriti Thomas Husband in the Department of Natural Resources Science. (Rabbit Photos/Courtesy Roger Williams Park Zoo)

The elusive native New England cottontail rabbit is the subject of lore and literature. But over the last century, their numbers declined precipitously in our region due to development, landscape change, and the introduction of an invasive rabbit.

Now researchers at the University of Rhode Island are using a two-pronged approach to improve the New England cottontail’s prospects, combining genetic and behavioral approaches at two very different sites: busy Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence and the aptly named Patience Island, off of Warwick.

Breeding programs coupled with translocation form an increasingly important method for conserving imperiled species; the approach has been used in the United States to help conserve pygmy and Riparian brush rabbits, but U.S. islands have rarely been used to produce animals for translocation.

T.J. McGreevy, Jr. in URI’s Department of Natural Resources Science is hoping that islands will help preserve the New England cottontail here.

McGreevey recently finished his 14th season of field trapping the New England cottontail on Patience Island; now his state wildlife biologist collaborators will release the rabbits in New Hampshire and Maine this spring. Each winter they move approximately 30 rabbits off island to the mainland; last winter it was 41.

He’s working with URI colleague Justin Richard; they hope their combined efforts will give the native rabbit a better future, preserving its numbers here for centuries to come.

COVID‑19 variant BA.3.2 is spreading quickly across US – a doctor explains what you need to know

Covid variant poses new risks

Kyle B. Enfield, University of Virginia

A variant of COVID-19 called BA.3.2, which has circulated under the radar since late 2024, is now spreading quickly across the United States.

As a pulmonary and critical care doctor, I see many patients who are at high risk for severe COVID-19 due to chronic lung disease, as well as patients living with long COVID. All of them ask me how worried they should be about new variants of the virus.

There’s no sign so far that BA.3.2, nicknamed Cicada, is any more dangerous or causes more severe disease than the variants that were circulating in the winter of 2025-26. But because it’s significantly different from them, the current COVID-19 vaccine may not be as effective against it.

Where did the BA.3.2 variant come from?

BA.3.2 is descended from the omicron variant, which emerged in late 2021.

Compared to the current predominant strains of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, BA.3.2 carries 70 to 75 genetic changes in its spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it get into cells. The spike protein is also the part of the virus that vaccines rely on to coax people’s immune systems into recognizing the virus.

Researchers first identified BA.3.2 in November 2024 in Africa. It started its global trek in 2025 and had made it to 23 countries as of February 2026.

The first U.S. case was detected in a traveler coming into the U.S. in June 2025. Since then, it has been detected in patients and the wastewater systems of 29 states.

Wastewater monitoring is one of the best early methods of detecting strain shift, though the number of states submitting wastewater data to the CDC has declined since around 2022, after the height of the pandemic.

The Cicada variant was first detected in November 2024.

New Trump Rule Would Let Private Equity, Crypto ‘Endanger Retirement Savings of Millions’

Money for tech bros

Jake Johnson

Donald Trump’s Labor Department unveiled a proposal that would welcome private equity and cryptocurrency investments into Americans’ 401(k) plans, the culmination of an aggressive Wall Street lobbying push that could leave the retirement savings of millions vulnerable to the wild swings of so-called “alternative assets.”

The proposed rule, now subject to a public comment period, was issued at the direction of a Trump executive order from last year that was characterized at the time as “the holy grail for private equity.”

In addition to giving employers a green light to include private equity and crypto investments in 401(k) plans offered to workers, the new rule would establish a “safe harbor” allowing retirement account administrators to avoid legal action from employees who believe their funds were steered into excessively risky products.

Trump's Magical Thinking

He says he's winning in Iran. He's losing bigly.

Robert Reich

Mr. Trump, may I have a word?

Bad enough for you to insist — in the face of all evidence to the contrary — that you won the 2020 election.

But it’s another thing for you to pretend — in the face of mounting deaths and injuries, ballooning expenses, and rising prices — that you won, or are winning, the war with Iran you began on February 28.

“Let me say, we’ve won,” you told a rally in Kentucky on March 11.

“I think we’ve won,” you said on the White House South Lawn on March 20.

“We’ve won this war. The war has been won,” you said in the Oval Office on March 24.

“We are winning so big,” you told a fundraising dinner on March 25.

“We’ve had regime change,” you told reporters three days ago. “The one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead.” Iran has now moved onto its “third regime,” and American negotiators are now speaking to “a whole different group of people” who have “been very reasonable,” you said.

You’re making all this up. In fact, you’re losing your war. And so is America and much of the rest of the world.

Bombs for bucks

Well, look who's trans

Here's hubby (Photo: Daily Mail)

Senator Gu posts new bill to protect you from identity theft

Sen. Gu, Rep. Carson bill would modernize identity theft protection laws

Legislation from Sen. Victoria Gu and Lauren H. Carson aims to modernize cybersecurity laws to better protect the personally identifiable information of Rhode Islanders.

“In the wake of the RIBridges cyberattack, it’s important to set clear expectations that state agencies, municipalities and companies should be meeting current best practices of an industry-recognized cybersecurity framework, such as NIST Cybersecurity Framework, to protect the personally identifiable information of Rhode Islanders,” said Senator Gu (D-Dist. 38, Westerly, Charlestown, South Kingstown) who chairs the Senate Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies. “Our current laws governing the protection of this information need updating to match the reality of our increasingly digital world and its threats.”

The December 2024 breach of RIBridges, Rhode Island’s online portal for social services, affected around 650,000 people in total, releasing Social Security numbers, employment details, financial data and other personal information to the dark web. Senator Gu and Representative Carson saw this as a clear sign that Rhode Island needed to update its cybersecurity standards.

How far can anti-vax craziness go?

More people requesting ‘unvaccinated’ blood for themselves or their children

Liz Szabo, MA

A growing number of patients who need transfusions are asking for blood from unvaccinated donors, a difficult request to honor, given that blood centers don’t ask donors if they’ve been vaccinated and don’t label blood according to vaccinated status.

These requests often delay care and, in some cases, harm patients’ health, according to a report published late last week in Transfusion. Health systems need to develop standardized policies, include counseling, to handle these requests, the report’s authors wrote.

The US blood supply is incredibly safe, the authors wrote. Donations are carefully screened for HIV and other potentially infectious microbes. There’s no evidence that blood from unvaccinated people is any safer than other blood.

The requests for “unvaccinated blood” increased after the release of COVID-19 vaccines, which saved an estimated 20 million lives in their first year of use, but which have been the subject of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center received 15 requests for unvaccinated blood from January 1, 2024, to December 31, 2025, according to the new report. The median age of patients was 17 years old; more than half were children.

An Inadvertent Release

Yet another monumental screwup

Joyce Vance

Judge Aileen Cannon forbade it. There would be no release of Volume II of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report, the part that dealt with the discovery that Donald Trump kept classified documents, some at the Top Secret/SCI level, when he left the White House. When Smith testified before Congress, he carefully tailored his responses to avoid violating the court’s order.

But not so much the Trump White House. In what appears to be a sloppy but serious error, the administration released a document to Congress that MSNOW’s Carol Leonnig and Jacqueline Alemany reported on yesterday. They write, “In a January 2023 'progress memo' reviewed by MS NOW, Smith’s office discussed the possible motive after the FBI discovered that Trump held on to many documents related to his businesses.” Although the document isn’t publicly available, it sounds like the sort of reports agents and/or prosecutors might prepare for supervisors. This one contains some fascinating details.

The document was released as part of a regular document production DOJ has been making to Congress in support of the Republican inquiry into Smith. House Judiciary Democrats put it like this: “This particular production contained a memorandum detailing non-public information about the classified documents Trump stole when leaving office. The newly produced materials offer a startling view of evidence gathered by Special Counsel Jack Smith during his investigations into the criminal activity of President Trump, even as DOJ continues to suppress Volume II of his final report.”

First, is the hint at motive. Why did Trump do something so obviously criminal, and not do it particularly well? Why did he lie to DOJ officials when asked to return classified material they had learned was still in his possession? What was so important to the former president? 

Motive is not an element of the crimes Trump was ultimately charged with (indictment ironically still available on the DOJ website). There were 32 counts of Willful Retention of National Defense Information, along with some related counts and a conspiracy to obstruct justice. The lead charge, 18 U.S.C. § 793(e), provides as follows:

Leave Ninigret, Trustom Pond et al. alone, dammit!

Wildlife Refuges on Trump’s Hit List 

By Gina-Marie Cheeseman

Trustom Pond. Photo by Will Collette

The Trump administration has wildlife refuges in its sights. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service head Brian Nesvik launched a review of the National Wildlife Refuge System and the National Fish Hatchery System. The review will look for “refuges or hatcheries established for a purpose that no longer aligns with the mission. It will also look for operational funding and the workforce.

The NWRS has 573 refuges on more than 96 million acres of land and five Marine National Monuments on 760 million acres of submerged lands and waters. Half of FWS employees work for the NWRS. The NFSH stocks over 122 million fish per year. President Theodore Roosevelt created the Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge off Florida’s coast as the first unit of the NWRS.” Congress created the NFHS in 1872 to help the production of fish for food. 

Wildlife refuges are places set aside to protect wildlife and their habitats. The NWRS and the NFHS protect 700 species of birds, 220 species of mammals, 250 species of reptiles and amphibians, and more than 1,000 species of fish. Wildlife refuges welcome more than 67 million visitors per year, generate over $3 billion in economic activity, and support more than 41,000 jobs.