Just another Tuesday

Annual HopArts tour is back, Oct. 17-18

 

1) Ashaway Free Library, 15 Knight Street, Ashaway
2) Crandall House, 188 Main Street, Ashaway
3) Clark Library, 7 Pinehurst Drive, Carolina
4) Carolina Pottery, 3 Carolina Main Street, Carolina
5) Carolina Fiber Center, 4 Carolina Main Street, Carolina
6) Quilted Treasures, 23 Wendy Lane, Carolina
7) Ramshead Pottery, 323 Switch Road, Richmond
8) Post Office Studio, 335 Canonchet Road, Rockville
9) Hartman Studio, 275 Fenner Hill Road, Hope Valley
10) Langworthy Public Library, 24 Spring Street, Hope Valley
11) Captivating Notions, 978 Main Street, Hope Valley
12) Village Place Studio, 999 Main Street, Hope Valley
13) Pond Studio, 5 Lakeside Dr Ext, Hope Valley
14) Rick Devin Ltd, 1054 Main Street, Hope Valley
15) Shaw Gallery, 7 Corey Trail, Wyoming

URI Theatre’s ‘Proof’ explores family, grief, value of women’s voices

Production’s two-weekend run starts Oct. 16

By Paige Monopoli

The cast and crew for URI Theatre’s “Proof” gather together in advance of their play’s production starting Oct. 16. “Proof” offers URI students and audiences a chance to consider what we owe our families, how we measure intellectual achievement and what it means to truly see another person.

When Jimmy Calitri returned to University of Rhode Island Theatre Department to direct David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Proof,” he knew he was taking on a story with more than intellectual depth.

For Calitri, who first discovered his passion for directing as a URI undergraduate, the play’s exploration into family, grief, caregiving, mental illness and gender equality offered an opportunity to create the kind of intimate, thought-provoking theater he values most. Unlike the large-scale musicals he often directs, “Proof” is a four-character drama; one Calitri was eager to take on because of the depth of its material.

At mealtime, the order of what you eat matters - carbs go last

Olive oil before carbs blunts early blood sugar rise in mice

By Kyoto University

Edited by Swati Mestri, reviewed by Robert Egan

Olive oil administered before carbohydrates elicits early
glucagon and GLP-1 responses that act in a partially redundant
manner and, with involvement of vagal pathways,
slow gastric emptying and attenuate the early post-meal glucose.

In treating diabetes, postmeal elevation of glucose levels is an important therapeutic target. Existing clinical studies indicate that eating vegetables, protein or fat before carbohydrates can moderate a postmeal rise in blood glucose, pointing to the potential of meal sequencing as a simple and sustainable dietary strategy.

Scientists have often attributed the benefits of this strategy to slower gastric emptying and greater secretion of incretin hormones, such as GLP-1, that decrease blood glucose levels. However, the roles that gut and pancreatic hormones, as well as neural pathways, play in this process have remained less understood.

This motivated an international team of researchers to investigate how the timing of fat intake influences glucose levels, hormone secretion and gastric emptying. Their study is published in the journal Diabetes.

"Our group has long been interested in practical dietary approaches that people can continue in everyday life," says corresponding author Daisuke Yabe of Kyoto University. "Meal sequencing is appealing because it merely changes how a meal is eaten rather than requiring people to avoid entire food groups."

Oct. 17: NO KINGS rally in Westerly

 

From South County Rising:

MEET US IN WESTERLY FOR A VOTE EARLY RALLY & MARCH!!

JOIN US at the municipal parking Lot at 14 Canal St Westerly, RI at Noon where we will talk about how important it is to get out and vote early!!

Kids Always Welcome!! There will be a children's book reading during the Rally, location to be determined. Watch for updates!

We'll be joined by Resistance singers and musicians to launch our March on the sidewalks around Wilcox Park after the rally! We'll have drums to borrow & lots of music. Bring your voices, instruments and music!

For those who want to opt out of the march, feel free to post up at the Town Hall or Post office with your signs after the rally!

Parking for the post office located in the small municipal lot next to the post office or behind, or on street. Parking for the town hall located on street & the public garage next to the Pizza place.

Bring your signs and messages to VOTE EARLY!! And invite your friends & family! Let's get the message out that YOUR VOTE HAS POWER!!

We decide who represents us. We decide what comes next.

For more than a year, millions of people have come together to reject the idea that power belongs to kings, billionaires, or politicians who believe they are above the people and the law.

Now, we are taking the next step, turning people power into voter power. Unlike previous No Kings actions, No Kings: Vote Early, is not purely a protest. Instead, on October 17th, it's a day of nonpartisan voter participation: we are bringing our community together to make a plan to vote early and ensuring every eligible voter understands their options for how to vote and has the opportunity to make their voice heard.

No Kings: Vote Early events are nonpartisan and are designed to increase participation from all eligible voters.

A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events. Weapons of any kind, including those legally permitted, should not be brought to events.

Can America Recover From Trump-World?

If we actually survive it, recovery will be long and hard

Stephen Eric Bronner in Common Dreams

Much can be said about Donald Trump, but it is impossible to say that he has “done nothing.” This boorish, megalomaniacal, unpredictable, and frighteningly ignorant real-estate salesman has transformed his country by unleashing an avalanche of executive orders, edicts, institutional transformations, legislative shifts, and policy changes. 

Whether the nation can recover its democratic roots should not be taken for granted despite its institutional resilience and civic culture.

Trump-World is about more than Trump the president and demagogic ruler of the Republican Party. MAGA stands on tradition. Its base is rooted in the same backward classes, with a similar authoritarian and fascist ideological outlook as its right-wing extremist forerunners such as the “know-nothings,” the KKK, “America First!,” McCarthyism, and the White Segregationist Councils. 

Whatever the president’s decline in poll numbers, his mass base isn’t going anywhere and its racist, xenophobic, chauvinistic, and anti-working class beliefs are firmly entrenched. A reactionary sword of Damocles still hangs over a Democratic Party torn between a sclerotic mainstream and an exuberant faction of democratic socialists. 

Republicans collapse the former into the latter and then attack this essentially “center-left” political organization as “liberal,” “socialist,” communist, “Marxist,” and “anarchist,” even as Trump followers haven’t a clue what these words actually mean.

For a forest to recover from a fire takes more than planting a few new trees. Rolling back what amounts to a domestic counterrevolution is a daunting task, and it is easy to be misled. It is not a matter of the next election or putting together a grab bag of issues that will leave the public as confused as it was before, but a readiness to change institutions, reorient economic policy, and refashion foreign policy by highlighting three or four crucial points in each domain.

Trump has issued over 500 executive orders in 2025-2026 alone. These now touch upon virtually every aspect of everyday life. Every progressive social movement with a marginalized constituency has come under attack through legislative and often coercive means. 

Public lands have been privatized, coal has been promoted while wind and solar energy projects have been shut down. Agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security have been “weaponized;” indeed, between the beginning of June and the end of August 2026, more than 150,000 arrests were made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Meanwhile the “leftist” departments of education, environmental protection, and health and human serves have been gutted. Other regulatory agencies have been purged, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Legal gambits have insulated the presidency from criminal indictment, legal harassment of critics and “enemies” has become an everyday occurrence. 

The press has been intimidated, television shows have been canceled, and academic freedom is on the ropes. The threat to democracy is real and the nation’s fabric is fraying. Drastic changes to the tax codes favoring elites and the top 0.1% have contributed to the greatest upward shift in wealth in American history. 

Unions have been banned from 40 federal agencies, collective bargaining agreements are imperiled, and worker health programs have been eviscerated. The new imbalance of class power is fixed, if not set in stone. Everything associated with the “New Deal” of the 1930s, and the “Great Society” programs of the 1960s is hanging by a thread. 

With the Trumpist counterrevolution, the whole has become more than the sum of its parts, and everyday people find it difficult to process this avalanche of reactionary measures or the dangers that they pose. A mixture of political frustration and disorientation that provides fertile ground for nostalgia associated with the 1950s, when America was seemingly admired by the whole world.

US foreign policy has changed for the worse as multilateralism has surrendered to “America First!” Indeed, reference to the isolationist and quasi-fascist movement of the 1930s with the same name is not coincidental. Trump has identified the American national interest with his own. 

His personal enrichment by $2.6 billion in 2025-2026 occurred in concert with constantly fluctuating positions on the Russia-Ukraine War, the Iran War, NATO, the European Union, and Canada. The rule of thumb: Where cash is not to be made, support is not to be given. 

The United States has reneged on all major climate treaties. Aid to the United Nations, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the world’s most vulnerable nations has been cut to the bone. Trump has signed a sweeping bill imposing sanctions on Russia while simultaneously negotiating new “business deals” before the conflict ends, thus contradicting his previous warnings. 

His on-again, off-again imperialist threats to turn Canada into America’s 51st state, “protect” Greenland and Denmark, “run” Venezuela’s oil industry, create a “Gazan Riviera” (presumably based on Trump company investments), exploit Ukrainian minerals, sign a bill with sweeping sanctions and set up hotel deals in Russia, constitute the mix of personal and institutional goals that provide the president’s zigzag approach with a certain logic.

Trump’s foreign policy has no need for a state department, which has essentially been hollowed out along with the experts necessary to create prudent policies. Our president values the personal touch, and he is not above blackmail, threats, intimidation, bluster, and childish tantrums to get his way. None of this has worked. 

Trump has alienated NATO and the EU to Russia’s delight. Relations with Canada are at their lowest point amid a bitter tariff war. America’s squandering of military sources and diplomatic setbacks have left Taiwan and South Korea feeling increasingly uneasy as Chinese military actions linger in the background.

Trump’s record of failure is astonishing. After all the grandiose claims, mediation efforts to end the Russian-Ukraine War are stalled, policy toward Israel is an embarrassment, Venezuela has the same authoritarian regime, Iran’s geopolitical importance has actually increased, and there are rumblings about charging the United States with war crimes. 

Trump’s attempts to intimidate China have failed, the tariff offensive is tottering, and the president’s charismatic charm apparently hasn’t prevented North Korea’s “supreme leader” Kim Jong Un from further nuclear testing. Never has the moral and symbolic standing of the United States been lower, and never has it shown itself so incapable of distinguishing between democratic friends and authoritarian enemies.

“America First!” has turned into America last. Reversal of discrete policies is possible, restoring checks and balances is more difficult, and reigning in the charismatic presidency is likely. But this ignores the forest for the trees. Trump-World is more than the sum of its parts, and the avalanche of policies and edicts makes the counterrevolution difficult to process and threatens to overwhelm the ability of critics to prioritize their responses. 

MAGA will offer ongoing opposition to progressive forces and, in response, they must forward a rational and radical agenda of their own. This calls for shifting away from Trump, the insufferable person, and focusing on Trump-World’s devastating attack on the welfare state, neofascist battle against civil liberties, cultural parochialism, and xenophobic-imperialist foreign policy. That is what it will take for the United States to recover from its decade-long trauma—and even then...

Stephen Eric Bronner is Board of Governors distinguished professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University and executive director of the “Independent Experts’ Peace Initiatives.”

Oh, all right

Happy Thanksgiving, Canada!

 Not to mention the US could have done this instead of buying from Russia and screwing Ukraine:

Who can best represent Charlestown and the rest of the Second District in Congress?

First debate between US Rep. Seth Magaziner and carpetbagger Vic Mellor shows the contrast between the two candidates

By Alexander Castro, Rhode Island Current

Vic Mellor wants to represent YOU. He already represents
the government of Cuba. Screenshot from his registration.

Clang clang clang went the cowbells as supporters of Republican congressional candidate Vic Mellor gathered outside WPRI 12’s studios Friday ahead of his first TV debate with incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Seth Magaziner, who had his own posse of fans congregating before his arrival.

Inside was at first quieter, with Magaziner and Mellor shaking hands before and after the taping. While cordiality reigned over their limited offscreen interaction, the televised back-and-forth was decidedly more acrimonious, with each man impugning the other’s character as much as his politics.

“So he wants to abolish ICE,” Mellor, 56, said of Magaziner’s stance on the immigration enforcement agency at one point. “That’s basically what he said there. He just doesn’t have the gonads to say it.”

Magaziner, meanwhile, described his opponent as a fly-by-night opportunist.

Mellor told the US Justice Department he lives in Florida.
He told the Federal Election Commission he lives
in Warwick. One of these two federal filings is a lie. 

“Vic Mellor is treating Rhode Island like a pit stop between Florida and Washington,” the 43 year-old congressman said, a reference to Mellor moving from Florida back to his native state and beginning his congressional campaign within the same month.

“He hasn’t lived here since 1997,” Magaziner noted, and twice said that when Mellor last lived in Rhode Island, “‘Titanic’ was No. 1 at the box office.”

The candidates also clashed over Iran, healthcare and stock trading.

And inevitably they engaged on Mellor’s embrace of the Jan. 6, 2021, march on the U.S. Capitol, a choice which he reiterated Friday came with “no regrets.”

“You know he tried to do a stunt, and that backfired on him,” Mellor said of Magaziner’s Sept. 10 press conference outside the Rhode Island State House, in which Magaziner enlisted police officers who had been harmed in the events of Jan. 6 to make the case that Mellor’s participation that day was repugnant and disqualifying.

“Rhode Islanders don’t care about Jan. 6,” Mellor said, then turned to his opponent, “What they do care about is the riots that happened here in Providence with the socialists, the DSA, and the defund the police movement, which you marched with in solidarity.” Editor's note: WTF? What riots?

Flu season is near – here’s a guide to available vaccines

Be safe - get your shots

Annette Regan, University of California, Los Angeles

The number of people sick with flu is starting to increase across the United States, with health authorities warning that in some western regions of the country, the 2026-27 flu season may be off to an early start.

Health authorities often advise people to get their flu vaccine by the end of October – but as an epidemiologist focusing on vaccines and infectious diseases, I see the uptick in activity as a sign that there’s no time like the present.

Several vaccine options are available, including the new mRNA influenza vaccine, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in August 2026.

Seasonal patterns

It’s too early to say for sure that this year’s flu season will be an early one across the entire U.S. or to predict if it will be particularly severe.

As of Sept. 26, the latest date for which data is available, seasonal influenza activity remains low nationally, and wastewater surveillance still shows very low to low activity in most states.

However, the number of patients with respiratory infections who were testing positive began increasing near the end of September, suggesting that influenza viruses are beginning to circulate more widely.

Columbus’ own writings reveal how tightly religion and conquest (and slavery) were intertwined from the start

His writings also show his delusions of grandeur

Peter C. Mancall, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

A manuscript with the text of the letter Cristopher
Columbus wrote in February 1493, giving his account
of the first voyage to the Americas.
Archivo General de Simancas/Spanish Ministry of
Culture via Wikimedia Commons

Few historic figures are as divisive as Christopher Columbus. For some, in both Spain and the United States, he remains a great hero, an explorer who found a “new world.” 

He is reviled by others who see him as an arrogant conqueror: the first European to enslave Indigenous Americans, and the man who launched ecological destruction in the Western Hemisphere.

As a historian who writes about early encounters between Europeans, Indigenous Americans and Africans in North America, I believe it is important to recapture this period as much as we can from existing documents – including Columbus’ own writings. Those texts reveal the enormous importance the push to spread Christianity played in Europeans’ colonial plans from the start.

In my 2026 book, “Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680,” I describe how Europeans’ religious desires shaped the creation of American colonies that benefited conquerors, at a high cost to those they displaced or enslaved. In the Americas, the linkage of religious purpose and the eager pursuit of glory and wealth began in 1492.

Green Bond Would Add $25 Million to Resilient Rhody Infrastructure Fund

Green Bond important to protect Rhode Island from effects of climate change

By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff 

It’s not every day that lingering rain and wind from a rare, offseason nor’easter is an auspicious event.

Last week, just as the last of the weekend storm began to fade, state and local officials gathered inside the Looff Carousel in Crescent Park to launch the campaign for one of November’s ballot questions: the semiannual Green Bond.

The bond, a regular feature on election day in Rhode Island, is the ballot question that asks voters to approve funding for a number of environmental and climate resilience projects. The Sept. 28 event was aimed at encouraging people to vote yes on Question 5 this year.

Local state Rep. Megan Cotter worked hard to get
more funding for the Green Bond

The $55 million bond includes funding for state beaches, parks, and campgrounds; watershed restoration around Narragansett Bay; brownfield remediation; and farmland and open space preservation.

The Green Bond is one of five bond questions on the ballot this year, as voters are being asked to approve $600 million in new borrowing. Other bond questions include funding for capital improvements at the state’s three public higher education institutions; an affordable housing fund; economic development for Quonset Business Park and the I-195 District; and a new State History Center.

The clear winner this year for the Green Bond is climate resilience; $25 million from the bond would go toward the Resilient Rhody Infrastructure Fund administered by the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank (RIIB).

At a September 10 rally, Trump tells his supporters they are morons

Here's what he said: "It's amazing," Trump told his audience. "When you stand up here, it's just like…the love. I could say the stupidest things and you'd clap. 'Oh, I love you so—' It's true."

Comments by Jeff Tiedrich: 

He’s not wrong. I mean, it’s not even a hypothetical. Donny does feed his cultists on a steady diet of the stupidest shit imaginable. He tells them that magnets stop working if they get wet. They clap. He tells them exercise is bad for you. They clap again. He tells them windmills give you noise cancer. They smack their goddamned hands together like meth-tweaked seals.

Climate Action endorsing Sen. Victoria Gu, Senate candidate Sam Wilcox, and state reps. Megan Cotter, Carol McEntee and Kathy Fogarty

URI wildlife researcher Patrick Bailey answers questions about fall’s favorite winged mammal

Rhode Island’s new State Wildlife Action Plan lists all local bats as species of concern

By Kristen Curry 

Rhode Island’s new State Wildlife Action Plan lists all local bats as species of concern, including the hoary bat. (Photo / J.N. Stuart)

Patrick Bailey, a Ph.D. candidate in the Comparative Ecophysiology of Animals Lab at the University of Rhode Island, is drawn to the animals that populate our landscape each fall. He’s studied some of the quintessentially ‘scary’ Halloween animals, including wolves — though not the were- variety — as well as the bats of southern New England.

To be honest, the flying squirrel is my favorite local flying
mammal. This little guy got into our house right after
we moved in back in 2002 and I've seen them multiple
times. I managed to get him out safely. I also like bats.
- Editor Will Collette who also took the photo

Rhode Island’s newly approved State Wildlife Action Plan classifies local bat species such as the silver-haired bat — which favors oak and pine for habitat — of greatest concern. And while Bailey is not glad to see them on the list, he’s glad to see attention being paid to their vulnerability, having worked with bats earlier in his academic career. Bailey says working with bats helped him develop a wildlife skillset and gave him a deep appreciation for the misunderstood mammal.

“I’ve definitely had an appreciation for the ‘misfit’ mammals over the years,” he says. Today, he primarily works with gray wolves in coastal ecosystems.

Bailey fielded questions about New England bats, some of the challenges they face and how we can help them.

How is the local bat population faring in New England?

Bats in New England are facing a variety of threats, which have definitely impacted populations over the last few decades. As with most at-risk species, habitat loss continues to pose a huge problem for them. In Rhode Island, this occurs as a result of residential and commercial development that degrades forested habitats. Bats are also losing many of their maternal roost sites, which have historically included old barns, trees, snags (dead trees), etc.