Letting out a swear word in a moment of frustration can feel
good. Now, research suggests that it can be good for you, too: Swearing can
boost people's physical performance by helping them overcome their inhibitions
and push themselves harder on tests of strength and endurance, according to
research published by the American Psychological Association.
"In many situations, people hold themselves
back—consciously or unconsciously—from using their full strength," said
study author Richard Stephens, Ph.D., of Keele University in the U.K.
"Swearing is an easily available way to help yourself feel focused,
confident and less distracted, and 'go for it' a little more."
The article appears in the journal American
Psychologist.
How swearing impacts physical performance
Previous research by Stephens and others has found when
people swear, they perform better on many physical challenges, including how
long they can keep their hand in ice
water and how long they can support their body weight during a chair
push-up exercise.
"That is now a well replicated, reliable finding,"
Stephens said. "But the question is—how is swearing helping us? What's the
psychological mechanism?"
He and his colleagues believed that it might be that
swearing puts people in a disinhibited
state of mind.
"By swearing, we throw off social constraint and allow
ourselves to push harder in different situations," he said.
But the cold can be deadly - Providence man dies in the cold
By Will Collette
Compared to the foot of snow that fell on Charlestown last week, this weekend's supposed "Bomb Cyclone" is almost certainly going to be mild. But the deep freeze continues.
The National Weather Service forecast shows that we will not reach the freezing mark until Monday or Tuesday when the daily high temperatures are expected to top out at 32 and 33 degrees respectively. It will continue to be cold through next week, bad news for heating bills.
The 10 AM NOAA snow forecast is for a range of zero to three inches in Westerly through Monday, though it is theoretically possible (6-15%) we could match last weekend. Unless there is a major shift in the storm track, I like our odds.
Cold kills man in Providence
Statement from the Rhode Island Council of Churches
The Rhode Island State Council of Churches is
deeply saddened to learn of the death
of a man found on a sidewalk in downtown Providence early
Wednesday morning. Our condolences are with his loved ones and community.
According to police, first responders were called to Washington Street just
before 5 am after a report of concern for an individual outside during freezing
temperatures. They located an unresponsive man who was pronounced dead at the
scene.
We are told that the greatest commandment is to “Love the
Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
mind,” and that the second is like it, “to love your neighbor as yourself.”
This has been the key principle of faith guiding our service to our communities
and to one another.
Rhode Island continues to lack the essential infrastructure
and coordinated response needed to ensure that no one in our community freezes
to death on the coldest nights of the year. In response to this ongoing
crisis, Operation
No One Dies is putting out a call for immediate, concrete
collaboration.
No single organization can solve this alone. It is only
through committed partnership and shared accountability that we can build a
system strong enough to prevent future deaths. We urge every sector partner to
join us in a commitment to working collaboratively to implement these
lifesaving measures.
“Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the
least of these, you did not do it to me.” To take God seriously is to take
God’s concerns seriously.
In Minneapolis, 37-year-old Alex Pretti, a VA nurse, moments before being knocked to the ground by ICE agents and executed
When an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killedRenee Nicole Good in south Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026, what happened next looked familiar, at least on the surface.
Within hours, cellphone footage spread online and eyewitness accounts contradicted official statements, while video analysts slowed the clip down frame by frame to answer a basic question: Did she pose the threat federal officials claimed?
What’s changed since Minneapolis became a global reference point for bystander video in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder is how thoroughly camera systems, especially smartphones, are now entangled with the wider surveillance ecosystem.
I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. The hard truth for anyone filming law enforcement today is that the same technologies that can hold the state accountable can also make ordinary people more visible to the state.
Recording is often protected speech. But recording, and especially sharing, creates data that can be searched, linked, purchased and reused.
Video can challenge power. It can also attract it.
Targeting the watchers
Documentation can be the difference between an official narrative and an evidence-based public record. Courts in much of the U.S. have recognized a First Amendment right to record police in public while they perform official duties, subject to reasonable restrictions. For example, you can’t physically interfere with police.
While the legal landscape of recording law enforcement is important to understand, your safety is also a major consideration. In the days after Good’s killing, Minneapolis saw other viral clips documenting immigration enforcement and protests, along with agents’ forceful engagement with people near those scenes, including photographers.
It’s difficult to know how many people have been targeted by agents for recording. In Illinois in late 2025, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, operated by advocacy group Freedom of the Press Foundation, documented multiple incidents in which journalists covering ICE-facility protests reported being shot with crowd-control munitions or tackled and arrested while filming.
These incidents underscore that documentation isn’t risk-free. There is an additional layer of safety beyond the physical to take into account: your increased risk of digital exposure. The legal right to record doesn’t prevent your recording from becoming data that others can use.
Platner has a million dollar grievance…it’s about her
million dollar grift
By Will Collette
After a period of quiet, the Charlestown Citizens Alliance
(CCA) de facto leader Ruth Platner has gotten around to complaining about a
November vote by the Town Council to issue a $1.05 million bond drawn from
the voter-approved 2015 $2 million open space bond fund.
Platner has been kvetching about this matter for the past few months indicating that only she has the right to make any decisions about this bond funding.
That bond referendum was approved by the narrowest of
margins - 11 votes. Rather than use the bond authority for the purpose voters
intended, Planning Commissar Platner went on a buying spree, spending more than
a million dollars in CASH from the town's General Fund to shop for land usually at inflated prices and often as a
favor to a CCA client.
Around 60% of Charlestown is already protected
Platner’s actions were contrary to what the bond referendum actually said. However, that didn’t matter since the CCA-controlled Town Council gave Platner
anything she wanted from the town's deliberately bloated surplus, essentially Platner's slush fund.
In 2022, CCA financial mismanagement – which included Ruth’s
slush fund and shady land deals – led voters to strip the CCA of Town Council
control. No more blank checks. Voters completed the CCA’s ouster in 2024.
The winners of the 2022 and 2024 elections, Charlestown
Residents United (CRU), worked diligently to repair the financial damage caused
by 10 years of CCA reign. According to data from the
RI Auditor General, they succeeded.
However, there was a remaining piece of unresolved business - the over a million in cash taken from the town’s General Fund for land
deals, instead of using the bond as intended by Charlestown voters in 2015.
Town Council President Deb Carney (CRU) sought to redress
these improper purchases by pushing for the town to issue a million-dollar bond
from the 2015 open space bond authorization to pay back the town’s General
Fund. Her resolution passed by a 3-1 vote.
Platner (left) giving former Town Council President Tom Gentz his instructions. Photo by Will Collette
Contrary to the foggy claims made by Platner (and dissenting
Council member Stephen Stokes), this is NOT new spending. It balances the books and corrects the CCA’s mistake, putting the money back where it
belongs.
Platner says – with no evidence - the CRU majority has some
nefarious scheme in mind for the $1.05 million.
This latest CCA-concocted phony issue is entirely of Ruth
Platner’s creation. She was the one who decided after the 2015 bond passed not
to use it and instead draw cash for her land grabs.
Her motive? Clearly, she
wants to keep that $2 million bond authority untouched as a future source of
cash for her shady land deals.
Each time between 2015 and 2022 that Platner came up with a
new land deal, she proclaimed voters had given her a mandate (by 11 votes) to
buy land regardless of need or, most tellingly, the price. Leaving the bond
authority untouched permitted Platner to use it as her excuse for more land
deals, provided of course that the CCA held a Town Council majority.
Just about everyone in Charlestown loves open space. I know I do. That's why Charlestown has so much of it - about 60% of all land in town. See the town map, above.
But few, other than the CCA, want to continue to add more land blindly and stupidly. Opponents of Platner's open space Über Alles approach want future town land deals to be strategic and priced right.
Platner pines for the days when the CCA controlled the
Council because that meant that SHE controlled the Council. In this year’s
election, she hopes to get that control back.
Consider this the opening salvo for the 2026 Charlestown
municipal election. As they have during their history in Charlestown, expect
the CCA to fire off more lies and concoct more fake issues to retake power.
Let’s not let them get away with it.
The local animal shelter’s Facebook post was picked up by national and international outlets and quickly inspired raccoon-themed cocktails, “trashed panda” merchandise and even a cameo on “Saturday Night Live.”
For me, the story hit close to home.
The store that hosted this inebriated bandit sits just blocks from the small behavioral neuroscience laboratory where I began investigating raccoon brains about 15 years ago. Although the so-called drunken raccoon made questionable decisions after breaking into the liquor store, the species – Procyon lotor – is known for its impressive intelligence, curiosity and problem-solving skills.
Despite being one of the most intriguing mammals living alongside humans, raccoons have avoided the scientific spotlight. Why aren’t more neuroscientists and psychologists studying raccoons? What have researchers missed about the mammalian brain by focusing on rodents instead?
In
Providence, more than one thousand demonstrators will gather at the Rhode
Island State House at 2 pm for a rally and march as part of the nationwide
shutdown on Friday, January 30th. After hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans
led the first general strike in the U.S. in 70 years this past Friday, federal
agents murdered VA ICU nurse Alex Pretti in cold blood the very next day. In
response to this escalating campaign of ICE terror, the Somali Student
Association of the University of Minnesota has called for a nationwide shutdown
on Friday, January 30th with the call: “No Business as Usual! – No School,
No Work, and No Shopping.”
Hundreds of organizations have answered the call and are
preparing actions all across the country. The growing list of endorsers can be
found at: https://nationalshutdown.org
Students across Rhode Island are organizing walkouts to join
the protest at the State House, including high school students from across the
Providence Public Schools as well as the Wheeler School, East Greenwich, Moses
Brown, Barrington, the Lincoln School. College students from Brown University
to URI are also walking out.
Immigrant rights organizations in Rhode Island have taken up
the call and endorsed the national day of action, including the Immigrant
Coalition of Rhode Island, Refugee Dream Center, and the Rhode Island
Deportation Defense Network. Faith leaders and congregations of local churches
and mosques have also pledged their support for the day of action, and will be
mobilizing together as participants. Local businesses in and around Providence
are putting up signs promoting the national day of action, and have pledged to
close outright and instead participate in the mobilization.
This day of action will be a powerful demonstration of the
increasingly militant resistance to the Trump administration's full-scale
assault on our most basic rights. ICE, CBP, other federal agencies, and local
police collaborators are waging a war on immigrants and citizens who dissent or
just happen to be racially profiled. In addition to the horrific murders of
Alex Pretti, Renée Good, Silverio Villegas González, and Keith Porter Jr.,
these enforcers of Trump's racist agenda have subjected the people of this
country to brutal kidnappings and deportations; arbitrary arrest and
imprisonment; forcible, warrantless entry into homes and workplaces; shootings
with live ammunition and with "less than lethal" weapons causing
severe and permanent injuries; and targeted reprisals for political expression
and community organizing.
Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of
Minnesota was assaulted on Tuesday evening during a town hall event in
Minneapolis by a man who squirted some kind of liquid from a syringe on the
lawmaker amid heightened tensions in the state and following a series of
baseless allegations and intensifying insults directed at her by US
President Donald
Trump.
During public remarks to local constituents—just as she
called for ICE to be abolished and that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi
Noem should “resign of face impeachment”—video footage of the attack shows a
man wearing a black jacket sitting in the front row abruptly rise from his seat
and lunge toward Omar’s podium as he sprays something at her with a syringe in
his right hand.
While apparently unharmed, Omar first backs away before
charging at the man, before he is tackled by security, and other bystanders
intervene.
Watch: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)
assaulted during town hall meeting: "Here's the reality that people like
this ugly man don't understand; we are Minnesota strong and we will stay
resilient in the face of whatever they might throw at us." pic.twitter.com/Ud5l3yP4lQ
— CSPAN (@cspan) January
28, 2026
“Oh my god,” someone off camera can be heard saying, “He
sprayed something on her.”
Maintaining her composure after the man was subdued, Omar
said, “Here’s the reality that people like this ugly man don’t understand; we
are Minnesota strong, and we will stay resilient in the face of whatever they
might throw at us.”
Minneapolis police said officers saw a man use a syringe to
spray an unknown liquid at Omar. They immediately arrested him and booked him
at the county jail for third-degree assault, spokesperson Trevor Folke said in
an email. Police also said forensic scientists responded to the scene.
Ethylene oxide was once considered an unremarkable pollutant. The colorless gas seeped from relatively few industrial facilities and commanded little public attention.
All that changed in 2016, when the Environmental Protection Agency completed a study that found the chemical is 30 times more carcinogenic than previously thought.
The agency then spent years updating regulations that protect millions of people who are most exposed to the compound. In 2024, the EPA approved stricter rules that require commercial sterilizers for medical equipment and large chemical plants to slash emissions of ethylene oxide, which causes lymphoma and breast cancer.
It was doing what the EPA has done countless times: revising rules based on new scientific knowledge.
Now, its ability to do that for many air pollutants is under threat.
In government records that have flown under the radar, Donald Trump’s EPA said it is reconsidering whether the agency had the legal authority to update those rules.
Chemical companies and their trade organizations have argued that the EPA cannot reevaluate hazardous air pollution rules to account for newly discovered harms if it has revised them once already.
It doesn’t matter if decades have passed or new information has emerged.
In each of these cases, the aggressors were men working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and their actions were caught on video widely shared online.
Then came Renee Nicole Good.
The 37-year-old mother of three and her wife had dropped off their 6-year-old son at school and were blocks away from home when they stopped by an ICE protest to “support their neighbors,” according to Good’s wife, Becca. People had gathered to blow whistles and shout to alert nearby residents about ICE’s presence in Minneapolis’ Central neighborhood.
Video taken at the scene from different angles and analyzed by multiple news outlets shows Good trying to leave as an ICE agent grasps at the driver-side door handle of her car. A second agent, later identified as Jonathan Ross, was standing toward the front of the car. He fired at least three shots aimed at Good as she attempted to drive away. An agent can be heard saying in one of the videos, “Fucking bitch” after the shots were fired.
Good was killed.
Trump and Vice President JD Vance have, without evidence, accused Good of attacking Ross and justified his actions as self-defense.
There is no database tracking when ICE agents use force against women. But a growing number of videos captured throughout the first year of the second Trump administration offer some insight into the violent encounters that women have experienced: broken car windows, yanking, shoving, pepper-spraying and shootings, all of them out in the open and available on social media.
ICE agents’ history of violence against men, women and transgender people in detention facilities has been documented. Gender-based violence researchers told The 19th that the widespread visibility of physical violence against women in public spaces does not happen in a vacuum and goes hand-in-hand with the policies and messaging coming from the administration.
“All of these things converge to entrap women and make more violence in their lives and have fewer ways for them to escape the violence,” said Dr. Carolyn West, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington Tacoma. “So, it's not just the violence in your home, it's the violence in your workplace, it's the violence in the larger community. It's state-sponsored violence; all of these things converging together.”
“State-sponsored violence,” as West refers to it, is a term used by researchers to discuss violence perpetrated by government authorities, including local and federal police and ICE agents.
Between 1999 and 2015, the percentage of women who made up the population of people experiencing police use of force increased from 13 percent to 25 percent according to an analysis by the nonprofit think tank Prison Policy Initiative.
A study published in the journal for the National Academy of Sciences, based on data from 2013 to 2018, found that Indigenous women and girls experienced a lifetime risk of 4 per 100,000 potentially being killed by police, while the rate for Black women and girls ranged from 2.4 to 5.4 per 100,000; the rate for White women and girls was 2 deaths per 100,000. A 2022 survey of LGBTQ+ people found that 25 percent said they were verbally assaulted during their most recent encounter with police, 13.4 percent said they were sexually harassed and 12.8 percent said they were physically assaulted.
Data tracking use of force by members of law enforcement is underreported and not standardized across the thousands of law enforcement agencies throughout the country, so what is available does not fully reflect the scope of the issue.
For example, the most recent data from government sources, news and academic analysis do not capture specific rates of force among immigration officials against women. One report, by the American Immigration Council, indicates that ICE encounters and arrests with women increased from the end of the Obama administration through the beginning of Trump’s first term. Scenes of Latinas on the receiving end of violence by ICE agents are more common among recent online videos, in part because about half of all immigrants in the United States are from Latin America.
This dearth of more complete data is more apparent in the current Trump administration, researchers said. Over the course of the last year, executive orders on gender and diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility banned the use of certain words. As a result, federal departments and some advocacy groups that cater to marginalized populations removed these words from information in their grant applications and on their websites.
“I'm writing something now and I’ve got seven configurations of the word gender that can't be used in a grant application,” said Dr. Earl Smith, a professor of women and gender studies at the University of Delaware.
West stated that the lagging research and support for data create a vicious cycle: without updated data, it becomes impossible to show there is a problem, she said.
“It's almost like a willful ignorance,” West said. “If we can not collect the data, if we defund all these programs, and if nobody's counting, then there’s the gaslighting that says, ‘Well, there's no data to say there’s a problem.’”
This has been part of the challenge when speaking about violence by ICE agents since the start of the second Trump administration, researchers said. Without comprehensive tracking, it is difficult to demonstrate a pattern of behavior and its effects. Still, as immigration enforcement escalates to unprecedented levels during the second Trump administration, unbothered by objections and court challenges by state and city leaders, the increasing presence of online videos depicting violent ICE encounters with women has caught public attention, fueling outrage and protest that, at times, has led to more violence.
Six days after the fatal shooting of Good, a video shared and liked by thousands on the social media site Bluesky shows ICE agents in Minneapolis breaking the car window, cutting the seatbelt and forcibly removing a woman of color from her car as she screams, “I’m disabled.”
In another video, a woman can be heard saying “shame on you” to an ICE agent in Minneapolis. In response, the officer says, “Have you all not learned from the past couple of days?" presumably referring to Good’s killing. He then appears to grab the woman’s phone out of her hand.
Reflecting on this dynamic, Hillary Potter, an associate professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, said, “I wonder how much of that culture of machismo, toxic masculinity, whatever you want to call it, is impacting how ICE agents are treating women in the field.”
Potter and other researchers agreed that violence against Black, Brown and LGBTQ+ women has been normalized for years. Good was a White queer woman who was killed while participating in a neighborhood protest to show solidarity with immigrant communities. In Minneapolis, Latinos, Somalis and Hmong people have been the main targets of ICE enforcement actions.
“This is new to the current generation of folks looking in,” Smith said. “But Black folks for sure, Somalis, for sure, Hmong people in Minneapolis — they know the deal. They've been abused for years.”
Trump, meanwhile, has called Good “very violent” and “very radical,” and said she was “very, very disrespectful to law enforcement” before she was shot dead. It is a similar kind of language he has used to vilify immigrants of color and justify his administration’s pursuit.
“We've seen countless numbers of marginalized women, transgender women, who have been brutalized by law enforcement,” West said. “So it's really interesting to me at this time that White people are seeing that they're not going to be protected either. Your Whiteness and your femaleness is not going to protect you, not from these systems.”
The latest gauge on inflation showed
prices increasing 2.7 percent in December compared with the same period a year
ago. Food prices were up 3.1 percent. (Reminder: Trump was elected on two
issues: bringing prices down, especially food, and avoiding foreign
entanglements.)
Trump traveled to Detroit to deliver an address to
the Detroit Economic Club. It was about “affordability” and he filled it with
lies — such as Americans aren’t paying for his tariffs (of course they are) and
inflation was “way, way, down” (it’s about the same as it was when he took
office).
And he insisted that “affordability” is a “fake word by
Democrats.” Unfortunately for Trump, “affordability” has become even more
politically potent than immigration or crime. And in his first year at the
helm, he’s made America less affordable.
He’s also been putting forward some ass-backward ideas for
bringing down prices that will actually increase them. His biggest: Fire the
current chair of the Federal Reserve Board and install a chair who’ll lower
interest rates — and thereby, in Trump’s addled brain, bring down the costs of
borrowing to buy homes and cars. (In his speech today, he called Fed chair
Jerome Powell Powell, a “jerk.”)
Trump’s decision to open up a criminal investigation of
Powell is a bizarre escalation of his pressure campaign against the central
bank to cut interest rates. And it’s truly ass-backwards. Without an
independent Fed committed to using interest rates to fight inflation, everyone
who buys or sells or invests will have to assume the risk of runaway prices in
the future. The result is a risk “premium” that makes everything more
expensive instead of more affordable.
What should be done to make America more
affordable? Ten commonsense initiatives:
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Documentation can be the difference between an official narrative and an evidence-based public record. Courts in much of the U.S. have recognized a First Amendment right to record police in public while they perform official duties, subject to reasonable restrictions. For example, you can’t physically interfere with police.
Just about everyone in Charlestown loves open space. I know I do. That's why Charlestown has so much of it - about 60% of all land in town. See the town map, above.
“State-sponsored violence,” as West refers to it, is a term used by researchers to discuss violence perpetrated by government authorities, including local and federal police and ICE agents.
Video taken at the scene from different angles and analyzed by multiple news outlets shows Good trying to leave as an ICE agent grasps at the driver-side door handle of her car. A second agent, later identified as Jonathan Ross, was standing toward the front of the car. He fired at least three shots aimed at Good as she attempted to drive away. An agent can be heard saying in one of the videos, “Fucking bitch” after the shots were fired.
The visible attacks shared online come on the heels of President Donald Trump insulting women reporters as “piggy” and “ugly” and downplaying the severity of domestic violence. They also come at a time when reproductive rights and access to gender-affirming care have been significantly restricted, and as funding for gender-based violence services and research centering women and LGBTQ+ people has been stripped. 
