Saturday, April 4, 2026
OMG! Baby bunnies!
Wild, captive, to wild: Working to help save New England’s only native rabbit
 |
| 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
.webp)
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.
New Trump Rule Would Let Private Equity, Crypto ‘Endanger Retirement Savings of Millions’
Money for tech bros
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.
Friday, April 3, 2026
Trump's Magical Thinking
He says he's winning in Iran. He's losing bigly.
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.
Senator Gu posts new bill to protect you from identity theft
Sen. Gu, Rep. Carson bill would modernize identity theft protection laws
“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
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
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:
Thursday, April 2, 2026
Leave Ninigret, Trustom Pond et al. alone, dammit!
Wildlife Refuges on Trump’s Hit List
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.
Trustom Pond. Photo by Will Collette
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.
Charlestown Democrats announce April events
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)