---

---

The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Phillip Walker

---

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Texas blues guitarist Phillip Walker. Enjoy!

^{Phillip Walker – How Many More Years}

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

-- George Orwell

---

News and Opinion

In This Dystopia You Can’t Vote Against Wars But You Can Gamble On When They’ll Start

I can’t get over the fact that people were casting bets on whether the US would bomb Iran the other day. It just says such dark things about the type of civilization we are living in.

In this dystopia, Americans are never given the option to vote for a president who won’t bomb foreign countries in wars of aggression. But they do have the option to gamble on when those bombs will be dropped.

They’re not allowed to vote against war, militarism and imperialism, but they can go to an app on their smartphone and place bets on how the war, militarism and imperialism will unfold.

Preventing your government from raining military explosives onto foreign countries full of civilians who are just trying to live their lives? No. Thumbs down. You don’t get to do that.

Pouring money into “prediction market” scams like Kalshi and Polymarket with bets on when those military explosives will end the lives of those foreign civilians? Yes. Thumbs up. You are encouraged to do that.

BREAKING: 51% chance the U.S. strikes Iran tonight. https://t.co/cOFZOwns3T

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) January 14, 2026

You’re allowed to get rich making an app which lets westerners gamble on military atrocities of immense humanitarian consequence.

You’re allowed to get rich starting a company that manufactures missiles, sells those missiles to the US government, and then pays think tanks and lobbyists to convince US decision makers to use those missiles in gratuitous acts of mass military violence.

You’re allowed to get rich buying stocks in the arms industry and then funding the political campaigns of politicians who pledge to help start wars.

As long as it’s profitable and sits within the extremely broad parameters of acceptable liberal norms, it’s perfectly legal. But when it comes to doing anything that might eat into those profits by making the world a less violent place, there’s not even a viable option at the ballot box.

Polymarket spreads neocon disinformation to manufacture consent for bombing Iran

It is also paying influencers all across this site to popularize its brand

The "world's largest prediction market" relies on psychological warfare to manipulate betting markets https://t.co/wPfOtneENR

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 12, 2026

Our world looks the way it looks because our entire civilization is driven by the mindless pursuit of profit.

It’s profitable to start wars, so the wars never end.

It’s profitable for corporations to destroy the ecosystem and offload the costs of industry onto the environment, so it keeps happening.

It’s profitable for capitalists to keep wages down and worker’s rights at a minimum, so wealth inequality gets worse and worse.

It’s profitable for plutocrats to manipulate legislation and government policy using campaign funding and corporate lobbying, so the government gets more and more corrupt and oligarchic while society gets more and more unjust and oppressive.

As long as we have systems in place which cause mass-scale human behavior to be driven by the pursuit of profit, things are going to keep getting more and more violent, abusive, poisoned, polluted, unjust, unhappy, and dystopian.

This will continue until we as a collective decide we’ve had enough and force new systems into place. Until then the object in motion shall remain in motion.

Col. Larry Wilkerson: Blazing Alarms, Collapsing Alliances — America’s Foreign Policy Just Backfired

Trump demented, Conditions in IRAN /Larry Johnson

The US-Israel Hybrid War Against Iran

The question is not if the US and Israel will attack Iran, but when. In the nuclear age, the US refrains from all-out war, since it can easily lead to nuclear escalation. Instead, the US and Israel are waging war against Iran through a combination of crushing economic sanctions, targeted military strikes, cyberwarfare, stoking unrest, and unrelenting misinformation campaigns. This combination strategy is called “hybrid warfare.”

Both the American and Israeli deep states are addicted to hybrid warfare. Acting together, the CIA, Mossad, allied military contractors and security agencies have fomented chaos across Africa and the Middle East, in a swath of hybrid wars including Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen.

The shocking fact is that for more than a quarter century, the US and Israeli militaries and intelligence agencies have laid waste to a region of hundreds of millions of people, blocked economic development, created terror and mass refugee movements, and have nothing to show for it beyond the chaos itself. There is no security, no peace, no stable pro-US or pro-Israel alliance, only suffering. In the process, the US is also going out of its way to undermine the UN Charter, which the US itself had brought to life in the aftermath of World War II. The UN Charter makes clear that hybrid war violates the very basis of international law, which calls on countries to refrain from the use of force against other countries.

There is one beneficiary of hybrid war, and that is the military-industrial-digital complex of the US and Israel, with firms like Palantir and others profiting from their AI-supported assassination algorithms. President Dwight Eisenhower warned us in his 1961 farewell address of the profound danger of the military-industrial complex to our society. His warning has come to pass even more than he imagined, as it is now powered by AI, mass propaganda, and a reckless US foreign policy.

We are witnessing two simultaneous hybrid wars in recent weeks, in Venezuela and Iran. Both are long-term CIA projects that have recently escalated. Both will lead to further chaos.

The United States has long had two goals vis-à-vis Venezuela: to gain control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves in the Orinoco Belt, and to overthrow Venezuela’s leftist government, in power since 1999. America’s hybrid war against Venezuela dates to 2002, when the CIA helped to support a coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez. When that failed, the US ramped up other hybrid measures, including economic sanctions, the confiscation of Venezuela’s dollar reserves, and measures to cripple Venezuela’s oil production, which in fact has collapsed. Yet despite the chaos sown by the US, the hybrid war did not bring down the government.

Trump has now escalated to bombing Caracas, kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro, stealing Venezuelan oil shipments, and imposing an ongoing naval blockade, which of course is a continuing act of war. It also seems likely that Trump is thereby enriching powerful pro-Zionist campaign funders who have their eyes on seizing Venezuelan oil assets. Zionist interests also have their eye on toppling the Venezuelan government, since it has long supported the Palestinian cause and maintained close relations with Iran. Netanyahu has cheered on America’s attack on Venezuela, calling it the “perfect operation.”

The United States and Israel are simultaneously escalating their ongoing hybrid war against Iran. We can expect ongoing US and Israeli subversion, air strikes, and targeted assassinations. The difference with Venezuela is that the hybrid war on Iran can easily escalate into a devastating regional war, even a global war. In fact, even US allies in the region, especially Gulf countries, have been engaged in intensive diplomatic efforts to persuade Trump to back down and avoid military action.

The war on Iran has a history even longer than the war on Venezuela. The US started to make deep trouble for Iran back in 1953, when democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil in defiance of then-called Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (today’s BP). The CIA and MI6 orchestrated Operation Ajax to depose Mossadegh through a mix of propaganda, street violence, and political interference. The CIA installed the Shah and backed him until 1979.

During the Shah’s rule, the CIA helped to create notorious secret police, SAVAK, that crushed dissent through surveillance, censorship, imprisonment, and torture. Eventually, this repression led to a revolution that swept Ayatollah Khomeini to power. Amid the revolution, students seized US hostages in Teheran when the US admitted the Shah for medical treatment, leading to fear that the US would try to reinstall him in power. The hostage crisis further poisoned the relations of the US and Iran. From 1981 onward, the US has plotted to torment Iran, and if possible, to overthrow the government. Among the countless hybrid actions the US has undertaken, the US funded Iraq in the 1980s to wage war on Iran, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, but failing to topple the government.

The US-Israeli objective vis-à-vis Iran is the opposite of a negotiated settlement that would normalize Iran’s position in the international system while constraining its nuclear program. The real objective is to keep Iran economically broken, diplomatically cornered, and internally pressured. Trump has repeatedly undercut negotiations that could have led to peace, starting with his withdrawal from the 2016 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that would have monitored Iran’s nuclear energy activities while removing US economic sanctions.

Understanding the hybrid war tactics helps to explain why Trump’s rhetoric oscillates so abruptly between threats of war and phony offers of peace. Hybrid warfare thrives on contradictions, ambiguities, and outright deceit in US intentions. Last summer, the US was supposed to have a round of negotiations with Iran on June 15, 2025, but then supported Israel’s bombing of Iran on June 13, two days before the negotiations were to take place. For this reason, signs of de-escalation in recent days should not be taken at face value. They can all too readily be followed by a direct military attack in the coming days.

The world’s best hope is that the other 191 countries of the UN aside from the US and Israel finally say no to America’s addiction to hybrid war: no to regime-change operations, no to unilateral sanctions, no to the weaponization of the dollar, and no to the repudiation of the UN Charter. The American people do not support the lawlessness of their own government, but they have a very hard time making their opposition heard. They and almost all the rest of the world want the US deep state brutality to end before it’s too late.

Deconstructing Trump's 'Peace' Plan for Gaza (w/ Norman Finkelstein) | The Chris Hedges Report

Kremlin says Putin has been invited to join Trump’s Gaza ‘board of peace’

The Kremlin has announced that Vladimir Putin has been invited to join Donald Trump’s “board of peace”, set up last week with the intention that it would oversee a ceasefire in Gaza. The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists on Monday that Russia was seeking to “clarify all the nuances” of the offer with Washington, before giving its response. ...

The Kremlin also said on Monday that Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev would be attending the World Economic Forum in Davos this week and would meet members of the US delegation there. It is unclear whether those meetings will involve discussions of the Gaza board.

The invitation to Putin, which has yet to be confirmed by Washington, raises more questions about the intended agenda for the board. It was originally part of Trump’s ceasefire proposals for the Gaza war, and was supposed to oversee the transition to a lasting peace in the territory and supervise the work of a committee of Palestinian experts, also announced last week, who would take care of the day-to-day running of Gaza. The vaguely described scheme was endorsed in a UN security council resolution in November.

The invitation letters included a “charter” saying the board would seek to “solidify peace in the Middle East”, and at the same time “embark on a bold new approach to resolving global conflict”. Each national leader would serve a maximum of three years on the board, unless their governments paid a $1bn (£745m) fee to become a permanent member, in an echo of Trump’s elite membership structure for his Mar-a-Lago estate and his golf clubs. It is unclear who would be the recipient of such membership payments and how they would be used.

The charter states: “The board of peace is an international organisation that seeks to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” It adds that the board should have “the courage to depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed”, likely to be a swipe at the UN.

COL Douglas Macgreor : Foreign Policy Without a Plan, Who’s in charge?

‘Tariff for Oligarchs’: Top Economist Urges Europe to Fight Trump by Punishing US Billionaires

The leading French economist Gabriel Zucman is urging European governments to inflict financial pain on American billionaires in response to US President Donald Trump’s effort to seize control of Greenland, a mineral-rich island that some of Trump’s rich campaign donors see as a potentially massive profit opportunity.

“Europe should respond to Trump’s blackmail with targeted measures aimed not at American consumers, but at American billionaires,” Zucman wrote in a post on his Substack. “Access to the European market—by billionaires and the companies they own—should be made conditional on paying a wealth tax: in effect, a tariff for oligarchs. If Elon Musk, for example, wants to keep selling Teslas in Europe, he should have to pay it. If he refuses, Tesla would lose access to the European market.”

Zucman outlined his proposal after Trump threatened over the weekend to hit France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland with tariffs up to 25% if they don’t drop their opposition to the US president’s demand for “the complete and total purchase of Greenland,” an autonomous territory of Denmark.

The targeted countries are currently weighing retaliatory tariffs and other potential responses to Trump’s threat.

Zucman, a renowned expert on global inequality, argued that while existing mechanisms such as the anti-coercion instrument known as Europe’s trade “bazooka” can be useful, “anti-oligarchic protectionism has a decisive advantage: It opens a two-front struggle against Trump, at home and abroad.”

“By targeting oligarchic wealth rather than national pride,” Zucman wrote, “Europe can blunt Trump’s ability to mobilize nationalist resentment and rally part of the American public behind his imperial agenda.”

Trump’s proposed Greenland takeover is widely opposed by the island’s population and US voters. But as journalist Casey Michel wrote for The New Republic last week, there is one key constituency that stands to benefit massively from a US takeover of the mineral-rich territory: American oligarchs, including some of Trump’s top campaign donors.

“Ranging from tech moguls to fossil fuel company heads, all of these figures and forces have invested in mining and extraction companies across the island—and all stand to profit if only they can cut out any pesky Danish or Greenlandic authorities from regulating or restraining their operations,” wrote Michel. “The figures behind the curtain are by no means obscure. KoBold Metals, a mining outfit helping lead Greenland’s ‘modern gold rush,’ has seen investments from figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and hedge funds like Andreessen Horowitz.”

“Another company eyeing Greenland,” Michel added, “is Critical Metals Corp, which is backed by the same hedge fund that Howard Lutnick, now Trump’s commerce secretary, spent years running.”

Tariffs targeting such firms and the billionaires behind them, Zucman argued, would be the most effective way to penalize Trump’s reckless behavior and deter him in the future.

“If imperialism is driven by oligarchic power, then oligarchic power must be confronted,” Zucman wrote. “What are the alternatives? Doing nothing invites endless blackmail.”

US economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, made the case for a similarly aggressive European response to Trump’s economic warfare.

“European countries can announce that they will no longer honor US-owned patents and copyrights,” Baker wrote Monday. “Putting US patents and copyrights on the line is a guaranteed attention grabber. The vast fortunes of the sleaze buckets who put Trump into the White House and back his attack on democracy in the United States and around the world will suddenly be thrown into question.”

“The key point is that European countries, by opting to not respect US patents and copyrights, have an incredibly powerful weapon to use against Donald Trump and his rich supporters,” Baker added. “The time has come for them to go nuclear.”

Pepe Escobar : The Emperor of Chaos Strikes Again!

‘Make America Go Away’: spoof Maga caps soar in popularity amid Greenland crisis

Red baseball caps spoofing Donald Trump’s Maga hats have become a symbol of Danish and Greenlandic defiance against the US president’s threat to seize the frozen territory.

The caps reading “Make America Go Away” – parodying Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan – have gained popularity, along with several variants on social media and at public protests, including a weekend demonstration held in freezing weather in Copenhagen.

The hats were created by Copenhagen vintage clothing store owner Jesper Rabe Tonnesen. Early batches flopped in 2024 – until the Trump administration recently escalated its rhetoric over Greenland. Now they are popping up everywhere.

“When a delegation from America went up to Greenland, we started to realise this probably wasn’t a joke – it’s not reality TV, it’s actually reality,” said Tonnesen. “So I said, ‘OK, what can I do?’ Can I communicate in a funny way with a good message and unite the Danes to show that Danish people support the people of Greenland?”

Demand suddenly surged from a trickle to selling out in the space of one weekend. Tonnesen said he has now ordered “several thousand”.

Greenlanders DEFIANT as Trump RAMPS UP THREATS of Annexation

Donald Trump links Greenland threats to Nobel snub as EU trade war looms

Donald Trump has linked his repeated threats to seize control of Greenland to his failure to win the Nobel peace prize, as transatlantic tensions over the Arctic island escalated further and threatened to rekindle a trade war with the EU. In an extraordinary text message sent on Sunday to the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, the US president wrote that after being snubbed for the prize, he no longer felt the need to think “purely of peace”.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” he wrote, adding that the US needed “complete and total control” of Greenland.

Trump has ramped up his push to grab the island, a largely self-governing part of Denmark, in recent weeks, saying that the US would take control of the Arctic island “one way or the other” and, over the weekend: “Now it is time, and it will be done!!!” On Saturday he threatened to impose from 1 February a punitive 10% tariff, increasing later to 25%, on imports from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Finland unless they dropped their objections to his plan.

He has repeatedly said the US needs to take control of the territory for “national security”, despite the US already having a military base on the island and a bilateral agreement with Denmark allowing it to massively expand its presence there. In a brief telephone interview with NBC on Monday, Trump declined to comment on whether he would rule out seizing Greenland by force, insisted he would “100%” push ahead with his tariff plans, and blamed Norway for denying him the Nobel prize.

“Norway totally controls it despite what they say. They like to say they have nothing to do with it, but they have everything to do with it,” he added. The Nobel peace prize is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel committee, a five-member private body whose members – mostly retired politicians – are appointed by Norway’s parliament but whose decisions are independent of the government.

AMB. Chas Freeman : Do Any Allies Still Trust Washington?

US protests have jumped since Trump’s first term

In the year since Donald Trump retook office, the number of protests in the US outpaced those at the same point in his first administration, according to data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, an open-source project collaboration between Harvard University’s Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut. There were more than 10,700 protests in 2025, a 133% increase from the 4,588 recorded in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term. According to the data, an overwhelming majority of US counties – including 42% that voted for Trump – have had at least one protest since he was re-inaugurated last year.

“It is a very historic time, in the sense that people are mobilizing where they live in ways that I don’t think I have seen before in my lifetime,” said Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium. ... Typically, they said, flash points of protest have been localized to big cities or a march on Washington. “We’re not seeing that,” they said. “We’re seeing very diffused protest mobilization all around the country.”

The diversity of locations, especially in red and rural corners such as Cut Bank, Montana, and Sparta, North Carolina, shows that the movements defy stereotypes around where protest happens. “It definitely cuts against the narrative that protest is confined to major cities, to the coasts, and to predominantly liberal areas where it doesn’t change anybody’s mind,” said Chenoweth. ...

Over a decade ago, Chenoweth’s research, studying a data set of more than 300 nonviolent protest movements between 1900 and 2006, found that no government has ever overcome a nonviolent movement that involved at least 3.5% of its population. However, Chenoweth cautions that this is not a prescriptive rule. When asked if the US is at a tipping point akin to that number, they replied, “I would think about it more as an inflection point,” noting that public opinion is shifting.

U.S. Assets COLLAPSE As China CANCELS Buying While EU Plans $10 TRILLION USD Dump

Major Study Shows US Consumers, Businesses Pay for Vast Majority of Trump’s Tariffs

President Donald Trump has long insisted, in the face of decades of research by economists, that foreign producers are the only ones who are paying for his tariffs on imported goods.

However, a major new study released Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, an economic think tank based in Germany, shows that US businesses and consumers are shouldering the burden for the vast majority of Trump’s tariffs.

After examining more than 25 million shipment records of goods imported to the US last year, the institute found that foreign exporters only absorbed 4% of the $200 billion in tariff payments, with the remaining 96% being passed on to US importers and consumers.

“This finding has profound implications,” the study explains. “If foreign exporters do not reduce their prices in response to tariffs, then the entire burden of the tariff falls on US buyers. The tariff functions not as a tax on foreign producers, but as a consumption tax on Americans. Every dollar of tariff revenue represents a dollar extracted from American businesses and households.”

The study identifies several factors to explain why exporters did not slash their prices to remain competitive in the lucrative US market, including exporters shifting their sales to other markets where they will not face such high tariffs; firms not being able to shoulder the high price cut that would be needed to overcome the tariff rates set by the president; and companies not wanting to give Trump an incentive for further tariffs by rewarding US consumers with lower prices.

Julian Hinz, research director at the Kiel Institute and an author of the study, described the Trump tariffs as an “own goal” that has harmed Americans far more than it has harmed foreigners.

“The claim that foreign countries pay these tariffs is a myth,” explained Hinz. “The data show the opposite: Americans are footing the bill.”

The Kiel Institute study came out two days after Trump vowed to slap even more tariffs on European countries opposed to his efforts to take over Greenland.

In an analysis published Monday, economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) said that the latest Trump tariffs on Europe amounted to a “$75 billion tax increase” in an attempt to fulfill the president’s “demented dreams” of taking over the self-governing Danish territory.

“Well over 90% of the cost of a Trump tariff is borne by consumers or importers in the United States, not by the exporting countries,” Baker contended. “When Trump starts yelling ‘tariff, tariff, tariff,’ he is yelling ‘tax, tax, tax,’ and we’re the ones paying it. And $75 billion is not trivial. It’s 1% of the budget, more than twice the cost of the enhanced premiums for Obamacare policies that Trump says we can’t afford.”

Rashida Tlaib on fighting billionaire oligarchs: ‘The American people overwhelmingly want to tax the rich’

On Tuesday, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib plans to introduce a bill in the House of Representatives urging the US to end the political and economic dominance of billionaire oligarchs, halt the corporate subsidies and tax advantages that fortify their power and reinvest in the American people to defend democracy from authoritarianism. The legislation is supported by Our Revolution, a political organisation that spun out of the senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run, which is launching a “Defund the Oligarchy” campaign with research showing that individuals and corporations who funded Trump’s election received a staggering return on their investment.

Tlaib, a member of a group of House progressives known as “the squad”, explained: “It’s out of control. Our resolution urges Congress to act to address it and reinvest in the needs of the American people. So many folks say to us over and over again, there’s always investment in the fossil fuel industry, there’s always investment in the for-profit healthcare industry. “We’re always bailing out the big banks but where is our investment? How come we don’t seem to have money for Medicare for all but we have money to bomb Venezuela and continue to fund a genocide in Gaza? A lot of folks are tired of it. We want to push our colleagues to acknowledge it and then hopefully move forward with real policy change.” ...

Last year, a survey by Pew Research found that more than six in 10 US adults (63%) say tax rates on big businesses and corporations should be raised. Sanders and the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew big crowds on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, swept to victory in New York’s mayoral race, championing a “tax the rich” agenda to fund social programmes. Trump, a Republican, campaigned for election in 2024 on a pledge to “drain the swamp” and help America’s working people. But Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress, contends that he made the inequality crisis worse with last year’s so-called “big, beautiful bill”, a record transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

“There is a billionaire as our president of the United States. He’s using our democratic process and passing bills that transfer even more concentrated wealth to those that are already hurting American people with starvation wages,” she said.

Police officers stopped, harassed by ICE agents in Twin Cities

Second man dies at Texas ICE detention facility in two weeks

A second man being held at a US immigration detention facility in Texas has died in two weeks, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said on Monday. Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, originally from Nicaragua, was found “unconscious and unresponsive in his room” on 14 January at the Camp East Montana detention facility in El Paso, ICE said in a press release.

“They immediately notified contract medical staff on site to conduct life saving measures,” it said, adding that emergency medical technicians arrived to the facility but could not revive Diaz, who was pronounced dead just after 4pm. ICE asserted that Diaz “died of a presumed suicide” but that the “official cause of his death remains under investigation”.

Diaz was detained on 6 January during the Trump administration’s controversial deportation blitz in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He initially entered the US through the Mexican border in March of 2024, when border patrol agents picked him up and he was given a court date with an immigration judge, then released on parole. On 26 August of last year an immigration judge ordered Diaz’s removal “in absentia”. ICE detained him on 12 January in order to deport him.

The extensive tent facility is located on the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso.

Another man, Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, who immigrated to the US from Cuba, died in the same detention camp on 3 January. ICE said Campos was “experiencing medical distress” and that staff provided emergency treatment in the hopes of saving him. His death is potentially being investigated as a homicide. The local medical examiner determined the preliminary cause of death was “asphyxia due to neck and chest compression”, according to reports. ICE said he experienced a medical emergency after being “disruptive while in line for medication”. Santos Jesus Flores, who was detained with him, told the Washington Post that he saw five guards choking him, and that he heard Lunas Campos repeatedly say in Spanish that he couldn’t breathe.

ICE vs. People of Minnesota: Community Resists Trump's Militarized Crackdown

Noem backtracks on ICE pepper spray denial amid tension in Minneapolis

Kristi Noem first denied that federal agents were using chemical agents against protesters, then after being shown video footage turned to blaming the protesters themselves, as tensions continued to run high amid the Trump administration’s surge of federal officers into Minneapolis. The head of homeland security, who has acted as spearhead for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in the city – known as “Operation Metro Surge” – told the CBS show Face the Nation on Sunday that her department had not used pepper spray against crowds.

A federal judge on Friday had ordered that federal law enforcement stop using pepper spraying against peaceful protesters, whom Noem has accused of attempting to hinder the immigration crackdown. Kate Menendez found federal agents had used “chemical irritants” to punish protesters for exercising “protected first amendment rights to assemble and to observe and protest ICE operations”.

Noem first denied the judge’s finding, but after being shown a video of chemical agents being used on four occasions, she backtracked and said her department “only use those chemical agents when there’s violence happening and perpetuating and you need to be able to establish law in order to keep people safe”.

On Sunday the Department of Justice also declared it is investigating a group of protesters who disrupted services at a church where a local ICE official is reportedly a pastor. Footage livestreamed by Black Lives Matter Minnesota showed people interrupting services at the Cities church in St Paul by chanting “ICE out” and “justice for Renee Good”, referring to the 37-year-old mother of three who was fatally shot by an ICE agent.

It is not clear whether David Easterwood, the pastor who also reportedly heads the local ICE field office, was present at the church. He has defended ICE tactics in Minnesota such as swapping out license plates and using pepper spray on protesters.

---

---

‘Are We Really Living in a Democracy?’ Asks Sanders After Musk Drops $10 Million on US Senate Race

After flirting last year with forming his own political party, far-right billionaire Elon Musk is funding Republican political candidates once again.

Axios reported on Monday that Musk recently made a massive $10 million donation to bolster Nate Morris, a MAGA candidate who is vying to replace retiring US Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Axios described the massive donation, the largest Musk has ever given to a Senate candidate, as “the biggest sign yet that Musk plans to spend big in the 2026 midterms, giving Republicans a formidable weapon in the expensive battle to keep their congressional majorities.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) reacted with disgust to the news, and said that Musk’s enormous donation was indicative of a broken campaign finance system.

“Are we really living in a democracy when the richest man on earth can spend as much as he wants to elect his candidates?” Sanders asked in a social media post.

“The most important thing our nation can do is end Citizens United and move to public funding of elections,” he added, referring to the 2010 Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for unlimited spending on elections by corporations. “Billionaires can’t be allowed to buy elections.”

Democratic Maine State Auditor Matt Dunlap, currently running to represent Maine’s second congressional district, also denounced Musk for throwing his weight around to buy politicians.

“Billionaires buy our elections, rig the tax code, and undermine our democracy,” wrote Dunlap. “Working people deserve a government that works for them—not for billionaires like Elon Musk.”

Musk is no stranger to spending big to help elect Republicans, having spent more than $250 million in 2024 to help secure President Donald Trump’s victory.

However, his riches are no guarantee of a GOP win. Last year, for example, Musk spent millions to elect former Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel to a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, only to wind up losing the race by 10 points.

---

---

15 years after Fukushima, Japan prepares to restart the world’s biggest nuclear plant

The activity around the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant is reaching its peak: workers remove earth to expand the width of a main road, while lorries arrive at its heavily guarded entrance. A long perimeter fence is lined with countless coils of razor wire, and in a layby, a police patrol car monitors visitors to the beach – one of the few locations with a clear view of the reactors, framed by a snowy Mount Yoneyama. When all seven of its reactors are working, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa generates 8.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power millions of households. Occupying 4.2 sq km of land in Niigata prefecture on the Japan Sea coast, it is the biggest nuclear power plant in the world.

Since 2012, however, the plant has not generated a single watt of electricity, after being shut down, along with dozens of other reactors, in the wake of the March 2011 triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chornobyl.

Located about 220km (136 miles) north-west of Tokyo, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant is run by Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the same utility in charge of the Fukushima facility when a powerful tsunami crashed through its defences, triggering a power outage that sent three of its reactors into meltdown and forcing 160,000 people to evacuate.

Weeks before the 15th anniversary of the accident, and the wider tsunami disaster that killed an estimated 20,000 people along Japan’s north-east coast, Tepco is set to defy local public opinion and restart one of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa’s seven reactors. Restarting reactor No 6, which could boost the electricity supply to the Tokyo area by about 2%, will be a milestone in Japan’s slow return to nuclear energy, a strategy its government says will help the country reach its emissions targets and strengthen its energy security.

But for many of the 420,000 people living within a 30km (19-mile) radius of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa who would have to evacuate in the event of a Fukushima-style incident, Tepco’s imminent return to nuclear power generation is fraught with danger.

Scientists warn of ‘regime shift’ as seaweed blooms expand worldwide

Scientists have warned of a potential “regime shift” in the oceans, as the rapid growth of huge mats of seaweed appears to be driven by global heating and excessive enrichment of waters from farming runoff and other pollutants. Over the past two decades, seaweed blooms have expanded by a staggering 13.4% a year in the tropical Atlantic and western Pacific, with the most dramatic increases occurring after 2008, according to researchers at the University of South Florida.

In a new paper, they say this shift could darken the waters below, changing their ecology and geochemistry, and may also accelerate climate breakdown. “Before 2008, there were no major blooms of macroalgae [seaweed] reported except for sargassum in the Sargasso Sea,” said Chuanmin Hu, a professor of oceanography at the USF College of Marine Science and the paper’s senior author. “On a global scale, we appear to be witnessing a regime shift from a macroalgae-poor ocean to an macroalgae-rich ocean.”

The scientists used artificial intelligence to scan 1.2m satellite pictures of the oceans taken between 2003 and 2022. A deep-learning model was employed to detect signals of floating algae – a process that took several months. The team, who say their study provides the first global picture of algae floating in the world’s oceans, found that seaweed blooms increased in area by 13.4% a year over the period examined. Blooms of microalgae, such as phytoplankton, also increased but at a relatively more modest 1% a year. “What is noteworthy is that most increases in both floating macroalgae and microalgae scums occurred in the recent decade, in line with the accelerated global ocean warming since 2010,” the authors wrote. They identified tipping points in 2008, 2011 and 2012 for three types of seaweed in different oceans.

---

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Phase farce: No way 'Board of Peace' replaces reality in Gaza

Deadly virus grips Gaza as Israel blocks critical supplies

Israel Flouts US Demand to Open Rafah Crossing

Smotrich calls to shutter US-led Gaza coordination center, resettle Strip

How America Plans to Refill Its Emergency Oil Stockpile Using Venezuelan Crude

Imbecile Trump Threatens Americans With $75 Billion Tax Hike So He Can Conquer Greenland

Trump Will Take Greenland … And Then Go For More

Greenland and Irrational Responses to the Crisis of Capital Accumulation

‘Unchecked Corruption’: First US Sale of Venezuelan Oil Goes to Company of Trump Megadonor

Sheinbaum Says She Received Written Assurance There Will Be No US Military Flights Over Mexico

Epstein victims’ advocates express outrage over slow release of files

‘Gestapo tactics’: Bruce Springsteen condemns Trump team’s ICE crackdown

“We Are Watching Critical Thinking Disappear in Real Time” Due to AI Addiction: 40% of Kids Can’t Read, Teachers Quitting in Droves

Local Cops HARASS Woman Who Criticized Israel

Cyprus's Pro-Israel President Engulfed By Crisis After Mysterious Video Goes Viral

Blair and the Californication of politics

---

A Little Night Music

Phillip Walker – Hello My Darling

Phillip Walker – I'm Tough (Tough As I Want To Be)

Phillip Walker – Sure Is Cold

Phillip Walker – Tin Pan Alley

Phillip Walker – If My Tears Must Fall

Phillip Walker – Big Rear Window

Phillip Walker – The Train

Phillip Walker – The Bottom Of The Top

Phillip Walker – Breakin' Up Somebody's Home

---