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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Otis Clay

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features soul and gospel singer Otis Clay. Enjoy!

^{Otis Clay - Trying to Live My Life Without You}

"Corporate and government surveillance aren't separate; they're an alliance of interests."

-- Bruce Schneier

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News and Opinion

DOGE Employees May Have Improperly Accessed Social Security Data With Aim to ‘Overturn Election Results’

The US Department of Justice acknowledged last week that two members of the Department of Government Efficiency may have improperly accessed Social Security data at the request of an unidentified organization whose goal is challenging US election results.

In a court filing dated January 16, the DOJ revealed that the unidentified organization last March reached out to to two DOGE employees, who were working at the Social Security Administration (SSA), and requested that they “analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired.”

“The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain states,” the DOJ wrote. “In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a ‘Voter Data Agreement,’ in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group.”

The filing said that SSA has “not yet seen evidence that SSA data were shared with the advocacy group,” but that it had reviewed emails indicating that “DOGE team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.”

The DOJ also revealed that the SSA in December 2025 made referrals of the two DOGE employees to the US Office of Special Counsel for possible violations of the Hatch Act, which bars federal government employees from using their positions for political purposes.

Politico, which first reported on the DOJ filing, noted that the disclosure “came as part of a list of ‘corrections’ to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data,” and also included revelations that “DOGE team members shared data on unapproved ‘third-party’ servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time.”

The admission that DOGE employees shared data on a third-party server bolsters an explosive whistleblower complaint filed in August from former SSA chief data officer Charles Borges, who alleged that DOGE officials have been responsible for “serious data security lapses” that “risk the security of over 300 million Americans’ Social Security data.”

At the heart of Borges’ complaint was an effort by DOGE employees to make “a live copy of the country’s Social Security information in a cloud environment” that “apparently lacks any security oversight from SSA or tracking to determine who is accessing or has accessed the copy of this data.”

Should hackers gain access to this copy of Social Security data, the Borges complaint warned, it could result in identity theft on an unprecedented scale and lead to the loss of crucial food and healthcare benefits for millions of Americans. In a worst-case scenario, the complaint said, the government may also have to give every American a new Social Security number “at great cost.”

Everyone Hates Israel Now Because Our Own Institutions Made It Personal

Everyone hates Israel now, and what’s funny is this wouldn’t have happened if our society had been the tiniest bit normal about Gaza.

If everyone wasn’t constantly being forcefully told they’re not seeing what they’re seeing, it wouldn’t have become so personal for them.

If western governments had just said “this is bad” when news came out about Israel bombing a hospital instead of “THIS ISN’T WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE THERE’S A HAMAS BASE IN EVERY HEALTHCARE FACILITY YOU ARE BEING ANTISEMITIC”.

If the news media had just said “this is bad” when Israel systematically exterminated journalists in Gaza instead of reporting “three killed in what IDF describes as strike on terrorist vehicle” over and over again.

If we’d just been allowed to say “this is bad” when we saw raw video footage showing children ripped apart by military explosives without getting fired and de-platformed and told we’re evil Nazis who need our free speech rights taken away.

That’s all it would’ve taken to keep Israel from being a front-and-center issue for so many people. There would still have been critics of the Gaza holocaust, of course, but opposing Israel wouldn’t have become this massive mainstream cultural phenomenon if our own western leaders and institutions hadn’t exposed themselves as lying, propagandizing, murderous sociopaths.

It’s not hard to get westerners to ignore the victims of mass military violence, even when it’s mass military violence their government is directly orchestrating. Westerners, by and large, are indoctrinated human livestock who think whatever they’ve been programmed to think by the imperial propaganda machine. What opened so many eyes to Israel’s criminality wasn’t the slaughter itself, it was our own government, media and social institutions trying to gaslight us about what we knew we were looking at.

It’s one thing to see a cruel government doing bad things on the other side of the world. It’s quite another to be shown in vivid detail that your own society is ruled by monsters, and that those monsters have a vested interest in deceiving you and controlling your words and your actions in order to advance the most depraved agendas you could possibly imagine.

That’s what made this so personal for so many people. It’s not that Israel exposed itself, it’s that the whole of western civilization did.

Canada briefly detains Israeli comedian after complaints over conduct in Gaza

An Israeli comedian and former combat soldier was detained and interrogated for six hours while traveling to Canada on Monday after a pro-Palestinian legal group filed a complaint against him accusing him of war crimes and “incitement to genocide”.

The comedian, Guy Hochman, was detained upon arrival at Toronto Pearson international airport and only released after the intervention of the Israeli consulate, according to the Times of Israel. His detention came after the Hind Rajab Foundation, a Belgium-based group that aims to hold Israeli military personnel accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, filed a 40-page dossier about him with Canadian authorities. The groups Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights and the Legal Centre for Palestine also joined the complaint.

Hochman’s performance went on as scheduled following his release. On Tuesday, the Hind Rajab Foundation also filed a complaint urging US authorities to investigate and prosecute Hochman, who is scheduled to perform in New York City on Tuesday evening. The group argued that the scheduled performance “poses an imminent risk of further criminal conduct” and noted that in addition to international law, Hochman’s conduct might violate US federal criminal statutes, including the War Crimes Act and genocide statute.

The group’s dossier, which includes several photos and videos Hochman himself posted on social media, details evidence of his presence and participation in September 2024 in the destruction of the Raed al-Attar Mosque in Rafah – which the group notes was a religious structure protected under international law. It also accuses Hochman of “clear, repeated, and public incitement to genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza, in statements made both during his time working along with the Israeli military and during performances and online broadcasts.

According to the group, Hochman called for the “mass killing and extermination” of Palestinians, advocated for the use of nuclear weapons against Gaza, celebrated civilian deaths, and called for the starvation, displacement and collective punishment of Palestinians, among other statements. He also called for the destruction of religious sites, including stating that “not a single mosque will remain in Gaza”.

Aaron Maté : Did a Regime-Change Operation in Iran Fail?

Here’s The REAL End Game For Iran w/ Thomas Massie

‘New Level of Open and Deliberate Defiance of International Law’: Israel Demolishes UNRWA Buildings

Israeli authorities’ demolition of the headquarters of the United Nations agency that has for decades provided aid and civil services to Palestinians in territories illegally occupied by Israel was about “more than destroying walls,” said one journalist and rights advocate in the region.

The bulldozing of the complex on Monday attacks the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East’s (UNRWA) “very mission since 1949, violates the rights of to erase the support system they rely on,” said Maha Hussaini, head of media and public engagement at the Palestinian refugees, and aims Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

Hussaini was among those who spoke out as Israeli forces stormed the complex with bulldozers and began destroying buildings at the site after having sealed off the surrounding streets in East Jerusalem, the occupied city that Palestinians consider the capital of a future Palestinian state.

The Israel Defense Forces and demolition workers were also accompanied by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who said the destruction of the compound, which has operated at the site for decades, marked a “historic day.”

UN officials and other rights advocates, such as Jonathan Whittall—formerly the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territories—said Israeli authorities were once again broadcasting their “contravention of their obligations under international law.”

Whittall emphasized that Israel’s destruction of UN property came months after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) “reaffirmed that Israel ‘may not obstruct the functions of UNRWA.’”

UNRWA released a statement accusing Israel of “a new level of open and deliberate defiance of international law,” noting that the country is obligated “to protect and respect the inviolability of UN premises.”

Ben-Gvir led the destruction of the headquarters more than a year after Israeli lawmakers passed a law banning UNRWA, and weeks after the country banned dozens of international aid groups from operating in Gaza. Israeli officials claimed in 2024 that a small fraction of UNRWA’s 13,000 staffers in Gaza had been involved in a Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, but an independent investigation found that they had not backed up their claims with evidence.

UNRWA noted that last week, Israeli forces stormed an UNRWA health center in East Jerusalem and ordered it closed, and water and power supplies to the agency’s health and education buildings across the region are scheduled to be cut in the coming weeks.

“These actions, together with previous arson attacks and a large-scale disinformation campaign, fly in the face of the ruling in October by the International Court of Justice, which restated that Israel is obliged under international law to facilitate UNRWA’s operations, not hinder or prevent them,” said UNRWA. “The court also stressed that Israel has no jurisdiction over East Jerusalem.”

“There can be no exceptions. This must be a wake-up call,” the agency added. “What happens today to UNRWA will happen tomorrow to any other international organization or diplomatic mission, whether in the occupied Palestinian territory or anywhere around the world. International law has come under increasing attack for too long and is risking irrelevancy in the absence of response by member states.”

In the UK, member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn spoke to his fellow lawmakers about the destruction of the UNRWA compound—on top of Israel’s continued slaughter of Palestinians despite a “ceasefire” deal that was reached in October and settler attacks in the West Bank—and demanded to know: “When is the British government going to impose sanctions on Israel for its endless violations of international law?”

Israel has begun bulldozing the UNRWA headquarters in occupied Jerusalem.

When is the British government going to impose sanctions on Israel for its endless violations of international law? pic.twitter.com/YADND8varu

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) January 20, 2026

International law advocate and UN representative Mohamad Safa noted that Israeli authorities violated Article 52 of Additional Protocol (I) Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter when they took over UNRWA’s headquarters and raised the Israeli flag there.

“Another violation of international law being broadcast live. Israel’s impunity must end!” he said.

Last week, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the UN could take Israel before the ICJ over its laws targeting UNRWA.

The UN, said Guterres, cannot remain indifferent to “actions taken by Israel, which are in direct contravention of the obligations of Israel under international law. They must be reversed without delay.”

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Diplomacy by Insult — Trump and Norway

Might is right: US ‘foreign policy’ held hostage to mad king Trump’s whims

One year into the second Trump administration, an actual US foreign policy remains just a nice idea. Instead, the world has been forced to adapt to the world according to Donald Trump: one increasingly shaped by his erratic shifts and unpredictable decisions, his fury at perceived slights and his growing desire to stamp his legacy in the model of an imperial leader from centuries past. Think of it as the mad king’s court, where every day is a carnival.

Consider the last few days. Trump texted the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, at the weekend to tell him that because he had not been awarded the Nobel peace prize “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.” The world would not be secure “unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland”, he wrote.

The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has said a US takeover of Greenland would mark the end of Nato, and the drama will continue to play out at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, sought to organise a G7 meeting and dinner to smooth over their differences, Trump leaked that conversation too. At the same time, the US president invited Vladimir Putin to an ill-defined “board of peace” intended to oversee the transition to a lasting peace in Gaza, despite the Kremlin’s continued invasion of Ukraine that has left millions of casualties and threatened Europe’s security. Trump appears to be positioning the new group to undermine the UN, which despite its flaws has been a cornerstone of the post-second world war order that has prevented the outbreak of further global conflict. When informed that Macron may not join, Trump threatened to slap a 200% tariff on French wine and champagne.

World leaders may previously have felt that they could manage the Trump administration’s frenetic focus by slowing down his demands on Ukraine, Nato spending or Gaza. But it now appears primed to ignore its allies and shake up the world order – perhaps mindful that with one year already passed in the White House, Trump only has three years left and faces painful midterm elections later this year. ... Facing resistance to his efforts to rewrite electoral laws and deploy the national guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers at home, Trump has turned towards the world stage as a salve. He has claimed to have “solved” six, and then seven – and then eight wars, more than any other president, despite the dubious nature of many of the “peace processes” concerned. His anger at being overlooked for the Nobel peace prize, which was famously given to his nemesis, Barack Obama, shortly after the Democratic president’s election in 2009, has also driven a quest for global recognition that has played out in tragicomic terms.

In Trump’s world there are winners and losers, bullies and the bullied. The only US foreign policy now is one of might makes right, and Trump and his allies have made clear that in their worldview geopolitics is a zero-sum game. In Trump’s new world order, all agreements and alliances can find themselves hostage to the whims of the moment. “These are International Powers who only recognise STRENGTH, which is why the United States of America, under my leadership, is now, after only one year, respected like never before,” he wrote.

Col Douglas Macgregor: TRUMP at DAVOS

‘You’ll find out’: Trump refuses to say how far he would go to seize Greenland

Donald Trump ratcheted up the uncertainty over how far he would be willing to go to acquire Greenland as he warned the Nato alliance on Tuesday that it was only as strong as the United States allowed it to be. “You’ll find out,” Trump said in a terse reply at a White House press briefing before moving to the next question.

Trump also declined to offer any reassurances that Nato leaders were craving about his commitment to the stability of the transatlantic alliance after his threats to take over Greenland by force. The president repeated multiple times that he had done more for Nato than anyone else, as part of suggestions that he should have free rein to shape its future and what territories the US controlled.

“I’ve made it so much better, so much stronger. It’s so good now. Nato is so much stronger,” Trump said. “When I came here we had a weak Nato … they were a nothing Nato. Whether you like it or not, it’s only as good as we are. If Nato doesn’t have us, Nato is not very strong.” When asked whether the breakup of Nato was a price he would pay to acquire Greenland, a territory of Denmark, Trump said he thought whatever happened would be beneficial to the alliance.

“I think that we will work something out where Nato is going to be very happy and where we’re going to be very happy. But we need it for security purposes. We need it for national security and even world security,” he said.

Trump’s bellicose remarks came just hours before he was scheduled to leave Washington DC to travel to the World Economic Summit in Davos in Switzerland, where he was set to meet with world leaders.

Kiev Blackout Crisis Deepens; 600K Kievans Leave; Zelensky Cancels Davos Trip; More Oreshniks; Davos

The dread pirate Trump strikes again.

US military says it seized another Venezuela-linked oil tanker

The US military said it seized another oil tanker with links to Venezuela on Tuesday, in the Caribbean Sea.

The report marks the seventh such apprehension since the start of Donald Trump’s month-long campaign to control Venezuela’s oil flows.

The US military’s Southern Command, which is overseeing nearly a dozen warships and thousands of troops in the Caribbean, said in a statement it apprehended the Motor Vessel Sagitta “without incident”.

“The apprehension of another tanker operating in defiance of President Trump’s established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean demonstrates our resolve to ensure that the only oil leaving Venezuela will be oil that is coordinated properly and lawfully,” it said in a statement.

'RUPTURE': Canada's PM UNLEASHES As Markets PLUMMET

Wall Street sees worst day since October after Trump tariff threats

Stock markets fell on both sides of the Atlantic on Tuesday, with Wall Street suffering its worst day since October, as investor concerns persisted over the fallout from Donald Trump’s push for US control of Greenland.

The sell-off hit US stocks on the first day of trading in New York since Trump threatened new tariffs on eight European countries, after the market was closed for a public holiday on Monday. The S&P 500 closed down 2.1% while the Dow Jones finished down 1.8%.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index fell 2.4%, with Amazon down 2.9% and Tesla and Nvidia both off more than 3%, wiping billions of dollars off their market values. The UK’s FTSE 100 index dropped 0.7% on Tuesday, after a smaller fall on Monday. In Europe, France’s CAC was down 0.6%, Germany’s DAX fell 1% and Italy’s FTSE MIB was off 1.1%. The dollar was down 0.9% against a basket of currencies.

Trump’s threat to increase tariffs on US imports of goods from Germany, France, Denmark, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway and Finland have renewed economic uncertainty.

Economic blackout day planned in Minnesota to protest ICE surge

Labor unions, community leaders and faith groups are calling for an economic blackout in Minnesota on Friday in protest against the surge of federal immigration agents in the state and to mourn Renee Good. Organizers are urging Minnesotans not to work, shop or go to school. The Trump administration has dispatched about 3,000 federal agents to the state, in what it claims amounts to its largest enforcement operation thus far, amid a broader crackdown on immigration.

More than 2,400 people in Minnesota have been arrested in recent weeks. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer fatally shot Good, 37, in Minneapolis earlier this month. “There is an unprecedented and outrageous attack being waged against the people of Minnesota. I have never seen anything like it in my life,” said Kieran Knutson, the president of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 7250 in Minneapolis. “This is just an outrageous acceleration and escalation of violence toward working-class people.”

The CWA, which represents workers in the state at companies including AT&T, Activision and DirecTV, is one of several local unions organizing and supporting the planned economic blackout. Others include Unite Here Local 17, Saint Paul Federation of Educators and Minneapolis Federation of Educators Local 59.

Chelsie Glaubitz Gabiou, the president of the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, said: “Working people, our schools and our communities are under attack. Union members are being detained commuting to and from work, tearing apart families. Parents are being forced to stay home, students held out of school, fearing for their lives, all while the employer class remains silent.”

“I think what generated the idea for this action comes out of the need to figure out what we can meaningfully do to stop it,” said Knutson. “The government in the state of Minnesota has not offered any path towards stopping these attacks, this violence.”

US citizen says ICE forced him from his home without clothes in subfreezing weather

Federal immigration agents forced open a door and detained a US citizen in his Minnesota home at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him out on to the streets in his underwear in subfreezing conditions, according to his family and videos reviewed by the Associated Press.

ChongLy “Scott” Thao told the AP that his daughter-in-law woke him up from a nap on Sunday afternoon and said that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were banging at the door of his residence in St Paul. He told her not to open it. Masked agents then forced their way in and pointed guns at the family, yelling at them, Thao recalled. “I was shaking,” he said. “They didn’t show any warrant; they just broke down the door.”

Thao, who has been a US citizen for decades, said that as he was being detained he asked his daughter-in-law to find his identification but the agents told him they didn’t want to see it. Instead, as his four-year-old grandson watched and cried, Thao was led out in handcuffs wearing only sandals and underwear with just a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

Videos captured the scene, which included people blowing whistles and horns and neighbors screaming at the more than a dozen gun-toting agents to leave Thao’s family alone. Thao said agents drove him “to the middle of nowhere” and made him get out of the car in the frigid weather so they could photograph him. He said he feared they would beat him. He was asked for his ID, which agents earlier prevented him from retrieving.

Agents eventually realized that he was a US citizen with no criminal record, Thao said, and an hour or two later, they brought him back to his house. There they made him show his ID and then left without apologizing for detaining him or breaking his door, Thao said.

US justice department subpoenas Minnesota Democrats accused of impeding ICE efforts

The justice department subpoenaed several top officials in Minnesota on Tuesday as part of its investigation into whether Minneapolis officials have conspired to impede federal immigration efforts there. A copy of a subpoena to the office of the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, obtained by the Guardian, requests guidance and policies related to immigration enforcement in Minnesota since last year. It also requests communication regarding those policies with other state agencies, as well as documents related to “hindering, doxxing, identifying, or surveilling immigration officers”.

The office of the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, also received a subpoena, his office said. The offices of the state attorney general, Keith Ellison, the Hennepin county attorney, Mary Moriarty, the St Paul mayor, Kaohly Her, and the Ramsey county attorney, John Choi, also reportedly received subpoenas.

Walz said he would not be intimidated. “This justice department investigation, sparked by calls for accountability in the face of violence, chaos, and the killing of Renee Good, does not seek justice. It is a partisan distraction. Minnesotans are more concerned with safety and peace than baseless legal tactics aimed at intimidating public servants standing shoulder to shoulder with their community,” he said in a statement.

The justice department is investigating the officials, claiming that they conspired to impede federal immigration agents. Legal experts have said the claim is flimsy.

Ellison said in a statement that his subpoena was for “records and documents” and “not for me personally”, NBC reported. Ellison said the subpoenas were “highly irregular” and came after his office sued the federal government earlier this month in an effort to end the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the state. When he announced the lawsuit, the attorney general accused federal agents of “warrantless, racist arrests” and excessive force.

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Is this the best "progressives" can do?

Ending GOP Authoritarianism Will Require Overcoming the Democratic Leadership

The past year has completely discredited any claim that choosing between the Democratic and Republican parties would be merely a matter of “pick your poison” with the same end result. In countless terrible ways, the last 12 months have shown that Donald Trump’s party is bent on methodically inflicting vast cruelty and injustice while aiming to crush what’s left of democracy and the rule of law.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s leadership persists with the kind of elitist political approach that helped Trump win in 2024. Hidebound and unimaginative, Senate leader Chuck Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries have been incapable of inspiring the people whose high-turnout votes will be essential to ending Republican control of Congress and the White House.

The Democratic establishment shuns the progressive populism that’s vital to effectively counter bogus right-wing populism. And so, the fight to defeat the fascistic GOP and the fight to overcome the power of corporate Democrats are largely the same fight.

Advocates for progressive change will remain on the defensive as long as the Trump party is in power. With the entire future at stake, social movements on the left should have a focus on organizing to oust Republicans from control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections.

The point isn’t that Democrats deserve to win – it’s that people certainly don’t deserve to live under Republican rule, and ending it is the first electoral step toward a federal government that serves the broad public instead of powerfully destructive and violent elites. Like it or not, in almost every case the only candidates in a position to defeat Republicans for the House and Senate this year will have a “D” after their name.

Democratic Party leaders have dodged coming to terms with reasons why their party lost the White House in 2024, preferring to make a protracted show of scratching their chins and puzzling over the steep falloff of support from working-class voters of all colors. The Democratic National Committee’s refusal to release its autopsy report, assessing what went wrong in the election, underscores the party’s aversion to serious introspection.

Cogent answers are readily available, but top Democrats like Schumer and Jeffries refuse to heed them. If the party wants to regain and expand support from working-class voters, it must fight for programs that they clearly want.

Extensive polling shows strong public support for major progressive reforms, such as raising taxes on big corporations and the wealthy, lifting the Social Security tax cap, boosting the federal minimum wage, and greatly expanding Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing coverage.

The multifaceted tyranny that Trump and his toady lieutenants want to impose is both abrupt and gradual. Relying on “big lie” techniques, they strive to turn this month’s shocks into next month’s old hat.

Yet counting on denunciations of Trump to win elections is a very bad strategy. It didn’t work in 2016, it barely worked in 2020, and it failed miserably in 2024.

Democrats on ballots this fall will need to be offering plausible relief to voters in economic distress. But it’s hard for Democratic leaders to come across as aligned with the working class when evidence is profuse that they aren’t.

In essence, Schumer and Jeffries—and the majority of Democratic officeholders who keep those two in the party’s top positions—represent the Biden-era status quo that was unpopular enough to return Trump to the White House. A key reason is a reality that Sen. Bernie Sanders described soon after Trump’s 2016 win: “Certainly there are some people in the Democratic Party who want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”

Democratic Party leaders should be removed from seats of party power or bypassed as relics of bygone eras. Their ongoing refusals to distance from corporate power, rich elites, and militarism have alienated much of the party’s base.

As I wrote in my free new book The Blue Road to Trump Hell, “The Democratic Party enabled Donald Trump to become president twice because of repetition compulsions that still plague the top echelons of the party.” To eject Republicans from power – and to advance a strong progressive agenda – true leadership must come from grassroots mobilization.

Trump 1 Year Approval TANKS Over Economy, ICE Raids

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Era of ‘global water bankruptcy’ is here

The world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy” that is harming billions of people, a UN report has declared. The overuse and pollution of water must be tackled urgently, the report’s lead author said, because no one knew when the whole system could collapse, with implications for peace and social cohesion. All life depends on water but the report found many societies had long been using water faster than it could be replenished annually in rivers and soils, as well as over-exploiting or destroying long-term stores of water in aquifers and wetlands.

This had led to water bankruptcy, the report said, with many human water systems past the point at which they could be restored to former levels. The climate crisis was exacerbating the problem by melting glaciers, which store water, and causing whiplashes between extremely dry and wet weather.

Prof Kaveh Madani, who led the report, said while not every basin and country was water bankrupt, the world was interconnected by trade and migration, and enough critical systems had crossed this threshold to fundamentally alter global water risk. The result was a world in which 75% of people lived in countries classified as water-insecure or critically water-insecure and 2 billion people lived on ground that is sinking as groundwater aquifers collapse.

Conflicts over water had risen sharply since 2010, the report said, while major rivers, such as the Colorado, in the US, and the Murray-Darling system, in Australia, were failing to reach the sea, and “day zero” emergencies – when cities run out of water, such as in Chennai, India – were escalating. Half of the world’s large lakes had shrunk since the early 1990s, the report noted. Even damp nations, such as the UK, were at risk because of reliance on imports of water-dependent food and other products.

“This report tells an uncomfortable truth: many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” said Madani, of the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health. “It’s extremely urgent [because] no one knows exactly when the whole system would collapse.” About 70% of fresh water taken by human withdrawals was used for agriculture, but Madani said: “Millions of farmers are trying to grow more food from shrinking, polluted or disappearing water sources. Water bankruptcy in India or Pakistan, for example, also means an impact on rice exports to a lot of places around the world.” More than half of global food was grown in areas where water storage was declining or unstable, the report said.

Antarctic penguins have radically shifted their breeding season – seemingly in response to climate change

Penguins in Antarctica have radically shifted their breeding season, apparently as a response to climate change, research has found. Dramatic shifts in behaviour were revealed by a decade-long study led by Penguin Watch at the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University, with some penguins’ breeding period moving forward by more than three weeks. The changes threaten to disrupt penguins’ access to food, increasing concerns for their survival. “We are very concerned because these penguins are advancing their season so much, and penguins are now breeding earlier than in any known records,” said the report’s lead author, Dr Ignacio Juarez Martínez.

“The changes are happening so fast that the penguins could end up breeding at times when their prey is not available yet. This could result in a lack of food for the penguin chicks in the first weeks of their life, which could be fatal. Even if the penguins could match their prey’s behaviour, we can’t expect them to keep this pace up much longer.”

The researchers examined changes in the timing of penguin breeding between 2012 and 2022, specifically their “settlement” at a colony – the first date at which penguins continuously occupied a nesting zone. Three species – Adélie (Pygoscelis adeliae), chinstrap (P antarcticus) and gentoo (P papua) – were studied, with colony sizes ranging from a dozen nests up to hundreds of thousands of nests. ... The results, published on Tuesday in the Journal of Animal Ecology, show that the timing of the breeding season for all three species advanced at record rates.

Gentoo penguins showed the greatest change, with an average advance of 13 days over the decade and up to 24 days in some gentoo colonies. This represents the fastest change in phenology (timing of breeding) recorded in any bird, and possibly any vertebrate, to date. Adélie and chinstrap penguins also advanced their breeding by an average of 10 days. Such drastic changes also threaten to increase competition between the region’s penguin species, with clear “winners” and “losers” expected.

“Gentoos are a more temperate species and are already benefiting from the milder conditions that climate change is bringing to Antarctica,” said Juarez. “They’re already expanding their colonies throughout the peninsula and growing their numbers in colonies that were already established, while Adélies and chinstraps are both declining throughout the Antarctic peninsula. “A scenario of increased competition would only exacerbate this. With food, gentoos are foraging generalists, meaning they can switch from krill to fish, so they would be less affected in low-krill years, while the others are krill specialists.”

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Also of Interest

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

A War Without Headlines

European Leaders Realize They’ve Put Themselves In A Vise

Danish MP Warns US Takeover of Greenland Will Start a War

Danish Pension Fund to Divest Its Holding in US Treasuries After Greenland Threats

Why the Trump administration’s demand for a list of Jews at Penn is so dangerous

Ukraine – The Mood Is Changing – Pep Songs Are No Longer Welcome

Trump Delivered 22% Boost to Billionaire Wealth in 2025, But Catastrophe for Working Class

Nervous rex: the Davos elite brace for Trump and his dinosaur diplomacy

IDF BUCKLES To Ms Rachel Over West Bank Soccer Field

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A Little Night Music

Otis Clay - Love Bone

Otis Clay - Even When I Win (Seems Like I Lose)

Otis Clay - A Nickel And A Nail

Otis Clay - That's How It Is (When You're In Love)

Otis Clay - She's About A Mover

Otis Clay & Johnny Rawls - What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

Otis Clay - Precious Precious

Otis Clay - Back Away From It (Or Leave Me Alone)

Otis Clay - Hard Working Woman

Otis Clay - That Kind Of Lovin'

Otis Clay - I'm Qualified

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