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"When they say [Donald Trump] is not "presidential": I asked myself what does it mean to be "presidential"? You wear a suit; you talk to the American people like you possess the character and the dignity of one who seeks the highest office in the land, and behind the door you're the worst criminal on the planet, plotting the overthrow of nations and governments, and regime change, and sending drones to kill people you don't like? That's presidential."

-- Louis Farrakhan

News and Opinion

The US Is Pushing So Many Regime Change Agendas It’s Hard To Keep Up

It’s just incredible how quickly and aggressively the US is advancing longstanding agendas of global conquest under the Trump administration. Now they’re racing to take out Cuba.

The US president has signed an executive order to impose new tariffs on countries which supply oil to Cuba, even indirectly, which is expected to dramatically increase the pressure on the already struggling island nation. This comes as Financial Times reports that “Cuba only has enough oil to last 15 to 20 days at current levels of demand and domestic production” after the US cut off the supply from Venezuela and Mexico shelved a planned oil shipment.

JUST IN | President Trump has signed a sweeping executive order declaring Cuba an "unusual and extraordinary threat" and authorizing broad new sanctions, including punishing foreign countries that sell oil to the island, even indirectly.

The move comes as the Financial Times… pic.twitter.com/Lp2cJeGxeL

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) January 30, 2026

Trump’s order itself contains the usual excuses we’ve come to expect from the empire of propaganda and lies, with its authors babbling without evidence about Hamas and Hezbollah and “transnational terrorist groups” receiving support from Havana, thereby making this crushing act of siege warfare a self-defense measure implemented in protection of the American people.

We’re being asked to believe that Cuba is Hamas, so Washington needs to strangle it to death in self-defense. The fact that the US has been pursuing regime change in Cuba for generations, we are told, is merely a coincidence.

The lies get dumber and dumber with each new imperial power grab. It’s just insulting at this point.

Trump Plotting Regime Change in Cuba by Year’s End: WSJ
Officials said the recent abduction of Venezuela’s president provides a “blueprint” for Trump’s plans in Cuba#Cuba #MarcoRubio #Venezuela #Trump https://t.co/Kg2gOtyYB0

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) January 23, 2026

Last week The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “The U.S. Is Actively Seeking Regime Change in Cuba by the End of the Year” which cited anonymous senior US officials saying they viewed the operation to remove Maduro from Caracas as a “blueprint” for bringing down Havana.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Emboldened by the U.S. ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration is searching for Cuban government insiders who can help cut a deal to push out the Communist regime by the end of the year, people familiar with the matter said.

“The Trump administration has assessed that Cuba’s economy is close to collapse and that the government has never been this fragile after losing a vital benefactor in Maduro, these people said. Officials don’t have a concrete plan to end the Communist government that has held power on the Caribbean island for almost seven decades, but they see Maduro’s capture and subsequent concessions from his allies left behind as a blueprint and a warning for Cuba, senior U.S. officials said.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that administration officials have been meeting with “Cuban exiles and civic groups in Miami and Washington” with the goal of “identifying somebody inside the current government who will see the writing on the wall and want to cut a deal,” in a way similar to how assets within the Maduro government were recruited to facilitate his removal.

In a new segment on Trump’s frenzied efforts to topple Havana, CNN’s Patrick Oppmann reports from Cuba that he’s “heard from a US embassy source that diplomats there have been advised to quote ‘have their bags packed’ as the Trump administration explores new ways to destabilize the communist-run government.”

The US likes to immiserate the populations of targeted nations using economic strangulation with the goal of fomenting unrest and turning people against their leaders. In 2019 Trump’s previous secretary of state Mike Pompeo openly acknowledged that the goal of Washington’s economic warfare against Iran was to make the population so miserable that they “change the government”, cheerfully citing the “economic distress” the nation had been placed under by US sanctions. Economic distress has been widely cited as a primary factor in the deadly protests that have rocked Iran in recent weeks.

Here's Trump's last secretary of state Mike Pompeo saying in 2019 that they're deliberately causing Iran "economic distress" in order to foment an uprising against Tehran, saying he doesn't think sanctions will pressure Tehran to change but "the people can change the government". pic.twitter.com/NKJDy4Al21

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) January 13, 2026

Starvation sanctions are the only form of warfare where it is widely considered both normal and ethical to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force. Deliberately impoverishing an entire nation so that it erupts in conflict and civil war is one of the most evil things you can possibly imagine, but it’s the go-to Plan A for the US empire when it comes to removing foreign leaders who refuse to kiss the imperial boot.

From Palestine to Lebanon to Yemen to Syria to Venezuela to Cuba to Iran, these last couple of years the US has been in a mad scramble to eliminate governments and resistance groups which attempt to insist on their own sovereignty. There’s a new excuse every time, but the end goal is always the same: the furtherance of planetary domination.

The US empire is the single most tyrannical and murderous power structure on this planet. If any regime is in need of changing, it’s that one.

Alastair Crooke : Trump’s Iran Strategy: All Bluster, No Exit

Trump says Iran talking to US and hints at deal to avoid military strikes

Donald Trump has said Iran is talking to the US, hinting at a deal that would avoid the use of military strikes, as Iran’s supreme leader warned that any attack by the US would spark a regional war. The US president’s comments came as Washington deployed a naval battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off Iran’s shores.

“The plan is that [Iran is] talking to us, and we’ll see if we can do something. Otherwise, we’ll see what happens … We have a big fleet heading out there,” Trump told Fox News. “They are negotiating, so we’ll see what happens.”

Later on Saturday, Trump declined to say whether he had decided on a course of action regarding US intervention in Iran. He sidestepped a question about whether Tehran would be emboldened if the US backed away from launching strikes, telling reporters: “Some people think that. Some people don’t.”

On Sunday, Iranian state television reported that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had warned that any attack by the Americans would have far-reaching consequences. “The Americans should know that if they start a war, this time it will be a regional war,” Khamenei was quoted as saying. “We are not the instigators and we do not seek to attack any country. But the Iranian nation will deliver a firm blow to anyone who attacks or harasses it.”

Asked about the warning, Trump told reporters on Sunday: “Of course he is going to say that. Hopefully we’ll make a deal. If we don’t make a deal, then we’ll find out whether or not he was right,” he said.

Jeffrey Sachs: US-Iran War INEVITABLE, Trump's WW3 for Israel Just BLEW UP

US Military Told Mideast Ally That Trump Attack on Iran is ‘Imminent’

Senior officials in the US military have told a key Middle East ally that President Donald Trump may strike Iran as soon as this weekend, as part of an operation that may seek to decapitate the Islamic Republic’s government, according to a report published Friday by Drop Site News.

While the Trump administration reportedly envisions attacks against nuclear, ballistic, and other military sites around Iran, a former senior US intelligence official who is acting as an informal advisor to Trump told the outlet: “This isn’t about the nukes or the missile program. This is about regime change.”

As Iran has been roiled by the largest wave of protests since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Trump has repeatedly threatened to launch strikes, which he has claimed would be in retaliation for the nation’s security forces killing demonstrators.

While counts vary widely, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported Friday that Iranian security forces have killed more than 6,000 protesters in a brutal crackdown that has largely quelled the unrest seen earlier this month.

NEW: Sources who spoke exclusively to @DropSiteNews indicated that a regional US ally has been informed that the US may be ready to attack Iran as early as Sunday and attacks if authorized would not be limited to nuclear or missile sites but also target regime change:…

— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) January 30, 2026

According to the senior official, who has worked as a consultant for Arab governments, Trump’s war planners hope that a strike on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) would galvanize Iranians to return to the streets and eventually deliver a knockout blow to their government.

He said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long sought to push the US to engage in direct conflict with Iran, “is hoping for an attack,” and is “assuring Trump that Israel can help put in place a new government that is friendly with the West.”

In the Oval Office on Friday, Trump told reporters that the US has a “large armada, flotilla, call it whatever you want, heading towards Iran right now.” He said that the armada was “larger than Venezuela,” referring to the buildup of ships leading up to the US invasion of the Latin American country earlier this month to overthrow its president, Nicolás Maduro.

According to Drop Site, two senior intelligence officials from an unnamed Arab country said they received word that a US attack could come “imminently,” potentially as soon as Sunday.

Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia, Iran’s military spokesperson, in an interview on Iranian TV on Thursday, said that a strike against Iran would likely play out very differently from the one launched in June against three Iranian nuclear sites. Iran’s response was limited: an attack on a single US military base in Qatar, which it telegraphed beforehand.

“If such a miscalculation is made by the Americans, it will certainly not unfold the way Trump imagines—carrying out a quick operation and then, two hours later, tweeting that the operation is over,” Akraminia said.

“The scope of war will certainly extend across the entire region, he added. ”From the Zionist regime to countries that host American military bases, all will be within range of our missiles and drones.“

Trump has said “time is running out” for Iran to come to the table to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with the United States, one with much more stringent restrictions than the one the president ripped up in 2018.

According to the New York Times

US and European officials say that in talks, they have put three demands in front of the Iranians: a permanent end to all enrichment of uranium and disposal of its current stockpiles, limits on the range and number of their ballistic missiles, and an end to all support for proxy groups in the Middle East, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis operating in Yemen.

As the Times pointed out, “Notably absent from those demands... was any reference to protecting the protesters.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated on Friday that Tehran would “welcome negotiations that ensure Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear activity” and that it would not “negotiate anything related to our conventional arms, including missiles. This is something we cannot risk.”

He said Iran would not agree to any deal that halts uranium enrichment on its soil, which it has said it has the right to pursue under the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). “We do not want to enter into any kind of negotiation that is doomed to failure and can then be used as another pretext for another war,” he told Al-Monitor.

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday, Trump said Iran “wants to make a deal” but did not elaborate on what that meant. “We’ll see what happens. I can say this: They do want to make a deal.”

Mohamed ElBaradei, former director general of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, has condemned Trump’s threats.

“The continued unilateral threats of a military strike against Iran in the absence of any clear and present danger and in violation of international law, bring to mind the same grim scene before the illegal and immoral Iraq war with its lies and horrifying consequences,” he wrote on social media. “Human life and regional destruction don’t seem to matter.”

High Stakes Debate: Strike Iran or NOT? /Lt Col Daniel Davis

My goodness, that Adelson money works wonders on corrupt idiots...

Trump Again Bypasses Congress To Advance Major Weapons Package for Israel

The Trump administration has approved $6.5 billion in new weapons deals for Israel that include Apache attack helicopters and military vehicles, a step Secretary of State Marco Rubio took without waiting for the normal congressional review process.

According to The New York Times, the approval of the arms deals marks the third time that the Trump administration bypassed Congress to send weapons to Israel.

The arms packages had been under review by the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the State Department is supposed to wait until the top two members of each committee approve the deals before advancing them, but Rubio didn’t, drawing a rebuke from Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking member of the House committee.

Netanyahu ALARMING Speech

Cuba on the brink as Trump turns up the pressure: ‘There is going to be a real blockade’

It’s just gone midday on Linea, one of the main roads through Havana’s Vedado neighbourhood, and Javier Peña and Ysil Ribas have been waiting since 6am outside a petrol station. They’re passing the time fixing a leak on Ribas’s 1955 gold and white Mercury.

A tanker has pulled up on the forecourt in front of them, and so the queue behind is growing fast. Although this station only takes US dollars, at a cost far out of reach of most Cubans, Peña says it’s their only choice. “There is no gas in the national pesos,” he says, shrugging. Soon, even buying petrol in dollars may be impossible. The United States has said it will ensure there will be no more fuel shipments to the beleaguered island.

On Thursday, Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing extra tariffs to be slapped on any country that sells oil to the island. The White House said the move was to “protect American citizens and interests” from a regime that provides “a safe haven for transnational terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas”. While no proof of this allegation was offered, the Trump administration has now made plain it is seeking to fell the 67-year-old communist regime. “Cuba will be failing pretty soon,” Trump said earlier in the week.

On Friday, Mexico’s president warned that Trump’s tariff’s “could trigger a far-reaching humanitarian crisis, directly affecting hospitals, food supplies and other basic services for the Cuban people”. ...

In a social media post on Friday, Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, accused Trump of trying to stifle the island, writing: “Under a false and baseless pretext … President Trump intends to suffocate the Cuban economy by imposing tariffs on countries that sovereignly trade oil with Cuba.” ... This follows robust anti-Cuba briefings all week from Washington. A story in the Wall Street Journal reported officials were actively seeking members of the Cuban government who “would cut a deal”, echoing reports that the US contacted members of Maduro’s inner circle before toppling the Venezuelan strongman.

‘It’s really sad’: US TikTok users rethink app over concerns about privacy and censorship

Many TikTok users across the US say they’re rethinking their relationship with the platform since its ownership and terms and conditions have recently changed, with some citing censorship and lack of trust as reasons why they’re removing themselves from the app. ....

TikTok, the short-form video platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has faced scrutiny after the decision to create a new US-based entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture, in an effort to avoid being banned in the country. Investors in the majority US-owned venture include Oracle, which is owned by Trump ally Larry Ellison, the private equity-group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX, who will own 80.1% of the new entity. ByteDance will own the remaining 19.9%.

TikTok’s new deal has been accompanied by changes to app’s terms and conditions, reports of technical issues and a growing debate among users and creators about privacy and censorship. The daily average of US users deleting the TikTok app has increased 195% from 22 Januaryto 28 January compared to the previous 90 days, according to data collected by Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm.

Many social media users have voiced concern over language in the app’s terms and conditions, which specifically point out the types of data that TikTok may collect on its users, including “racial and ethnic origin” and “sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information”. That language was present in the previous version of platform’s terms, which were updated in 2024, but one noticeable new feature in the terms is the explicit acknowledgment that TikTok collects precise location data (unless you opt out), as reported by Mashable.

TikTok user Julia, a 32-year-old caregiver based in Washington, told the Guardian that she deleted the app as soon as she heard about the company’s new agreement. “I trust Oracle and Ellison about as much as I trust eating a raw burger on a hot summer day,” she said.

Portland mayor demands ICE leave city after federal agents teargas protesters

The mayor of Portland, Oregon, demanded US Immigration and Customs Enforcement leave his city after federal agents launched teargas at a crowd of demonstrators – including young children – outside an ICE facility during a weekend protest that he and others characterized as peaceful.

Witnesses said agents deployed teargas, pepper balls and rubber bullets as thousands of marchers arrived at the South Waterfront facility on Saturday. Erin Hoover Barnett, a former OregonLive reporter who joined the protest, said she was about 100 yards (91 metres) from the building when “what looked like two guys with rocket launchers” started dousing the crowd with gas.

“To be among parents frantically trying to tend to little children in strollers, people using motorized carts trying to navigate as the rest of us staggered in retreat, unsure of how to get to safety, was terrifying,” Barnett wrote in an email to OregonLive.

Portland mayor Keith Wilson said the daytime demonstration was peaceful, “where the vast majority of those present violated no laws, made no threat and posed no danger” to federal agents. “To those who continue to work for ICE: resign. To those who control this facility: leave,” Wilson wrote in a statement on Saturday night. “Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame.”

The Portland fire bureau sent paramedics to treat people at the scene, police said. Police officers monitored the crowd but made no arrests on Saturday.

Five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father released from Texas detention center

A five-year-old boy and his father were back in Minneapolis on Sunday after being released from a Texas immigration detention center where they were held for more than a week, according to US House representative Joaquin Castro.

“Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack. Thank you to everyone who demanded freedom for Liam,” Castro, a San Antonio Democrat, said in a post on X. “We won’t stop until all children and families are home.”

The Texas politician said he picked them up from the detention center and brought them back to Minneapolis early Sunday. Liam Conejo Ramos and his father Adrian Conejo Arias were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on 20 January.

A viral photo of the five-year-old preschooler wearing a bunny hat and a plaid coat sparked outrage across the country after claims that the child, who was arrested on the driveway of his home, was used as bait to try to arrest his mother.

On Saturday, a US judge ordered the five-year-old boy and his father be released from the detention center, saying: “The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”

Two federal agents reportedly identified in fatal shooting of Alex Pretti

Government documents have identified the two federal officers who fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis as Jesus Ochoa, a border patrol agent, and Raymundo Gutierrez, an officer with Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to ProPublica. According to those records, Ochoa, 43, and Gutierrez, 35, were the agents who fired their weapons during the confrontation last weekend that resulted in Pretti’s death. The shooting sparked widespread demonstrations and renewed demands for criminal inquiries into federal immigration enforcement actions. Immediately following Pretti’s killing, the Trump administration repeatedly pushed false claims about the shooting.

At the time of the incident, both agents were participating in Operation Metro Surge, a large-scale immigration enforcement initiative that launched in December. The operation deployed numerous armed, masked agents throughout Minneapolis as part of a citywide sweep. CBP, the agency that employs both men, has declined to publicly name the agents involved and has released little additional information about the shooting. The lack of transparency has drawn heightened scrutiny, particularly because the incident occurred only days after another immigration agent shot and killed a different Minneapolis protester, Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three.

Lawmakers from both parties have since urged a full and transparent investigation into the killing of Pretti, who was 37 and worked as an intensive care unit nurse at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital.

"Billionaire Boys Club": What the Latest Epstein Files Reveal About Elite Impunity

Handling of Epstein files is ‘outrageous’, say attorneys of his sex trafficking survivors

Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation have reacted to the voluminous – and possibly last – tranche of government-held investigative documents with calls for further accountability for the scheme’s alleged clients. ... Sigrid McCawley, a partner with Boies Schiller Flexner, a firm representing survivors of the scheme said, “Those who find themselves entangled in the mire of newly released information, no doubt, will play the deny and distance card, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is exactly how the sex trafficking operation worked.” ...

Deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said several categories of pages were withheld from release, including personally identifying information of the victims, victims’ medical files, images depicting child sexual abuse and pages related to ongoing cases. Victims’ attorney Brad Edwards, however, told ABC News that there had been errors in the releases that identified victims. “We are getting constant calls from victims because their names – despite them never coming forward, being completely unknown to the public – have all just been released for public consumption,” Edwards said. “It’s literally thousands of mistakes.”

Victims attorney Jennifer Freeman said the justice department’s “handling of the Epstein files has been a mess from the start, filled with … ham-fisted redactions, while exposing the identities of survivors”. Freeman also alluded to how Friday’s release missed a congressionally set deadline that passed in December. She said that the victim-survivors and their advocates “won’t allow the federal government to simply dump a couple million documents and wash their hands of one of the largest law enforcement failures in US history”. She also accused the justice department of “hiding the names of perpetrators while exposing survivors”. ...

In the political dimension, bipartisan sponsors of the transparency law that forced the release of the documents sent a formal letter to Blanche demanding that they view the un-redacted files to ensure Congress is fulfilling its oversight duties. “Congress cannot properly assess the department’s handling of the Epstein and Maxwell cases without access to the complete record,” wrote California Democrat Ro Khanna and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie of the US House.

New EPSTEIN FILES Drops Are Pure NIGHTMARE FUEL

EPSTEIN FILES: ALL Major Trump Accusations

Todd Blanche says review of Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking case ‘is over’

The deputy US attorney general, Todd Blanche, the point person on the Trump administration’s Epstein files release, told ABC News on Sunday that prosecutors’ review of the Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell sex-trafficking case “is over”.

Separately, in comments to CNN about Epstein, Blanche said that “victims want to be made whole” after surviving the scheme attributed to the late convicted sex offender and which led to a 20-year prison sentence for Maxwell beginning in 2022. “And we want that,” Blanche said. “But that doesn’t mean we can just create evidence or that we can just kind of come up with a case that isn’t there.”

While Blanche acknowledged “there’s a lot of horrible photographs that appear to be taken by Mr Epstein or by people around him … that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody”. Blanche’s comments took aim at survivors who met Friday’s release with calls demanding further accountability for the alleged clients of Epstein and Maxwell. He also made those comments amid complaints from federal Democratic lawmakers that Friday’s release – along with a number of earlier ones – were incomplete. ...

However, US House member Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, disputed that the justice department’s Epstein investigative archive had been emptied to the extent called for by the transparency law that he co-authored. “They’ve released at best half the documents,” he told CNN. “But even those shock the conscience of this country.” Khanna alluded to some files released on Friday that revealed references to and correspondence with prominent individuals, including multibillionaire businessperson Elon Musk and commerce secretary Howard Lutnick. Those prominent figures were at times associated with Epstein, or attended private events he organized at his homes, but have not been accused of wrongdoing.

One big dirty club

Democrat flips reliably red Texas district in victory that stuns Republican party

Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a special election for the Texas state senate on Saturday, flipping a reliably Republican district that Donald Trump won by 17 points when he clinched a second presidency in 2024. Rehmet, a labor union leader and veteran, easily defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss, a conservative activist, in the Fort Worth-area district. With almost all votes counted, Rehmet had a comfortable lead of more than 14 percentage points.

His victory added to Democrats’ record of overperforming in special elections so far this cycle. Democrats said it was further evidence that voters under the second Trump administration are motivated to reject GOP candidates and their policies. ...

The seat was open because the four-term Republican incumbent, Kelly Hancock, resigned to take a statewide office. Hancock easily won election each time he ran for the office, and Republicans have held the seat for decades. The district is redder than its home, Tarrant county. Trump won the county by five points in the 2024 presidential election. But Democrat Joe Biden carried it by about 1,800 votes out of more than 834,000 cast in 2020, when he defeated Trump at the end of his first presidency.

Trump posted about the race on his Truth social media platform earlier Saturday, urging voters to get out to support Wambsganss. He called her a successful entrepreneur and “an incredible supporter” of his Make America great again (Maga) movement. But Rehmet had support from national organizations, including the DNC and VoteVets, a veterans group that said it spent $500,000 on ads. Rehmet, who served in the US air force and works as a machinist, focused on lowering costs, supporting public education and protecting jobs.

The FBI’s seizure of 2020 ballots in Georgia is a signal of what’s to come

While the nation’s attention was focused on the ICE invasion of Minneapolis, another part of Trump’s authoritarian state apparatus was in action more than a thousand miles away. On Wednesday 28 January, the FBI carried out a stunning raid at the central election facility in Fulton county, Georgia. Its purpose: to seize ballots cast in the 2020 election. Such an action is unprecedented.

In another unprecedented development, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was on the scene when the FBI carried out its raid. The New York Times quotes a “senior administration official” who explained her presence by saying Gabbard “has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure”.

The deployment of such firepower shows the lengths to which the president is willing to go to press his claim that the 2020 election was rigged and to lay the groundwork for the seizure of ballots in 2026. The seizure of ballots in Georgia is like a shot across the bow. ...

After the FBI raid, the president reposted the following to his Truth Social account: “President Trump’s legal team exposing the 2020 election fraud at the Georgia State Farm Arena … running the same stacks of ballots over, and over, and over, all through the night until Biden was ahead, stealing the election from President Trump. This is exactly why the FBI raided the election center today … This is only the beginning. prosecutions are coming.” The president added, “TRUMP WON BIG. Crooked election.”

It seems that in the world he wants to create, there is no future until the injuries (whether real or imagined) done to him are made right. Just last week, during his speech to the World Economic Forum, Trump reiterated that 2020 “was a rigged election”. And he added: “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did.” And in the Trump administration, what the president wants, the president gets. That’s why the FBI seized what it did in Fulton county.

‘Corruption on a Breathtaking Level’: Report Details Massive Foreign Investment in Trump Crypto Firm

A bombshell Saturday report from the Wall Street Journal revealed that a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family secretly backed a massive $500 million investment into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture months before the Trump administration gave the United Arab Emirates access to highly sensitive artificial intelligence chip technology.

According to the Journal’s sources, lieutenants of Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan signed a deal in early 2025 to buy a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the startup founded by members of the Trump family and the family of Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

Documents reviewed by the Journal showed that the buyers in the deal agreed to “pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities,” while “at least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with” the Witkoff family.

Weeks after green lighting the investment into the Trump crypto venture, Tahnoon met directly with President Donald Trump and Witkoff in the White House, where he reportedly expressed interest in working with the US on AI-related technology.

Two months after this, the Journal noted, “the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters.”

Tahnoon in the past had tried to get US officials to give the UAE access to the chips, but was rebuffed on concerns that the cutting-edge technology could be passed along to top US geopolitical rival China, wrote the Journal.

Many observers expressed shock at the Journal’s report, with some critics saying that it showed Trump and his associates were engaging in a criminal bribery scheme.

“This was a bribe,” wrote Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, in a social media post. “UAE royals gave the Trump family $500 million, and Trump, in his presidential capacity, gave them access to tightly guarded American AI chips. The most powerful person on the planet, also happens to be the most shamelessly corrupt.”

Jesse Eisinger, reporter and editor at ProPublica, argued that the Abu Dhabi investment into the Trump cypto firm “should rank among the greatest US scandals ever.”

Democratic strategist David Axelrod also said that the scope of the Trump crypto investment scandal was historic in nature.

“In any other time or presidency, this story... would be an earthquake of a scandal,” he wrote. “The size, scope and implications of it are unprecedented and mind-boggling.”

Tommy Vietor, co-host of “Pod Save America,” struggled to wrap his head around the scale of corruption on display.

“How do you add up the cost of corruption this massive?” he wondered. “It’s not just that Trump is selling advanced AI tech to the highest bidder, national security be damned. Its that he’s tapped that doofus Steve Witkoff as an international emissary so his son Zach Witkoff can mop up bribes.”

Former Rep. Tom Malinkowski (D-NJ) warned the Trump and his associates that they could wind up paying a severe price for their deal with the UAE.

“If a future administration finds that such payments to the Trump family were acts of corruption,” he wrote, “these people could be sanctioned under the Global Magnitsky Act, and the assets in the US could potentially be frozen.”

How Trump’s EPA rollbacks could harm our air and water – and worsen global heating

In his first year back in office, Donald Trump has fundamentally reshaped the Environmental Protection Agency, initiating nearly 70 actions to undo rules protecting ecosystems and the climate.

The agency’s wide-ranging assault on the environment will put people at risk, threatening air and water quality, increasing harmful chemical exposure, and worsening global warming, experts told the Guardian. The changes amount to “a war on all fronts that this administration has launched against our health and the safety of our communities and the quality of our environment,” said Matthew Tejada, the former director of the EPA’s environmental justice program. “It is an attempt to completely eliminate the EPA and just leave a symbolic husk,” said Tejada, who is now senior vice-president of environmental health at the national green group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Since January last year, Trump’s EPA has launched a total of 66 actions to roll back or weaken environmental rules – a stunning rate of more than one a week – an analysis by the Guardian has found. Based on research by NRDC, that total comprises a wide variety of moves, from issuing rule exemptions for polluters, to shuttering the agency’s research and development office, to initiating efforts to repeal the legal finding underpinning virtually all US climate regulations. The moves have come as federal officials repeatedly pledged to return the agency to its “core mission” of protecting the environment and human health. But in reality, the EPA has “abandoned” its mission, said Jeremy Symons, a former EPA policy adviser. “The Environmental Protection Agency is now the Environmental Pollution Agency, helping polluters at the expense of human health,” he said. [Much more detail at the link. - js]

Mexico moves to combat pollution following Guardian investigations

The Mexican government has announced it will pursue a sweeping array of tactics to combat industrial pollution, from $4.8m in fines against a plant processing US hazardous waste to the rollout of a new industrial air-monitoring system, following investigations by the Guardian and Quinto Elemento Lab, a Mexican investigative unit. Those stories revealed high levels of heavy-metal contamination in the neighborhood around the factory, Zinc Nacional, in the Monterrey metropolitan area, and showed the broader extent of industrial pollution in the region, linked to Monterrey’s role in manufacturing and recycling goods for the US market.

The investigations found that facilities are releasing more toxic heavy metals into the city’s air than the totals reported in many US states, and more carbon dioxide than nearly half the world’s nations. In an announcement last week, the government said it would establish a new atmospheric monitoring network for industry, “the first of its kind in Latin America”. It said the system will measure emissions from industry, including heavy metals.

Mariana Boy Tamborrell, Mexico’s federal attorney for environmental protection, said the latest moves represent a new wave of enforcement against industrial pollution in Mexico. They originated when the first stories were published in early 2025 and include Zinc Nacional agreeing to address environmental damage, according to her agency. “The work we have done over the past year with Zinc Nacional is a watershed moment in how we monitor and inspect regulatory compliance by industries,” she said in a statement.

Details of the new air-monitoring system remain unclear, and the agency did not provide the information by the time of publication. It is unclear whether this will be for Monterrey or the whole country. Additionally, the nation’s main environmental regulator has announced it is updating air and soil contamination standards, some of which have not been revised for decades. ...

Zinc Nacional, a Mexican company that imports highly toxic dust left over after the US steel industry recycles old cars and appliances, must undertake 24 corrective measures in addition to the fine. The company is required to relocate some of its operations to a new plant outside residential areas of densely populated Monterrey and to build new containment and water treatment facilities. It must remediate contaminated land, reforest 12 acres (5 hectares) and monitor future emissions.

Fossil fuel firms may have to pay for climate damage under proposed UN tax

Fossil fuel companies could be forced to pay some of the price of their damage to the climate, and the ultra-rich subjected to a global wealth tax, if new tax rules are agreed under the UN. Negotiations on a planned global tax treaty will resume at the UN headquarters in New York on Monday, with dozens of countries supporting stronger rules that would make polluters pay for the impact of their activities.

But developing countries are worried the current draft of the proposals is too weak, and want more robust backing from the rich world. Clear proposals on taxing the profits of fossil fuel companies have been watered down in their language, and proposals for a global asset registry that would help in taxing wealthy individuals have been removed from the text.

Marlene Nembhard Parker, main delegate for Jamaica at the negotiations for the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, said: “In the context of Hurricane Melissa, which wiped the equivalent of 40% off our GDP overnight, it is time that the draft template text on sustainable development gets fleshed out. A much clearer link now needs to be made to environmental taxation and climate change, with clearer agreements on the actions that must be taken, nationally and internationally, particularly for the countries and industries who are most responsible.”

Progress on the tax treaty, which was first proposed by African countries in 2022, has been slow so far. The US has withdrawn from the talks, though this need not prevent other countries pressing ahead. Some rich countries have also argued that tax matters should be discussed within the OECD, of which only advanced economies are members, rather than within the UN, where all countries have a say.

If it can be made to work, the treaty could be a big step forward in making fossil fuel producers pay for the damage they cause, and in ensuring the richest contribute. Inequality rates have soared in recent years, with the wealthiest 0.001% of the population – roughly 56,000 people – holding three times more wealth than the poorer 50%, and the disparity is growing. ... Countries are losing $492bn (£359bn) a year in tax, as multinational corporations and wealthy individuals use tax havens to underpay, according to the Tax Justice Network (TJN).

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