Music: Bremer/McCoy — ‘Forenet + Højder’
Hundreds of clergy descend on Minneapolis to join the resistance against ICE
Religion News Service reports: Around 200 faith leaders fanned out across the city on Thursday (Jan. 22) to observe and document the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with some clergy confronting Department of Homeland Security agents, adding a visible religious presence to widespread efforts to counter the president’s mass deportation campaign in the region. The faith leaders, who are in Minneapolis as part of a larger convening focused on religious pushback to ICE, deployed to neighborhoods with significant immigrant…
100 clergy arrested protesting against ICE at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport
The Wall Street Journal reports: During demonstrations in Minneapolis on Friday, roughly 100 clergy members were arrested at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Mostly Christian clergy and faith leaders rallied at the airport, where they claimed planes were flying detained migrants out of the state as part of ICE’s “Operation Metro Surge,” according to Justin Lind-Ayres, a Lutheran pastor in Minneapolis. The MSP Airport Police Department confirmed officers made arrests, but didn’t immediately confirm how many. Protesters at the airport, some…
Trump’s stormtroopers are terrorizing Minnessotta and they won’t stop there
Don Moynihan writes: We use words like “police state.” Then we see it happen. To watch is not the same as to experience it, of course. Of being afraid to leave your house. Or having a classmate, co-worker, or family member disappear. But the images make it more real. It removes any illusion that it could not happen here. It is happening here. We see it happening here, if we are willing to look. In recent weeks, the paramilitary occupation…
Federal judge rules ICE raids require judicial warrants, contradicting secret ICE memo
Wired reports: A federal judge in Minnesota ruled last Saturday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents violated the Fourth Amendment after they forcibly entered a Minnesota man’s home without a judicial warrant. The conduct of the agents closely mirrors a previously undisclosed ICE directive that claims agents are permitted to enter people’s homes without a warrant signed by a judge. The ruling, issued by US District Court judge Jeffrey Bryan in response to a petition for a writ of…
Trump’s retreat on Greenland proves that retaliation — not conciliation — is the answer to his hardball tactics
The Washington Post reports: After President Donald Trump used his bully pulpit in Davos, Switzerland, to demand “the acquisition of Greenland by the United States — just as we have acquired many other territories throughout our history” — and then backed down on the same day, many officials here see a lesson for the European Union: Pushing back works. The brazen ultimatum — give up Greenland or face tariffs — elicited a level of unity that largely had eluded the…
German soccer federation official wants World Cup boycott considered because of Trump
The Associated Press reports: A German soccer federation executive committee member says it’s time to consider a World Cup boycott because of the actions of U.S. President Donald Trump. Oke Göttlich, the president of Bundesliga club St. Pauli and one of the German federation’s 10 vice presidents, told the Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper in an interview on Friday that “the time has come” to “seriously consider and discuss this.” Trump has sowed discord in Europe with his takeover bid for Greenland…
Science is drowning in AI slop
Ross Andersen writes: On a frigid Norwegian afternoon earlier this month, Dan Quintana, a psychology professor at the University of Oslo, decided to stay in and complete a tedious task that he had been putting off for weeks. An editor from a well-known journal in his field had asked him to review a paper that they were considering for publication. It seemed like a straightforward piece of science. Nothing set off any alarm bells, until Quintana looked at the references…
Music: Dhafer Youssef — ‘Winds And Shadows’
Renee Good’s killing is being used by the Trump regime to show they can get away with murder
Radley Balko writes: Police agencies in the United States kill more than 1,000 people each year. After many of those deaths, the agencies involved put out statements. Those statements often use what’s known as the exonerative voice to minimize officers’ involvement. The first statement from the Minneapolis Police Department after George Floyd’s death, for example, said that the officers at the scene “noted that he appeared to be suffering from medical distress.” Quite the understatement. These communications often cast events…
Autopsy indicates shot to the head that killed Renee Good was fired when Ross was in no danger
NBC News reports: An autopsy commissioned by the family of Renee Good, who was fatally shot by an immigration officer in Minneapolis this month, found that she suffered three clear gunshot wounds, including one to her head, lawyers for her family said Wednesday. One of the injuries was to Good’s left forearm, the lawyers said in a statement, while another gunshot struck her right breast without piercing major organs. Neither of those wounds was immediately life-threatening, the attorneys said. A…
What images of a detained five-year-old boy reveal about Trump’s brutal ICE crackdown
Robert Tait writes: As symbols of the indiscriminate disproportionality of the Trump administration’s militant anti-immigrant crusade in Minneapolis, the images are hard to surpass. One recent image shows the innocent figure of Liam Ramos, a five-year-old preschooler wearing a blue bobbled winter hat, standing next to a black vehicle with a dark-clad adult figure standing behind him, whose hand is proprietorially placed on his backpack. A second picture depicts the same child at the door of a house, with what…
The American threat: Three words I never imagined writing
Nicholas Kristof writes: President Trump pounces on weakness, but retreats from strength. That’s one reason for Europe’s present troubles: For too long it was weak both toward President Vladimir Putin of Russia in the East and toward the new menace arising in the West. That’s certainly Trump’s perception. “I think they’re weak,” Trump said last month of European leaders, and he had a point. They fawned over him and meekly surrendered as he steamrolled them with tariffs. Trump was preying…
White House propagandists post digitally doctored image of woman arrested after ICE protest
The Guardian reports: The White House posted a digitally altered image of a woman who was arrested on Thursday in a case touted by attorney general Pam Bondi, to make it seem as if she was dramatically crying, a Guardian analysis of the image has found. The woman, Nekima Levy Armstrong, also appears to have darker skin in the altered image. Armstrong was one of three people arrested on Thursday in connection to a demonstration that disrupted church services in…
Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media
The Guardian reports: Political leaders could soon launch swarms of human-imitating AI agents to reshape public opinion in a way that threatens to undermine democracy, a high profile group of experts in AI and online misinformation has warned. The Nobel peace prize-winning free-speech activist Maria Ressa, and leading AI and social science researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale are among a global consortium flagging the new “disruptive threat” posed by hard-to-detect, malicious “AI swarms” infesting social media and…
Cells that are not our own may unlock secrets about our health
Tracy DeStazio writes: During pregnancy, maternal and fetal cells migrate back and forth across the placenta, with fetal cells entering the mother’s bloodstream and tissues. They can settle in maternal organs such as the thyroid, liver, lungs, brain and heart—and can persist there for decades. Conversely, maternal cells can enter the fetus and be passed down to future generations, essentially creating a lifelong connection between mothers, their offspring and their descendants. In other words, we all carry little pieces of…