Music: Dhafer Youssef — ‘Electric Sufi’
Warrantless searches: Immigration officers assert sweeping power to disregard the Fourth Amendment
The Associated Press reports: Federal immigration officers are asserting sweeping power to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judge’s warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by The Associated Press, marking a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches. The memo authorizes ICE officers to use force to enter a residence based solely on a more narrow administrative warrant to arrest someone with a final order of removal, a move…
ICE detainee’s death a homicide. DHS claimed he was attempting suicide, then tried to deport witnesses
The Washington Post reports: The recent death of a detainee at an immigrant detention camp in Texas has been officially deemed a homicide, according to an autopsy report released Wednesday by the El Paso County Office of the Medical Examiner. “Based on the investigative and examination findings, it is my opinion that the cause of death is asphyxia due to neck and torso compression,” Adam C. Gonzalez, deputy medical examiner for El Paso County, said in the report. “The manner…
How Trump turned ICE and CBP into a fascist secret police
Garrett Graff writes: It’s sometimes hard to capture just how far the looking glass we are in American politics and daily life, but here’s one snapshot: I was on Audie Cornish’s CNN show last Thursday morning, which I always try to do when I’m in Washington, D.C., and at the time I went to bed the night before, we were prepping to talk about some combo of the following: The US takeover of Venezuela and Donald Trump’s meeting with its…
Trump regime social-media managers have turned official feeds into streams of neo-Nazi xenophobia
Ali Breland writes: The U.S. Labor Department is embracing Nazi slogans and tropes, the Pentagon’s research office is deploying neo-Nazi graphic elements in its social-media feeds, and the Department of Homeland Security recently posted lyrics mimicking a popular song by a band with ties to an ethno-nationalist social club. The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery. The leaders of these departments so far refuse to answer questions about…
Mark Carney: The rupture in the world order
The full text of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, yesterday (with his opening remarks translated from French by Paul Wells): It’s a pleasure — and a duty — to be with you at this turning point for Canada and the world. I’ll speak today about the rupture in the world order, the end of the pleasant fiction and the dawn of a brutal reality in which great-power geopolitics is unconstrained. But…
Trump drops Greenland tariffs threat, citing vague ‘concept of a deal’ over territory
The Guardian reports: At a Nato meeting on Wednesday, military officers from member states of the transatlantic alliance discussed a compromise through which the US would be granted sovereignty over small pockets of Greenland, the New York Times reported, citing three unnamed senior officials. Two of the officials compared the proposal with the UK’s military bases in Cyprus, which are regarded as British territory, it said. Aaja Chemnitz Larsen, a Greenlandic member of the Danish parliament, wrote on Facebook Wednesday…
‘Minority Report policing’: UK believes that through AI ‘the eyes of the state can be on you at all times’
The Telegraph reports: Criminals could be stopped before they strike under Minority Report-style policing plans. Police chiefs are evaluating around 100 projects in which officers are trialling the use of AI to help combat crime. The expanded use of AI and technology by police – with the aim of putting the “eyes of the state” on criminals “at all times” – is expected to be part of police reforms by Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, in a white paper next…
Music: Dhafer Youssef — ‘Ysamy’
Europe wields $8 trillion ‘sell America’ weapon as Trump reignites a trade war over Greenland
Fortune reports: As the European Union weighs options to retaliate against President Donald Trump’s latest tariffs, its most potent weapon may be in financial markets. France is already urging the EU to deploy its “anti-coercion instrument,” which can target foreign direct investment and finance as well as trade. That’s after Trump announced new U.S. tariffs on NATO countries that sent troops to Greenland amid his plans to take over the semi-autonomous Danish territory. At face value, a 10% tariff rising…
‘Morally acceptable’ for U.S. troops to disobey orders, Catholic archbishop says
The Washington Post reports: As the Trump administration intervenes in Venezuela, readies troops for a possible deployment to Minnesota and threatens to seize Greenland, the Catholic archbishop for the U.S. armed forces said it “would be morally acceptable” for troops to disobey what violated their conscience. Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio is one of a chorus of Catholic leaders questioning the administration’s use of force. His comments also underscored the mounting concern being voiced by the first American pontiff, Pope Leo…
How Trump has used his presidency to pocket more than $1.4 billion
The New York Times editorial board writes: President Trump has never been a man to ask what he can do for his country. In his second term, as in his first, he is instead testing the limits of what his country can do for him. He has poured his energy and creativity into the exploitation of the presidency — into finding out just how much money people, corporations and other nations are willing to put into his pockets in hopes…
The catastrophe overtaking America right now is the responsibility of Trump’s enablers
Paul Krugman writes: Trump is so deeply unwell that it’s time to stop blaming him for all the terrible things he’s doing. He is what he is. Responsibility for the catastrophe overtaking America now rests with his enablers — people who have to know that he’s a sick man but continue to support his depredations. Some of these enablers are monsters themselves. For example, Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar and the architect of his violent ethnic cleansing policies, is clearly…
The correct response to Dachau was not to suggest the guards needed better training
Andrea Pitzer writes: Events are moving so quickly that it’s worth stopping to assess where we are. The U.S. government is currently building massive detention facilities, already detaining tens of thousands of people there and elsewhere, with incompetent and deeply racist secret police sweeping undocumented all kinds of people—immigrants, those with their paperwork in order, and US citizens alike—off the street. We’re hearing grass-roots calls to abolish ICE, while opposition leadership instead speaks mostly about affordability issues. When they do…
American importers and consumers foot the bill for Trump’s tariffs, study finds
Kiel Institut reports: • The 2025 US tariffs are an own goal: American importers and consumers bear nearly the entire cost. Foreign exporters absorb only about 4% of the tariff burden—the remaining 96% is passed through to US buyers. • Using shipment-level data covering over 25 million transactions valued at nearly $4 trillion, we find near-complete pass-through of tariffs to US import prices. • US customs revenue surged by approximately $200 billion in 2025—a tax paid almost entirely by Americans….
‘Board of Peace’: Trump is running Gaza, and the world, like a mafia boss
David Hearst writes: Everyone and his dog appears to have been invited on US President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” but thus far only Morocco, Albania, Argentina, Hungary and Vietnam have accepted. With admission priced at $1bn, and with the suspicion they could be joining a half-baked proposal to sideline the UN, it is little wonder that few are rushing in. The Board of Peace is supported by a founding executive board, which is stacked full of people who denied…