Tim Walz, state’s Democratic governor and Jacob Frey, Minneapolis mayor, have been vocal critics of immigration crackdown
The US justice department is investigating Minnesota’s political leaders for allegedly conspiring to obstruct the Trump administration’s controversial immigration crackdown there, according to multiple reports.
The investigation, which CBS News first reported, marks an extraordinary use of federal power to challenge two of the crackdown’s most vocal Democratic critics, including the state’s governor, Tim Walz, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey.
White House says seven-strong board, chaired by Trump, will steer Gaza through next phase of reconstruction
Donald Trump has appointed the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and former British prime minister Tony Blair to a newly created Gaza “board of peace”, a body he claims will steer the next phase of reconstruction and governance in the war-ravaged territory.
The White House said the seven-strong “founding executive board” will also include Trump’s special envoy, the property developer Steve Witkoff; the World Bank president, Ajay Banga; and the president’s son-in-law and long-time adviser Jared Kushner. Trump himself will serve as chair, with further appointments expected in the coming weeks.
Taking drug in pregnancy does not raise chances of autism, ADHD or intellectual disability, ‘gold standard’ review finds
Taking paracetamol in pregnancy does not increase the chance that the child will be autistic, or have ADHD or an intellectual disability, a “gold standard” review of the evidence has found.
The findings debunk Donald Trump’s claims last September that the painkiller causes autism, which were condemned by medical, women’s health and scientific organisations around the world.
Grand jury in Ohio charged Michael David McKee, 39, with aggravated murder and burglary for fatal shootings
An Ohio grand jury has indicted an Illinois surgeon in the double homicide of his ex-wife and her dentist husband, who were killed in their Columbus home in December in a case that initially generated nationwide mystery.
Court records show a Franklin county grand jury charged Michael David McKee on 16 January with aggravated murder and aggravated burglary while using a firearm suppressor.
Wanda Vázquez Garced, who accepted plea deal over campaign finance violation, endorsed Trump in 2020
Donald Trump reportedly intends to pardon Puerto Rico’s former governor Wanda Vázquez Garced, who was indicted in 2022 on federal corruption charges surrounding her earlier gubernatorial campaign.
In addition to Vázquez, Trump plans to pardon her co-defendants including Julio Martín Herrera Velutini, founder of Britannia Financial Group; as well as Mark Rossini, a former FBI agent who served as a consultant for Herrera, according to CBS, which first reported the development on Friday.
Astrid Tuminez will step down as Utah Valley University president in May as school still reckons with Kirk’s murder
Astrid Tuminez, Utah Valley University’s seventh president, will step down at the end of the semester. She announced the decision on Wednesday during a State of the University address, speaking to a packed audience of students and faculty.
Tuminez, 61, said in an interview that the decision to step down had been building for some time. “There’s never a good time,” she said. “I love UVU so much.” The choice, she explained, came with a mix of grief and relief. “It is a swirl of emotion. I am heartbroken on one hand, but also happy and excited on the other, because life has its rhythms.
Ads to be placed alongside answers as OpenAI looks to beef up revenue for flagship AI product
ChatGPT will start including advertisements beside answers for US users as OpenAI seeks a new revenue stream.
The ads will be tested first in ChatGPT for US users only, the company announced on Friday, after increasing speculation that the San Francisco firm would turn to a potential cashflow model on top of its current subscriptions.
The US president wants Americans to believe they are facing an emergency. The real danger is from his administration
In Minnesota, armed and masked agents are ripping families apart. They are seizing parents while they wait with their child at a bus stop, going door to door seeking undocumented migrants and breaking car windows to drag people out. Last Wednesday an officer shot dead Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American citizen. Her killing is a tragedy for all who loved her, and most of all for the three children left motherless. It also marks her country’s crossing of a Rubicon.
Where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) once preferred to keep a low profile, it now seeks publicity and confrontation – pumped up on billions of dollars in funding, the aggression and brazenness of the administration and the licensing of bigotry.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Rochelle Bilal, Philadelphia’s sheriff, warned ICE agents last week: “If any of them want to come in this city and commit a crime, you will not be able to hide.
“Nobody will whisk you off,” she said. “You don’t want this smoke, ’cause we will bring it to you.”
John Ratcliffe meets Delcy Rodríguez in Caracas less than two weeks after his agents helped to oust her precedessor
The CIA chief whose agents reputedly played a key role in abducting Nicolás Maduro has flown to Venezuela to meet his successor as the sidelined opposition leader, María Corina Machado, vowed she would become the country’s first elected female president.
Machado’s comments were broadcast on Friday, a day after she handed her Nobel peace prize medal to Donald Trump in recognition of what she called a principled and decisive move against Maduro, whom US special forces snatched on 3 January.
Actor held without bond in New Mexico on child abuse charges stemming from twin brothers’ complaint
With allegations of prior sexual misconduct against him continuing to mount, Timothy Busfield received an expression of support from his wife and fellow actor, Melissa Gilbert – as he was also ordered held without bond in connection with on-set child abuse charges in New Mexico.
A statement that a representative for Gilbert, known best for her work on Little House on the Prairie, shared with media outlets said she “supports her husband” and was keeping “her focus … on supporting and caring for their … family, as they navigate this moment”.
US bombs are not the answer, but there’s much the outside world can do – starting with noticing the horror unfolding in Tehran
Did you notice history being made this week? I am not referring to what may have been the most pathetic moment in recorded time – Donald Trump gratefully taking the Nobel peace prize medal from the woman who actually won it – nor the defection of a politician from one British rightwing party to another, but something grimmer. For this week witnessed what could well prove to be a landmark chapter in the blood-soaked history of the Middle East.
Thanks to an information blackout caused by Tehran’s decision to switch off the internet, it is hard to be precise about what just happened on the streets of Iran. But one official has admitted to a death toll of 2,000. CBS News put the number of dead at 12,000, while some warn it could be many thousands more – all of them Iranian civilians, gunned down for daring to protest against their government and to demand a better life.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Trump continues to claim, baselessly, that people protesting against federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis are ‘highly paid professionals’
Trump began his remarks today by undermining the Affordable Care Act, and touted his newly unveiled “Great Healthcare Plan”.
A reminder that Affordable Care Act subsidies, that were extended during the Covid pandemic, expired at the end of last year, and legislation to revive them has stalled in Congress.
New incident reports from the Minneapolis police and fire departments, along with transcripts of 911 calls, provide new details about the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good last week in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer.
According to a Minneapolis fire department incident report obtained by the Guardian, along with police records and 911 transcripts, paramedics arrived at the scene at about 9.42am on 7 January and found Good “unresponsive” in the driver’s seat of her car, “with blood on her face and torso”.
Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on countries that do not “go along” with his plan to annex Greenland, increasing pressure on European allies who have opposed his effort to take over the Arctic territory.
After a tense week in which Nato allies deployed troops to the largely autonomous territory, which is part of the Danish kingdom, the US president announced he might punish countries that do not support his plans to take over Greenland, using force if necessary.
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, accusing federal immigration authorities in Minnesota of racial profiling and unlawful arrests.
Experts say central banks are increasingly stuffing their vaults as an insurance policy in a volatile world
Fifteen minutes after takeoff, the call came for Serbia’s central bank governor: millions of dollars’ worth of gold bars, destined for a high-security Belgrade vault, had been left on the runway of a Swiss airport.
In air freight – despite the extraordinary value of bullion – fresh flowers, food and other perishables still take priority. “We learned this the hard way,” Jorgovanka Tabaković told a conference late last year.
Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, said he expected there was “nothing to see here” as the US Department of Justice pursues its criminal investigation of Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair.
The Trump administration has faced a chorus of criticism in recent days after it emerged that the justice department had served the Fed with grand jury subpoenas, in a significant escalation of its extraordinary attack on the US central bank’s independence.
European countries sending troops to the island is only raising the temperature and generating fear – exactly what the US president wants
Is Greenland Donald Trump’s 25th-amendment moment? Last time around, this was when the Washington “grownups” debated his capacity to be president, notably in the final fortnight of his presidency, after the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Under the constitution, a president can be replaced should the vice-president and a cabinet majority decide their leader is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”. The trouble today is that there are no grownups.
The US president’s designs on Greenland are clearly mad. He claims Russia and China are scheming to seize the island and that Denmark should be forced urgently to transfer its sovereignty. Denmark had long allowed the US extended military access to Greenland, but Trump seems to want to own it. None of his staff has been able to say why.
When he returned to power last year, Trump was eager to negotiate a new deal with Tehran, but a diplomatic breakthrough has been elusive
Will Donald Trump order a US military attack on Iran? That question captivated the world for the past two weeks, as the US president issued bellicose threats warning the Iranian regime not to crack down on nationwide protests demanding economic and social reforms. On Tuesday, as he was scheduled to be briefed by Pentagon officials on various options for a strike, Trump posted a message on social media urging Iranians to continue their demonstrations and take over government institutions. The president signaled that he was leaning toward ordering an attack, telling protesters that “help is on its way”.
But by Wednesday, Trump pulled back from the brink of a military intervention, saying he had received assurances from “very important sources” that Iran had stopped killing protesters and was not moving forward with executions. A group of US allies in the Middle East – including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Turkey – seem to have succeeded in a last-ditch effort to convince Trump not to launch airstrikes against Tehran, warning it could unleash a wider conflict in the region. While many Sunni-led Arab states resent Shia Iran’s influence in the Arab world, they are also worried about retaliatory attacks by Iran and its allies, an influx of refugees and a civil war that could lead to the collapse of the Iranian state.
Any Lucía López Belloza was detained at Boston’s airport in November and flown to Honduras two days later
The Trump administration apologized in court for a “mistake” in the deportation of a Massachusetts college student who was detained trying to fly home to surprise her family in Texas for Thanksgiving.
But the administration still argued that the federal government error should not affect her immigration case.
US president criticised for accepting medal awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado
Political leaders in Norway have condemned the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado’s“absurd” decision to present her Nobel peace prize medal to Donald Trump, accusing the US president of being a “classic showoff” who takes credit for other people’s work.
The Nobel laureate gave her medal to Trump at the White House on Thursday “in recognition [of] his unique commitment [to] our freedom”. Several hours later, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Machado “presented me with her Nobel peace prize for the work I have done. Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect.”
No one wants to visit us any more – but they might pay $50,000 for a bag you could get here for $3
There aren’t many escapes from the grim onslaught of terrible news these days. You can stare at a blank wall, obsessively count the hairs on your arm, or, in a true moment of desperation, ponder the state of global fashion. I prefer the last one. I love being on the cutting edge of style, peacocking out in the decaying slopfest that is our planet. A crisp, well-made suit is a cure for all manner of emotionally trying times. I relish being hyper-aware of the goings-on of fashion, so I was one of the first sorry souls to learn of the current global obsession with flimsy canvas Trader Joe’s shopping bags.
For those unaware, Trader Joe’s is an American grocery store chain known primarily for its affordable prices, whimsical tropical branding, and heart-attack-inducing parking lots – apparently designed to be small because the stores themselves are so tiny that they can’t justify more spaces. I don’t naturally see the use in swanning about with a tote bag promoting a demolition derby disguised as a market, but I’m not most people.
Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist
Connexion
