US president announces efforts being made to strike a deal having earlier threatened to stop island importing oil

Washington is negotiating with Havana’s leadership to strike a deal, Donald Trump has said, days after threatening Cuba’s reeling economy with a virtual oil blockade.

“Cuba is a failing nation. It has been for a long time but now it doesn’t have Venezuela to prop it up. So we’re talking to the people from Cuba, the highest people in Cuba, to see what happens,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida on Sunday.

After stories revealed high levels of contamination in neighborhood around factory processing US toxic waste, government announces sweeping array of tactics

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.

Melania, however, cost quite more than a typical documentary, at $40m to make and $35m to promote.

Amazon’s Melania Trump documentary has reportedly beaten box office expectations and recorded the strongest start of any documentary in over a decade, taking $7m at the US box office during its lavishly-promoted opening weekend. But it also cost quite more than a typical documentary, at $40m to make and $35m to promote.

And Amazon – which recently cut 16,000 corporate jobs – has been hit with criticism that making the documentary about the first lady, and paying so highly for it, was little more than a ploy to curry favor with her husband, Donald Trump, during his second presidency.

ICE’s killing of Renee Good has revealed how the state will only defend those who uphold a white racial order. A 1915 film points to the origins of this social pact

In the hours after the 7 January fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three, gut-wrenching footage of her killing was released, discrediting initial claims from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the Department of Justice that she was shot in self-defense. As a response to the public outcry, the Trump administration and a chorus of conservative public figures unleashed a litany of dehumanizing and defamatory remarks about Good, a beloved wife, neighbor and dental assistant, in ways that were unduly callous.

The Fox News host Jesse Watters derided Good’s queer identity, and mocked her as a “self-proclaimed poet from Colorado with pronouns in her bio”. The homeland security secretary Kristi Noem vilified Good as a domestic terrorist who “weaponized” her vehicle in an attempt to run over officers – a patently false comment. Laura Loomer, a personal adviser to the president, posted to social media, “She deserved it … I’m shocked her lesbian girlfriend wasn’t shot with her.” JD Vance lobbed the biting accusation that the victim was “a deranged leftist”, before adding that “it’s a tragedy of her own making”. Donald Trump justified the shooting, telling reporters that “at a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement”. And on 17 January, the justice department announced a criminal investigation into claims tying her grieving widow, Becca Good, to unnamed “activist groups” (six federal prosecutors resigned in objection to the investigation).

In Trump’s first term, activists focused on lobbying and voting. Now tactics are shifting to nonviolent civil disobedience

On 24 January, Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents while he was helping another civilian in Minneapolis who had been knocked to the ground – just weeks after an ICE agent killed Renee Good. In response to this second killing of a Minnesotan, demonstrations spread across the United States to protest the Trump administration and its ultra-violent immigration enforcement tactics.

Minneapolis has been in a state of sustained protest. Its general strike on 23 January mobilized tens of thousands of Minnesotans to participate in an economic blackout and march in the streets. Solidarity protests, strikes and marches also took place across the country, including the Free America Walkout, which involved more than 900 local actions across all 50 states on the anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

In the final part of this series, we look at how infighting has ripped the left apart online while the right has flourished – and how some progressives are turning the tide

• Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London

• Part one: How liberals lost the internet

• Part two: How the right won the internet

There is politics before the internet, and politics after the internet. Liberals are floundering, the right are flourishing, and what of the left? Well, it’s in a dire state. This is despite the fact that the key political problems of the last decade – rising inequality and a cost of living crisis – are problems leftists claim they can solve. The trouble is, reactionaries and rightwingers steal their thunder online, quickly spreading messaging that blames scapegoats for structural problems. One reason for this is that platforms originally built to connect us with friends and followers now funnel us content designed to provoke emotional engagement.

Back when Twitter was still the “town square” and Facebook a humble “social network”, progressives had an advantage: from the Arab spring to Occupy Wall Street, voices excluded from mainstream media and politics could leverage online social networks and turn them into real-life ones, which at their most potent became street-level protests that toppled regimes and held capitalism to account. It seemed as though the scattered masses would become a networked collective empowered to rise up against the powerful.

Robert Topinka is a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London

Arctic air will freeze Tennessee and Florida, as 230,000 households in region remain without power in area

Freezing weather that will reach deep into Florida was moving across the south-eastern US on Friday as millions braced for another weekend blast of winter storms following last week’s deadly assault that killed at least 85 people.

Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in southern states were without power for a sixth day on Friday as the next onslaught of blizzards, ice and biting cold winds approached.

The man who created House Party, wrote for the Black Panther comics, produced Django Unchained and briefly ran BET talks his illustrious career

Reginald Hudlin’s home office is a monument to an audacious American dream – the Black scion who grew up far from Hollywood glamour and rose to become one of the industry’s most adaptable storytellers. On the walls, a framed Black Panther comic page he penned glints under glass near a portrait of Jamie Foxx – a souvenir from Hudlin’s stint producing Django Unchained – and a piece of the Martin Luther King memorial that he was gifted while shooting the Disney sports drama Safety. “Look, I’m pleased with my life,” he tells me with a wry smile. “But honestly it’s taken a lot of trickery to get people to let me do these crazy things. It’s taken a lot of effort, but the reward is always worth it.”

Hudlin may be the nearest thing in Hollywood to a real-life Forrest Gump, given the things he’s done, the folks he’s worked with and the history he’s made. On Marvel Comics’ Black Panther graphic novel, Hudlin was the writer who repositioned the franchise as an explicit Black empowerment allegory, laying the foundation for Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster feature films. On the big screen, Hudlin has directed Eddie Murphy in Boomerang, Samuel L Jackson in The Great White Hope and Chadwick Boseman in Marshall.

It took six years to identify the condition that caused my chronic pain: a blood sugar dysregulation condition

Seven years ago, when I was 27, I got my first-ever migraine. Ten months later, it was still there.

Even after the 10-month migraine ended, frequent weeks-long migraine attacks and bouts of stabbing “icepick” headaches kept me in pain more often than not. I was a software engineer at Facebook, but had to take leave from work because looking at my laptop screen made my head scream in revolt. I would never go back.

Natalie Mead publishes a Substack called Oops, My Brain about life with chronic illness and recovery. She is also working on a memoir about the tension between love and caregiving in chronic illness

Projects in development expected to grow global capacity by nearly 50% amid growing concern over impact on planet

The US is leading a huge global surge in new gas-fired power generation that will cause a major leap in planet-heating emissions, with this record boom driven by the expansion of energy-hungry datacenters to service artificial intelligence, according to a new forecast.

This year is set to shatter the annual record for new gas power additions around the world, with projects in development expected to grow existing global gas capacity by nearly 50%, a report by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) found.