US president says ‘we have a lot of ships’ going in that direction and that Washington is watching Iran closely
Donald Trump has said a US “armada” is heading towards the Middle East and that the US is monitoring Iran closely, as activists put the death toll from Tehran’s bloody crackdown on protesters at 5,002.
Speaking on Air Force One as he returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos overnight, he said: “We have a lot of ships going that direction, just in case. I’d rather not see anything happen, but we’re watching them very closely … we have an armada ... heading in that direction, and maybe we won’t have to use it.”
Renee Nicole Good’s killing is the latest example of the president’s outrageous – and blatant – assaults on the truth
With Donald Trump back in office for a year, it seems increasingly clear what his motto should be: “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” Whether about grocery prices, January 6, Ukraine or actions by ICE agents, Trump keeps making astonishingly false statements that contradict what we can see with our own eyes.
In recent weeks, Trump has once again sought to bamboozle us into not believing what we saw – the most egregious recent example involved the ICE agent who killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Within hours of her death, Trump smeared Good on Truth Social, saying that the 37-year-old mother of three belonged to “a Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate” and that she “viciously ran over the ICE officer”. Trump added, “It is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”
Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues
Researchers found a new way to filter and destroy Pfas chemicals at 100 times the rate of current systems
New filtration technology developed by Rice University may absorb some Pfas “forever chemicals” at 100 times the rate than previously possible, which could dramatically improve pollution control and speed remediations.
Researchers also say they have also found a way to destroy Pfas, though both technologies face a steep challenge in being deployed on an industrial scale.
The only positive of this stranger-than-fiction scenario is that Greenland and Denmark stand more united than ever
Adam Price is the creator of the TV series Borgen
As a writer of political fiction for many years, including four seasons of my TV series Borgen, I find myself in the strangest of landscapes watching Donald Trump desperately wanting Greenland like a spoilt child who has never heard the word “no”.
We dedicated an episode to Greenland in the first season in 2010 and then it became the main setting for the fourth season in 2022. Our focus on this former colony of Denmark, and its amazing Indigenous people, was motivated by one big factor. For political drama I always look for stories with emotion, and the old colonial tale of Denmark and Greenland is full of it.
Following the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis, the Guardian’s Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone travel to the heart of affected neighbourhoods to speak with residents who are fighting to defend their community from violence and intimidation. They embed with ICE watch groups, hear from Somali-American residents, and witness a swarm of federal agents conduct a sweep in the suburbs
US president’s $5bn lawsuit against JP Morgan and Jamie Dimon follows a steady rise in tensions between the two men
Weeks after Donald Trump’s first shock election win, bosses from across corporate America were scrambling to enter the president’s orbit.
Business leaders ranging from the General Motors boss, Mary Barra, to Disney’s chief, Bob Iger, quickly signed up to a new advisory council in 2016 to help shape the aggressively pro-growth policies of this new populist politician. Among them was the head of America’s largest bank: Jamie Dimon, the chair and chief executive of JP Morgan.
‘Russia’s continued attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure are deliberately depriving civilians of heat, light and basic services,’ an EU commissioner said
The European Commission has offered a bit more detail on the deployment of 447 emergency generators from EU reserves to Ukraine, mentioned in the earlier post (12:33).
“The generators – mobilised from rescEU strategic reserves hosted in Poland – will be distributed by the Ministry for Development of Communities and Territories of Ukraine in cooperation with the Ukrainian Red Cross to the most affected communities.
The EU will not let Russia freeze Ukraine into submission and will continue helping Ukrainians get through this winter.”
They are designed to break Ukrainian spirit. They will fail.
We won’t let Russia freeze Ukraine. We bring light and warmth where Russia sends darkness.
With conflict averted for now, European leaders will be tempted to retreat to their comfort zone of cowardice. But the next crisis will soon be here
Donald Trump’s climbdown, after days of escalation during which he had refused to rule out a military attack to annex Greenland, was spectacular. In his Davos speech, Trump repeated his desire to own Greenland, claiming that you cannot defend what you do not own, only to then announce that he would not conquer the Arctic island by force. Hours later, he claimed that he had reached an unspecified deal on Greenland, and would therefore refrain from imposing additional tariffs on those European countries that had had the audacity to participate in a joint military exercise in Greenland at Denmark’s invitation.
We know neither the details of the framework agreement reached by Trump and the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, nor whether it carries any weight, given the US president’s fickleness. But it appears that the deal,while open to discussing Arctic security, mineral rights and possibly even the sovereignty of US bases, preserves Greenland’s sovereignty within the Kingdom of Denmark. In short, this has been a remarkable U-turn.
Despite US pushback, officials in west Africa say controversial hepatitis B study on pause amid ethics concerns
US health officials insisted it was still on. African health leaders said it was cancelled. At the heart of the controversy is the west African nation of Guinea-Bissau – one of the poorest countries in the world and the proposed site of a hotly debated US-funded study on vaccines.
The study on hepatitis B vaccination, to be led by Danish researchers, became a flashpoint after major changes to the US vaccination schedule and prompted questions about how research is conducted ethically in other countries.
Trump’s remarks and Project 2025’s proposals have made the plan clear. Democrats must focus on stopping it
Last week, during an Oval Office Interview with Reuters, Donald Trump touted his accomplishments and suggested that they are so great that “we shouldn’t even have an election” in November. Not surprisingly, that comment made headlines.
But it is at best a distraction from the real threat: the United States will have elections this year, but they will not be free and fair.
A “no work, no school, no shopping” blackout day of protest was kicked off by community leaders, faith leaders and labor unions on Friday in protest against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surge in the state.
The “Day of Truth & Freedom” protest comes in the wake of the killing of Renee Good, the unarmed woman killed by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis earlier this month.
The Trump administration has paused immigrant visa processing for people from 75 countries. We’re looking to speak to applicants, especially those close to a final decision, about the impact of the suspension
We would like to hear from people from countries on the visa ban list who are currently in the immigrant visa application process, particularly those who are at an advanced or final stage.
Since the end of the second world war, all eyes have been on Russia. Yet Trump’s increasingly erratic, hostile presidency is shattering old assumptions
One of the things that the depleted, often denigrated British state is still pretty good at is persuading the public that another country is a threat. As a small, warlike island next to a much larger land mass, Britain has had centuries of practice at cultivating its own sense of foreboding. Arguably, preparing for conflict with some part of the outside world is our natural mindset.
Warnings about potential enemy countries are spread by our prime ministers and major political parties, intelligence services and civil servants, serving and retired military officers, defence and foreign affairs thinktanks, and journalists from the right and the left. Sometimes, the process is relatively subtle and covert: reporters or MPs are given off-the-record briefings about our “national security” – a potently imprecise term – facing a new threat.
Keir Starmer has accused Donald Trump of “diminishing” the sacrifice of fallen British soldiers by claiming that those who fought in Afghanistan avoided the frontlines, as the US president faced a fierce backlash from all sides of the UK political spectrum as well as the families of veterans.
Keep Calm and Carry On: that’s not how people felt as the second world war loomed. But maybe, as Trump stalks, that old slogan is finally making sense
It has become known as the “war of nerves”. An apt name for a jittery, jangling time in British history, consumed with fear of what may be coming, in which the sheer unpredictability of life became – as the historian Prof Julie Gottlieb writes – a form of psychological warfare. Contemporary reports describe “threats of mysterious weapons, gigantic bluff, and a cat-and-mouse game intended to stampede the civilian population of this island into terror”.
It all sounds uncannily like life under Donald Trump, who this week marched the world uphill to war, only to amble just as inexplicably back down again. But Gottlieb is actually describing the period between the Munich crisis of 1938 and the blitz beginning in earnest in September 1940. Her fascinating study of letters, diaries and newspapers from the period focuses not on the big geopolitical picture but on small domestic details, and what they reveal about the emotional impact of living suspended between peace and war: companies advertising “nerve tonics” for the anxious, reports of women buying hats to lift their spirits and darker accounts of nervous breakdowns. We did not, contrary to popular myth, all Keep Calm and Carry On. Suicide rates, she notes, rose slightly.
By turning conflict into entertainment US games company is ignoring its living legacy, says victims rights’ group
It pits the IRA against the British army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, it lets players plant bombs and make political deals and it promises to wrap up the conflict within six hours.
Welcome to the Troubles – the provisional board game version. The brainchild of a US games company, The Troubles: Shadow War in Northern Ireland 1964-1998, is played with dice, tokens and a deck of 260 cards.
Majority US-owned venture includes Larry Ellison’s Oracle, private-equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX
TikTok announced on Thursday it had closed a deal to establish a new US entity, allowing it to sidestep a ban and ending a long legal battle.
The deal finalized by ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, sets up a majority American-owned venture, with investors including Larry Ellison’s Oracle, the private-equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX owning 80.1% of the new entity, while ByteDance will own 19.9%.
While leaders of many liberal democracies declined to sign on, Mark Carney had, before Davos, accepted in principle
Donald Trump withdrew on Thursday an invitation for Canada to join his “board of peace” initiative aimed at resolving global conflicts.
“Please let this Letter serve to represent that the Board of Peace is withdrawing its invitation to you regarding Canada’s joining, what will be, the most prestigious Board of Leaders ever assembled, at any time,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post directed at the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney.
Fetal tissue has been used to advance research into diabetes, Alzheimer’s, infertility and vaccines
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will no longer fund research that uses human fetal tissue obtained from “elective” abortions, the world’s biggest public funder of biomedical research announced on Thursday.
The ban marks the latest, and most dramatic, effort by the Trump administration to end research that uses fetal tissue from abortions – a goal that anti-abortion advocates, who oppose the research, have sought for years. In 2019, during Donald Trump’s first term in office, the NIH stopped funding internal research that involved the tissue and implemented a review committee to evaluate research proposals from scientists outside the government. Joe Biden ended that policy in 2021.
In post-Davos speech, Canadian PM jabs at Trump, saying the arc of history ‘can still bend towards progress and justice’
Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, said his country must be a “beacon to a world that’s at sea” and that national unity was critical as his government faces a dramatic reshaping of the world political order – and mounting domestic challenges
The national address, given at a historic military fortress in Quebec City, was far narrower in scope than the prime minister’s remarks earlier in the week at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland. Dubbed the ‘Carney Doctrine’, the Davos speech lamented the disintegration of rules-based order amid a rise of “great powers” that used economic “coercion” as a weapon.
US president says his qualms over the opinion poll would be added to existing defamation lawsuit against the paper
Donald Trump has said he is expanding his defamation suit against the New York Times after an unfavorable opinion poll.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, the US president said his qualms about the Times Siena poll would be added to his existing defamation lawsuit against the newspaper.
Guardian analysis shows images are the same, with Nekima Levy Armstrong looking composed in original but sobbing after alteration
The White House posted a digitally altered image of a woman who was arrested on Thursday in a case touted by the US 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 St Paul, Minnesota, on Sunday. Demonstrators alleged that one of the pastors, David Easterwood, was the acting field director of the St Paul Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. Bondi announced the arrests on social media on Thursday morning.
Refusal to approve charges against Lemon in connection with Minnesota protest reportedly ‘enraged’ Pam Bondi
A federal magistrate judge declined to sign off on charges against Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor, in connection with a protest at a Minnesota church over the weekend, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The magistrate’s decision “enraged” the attorney general, Pam Bondi, according to NBC News and CNN.
Connexion
