Major disturbance in the Earth’s magnetic field may make northern lights visible far more south than usual
The aurora could be visible across Canada and much of the northern tier of US states on Monday night, and possibly even further south, following a major disturbance in the Earth’s magnetic field, a forecast shows.
The forecast, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s space weather prediction center, comes amid intense geomagnetic and solar radiation storms, said Shawn Dahl, service coordinator at the center.
Holiday marked with parades and services but tempered by anxieties over racial and social equality under Trump
Martin Luther King Jr Day was marked with parades and services across the US on Monday. But the celebration for the achievements of the slain 60s civil rights leader was tempered by contemporary anxieties over racial and social equality and Trump administration’s crackdown in Minneapolis.
At a rally in Harlem, the Rev Al Sharpton referred to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother of three who was killed by an immigration officer in Minneapolis earlier this month.
A second man being held at a US immigration detention facility in Texas has died in two weeks, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said on Monday.
Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, originally from Nicaragua, was found “unconscious and unresponsive in his room” on 14 January at the Camp East Montana detention facility in El Paso, ICE said in a press release.
Blair, Putin, Erdoğan, Orbán: the names of those invited to serve say it all. And it's about so much more than Gaza
The fate of the Palestinian people offers a warning about the future of humanity. When I recently visited the West Bank, Palestinians kept impressing the same point on me: Israel has turned their land into a laboratory. The technology of oppression that it has deployed – including in its genocide in Gaza – ranges from hi-tech surveillance to military drones and AI on the battlefield. These technologies have been exported to oppressive states across the world. And it doesn’t stop there.
This brings us to Donald Trump’s “board of peace”, now set to rule Gaza. In the sleepy Oxfordshire village of Sutton Courtenay, where George Orwell lies buried, the ground itself ought to be shaking. This isn’t peace. It’s naked neocolonialism.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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US president tells Norwegian PM he no longer feels obliged to think ‘purely of peace’ as relations with Europe plunge into chaos
Donald Trump has linked his repeated threats to seize control of Greenland to his failure to win the Nobel peace prize, as transatlantic tensions over the Arctic island escalated further and threatened to rekindle a trade war with the EU.
In an extraordinary text message sent on Sunday to the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, the US president wrote that after being snubbed for the prize, he no longer felt the need to think “purely of peace”.
New Jersey musician said during concert in home state that US core values ‘have never been as endangered’ as now
Bruce Springsteen used a Saturday concert to decry what he called the “Gestapo tactics” of the Trump administration’s surge of immigration officers and said the country’s founding values “have never been as endangered as they are right now”.
While performing in his home state of New Jersey, Springsteen dedicated his 1978 song The Promised Land to Renee Good, the 37-year-old woman who was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minnesota.
US justice department announced it is investigating protesters in Minnesota who disrupted church services
Kristi Noem first denied that federal agents were using chemical agents against protesters, then after being shown video footage turned to blaming the protesters themselves, as tensions continued to run high amid the Trump administration’s surge of federal officers into Minneapolis.
The head of homeland security, who has acted as spearhead for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in the city – known as “Operation Metro Surge” – told the CBS show Face the Nation on Sunday that her department had not used pepper spray against crowds.
Oscar-nominated actor says his lawyer was trying to reimburse those who had donated money to a GoFundMe appeal set up allegedly to raise funds for the star
The actor Mickey Rourke has again spoken out against the GoFundMe appeal set up in his name, purportedly to raise funds for the star, who is currently in financial hardship.
Earlier this month, the actor – who made his name in 1980s action and romance films before being Oscar nominated for his 2008 comeback, The Wrestler – declared he had nothing to do with the crowdfunder.
Toady, or not toady? That is the question. When even Piers Morgan has taken his head out of Donald Trump’s bum far enough to see a glimmer of daylight, then it’s fair to say the US president has probably overstepped the mark.
Not content with threatening tariffs against the UK and seven EU countries for sending troops to Greenland – having previously demanded Nato allies get stuck in to protect the country from Russia and China – The Donald has now sent a letter to the Norwegian prime minister to complain about not winning the Nobel peace prize and to say he was so pissed off he was thinking of starting a war instead.
Countries due to play on Valentine’s Day in Italy amid Trump threats to seize Danish territory of Greenland
Their rendezvous may be on Valentine’s Day, but its nature looks likely to be anything but romantic: Denmark and the US, their relations frostier than they have been for decades, are due to face each other in ice hockey next month.
Data shows 133% increase from 2017 to 2025 as anti-ICE and No Kings protests push mobilization against White House
In the year since Donald Trump retook office, the number of protests in the US outpaced those at the same point in his first administration, according to data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, an open-source project collaboration between Harvard University’s Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut.
There were more than 10,700 protests in 2025, a 133% increase from the 4,588 recorded in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term. According to the data, an overwhelming majority of US counties – including 42% that voted for Trump – have had at least one protest since he was re-inaugurated last year.
The champion will be decided on 19 July in New Jersey. Here’s a rundown of the issues that will shape the tournament as it comes to North America
We’re only six months from the biggest single sporting occasion in the world. On 19 July in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the men’s World Cup final will kick off and a champion will be crowned (although it will be hard to top the last one).
The final will be more than a coronation (or confirmation, if Argentina repeat as champions). It will also be a culmination of six weeks of near non-stop soccer played across three countries, four time zones, and 16 cities. It’s likely that conclusions will already be drawn at that point on how the whole tournament fared. But for now, at this semi-convenient milestone, it’s worth taking stock of where we are six months out.
Trust had $254m invested in companies such as Chevron, BP and Shell in 2024, a nine-year record, analysis shows
The Gates Foundation Trust holds hundreds of millions of dollars in fossil fuel extractors despite Bill Gates’ claims of divestment made in 2019.
End-of-year filings reveal that in 2024 the trust invested $254m in companies that extract fossil fuels such as Chevron, BP and Shell. This was a nine-year record and up 21% from 2016, Guardian analysis found. Adjusting for inflation, it was the highest amount since 2019.
Over 2 million documents are under DoJ review despite ‘legal obligation’ from Epstein Files Transparency Act
The law was clear: Donald Trump’s Department of Justice was required to disclose all investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein by 19 December 2025, with rare exceptions.
One month after this deadline mandated by Congress’s Epstein Files Transparency Act, however, Trump’s justice department has not complied with this law, prompting questions about when – and whether – authorities will ever release investigative documents about the late sex offender.
Critics draw ‘direct line’ between content by Nick Sortor and similar figures and violent actions of federal agents
A rightwing influencer, who appeared to admit that he recently drove his truck at protesters in Minneapolis, has for years cooperated with the Trump administration even while he has been repeatedly accused of escalating conflict for video content he pumps out to 1.2 million followers on X.
Nick Sortor has received full-throated support of the Trump administration after an October arrest in Portland, and attended an October 2025 White House influencer roundtable on “antifa”.
These are the federal agencies detaining people across the US – mostly, but not all, under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security
When the Trump administration ordered a surge of armed federal immigration enforcement personnel on to the streets of Minneapolis, the Department of Homeland Security declared it the largest operation in its history and the liberal midwestern city became Donald Trump’s latest chosen hotspot.
Such escalations mark the US president’s agenda of mass arrests and deportations from the US interior. The highest-profile efforts involve officers from multiple agencies rushing to prominent Democratic-led US cities, against local leaders’ wishes. But coast to coast, federal officers have been raiding homes, businesses, commercial parking lots – even schools, hospitals and courthouses. The efforts have delighted the president’s hardcore Make America Great Again voter base, but are also tearing families apart and spreading fear and even death on the streets and in detention.
Martin Luther King Jr knew that ‘whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly’. But we Americans are denying that reality
The United States seems determined to turn its back on the rest of our planetary neighbors. The Trump administration’s recent decision to withdraw from 66 international treaties, conventions and organizations is striking for the range of its rejections. Everything from the global treaty on climate change to multilateral efforts to address migration and cultural heritage, clean water and renewable energy, and the international trade in timber and minerals has been summarily dismissed as “contrary to the interests of the United States”.
It’s no surprise that an administration hellbent on physical walls around the United States would also put up such walls of indifference, as if all of these longstanding collective efforts were simply “irrelevant” to our interests as a country, as the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, put it in a public statement. And yet, as we know, the reality of contemporary life on Earth is so profoundly otherwise. How has the truth of our interconnectedness with others elsewhere become so difficult to grasp in the United States?
People across the US are moving on from the empty platitudes MLK Day often evokes – and embodying King’s words
This year, the Dr Martin Luther King Jr holiday forces Americans to grapple with the crisis and protests that have spread across the country, particularly in Minneapolis. Each year on this holiday, we reflect on King’s life and legacy. We wonder about what he might make of this moment. Though civil rights protesters in the 1950s and 60s were repeatedly met with extreme state violence, Americans are now facing a president who is troublingly more powerful than past figures such as the notorious segregationist and Alabama governor George Wallace.
Militarized and masked federal police forces, abetted by a corrupted justice department, are expansive and employ far more deadly weapons against protesters today. Civil rights leaders often sought federal intervention to combat localized racial violence in the south. But now, local and state officials, along with ordinary citizens who have been galvanized by federal violence, are combating government crackdowns against immigrants and their neighbors. Over the span of a week, ICE agents killed an American wife and mother of three, Renee Good, and shot a man from Venezuela during a traffic stop. They have arrested and detained American citizens and have terrorized neighborhoods, businesses and schools. Their irrational, unprofessional and unconstitutional actions have caused chaos, panic and harm throughout American cities. This is far from the progress King dreamed of, and he used his last years to warn Americans to refuse comfort, the status quo, and bring oppression to an end.
Ter Apel, a small, unassuming Dutch town near the German border, is a place tourists rarely have on their itinerary. There are no lovely old windmills, no cannabis-filled coffee shops and on a recent visit it was far too early for tulip season.
When foreigners end up there, it is for one reason: to claim asylum at the Netherlands’ biggest refugee camp, home to 2,000 desperate people from all around the world.
Willy Esquivel was delivering nearby when neighbors asked him to help Ann Edwards, who lives alone in Santa Ana
A United Parcel Service driver at work recently charged into a burning home outside Los Angeles and carried a centenarian woman out to safety in what officials called a “remarkable” example of “people looking out for one another in a moment of need”.
As his heroics drew attention in online circles dedicated to finding uplifting stories in the media, Willy Esquivel told the Los Angeles news outlet KTLA that he was “just a UPS driver who was in the right place at the right time”.
In a nod to Trump’s efforts on Ukraine, Starmer says he recognises the US president’s role in pushing for ceasefire there – as he says “we will work closely with the United States, Ukraine and our other allies to apply pressure where it belongs: on Putin.”
In his strongest criticism of Trump yet, Starmer goes on to say:
A trade war is in no one’s interest, and my job is always to act in the UK’s national interest.
Connexion
