Rising fears that another US shutdown looms pushes gold price to new height amid nearly 90% rise since Trump’s inauguration

• Business live – latest updates

Gold has jumped above $5,000 an ounce for the first time, as Donald Trump’s chaotic policies and proclamations drive more investors to seek safe harbour in the precious metal.

The price of the yellow metal reached a record high of $5,100 on Monday morning, before easing back to settle up 2.2% at $5,089.

This is the news we should be paying attention to. At least for the moment, everything else is a distraction

When we talk about our inability to pay attention, to concentrate, we often mean and blame our phones. It’s easy, it’s meant to be easy. One flick of our index finger transports us from disaster to disaster, from crisis to crisis, from maddening lie to maddening lie. Each new unauthorized attack and threatened invasion grabs the headlines, until something else takes its place, and meanwhile the government’s attempts to terrorize and silence the people of our country continue.

So let me break it down. There is one story: our country is on the brink of an authoritarian takeover. In Minneapolis an innocent poet and an ER nurse at a VA hospital were both killed in cold blood by federal agents. It is happening now. Toddlers are being sent to detention centers; videos of their gyms for kids recall the youth choruses that the Nazis so proudly showed off at the Terezín concentration camp. Intimidation and violence are being weaponized against the citizens of Minneapolis, some of whom are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being beaten, arrested and shackled, regardless of whether they are US citizens or asylum seekers or people from another country peacefully living and working here for decades.

Francine Prose is a former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

PM says recent agreement just cuts tariffs on a few sectors, as Trump threatens 100% tariffs on Canadian imports

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, said on Sunday his country had no intention of pursuing a free trade deal with China, responding to Donald Trump’s threat to impose a 100% tariff on goods imported from Canada if the US’s northern neighbour went ahead with a trade deal with Beijing.

Carney said his recent agreement with China merely cut tariffs on a few sectors that were recently hit with them.

News of Tracee Mergen’s decision came before agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, another US citizen in Minneapolis

A supervisor in the FBI’s Minneapolis field office who unsuccessfully attempted to investigate the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in the city on 7 January has resigned, according to multiple reports.

News of agent Tracee Mergen’s resignation surfaced shortly before federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday. Pretti and Good were both 37-year-old US citizens.

Flood of boasts, broadsides and conspiracy theories leaves envoys sifting for the signal within the Trumpian noise

How does one keep tabs on, and then interpret, a president who in a single year sent out more than 6,000 social media posts, conducted more than 433 open press events and held free-associating press conferences lasting close to two hours? The White House Stenographer’s Office calculates it has transcribed 2.4 million of Trump’s words, four times the length of Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace.

Tracking Trump is not just a problem for exhausted reporters – but also exhausted diplomats, who are tasked with searching for the signal in the ceaseless Trumpian noise.

A massive winter storm on 24 January dumped snow and freezing rain from New Mexico to North Carolina as it swept across the US towards the north-east, threatening tens of millions of Americans with blackouts, transportation chaos and bone-chilling cold. After battering the country’s south-west and central areas, the storm system began to hit the heavily populated mid-Atlantic and north-eastern states as a frigid air mass settled in across the nation

Former president and first lady say killing should be ‘wake-up call’ and federal agents are not operating in lawful way

Pressure mounted on Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday to fully investigate the previous day’s killing by federal immigration officers of 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Calls for an investigation have come from all sides of the political divide after video analysis showed officers had removed from Pretti a handgun he was reportedly permitted to carry – and which he was not handling – before fatally shooting him.

• 37-year-old shot dead by federal agents on Saturday

• Angel Reese and Ryan Clark also post about shooting

• Hall of famer Alan Page reportedly at anti-ICE protests

A number of prominent US sports stars have condemned the killing of a registered nurse, Alex Pretti, by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday.

Pretti, 37, is the second person shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis in less than three weeks as protests over Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown sweep the city. Senior Trump administration officials have claimed Pretti intended to “massacre” federal officers with a handgun but video of the killing appears to contradict those claims.

The president’s approval ratings are plummeting and most Americans see him as an aberration. It is now up to them to curtail his despotic reign

Donald Trump is a monster, and a stupid one at that – as his foul slander of British soldiers who served in Afghanistan shows. His bid to seize loyal ally Denmark’s sovereign territory; his norm-shattering, profoundly ignorant speech in Davos last week; and his contemptuous bullying of UK and EU leaders have definitively demonstrated what an existential, unappeasable, unspeakable menace the 47th US president truly is.

All the post-Davos talk is about what the UK, the EU and Nato must do in future to resist and constrain Trump, and how to counter his attempts to demolish the global rules-based order. Yet a sense of proportion is required. If his policies and posturing are removed from the equation, it’s clear that the unedifying but familiar postwar world of great power rivalries and de-facto spheres of influence remains largely unchanged. Continuities outnumber ruptures. It’s also clear this crisis is not ultimately one Europe can solve.

Experts say guidance is ‘refreshing’ as it puts more emphasis on responsibility of companies and society

The American Academy of Pediatrics has released new guidance on how to protect children’s mental health in the digital age – emphasizing the need for systemic changes as well as parental engagement that goes beyond limiting screen time.

Jessica Schleider, an adolescent psychologist and professor at Northwestern University whose lab develops digital mental health interventions, said the new policy statement was “really refreshing to see”, because it contrasts with conventional wisdom that places too much of the safety burden on individual parents. Common advice like “limiting individual youth access to screens”, or asking parents to keep tabs on their children’s every digital movement is “not only impossible, but for adolescents in particular, potentially invasive”, Schleider said.

Alex Pretti’s death could be a moment of reckoning for Democrats to call time on Trump waging war on his people

Wearing helmets, gas masks and camouflage fatigues, the federal agents took aim and prepared to open fire. “It’s like Call of Duty,” one could be heard saying via a TV mic, referring to a first-person shooter military video game. “So cool, huh?”

This was the scene on the streets of Minneapolis on Saturday after armed agents, wearing masks and tactical vests, wrestled 37-year-old Alex Pretti to the ground and shot him dead. The killing took place just over a mile from where Renee Good was fatally shot on 7 January, a scene that itself was less than a mile from where police murdered George Floyd in May 2020.

In the search for stability, some western nations are turning to a country that many in Washington see as an existential threat

If geopolitics relies at least in part on bonhomie between global leaders, China made an unexpected play for Ireland’s good graces when the taoiseach visited Beijing this month. Meeting Ireland’s leader, Micheál Martin, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China’s president, Xi Jinping, said a favourite book of his as a teenager was The Gadfly, by the Irish author Ethel Voynich, a novel set in the revolutionary fervour of Italy in the 1840s.

“It was unusual that we ended up discussing The Gadfly and its impact on both of us but there you are,” Martin told reporters in Beijing.

Sea lion named Confetti was rescued early January and has ‘really great chance’ of being released, marine biologist says

A rescued sea lion is recovering in Los Angeles after a marine care center discovered he had two bullets in his head.

The sea lion, named Confetti, was rescued from Ballona creek, a watershed connected to the Santa Monica bay, on 5 January, the Marine Mammal Care Center Los Angeles announced on Thursday.

US president asks ‘whatever happened to global warming?’ Well, it could be making our winter storms worse

Donald Trump has erroneously cited an enormous winter storm that is set to deliver freezing temperatures and heavy snow to half of the US as supposed proof that the world is not heating up due to the burning of fossil fuels.

Trump, who has repeatedly questioned and mocked established climate science in the past, posted of the storm on Truth Social: “Rarely seen anything like it before. Could the Environmental Insurrectionists please explain – WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???”