Every House Democrat and two Republicans voted in favor of the measure. If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation. The latest in a series of congressional efforts to rein in President Donald Trump's military aggression against Venezuela failed Thursday as Republican lawmakers again defeated a war powers resolution by the tightest possible margin. House lawmakers voted 215-215 on H.Con.Res.68 — introduced last month by Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.) — which “directs the president to remove US armed forces from Venezuela unless a declaration of war or authorization to use military force for such purpose has been enacted.” By the tightest margin, Republicans blocked a War Powers Resolution to stop Trump's illegal military action to take Venezuela's oil.Trump is losing support in Congress. The American people are sick of foreign conflicts. Progressives will not stop until we end these wars. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). It also mandates that lawmakers approve any troop deployments lasting longer than 60 days. Trump has also imposed an oil blockade on the South American nation, seizing seven tankers. Since September, the US has also been bombing boats accused of transporting drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. “If the president is contemplating further military action, then he has a moral and constitutional obligation to come here and get our approval,” McGovern said following the vote. House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks (D-NY) lamented the resolution's failure, saying, “The American people want us to lower their cost of living, not enable war.” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said on Bluesky: “Only Congress has the authority to declare war. Today, I voted for a war powers resolution to ensure Trump cannot send OUR armed forces to Venezuela without explicit authorization from Congress.” “We are deeply disappointed that the House did not pass this war powers resolution, though it's notable that it failed only due to a tie,” he said. Progressive nonprofits are the latest target caught in Trump's crosshairs. With the aim of eliminating political opposition, Trump and his sycophants are working to curb government funding, constrain private foundations, and even cut tax-exempt status from organizations he dislikes. We're concerned, because Truthout is not immune to such bad-faith attacks. We can only resist Trump's attacks by cultivating a strong base of support. The right-wing mediasphere is funded comfortably by billionaire owners and venture capitalist philanthropists. Truthout has launched a fundraiser to raise $38,000 in the next 6 days. Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Get the news you want, delivered to your inbox every day. Truthout must raise $38,000 for our basic publishing costs this month.

“I have zero doubt that they intend to withhold funds” for political reasons, one Democratic lawmaker said. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is ordering an administration-wide review of federal funding for over a dozen states, the vast majority of which are led by Democratic governors. The review will focus on federal funding for the states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington, all of which are led by Democrats. Washington, D.C. will also face a review from OMB. Even that inclusion, however, comes with a caveat: While Vermont has a Republican governor, its state legislature is controlled by Democrats, meaning its purse strings are largely controlled by that party. The review is ostensibly meant to root out “fraud” in those states, and will likely target the supposed misuse of federal funds by immigrants in particular. Although state investigators have been tackling such fraud in Minnesota for months, the Trump administration has exaggerated the scale of the fraud, seemingly in order to scapegoat immigrants and justify attempts to block billions of dollars in federal funding to states. “We are moving forward with taking fraud seriously,” a spokesperson from OMB said. That statement, however, is doubtful, given that all but one of the states OMB is targeting with its inquiry are controlled by Democrats. Democratic lawmakers panned the OMB memo for being blatantly politically motivated. It's possible, though, that a legal challenge could still block the inquiry from moving forward, as the results of the OMB investigation could be used to unfairly block Democratic-led states only, since it includes just one GOP-led state. Progressive nonprofits are the latest target caught in Trump's crosshairs. With the aim of eliminating political opposition, Trump and his sycophants are working to curb government funding, constrain private foundations, and even cut tax-exempt status from organizations he dislikes. We're concerned, because Truthout is not immune to such bad-faith attacks. We can only resist Trump's attacks by cultivating a strong base of support. The right-wing mediasphere is funded comfortably by billionaire owners and venture capitalist philanthropists. Truthout has launched a fundraiser to raise $38,000 in the next 6 days. If you have the means, please dig deep. This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the following terms: He can be found on most social media platforms under the handle @thatchriswalker. Get the news you want, delivered to your inbox every day. Truthout must raise $38,000 for our basic publishing costs this month.

Top Wall Street bankers during the Trump 2.0 era have tread carefully around the subject of politics generally and President Donald Trump specifically. The consensus has generally been: Smile and nod, stay in your lane, don't become a target. But when a Trump “affordability” proposal earlier this month targeted banks' profit engine, the mood shifted. Publicly and forcefully, Wall Street executives were telling Trump “no.” Trump sues JPMorgan and Jamie Dimon for dropping him as a customer after Jan. 6 attack But, perhaps not coincidentally, its filing in Florida state court came one day after Dimon told a room full of powerful people at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that Trump's proposal to slash credit card interest rates roughly in half would be “an economic disaster.” His law firm didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. When Trump last spring rolled out steep global tariffs that threatened to sap corporate profits, executives stayed quiet. Even when he started explicitly meddling in private companies, carving out a cut of revenue for the government from companies like Nvidia and Intel, no one spoke out. Corporate America is silent as Trump abandons free-market principles Since Trump's second term began a year ago, he and his administration have investigated, sued or brought charges against an array of perceived enemies, including media companies like CBS, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. He threatened Apple with massive tariffs last year over a perceived slight from CEO Tim Cook, and Trump said he would block Exxon from entering Venezuela because Trump didn't like CEO Darren Woods' lack of enthusiasm during a meeting of oil executives earlier this month. Sonnenfeld and his research team found that 80% of the CEOs they surveyed believed Trump was not acting in America's best interest by pressuring Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates. But for Wall Street, the president seemed to finally cross a red line with the proposed 10% cap on credit card rates. In a Truth Social post on Jan. 9, the president, who is struggling to convince voters that Republicans care about the cost-of-living crisis, said the public will no longer be “ripped off” by credit card companies, which charge an average interest rate of 20% on card purchase. Trump's affordability pledge strikes directly at the heart of Wall Street's profit engine Even though such a cap would probably need to come from Congress, the statement rattled Wall Street, prompting rare critical public statements from executives. “A rate cap is not something that we can support,” said Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup, on the bank's earnings call. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan — no stranger to being publicly dressed down by Trump — said last week that a cap wouldn't have the effect Trump is seeking: “If you bring the caps down, you're going to constrict credit, meaning less people will get credit cards and the balance available to them on those credit cards will also be restricted.” But Dimon's “economic disaster” statement at Davos was a more direct critique, coming from the most prominent figure on Wall Street, and someone who has had a rocky personal relationship with Trump. Trump and Dimon have had an uneasy relationship for years. In 2018, in a comment Dimon almost immediately walked back, the Wall Street titan told a panel at the bank's headquarters that he “could beat Trump” in a head-to-head presidential race “because I'm as tough as he is, I'm smarter than he is. Dimon's approach to the president during his second term has been far more measured. In his Davos interview, Dimon said he disagreed with some of Trump's policies, agreed with others, but largely avoided a question about why he and other CEOs have been so unwilling to stand up to the president. After a tepid statement on JPMorgan's earnings call disagreeing with Trump's credit card rates plan (“it would be dramatic on subprime”) and his criminal investigation of Powell (“not a good idea”), Trump called out Dimon publicly. “Jamie Dimon probably wants higher rates,” Trump said on January 15. Two days later, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had previously offered Dimon the Fed chair role, Trump announced he would sue. “There was never such an offer and, in fact, I'll be suing JPMorgan Chase over the next two weeks for incorrectly and inappropriately DEBANKING me after the January 6th Protest,” Trump said on Truth Social. CNN's Matt Egan, Chris Isidore and Phil Mattingly contributed reporting. US market indices are shown in real time, except for the S&P 500 which is refreshed every two minutes. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. Market holidays and trading hours provided by Copp Clark Limited.

Days after Brooklyn Peltz Beckham exposed the depth of his rift with his parents, David and Victoria Beckham, in a blistering Instagram post, the DJ who performed at his wedding has offered his account of the now-infamous dance that contributed to the feud. Nicola Peltz Beckham, Brooklyn's new wife, left the room “crying her eyes out,” after Brooklyn danced with his mother, Victoria, before her at their April 2022 wedding, DJ Fat Tony told British TV show This Morning on Friday. As for the dance itself, “there was no slutdropping, there was no black cat PVC catsuits, there was no Spice Girl action,” Marnach said, dispelling some of the memes circulating on social media this week. “So Victoria is by the stage, she goes onto the stage, and of course at that point Brooklyn is literally devastated because he thought he was going to do his first dance with his wife. Then Nicola leaves the room, crying her eyes out,” Marnach said. “Brooklyn is stuck there on stage, and they do this dance, and Marc Anthony says ‘put your hands on your mother's hips' … and the whole situation was really awkward for everyone in the room.” That incident — which Brooklyn described as his mother dancing “very inappropriately on me in front of everyone,” leaving him “humiliated” — was one of several that the eldest Beckham child described in a long Instagram post Monday. In it, he accused his parents, who are among the most famous couples in the world, of trying to “ruin” his marriage to Peltz, planting stories about him in the media and of prioritizing “Brand Beckham” over the family unit. David and Victoria Beckham family drama pulls in a generation unafraid to go ‘no contact' “I do not want to reconcile with my family,” he wrote, confirming yearslong rumors of a rift. “I'm not being controlled, I'm standing up for myself for the first time in my life.” David and Victoria Beckham have not so far commented on their son's allegations. Marnach added that he had performed at several Beckham parties, describing them as a “close-knit family” who love to dance. “If (Brooklyn) felt it was inappropriate and awkward, it was inappropriate and awkward,” he said.

Ryan Wedding allegedly ran a drug-trafficking organisation that moved 60 tons of cocaine a year into Los Angeles Ryan Wedding, the Canadian Olympic snowboarder turned alleged drug kingpin, has been arrested, US law enforcement officials announced on Friday. Officials in the US allege that Wedding's organisation had moved nearly 60 metric tons of cocaine a year into Los Angeles from Mexico using a network of semitrucks. Wedding is also accused of ordering the killing of a key FBI witness as well as several other murders, including that of a couple who were killed in a case of mistaken identity. On Thursday, the FBI director, Kash Patel, was in Mexico City for meetings with the country's security chief, Omar García Harfuch. And on Friday morning he left with a souvenir: Ryan Wedding, and another, unnamed, “priority objective”. García Harfuch released a statement saying that Patel was leaving with “a non-US citizen who was arrested by Mexican authorities and is among the FBI's 10 most wanted, and a Canadian citizen who voluntarily surrendered yesterday at the US embassy”. In March, Wedding, whose nicknames include “Public Enemy”, “El Jefe” and “Giant”, was added to the FBI's list of 10 most wanted fugitives, and there was a $15m reward for information leading to his arrest. Patel, who is due to speak to the media later in the day from California, has compared Wedding to Pablo Escobar and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Wedding was allegedly being protected by the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico while he was on the run.

But this particular moment has been giving his political science degree – with a concentration in national security policy and international relations – a workout. Donald Trump's call to annex Greenland has roiled markets and flabbergasted half the world. But the president's supporters in conservative communities – to the degree that this issue has their attention at all – are apt to accept his political argument as genuine. Americans of either party are unlikely to know much about China's “Belt and Road Initiative”, a series of investments in infrastructure – ports, roads and rail across continents – to connect Chinese trade to the world, Strickland said. They are doing everything they can to reduce western influence.” (The Chinese investments in Greenland, many of which have been blocked are actually part of what it hopes to call the “Polar Silk Road”.) Strickland is one of many conservatives who believe that Trump's efforts to bring Greenland under American control are justified. “I may not necessarily agree with his approaches,” Strickland said. The technical elements for knocking down intercontinental ballistic missiles are both untested and classified. But faith is not in short supply among the converted, said Jack Watts, a Christian author in Atlanta with a large conservative social media following. “He's playing chess while others are playing checkers, and what he does they agree with even if they don't understand it.” We have an impenetrable base in Guantánamo Bay and the same thing will happen, and it won't happen near anybody that's living any place.” Voices to the farthest right of the political spectrum are leaning into the rhetoric of America as empire and Greenland as territory to conquer, taking a cue from Stephen Miller's comments earlier this month in which the senior White House adviser said to news anchor Jake Tapper that “we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. Matt Walsh, host of the rightwing Daily Wire, said that taking over Greenland by force was “worth talking about”, adding: “It's interesting to me when people today get so offended by the very notion that we would try to acquire land, that we would try to grow the empire, and in particular, that we would try to do it by force … that's the only way that America exists in the first place.” (In Davos on Thursday Trump said he would not consider military force in his quest.) The conservative commentator Erick Erickson described Trump's fixation on Greenland as evidence of “insane impulse control issues”, arguing that the fixation on Greenland was a product of isolationism within his cabinet. “The crazy thing here is that I agree with Donald Trump about the strategic importance of Greenland,” Erickson wrote in his newsletter. “But this is counterproductive to accomplishing the security goal he wants. The Europeans cannot now be seen to be bullied into giving up 840,000 square miles of territory to an unhinged and obsessive 80-year-old.” Alabama Republicans are focused more on political primaries than international politics. Hotly contested races for governor, US senator and statewide offices could upend Alabama politics this year. But the Greenland news has been hard to ignore. “I'd hate to say it's all in the wrong hands,” Mobley said of Greenland. “I think it's a security point … I would just like Trump to make sure that we maintain security for us and all of our allies.” Antonio Ruiz is a former Army Ranger in New Braunfels, Texas. He's been to Greenland a couple of times, always on the way somewhere else. “I mean, it's not like you guys haven't seen how Trump operates. Denying China a clear shipping route through the Arctic, and Chinese bases in the region, is a valid strategic objective, Ruiz said. The discussion within conservative military circles has been about how to achieve that objective. “A majority of them are all believing that this is this is a strategic thing that needs to happen,” Ruiz said.

Ukraine's army, with about a million troops, should form the backbone of a prospective European joint forces, President Volodymyr Zelensky told journalists on Jan. 23. The statement comes after Zelensky reiterated on Jan. 20 the call to create a joint European army of at least 3 million personnel in response to growing Russian threat. They want to reach all of this by 2030, and, based on their speed, we see that this is possible," Zelensky said following the World Economic Foundation's meetings in Davos, Switzerland. Zelensky pointed out how the Ukrainian army had used European and American weapons to great and even unprecedented effect in fending off the Russian army. And this will be the backbone of such an army." The size of the Ukrainian army, as announced by Zelensky, significantly exceeds Russia's demands, which seek to ensure that, following a peace agreement, Ukraine's military would consist of no more than 600,000 personnel — a condition Kyiv categorically rejects. Yet Ukraine has reportedly agreed to limit its peacetime military to 800,000 service members, the Financial Times reported on Nov. 25, citing unnamed Ukrainian officials. A Ukrainian army of this size would still remain the second-largest European force after Russia and put it close to its current wartime strength of about 900,000 service members. Zelensky's recent remarks come nearly a year after he first called on European partners to create a new armed force at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 15, 2025, amid uncertainty over further U.S. support if Russian aggression escalates. Since then, European leaders have taken no steps toward implementing the initiative for nearly a year, according to Zelensky. Several European nations, led by the U.K. and France, have held a series of talks aimed at establishing a "Coalition of the Willing," which aim to provide Ukraine with the military guarantees underpinning a peace deal. So far, this coalition has yet to guarantee any European boots on the ground in post-war Ukraine. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump's saber-rattling over Greenland, which he wants to take from Denmark, has reinvigorated talk of a joint European army, with several nations sending token forces to military exercises on the Arctic island on Jan. 15. Kyiv, home to more than 3 million people, is still reeling from the Jan. 20 attack in which Russia launched 33 missiles and 339 drones against Ukraine. The Kyiv Independent's Chris York speaks with Adam Entous, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, about his new investigation into the first year of U.S. President Donald Trump administration's peace efforts to end Russia's war against Ukraine. Describing the plan, which was first floated in December, as a "bundle of documents," President Volodymyr Zelensky said he expects progress to be made in the future. Kyiv's utilities workers have reconnected 650 high-rise apartment buildings in the past day, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Jan. 23. Russia launched 101 drones, including roughly 60 Shahed-type deep-strike unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), into Ukraine overnight, the Air Force said. "We are interested in resolving the (war) through political and diplomatic means. But until that happens, Russia will continue to pursue its goals on the battlefield," Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said.

Ukraine is banking on more anti-ballistic air defense missiles from the U.S. following a "positive" meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Jan. 23. Above all, let's be fair: An important meeting with the United States of America. With all due respect to other leaders," Zelensky told reporters. "We actually had a positive meeting with President Trump and his team," Zelensky said. Relations between Ukraine and the U.S. have soured since Trump returned to office just over a year ago. His administration has largely cut off aid, in contrast to extensive U.S. weapons support under President Joe Biden. PAC-3s are missiles for Patriot air defense systems that are to date the only reliable defense against Russian ballistic missiles like Kinzhals and Iskanders. "Nothing else works," Zelensky said earlier this week. Of course, there will be different technical details, and on the basis of this document, other supplementary documents will come up," Zelensky said. "Now I'm waiting for the time and place from President Trump. Ukraine and the U.S. have been discussing a potential agreement for several months that is expected to include security guarantees on land, sea, and air, as well as the involvement of foreign military contingents. A European "Coalition of the Willing," led by the U.K. and France, has held several meetings but has yet to secure commitments, such as providing boots on the ground, for a post-war Ukraine. Based in Kyiv, he covers weapons production and defense tech. Originally from western Michigan, he speaks Russian and Ukrainian. His work has appeared in Radio Free Europe, Fortune, Breaking Defense, the Cipher Brief, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, FT's Sifted, and Science Magazine. Orban cited a confidential document on Ukraine's accession allegedly presented at an EU summit in Brussels on the previous day. Kyiv, home to more than 3 million people, is still reeling from the Jan. 20 attack in which Russia launched 33 missiles and 339 drones against Ukraine. The Kyiv Independent's Chris York speaks with Adam Entous, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, about his new investigation into the first year of U.S. President Donald Trump administration's peace efforts to end Russia's war against Ukraine. A fire broke out at an oil depot in the Russian city of Penza following a Ukrainian drone attack overnight on Jan. 23. They want to reach all of this by 2030, and, based on their speed, we see that this is possible," Volodymyr Zelensky said. Describing the plan, which was first floated in December, as a "bundle of documents," President Volodymyr Zelensky said he expects progress to be made in the future. Kyiv's utilities workers have reconnected 650 high-rise apartment buildings in the past day, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Jan. 23. "We spoke with President Trump about additional anti-air missiles – the PAC-3s, against ballistics, which are what we need," Volodymyr Zelensky said. Russia launched 101 drones, including roughly 60 Shahed-type deep-strike unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), into Ukraine overnight, the Air Force said. "We are interested in resolving the (war) through political and diplomatic means. But until that happens, Russia will continue to pursue its goals on the battlefield," Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said.

Canadian soldiers patrol near one of the satellite relay domes of the NORAD Shingle Point North Warning System facility in Yukon in March, 2025.Gavin John/The Globe and Mail There have been two very different Canadian reactions to our shock of realizing, slowly over the last year and then very quickly over the last week, that the United States is no longer an ally or even a competitor, but a tangible threat to Canada's well-being – and possibly its existence. One response involves reaching out and renewing connections with more reliable partners. We heard the outward-facing response in Prime Minister Mark Carney's Davos speech: We need to forge new alliances with other mid-sized countries, and reconstruct the globalized systems of open trade and collective security that have protected us since the 1940s, but without Washington. It was a summary of what Canada and European countries have been attempting to do for the past year. “Canada needs a nuclear deterrent” has become a widespread message on social media lately; a search of those words on X or Bluesky or Reddit will yield hundreds of versions, some from commentators with large audiences (interestingly, voices on the left seem to dominate). Carney calls for national unity in face of economic challenges ahead But it's also a message coming from circles of well-informed Canadians. University of Toronto political scientist Aisha Ahmad made the case that Canada needs “a bulletproof defence of its homeland” that only domestic nukes can provide. At root is the increasingly popular image of a Hobbesian 21st-century world in which nuclear-armed countries invade or conquer those without nukes, and only individual countries adopting the bomb can protect them. That is a fallacy on several levels – especially as it applies to Canada. An attack over our northern border by Russia or any other major military would immediately be viewed by Washington – regardless what sort of regime is present there and regardless its attitude toward Canada – as an incursion on its northern and Alaskan borders. And in the event that Mr. Trump decided to turn his red-white-and-blue map of North America into reality by force, we'd be no better off with nukes. The world's largest nuclear arsenal was of no help in either preventing the invasion or eventually bringing it to an end, because Ukrainians knew that Russia would not irradiate millions of its own people (the same reason why experts say that Ukraine keeping its Soviet nukes would have hastened rather than prevented a Russian invasion). Likewise, Pakistan's nuclear arsenal did nothing to prevent India's large-scale aerial bombing of hundreds of Pakistani military sites following a conventional war last year – much as it hasn't stopped India from more or less permanently occupying parts of Kashmir that international law designates as Pakistani. But we need not learn to stop worrying and love the bomb. Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

It's near enough the kind of weather that defeated Napoleon and Hitler in Russia. Yet Minnesota won't be cowed; Minnesotans are determined to brave the coldest of cold snaps to continue their street demonstrations against Donald Trump and the army of immigration agents roaming the Twin Cities rounding up illegal aliens. Theirs is the politest and in some ways most middle-class of protests. It's been a fortnight since Renee Good was shot dead by an ICE agent in what the Trump administration has insisted was an act of self-defence against a “domestic terrorist”, but which video and eyewitness evidence suggests was a needless shooting of an innocent mother. A little over five years before, George Floyd, a black man, was murdered by a white police officer who knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes until he suffocated. The killing – just a few blocks from where Good was shot and killed – triggered violent protests, arson attacks and looting. Minneapolis's third precinct police station was overrun and set ablaze. In part it's because many of those protesting are middle-class “moms” like Good, but it's also because no one wants to give Donald Trump a reason – or call it an excuse – to crackdown on a city he really doesn't like. Eighteen months ago Tim Walz, Minnesota's governor, called Mr Trump “weird” in an interview that went viral and earned him the Democratic nomination for vice-president. Many Minnesotans now believe Mr Trump is hell bent on revenge for that humiliation. The people here know Minnesota is on a knife edge. It's no wonder Harris, 38, (she won't give her full name for fear of any consequences) starts to cry. She takes up her spot from 9am every day bringing supplies like hand and toe warmers, beanie hats, blankets and gas masks to the daily protest at the Bishop Henry Whipple Building where the department of homeland security has its Minnesota base. “I am here until ICE stops,” she says. That's why I get up, that's why I do it.” And then Harris, who works with children with special needs, starts to weep. The Trump administration has deployed 2,000 federal agents in Minnesota to round up illegal immigrants. It's not clear how much of a problem there is. Studies suggest there are somewhere between 80,000 and 95,000 undocumented migrants in Minnesota – about 1.5 per cent of the state's population. Florida, where Trump lives in Mar-a-Lago, has somewhere between 770,000 and 1.15 million undocumented migrants, in the region of five per cent of the population. Texas, another “red” state, has an estimated 1.7 illegal migrants – in the region of six per cent of a 30 million population. Yet Pete Hegseth, Mr Trump's defence secretary, has ordered 1,500 active duty soldiers with the army's 11th Airborne Division in Alaska to prepare for deployment to Minnesota. It's no coincidence that troops have been chosen from Alaska, acclimatised as they are to Minnesota's savage winters. Temperatures were dropping to a low of -20C in the early hours of Tuesday morning, with a wind chill that makes it feel more like -27C. Frostbite, at those temperatures, can take hold in 15 minutes. It does, say protesters, risk a clash of troops under potentially different commands. The city is so tense, civil war is spoken openly as a possibility – and not easily dismissed as a laughable prospect. There have been reports of Left-wing militants armed with semi-automatic rifles patrolling neighbourhoods on the lookout for ICE agents, the videos circulating on the social media feeds of hard-Right Trump supporters. Lily Wood, 43, a stay at home “mom” of three children, with “ICE OUT” pinned to her furry hat, said: “We are just hoping Donald Trump is so obsessed about Greenland that he forgets about us.” On Tuesday, to mark his first year in office, Mr Trump opened his address to the nation by displaying the photos of Minnesotan criminals caught by ICE agents. Ms Wood had attended the protests with her best friend from school Liz Walla, 43 and also a mother of three, on a day off. The pair are well used to Minnesota's freezing conditions. She would go home later to put a casserole in the oven for her husband and kids but wanted to let the ICE agents coming in and out of the Whipple building know what she thought of them. ICE are supposed to catch the murderers and bad people, instead they killed a mother,” she says. Across town at the makeshift shrine where Good was shot, Karen Hutt, 68, a Unitarian minister, had watched the dead woman's body being carried limp from her car, placed on a stretcher and taken to an ambulance, which she said was prevented from breaching the police cordon following the shooting. “This is all about Walz and the election. He called Trump weird and this is his retribution campaign. “But the big crisis is coming when Walz deploys the state national guard, Hegseth sends in the regular army from Alaska and ICE with its Stasi agents then who is fighting who?” The gas station on the corner where Floyd died remains burnt out and his shrine still in place, surviving demands for it to be removed. Becca Cerra, 34, education officer at the arts centre right where Floyd died, is hopeful ICE will be defeated by… well, the ice. “I am surprised if they can survive the cold,” she said. You can tell their boots aren't going to keep them warm,” she said. Videos circulating online are said to show ICE agents slipping and sliding, falling over. Her boss, Victoria Lauing, 54, a mother-of-two, urges caution. Most folks here are really not taking the bait,” she said. That is how Trump operates,” said Ms Lauing. How Minneapolis continues to respond is another matter. And then the White House will have won. It deployed the agents en masse in part on the pretext of a billion dollar fraud ring, a great chunk of it perpetuated by Somalis, starting in the Covid-era that covered food programmes, housing, day care centres and other social service provisions. To date, more than 90 people have been charged and 60 convicted, many of them Somalis. Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot her, is not under investigation but reports have suggested that Good's widow, Becca Good, is being investigated over allegations she impeded a federal officer in the moments before a shooting. Mr Walz and Jacob Frey, Minneapolis's mayor, are also facing federal investigation by the DoJ over allegations they impeded ICE operations by encouraging locals on the ground to report and record agents' activities. The DoJ is also investigating protesters who disrupted a Sunday service at a church in Minnesota where the local pastor was also said to be a senior ICE official in charge of local field services, who had appeared at a department of homeland security press conference back in the autumn ahead of the launch of Operation Metro Surge. At least two people were arrested on Thursday. Police have used pepper spray and tear gas to dispel crowds. Protest groups are split over whether to get more confrontational. The Minnesota immigrant rights action committee, a prominent anti-ICE group, issued a statement last week that declared: “There is violence and there is resistance to violence. Asamblea de Derechos Civiles, the faith-based nonprofit, also pushed for a stronger response to what it called a “racist, fascist” federal government. Ben Ramirez told the local Minnesota Star Tribune: “It's now time to take our gloves off. “They hit us with chemical weapons but we are staying peaceful,” she said. “The white community is seeing for the first time what the black community have been seeing for decades – that this is a country of white privilege and white supremacy. But now one of our own has been murdered in the street and now there is a white outcry.” Women dressed from Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, but wearing gas marks, promenaded past the ICE facility, the literary reference presumably lost on their adversaries. Or else they held up placards that proclaimed “Hey ICE – was that bonus worth your soul?” and “I need to be able to tell my grandchildren I did not stay silent.” In the bitter chill of Minnesota that really stings.

Her next book, Mirrored States, will be published in 2027. On July 19, 2024, a faulty software update from a company most people had never heard of grounded global air travel from Hong Kong to Hamburg. Hospitals couldn't access medical records or schedule appointments. Millions of people suddenly found themselves cut off from everyday services they assumed were reliable, all because of one cybersecurity company: CrowdStrike. What was a planned routine update from CrowdStrike triggered the largest global IT incident on record, crippling more than 8.5 million Windows machines. Images of stranded travellers and closed retail terminals peppered the news. Delta Airlines cancelled 7,000 flights and has since been cleared to sue CrowdStrike for the losses. What the CrowdStrike fiasco revealed is that we're governed continuously, and unavoidably, by a complicated, interconnected and deeply enmeshed system of data-intensive platforms. That is, technologies (often working seamlessly in the background) structure how we live. When we say “Big Tech,” we mean the many companies that govern our lives, through their platforms that traffic in data. As governors, Big Tech companies should take accountability for the outsized role they play in our lives. We often talk about Big Tech as if it were just Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft – the Big Five. Add Tesla and Nvidia if you like – the Magnificent Seven, instead. What unifies them is economic: market capitalization, stock valuations or shares across markets. What if we thought about “bigness” as their embeddedness and indispensability in our lives? These companies create platforms for users to access online resources. I recently chatted with a friend about libraries over dinner as we shared photos on our phones – and libraries popped up in her socials and online ads the next day. When my sister was house hunting, she and I were texting about a Midwestern city I was speaking in; the next day, her suggested houses included properties in that city, thousands of kilometres away from her targeted search. Big Tech companies mediate communication, commerce, transportation, entertainment, education, health care, and social services – and, now, they're our portals to AI. Big Tech companies, it can be said, not only control the means of connection through platforms, but also the means to computation as organizations and individuals rely increasingly on AI, which in turn depends on cloud computing. Your connectivity gives you access to a share of computation that is not otherwise possible. Governing is about creating a shared order with enforceable expectations. Since the Second World War, we've lived in a world where governance is presumed to be, and set up as, the domain of states, or governments. Today, we live in a world of multiple governors: states, yes, but also Big Tech governance. These self-reinforcing network effects give companies reach no state could achieve. • Platforms: The apps we use to direct our automated, internet-connected devices – from smart thermostats to office tools – create shared expectations and behaviours. The data, platforms and computation are mutually reinforcing, making better services that keep you online. The marvel and challenge is that technologies have enabled companies to govern. Like governments, they are rather difficult to forsake. You can (usually) opt out of social media. You can sometimes emigrate to a different country. Have you passed by a smart doorbell like Ring or Nest? Within days of each other, in October, 2025, two of the three biggest cloud computing services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft's Azure, erred and crashed. Online gaming “tilted” as Roblox, Pokémon Go, Epic Games and the PlayStation Network went dark. One unique casualty was Eight Sleep, a company that sells “smart beds” with temperature controls, sensors and adjustable bases. Customers found themselves stuck upright, overheated or shivering until the outage was resolved. Moreover, we all depend on platforms for our work, communication and finances. That dependence becomes obvious only when something breaks. We saw this during the 2021 Facebook outage, in which a configuration error of the company's internal systems took down Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram for six hours. Roughly 3.5 billion social network users lost access, but so did 200 million businesses that rely on such platforms to reach customers. Other users mused philosophically about who they really were without digital social networks, both as connections, and their personhood altogether. A small error in one system can cascade through dozens of others, toppling the digital dominoes that underpin daily life. There are consumer-facing ones, such as TikTok, business-oriented ones, such as Salesforce, and ones that enable the world to run, providing compute for our lives to work, such as Amazon Web Services. These days, the interwoven nature of platforms creating, sharing and storing data that needs to be accessed quickly requires an incredible amount of compute, and it's not cheap. They don't have to actively collude to govern us across all the different domains of human life – social, political, cultural and economic. What they possess is much more elementary: Big Tech companies have invented and maintain the means to connectivity and computation that underlie modern societies. The word “governor” more accurately characterizes what they do, and also, how we should view their powers. If we understand them better, we can also imagine different strategies to reduce their disproportionate dominance in the economy and control of data, among other things. When we look back at other “big” sectors, they've historically been active in limited areas. But Big Tech has moved beyond those limits and enmeshed itself in society and lives through platforms, and leverages the data collected from those platforms to govern us in ways that are hard to imagine ever giving Standard Oil or Philip Morris. We haven't seen business models like Big Tech before, because prior to the internet era, we didn't have the technology that has allowed companies to create the widespread tools and data collection capacity that we know today. Governments haven't been exactly enthusiastic about shaking up the bargain with Big Tech. But they also seem stuck in an antagonistic dynamic. Somewhere along the way we've been swept up into this idea that states and companies are at loggerheads. But in digital technologies, governments (particularly the U.S. government) have been a key investor and developer of tools we take for granted. Expansive studies have shown that many of the things we take for granted in our smartphones, from GPS to touchscreen displays to the very internet that enables their smartness, are based on government-funded research. Generative AI models like ChatGPT and many others benefited from Canadian government funding. To stand a chance of winning, you either drop the mallet and use your hands, or you figure out the underlying mechanism's pattern of revealing those smiling little mole faces. If anything, some government forays have intensified the problem. The U.S. declaring Google a monopoly hasn't resulted in profound changes. In fact, Amit Mehta, the Washington, D.C.–based U.S. federal judge overseeing the Google antitrust case, made it such that Google was required to share search data with other companies, which only spreads the wealth embedded in those data. Similarly, the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) places special demands on the “gatekeeper” companies, including that they must make data available to other businesses. Sharing data makes the hold data-intensive platforms has on us worse, even as it introduces “competition” by undercutting the most powerful firms. Several of the EU's regulatory mechanisms rely upon heavy fines as deterrents and punishments. For example, the DMA can levy fines up to 10 per cent of a company's annual revenue, an admittedly impressive penalty. But fines are only effective if they can be collected and not ensnared in courts for years. While it's normal to focus on some very prominent companies, we lose sight of the fact that in the very short history of the internet, Big Data and AI constantly introduce new players that can bring down seemingly unstoppable giants (pause here for AOL, Yahoo! More importantly, it perpetuates the idea that states need to whack companies into submission. Sometimes, positive incentives matter just as much (if not more) than punishments. They can also change the incentives of other governors, by using “carrots.” As we know from international relations, power can be soft or hard, and hard power doesn't always prevail. Second, acknowledging that Big Tech companies are governors isn't just rhetorical. It means that they take on responsibilities of governing, just as governments do. They need a lot more digital infrastructure than most customers, and the private sector wants those lucrative government contracts. For as much talk as there is about the antipathy between states and Big Tech, the companies benefit immensely from government largesse. Tech Inquiry revealed in 2022 that U.S. military and intelligence agencies, alone, had awarded US$28-billion to Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet from 2018 to 2022. The deal included a “winking” alert system that notified Israeli officials whenever their cloud-stored data was queried, and provisions preventing either company from cutting off Israel's access to their technologies–even if the terms of service were violated. Governments can embed requirements for complying with government policies in the contracts themselves. Thus, any value, be they transparency, security, oversight, accountability or rights, can become requirements in the contracts tech companies seek. In Canada, government can set standards on procurement through policies at the Treasury Board, or consider each case individually. Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau look over a vehicle along an assembly line at an event announcing plans for a Honda electric vehicle battery plant in Alliston, Ont. Another tool states have is the power of incentives, often called market-based policies (as opposed to punitive command and control policies). Think about how governments created supply and demand for electric vehicles in relatively short order. State-driven investments can support important research to overcome existing problems; it's also a way for governments to channel support as they see fit. It has also announced a registry to report federal government uses of AI. There is no escape hatch from the digital world. Even without AI, platforms would still shape how we communicate, shop, work and live. We expect states to hold other actors accountable because they represent the public. No one or few entities ought to dominate all others. Overcoming their dominance requires creativity, a willingness to use incentives and a recognition that platforms, like states, are governors in the digital age. Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following. © Copyright 2026 The Globe and Mail Inc. All rights reserved.

MOSCOW, January 23. /TASS/. The Russian-US consultations in the Kremlin, which lasted for about four hours, were constructive and frank, Russian Presidential Aide Yury Ushakov said. In his words, Vladimir Putin's conversation with US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and entrepreneur Jared Kushner "continued for about four hours, and was particularly meaningful and constructive." "I would also describe it as frank and trust-based to the utmost," Ushakov added. The diplomat added that the talks were also attended by Commissioner of the US General Services Administration's Federal Acquisition Service Josh Gruenbaum. "He is a senior adviser at the White House, a specialist on the economic dossier. It was the first time that he joined the US team," the Kremlin official said.

MOSCOW, January 23. /TASS/. Russia's Tu-22M3 long-range strategic bombers have performed a scheduled flight over the neutral waters of the Baltic Sea, the Russian Defense Ministry said. "Tu-22M3 long-range bombers of the Russian Aerospace Forces have performed a scheduled flight over neutral waters of the Baltic Sea. They were escorted by Su-35S and Su-30SM aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces," the ministry said in a statement. The flight continued for more than five hours. At certain stages of the route, the long-range bombers were escorted by fighter jets of foreign countries. The ministry said that long-range aviation crews regularly fly over the neutral waters of the Arctic, North Atlantic, Pacific oceans as well as Baltic and Black seas. All flights of the Russian Aerospace Forces aircraft are carried out in strict compliance with international rules on the use of airspace over international waters.