A week after the Canary first reported on the abysmal care of 23-year-old severe myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) patient Savannah Victora-May, and Queen Elizabeth Hospital's (QEH) continued intransigence is putting her life at risk.

Far from stabilising her condition, Savannah, under their care, is enduring a slow and excruciating death via dehydration and malnutrition.

Now, it turns out that a clinician with a history of psychologising ME could be behind this.

Severe ME patient Savannah: still being starved by an NHS hospital

On Friday, urgent appeals by Savannah's advocates forced the hospital to restore fluids. That day, Savannah attempted to demonstrate 'compliance' by drinking 60mls. The effort caused her to pass out from pain:

like my stomach is ripping from the inside.

However, over the weekend, Savannah was still experiencing dehydration leaving her "gasping for air".

She learned on Monday that her clinical team had rewarded her attempt by giving her just 10ml of fluids every hour.

Leading ME expert Dr Weir had already advised that Savannah needs a minimum of 3L fluids per day to counteract her low blood volume. After tireless pressure from Weir and Sam Pearce, author of World ME Alliance (WMEA) resources on severe ME, her doctor finally agreed to administer 3L on Monday afternoon.

Nevertheless, Savannah is still facing significant risk. On Monday 26 January, Savannah said:

Today is a victory as I have fluids back but I am in extreme danger, extreme. I still have no nutrition at all. They're saying they want to remove my IV access through my PICC line. My subcutaneous painkillers are still due to be reduced further.

Savannah's last meal was 5 chips, 12 days ago. Since the hospital withdrew her anti-nausea medication, eating orally causes unbearable pain and post-exertional malaise (PEM). For the last 7 years, Savannah has relied on an NJ tube for nutrition. Yet, QEH continues to dismiss Dr Weir's call to provide her with total parenteral nutrition (TPN).

The hospital has also halved her pain injections. Currently, it is giving her paracetamol every 6 hours through an intravenous drip. Now her medical team have started giving her a patch that's a quarter the dose of her injections — which had previously caused her allergic reactions.

Savannah said:

They've removed the cornerstone of my pain control so ice cubes are literally the only way I'm able to stay breathing from the acid fire inside of my body.

On Tuesday, Savannah lost consciousness after 12 hours without pain relief. She expressed after waking that:

It's not pain, it's another plane of existence that no human could and should be forced to endure.

Gaslighting and psychologisation

A female doctor at QEH told her she is "doing very well" under this new regime. She asked Savannah:

How are you going to live if we keep medicalising this?

On Tuesday, a psychiatrist woke and interrogated her for half an hour. Savannah had to repeatedly defend the biological neuroimmune basis of ME as he asked questions like "have you ever been sexually abused?", "how is your parents' relationship?" and "how was it growing up as the middle child?"

He returned on Thursday to ask Savannah why she wasn't getting out of bed.

Savannah said:

I've spent the entire night screaming and he's coming in and asking me about the power of suggestion.

She added:

They just say they don't believe it's psychological. They say they think it's a real chronic illness. They just…won't feed, hydrate, medicate, treat, listen to or help me.

A biopsychosocial clinician behind her care?

On Monday, Savannah reported that the reason for this persistent gaslighting seemed to finally fall into place. A staff member mentioned Dr Gerald Coakley — a rheumatologist who worked at QEH for over 20 years (until 2023). Coakley is another Graded Exercise Therapy (GET) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) proponent. He has practiced these at his private 'Fatigue Clinic London' since 2007.

He refers patients to Vitality 360 — a private fatigue clinic company owned by Jessica Bavinton, an author of the disgraced PACE Trial. Coakley also co-authored a 2022 book on ME with BACME trustee and Vitality 360 executive manager Beverly Knops. This aired his grievances over the 2021 NICE guidelines.

Savannah noted:

People report really bad experiences with him. And he seems to be leading my care, without my consent, making decisions I do not feel safe or comfortable with, and without having ever met me. He apparently has sent the hospital NICE guidelines that say that opioids should be reduced and so should parenteral or non oral fluids and nutrition.

Of course, nowhere in the 2021 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines for ME does it actually state this.

How you can help Savannah

Thanks to the community's pressure, Action for ME has now stepped up to help.

Savannah said:

I am very grateful that CEO Sonya Chowdhury has stepped in personally to assist and offered to advocate for me in medical management meetings. Unfortunately, QEH have so far not taken up her offer.

Sam, who is in constant contact with Savannah, has said she is now:

worried she is going to die of organ failure.

She added:

The extreme level of pain she is now being subjected to is pushing her heart beyond what is sustainable for such a compromised body. Her suffering is medieval in its brutality and completely unnecessary.

Sam is asking for anyone who can to contribute to a GoFundMe for Savannah. This would cover medical treatment costs, including private pain management, a syringe driver, and ME-literate nursing support.

Savannah has high hopes for her future. She wants to get her A Levels, study medicine, and become a doctor. But as it stands, QEH is failing to even stabilise her. Far from it in fact. As people living with post-viral disease the world over are painfully aware, it wouldn't be the first time a hospital has killed a severe ME patient through medical arrogance and negligence.

However, we can't let an NHS hospital kill Savannah - or any other severe ME patients - on our watch.

Feature image via the Canary

By Hannah Sharland

A coalition of professionals — including media and legal experts — are urging the UK government to stand-up to the war on free speech by the rich and powerful. In an open letter calling for action, its members warned that democracy cannot survive under the current conditions. The battle for free speech has never been more urgent in the UK.

Democracy under attack

The letter, circulated on 28 January, comes from professionals across multiple professional fields, and they contend that:

wealthy and powerful claimants have misused the British justice system and the costs associated with participating in pre-trial and court proceedings to stifle protected speech and public participation … democracy cannot be sustained without everyone being able to express themselves, challenge wrongdoing, or inform others.

They also insist that the right to free speech is critical for a functioning democracy.

It is the Government's duty to protect us from this system being weaponised against free expression

Wealthy parties use 'strategic lawsuits against public participation' (SLAPPs) as a tool to silence ordinary people who speak out via "costly, stressful and unpredictable legal action".

The Canary itself has faced such attacks. And we absolutely agree with the signatories that SLAPPs seriously undermine journalistic efforts to give people the full picture about who has power in our society and how they often harness that power against the rest of us.

The letter to prime minister Keir Starmer calls on him to add into the 2026 King's Speech measures through which parliament can:

establish robust, accessible and universal protections against abusive legal threats and actions.

The rich escape scrutiny

The professionals explain in their letter the impact these legal attacks have on people without the resources to fight back — namely most of us. They say that:

SLAPPs actively prevent a level playing field between those with deep pockets a nd those for whom affording to mount a defence can draw vital funds away from their families and businesses. The financial inequality so frequently at the heart of SLAPPs can force targets to choose between realising their fundamental rights and economic security. This must end.

From our own experience, wealthy and unscrupulous political donors can discourage publication of articles about them too easily by threatening legal action. We strongly suggest that readers familiarise themselves well with the people and organisations that fund our high-profile politicians, though.

Unfortunately, this situation has long been the case. In fact, it's probably been a key factor in ensuring the super-rich treat our political system as a plaything to protect their grubby interests. Moreover, free speech continues to be threatened by these persistent legal challenges.

Back in 2012, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism was discussing how:

British libel laws help rich villains escape the scrutiny of the press

They continued to say that the British legal system is:

exploited by the wealthy and powerful to censor the truth.

These issues are also highlighted by OpenDemocracy, stating that journalists are:

threatened with seven-figure legal fees, so we preemptively avoid any discussion of oligarchs known to be litigious.

Even the risk of legal action is enough to force self-censorship. As it admitted:

Just the prospect of dealing with Britain's ruinously expensive lawyers was enough to make a cash-strapped media organisation back down.

This way, it said, the rich and powerful:

suppress scrutiny on an industrial scale

And it rightly asked:

how many oligarchs successfully slipped into the upper reaches of the establishment because Google revealed nothing bad about them when they offered a political donation

In short, there's a good reason many have called the UK "Libel Capital of the World". Because the global rich and powerful know we have a system that serves them well. Therefore, defending free speech is about upholding accountability.

This is a fight we must all support!

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported in 2023 on how extreme wealth can protect the most powerful people from "legitimate scrutiny", and how:

mounting a defence is so expensive that it creates an inherent imbalance of power

The new open letter demanding change is very important. And if we think democracy is worth fighting for, then we absolutely need to support the campaign against SLAPPs. In summary, the right to free speech remains under threat and it is vital that it be defended robustly. We just think it'll be a tough, uphill struggle considering how much our political class is in the pockets of the rich and powerful.

Featured image via the Canary 

By Ed Sykes

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The Police Ombudsman in the North of Ireland has ruled that police failed in their duties when arresting a woman at a pro-Palestine protest in Belfast. Máire Mhic an Fhailí spoke to police in Irish after she was stopped for wearing a Palestine Action t-shirt in August 2025. When asked for her name and address, Mhic an Fhailí provided the information in Irish. Notably, Irish is an official language in the Six Counties.

Other protesters were also stopped by the cops for wearing the same t-shirt, but were allowed to go free after giving their details in English.

After some back and forth, police arrested the 74 year old grandmother and bundled her into the back of a police van. The police gave the reason for arrest as a breach of anti-terror laws. However, the fact that others wearing the same 'offending' t-shirt were let go is remarkable. Mhic an Fhailí was arrested, which meant she was targeted for speaking Irish. Amnesty International branded the arrest as "outrageous."

The Irish News reports that the arresting officer:

…likely fell short of expectations set out for officers in the PSNI Code of Ethics.

The code, which is currently being revised, stipulates that officers must:

…discharge the duties of the office of constable, with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all individuals and their traditions and beliefs…

Happy to get a taser out, but not a phone

Neither fairness nor impartiality were shown to the activist in this instance. The Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) code also states that detained persons have a right to "interpretation and translation services".

Almost everyone will by now have had the experience of stopping to assist someone whose language is not the same as our own. The normal thing to do is to access through our phones translation applications to communicate. Moreover, we do this despite having no statutory requirement.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), in contrast, are now bound by such a responsibility. Yet it was apparently too much trouble to swipe on their mobile to avoid needless arrest, and the subsequent lengthy ombudsman investigation. Clearly they display more hesitance when reaching for a phone than for a taser.

Mhic an Fhailí herself pointed out that the matter ought never have got to the ombudsman stage:

We shouldn't still be fighting for the right to give any details in Irish. That should be a given now. We shouldn't be at the point where we're still having to go to the ombudsman and wait on the ombudsman to decide whether the police are in the right or the wrong.

The officer in question will now face "performance procedures", a form of disciplinary action. However, the problem clearly cannot be whitewashed by blaming one individual. Numerous officers were present at the arrest and all failed to handled the matter correctly.

Ombudsman ruling welcome, but misses the point

The Police Ombudsman found that the behaviour of the officers:

likely fell short of expectations set out for officers in the PSNI Code of Ethics.

The Canary was present on the day and observed this first hand. However, the ombudsman's other rulings don't correlate with the facts. These include the decision that the West Belfast woman was not "treated differently than others because she spoke Irish". As outlined above, clearly she was.

The ombudsman also found:

…no misconduct regarding her other complaints that an older officer escalated the situation because she spoke Irish…

This is false. A younger officer was still attempting to get Mhic an Fhailí to answer in English, before an older officer stepped in and proceeded with arrest. This was clearly an escalation, and stemmed from speaking in Irish. The ombudsman also found it was not the case that:

…police failed to consider potential disabilities.

Again this was not the case, as the arrest was carried out with insufficient care given the arrestee's age, as footage shows.

Police have featured in similar shameful scenes in England as they cage frail people at peaceful pro-Palestine Action demonstrations in England. Mhic an Fhailí remains the only person the PSNI have arrested in Ireland for supporting Palestine Action. However, they have travelled to England to assist in pro-holocaust policing.

Nonetheless, the ombudsman ruling comes at a significant time. It comes a day after the Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act 2022 comes into full effect. Consequently, it means public bodies must ensure services are accessible to Irish speakers.

The solicitor who took the case to the ombudsman, Kevin Winters, said:

This decision puts a marker down for PSNI acceptance and respect for the Irish language. We ought never again to witness such an unacceptable policing response to a citizen's absolute entitlement to speak in Irish.

So in future, when you're being dragged off by the cops for whatever the latest thought-crime is, at least perhaps they'll do so in a culturally sensitive way.

Featured image via Irish News

By Robert Freeman

In the two months Minnesota has been under siege by federal agents, immigration officers have shot and killed two U.S. citizens, poet and artist Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti. Local and state law enforcement say they've been blocked from properly investigating the shootings of Good and Pretti. 

"The federal government has blocked our state BCA, so that's the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. They are the state law enforcement agency that has authority to investigate any kind of deadly use of force involving police," says Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who is leading local investigations into the killings of Good and Pretti. 

"We've not gotten anything from the federal government," Moriarty says. "To tell you how odd this situation is, we are getting our information from the media … we are not getting that from the federal government." 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Moriarty, whose office has jurisdiction over both killings. Moriarty says federal agents have blocked local and state law enforcement from properly investigating the killings. Even Moriarty, the top prosecutor in Minneapolis, does not know the identity of the agents who killed Pretti. 

In response, Moriarty says, "We set up a portal and asked the community to send any kind of videos or any other kind of evidence so that we could collect absolutely everything that we possibly could." The BCA, she says, was even "blocked physically, actually, by federal agents from processing the scene where Alex Pretti was shot."

Meanwhile, attacks by the administration on Minnesota's Somali citizens persist. At her first town hall of the year in Minneapolis, an attendee sprayed Rep. Ilhan Omar with an unidentified substance on Tuesday. Trump has backtracked on some of his bluster and removed Border Patrol Gregory Bovino from Minnesota, replacing him with border czar Tom Homan.

None of that has changed things on the ground yet in Minneapolis, says Moriarty. "Minnesotans care about their neighbors. They're delivering meals to people. They are there and they do not approve of the fact that their federal government is attacking them and their neighbors.

"We hear a lot of people talking to us about how they understand the threat from the administration or from DHS on their neighbors and on their communities, and it's really much more rooted in an understanding that they think their freedoms are under threat, even if they are not an immigrant or even if they don't really have deep ties to immigrant communities, that this really matters to them and it really bothers them," says Jill Garvey, co-director of States at the Core, an organization that leads and runs ICE Watch training programs. "So we hear a lot from folks who just haven't been engaged previously. But this for all those reasons is enough for them to step up."

Garvey says her organization is training community members in how to properly document ICE. "We also know that we can't stop all this aggression," Garvey says. "The aggression is the point of these operations. So we can't guarantee that people aren't going to be targeted with violent actions from federal law enforcement. What we can say is, if you're doing this in community, other people are going to be watching."

Garvey says the administration's claims that paid agitators are fueling protests around the country is a baseless attempt to save face as public opinion turns against it. 

"It's just another part of the propaganda machine. They need an explanation for why they're losing. … This is a very basic training that we're providing and that most other people are providing to folks rooted in how to be a good neighbor, frankly. How to assert your rights, how to protect your neighbor's rights," says Garvey.

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. 

Transcript 

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I'm Akela Lacy. 

Federal agents have shot three people in Minnesota, killing two U.S. citizens, since they descended on the state in December as part of President Donald Trump's massive surge in efforts to hunt down immigrants. 

Kristi Noem: Let me deliver a message from President Trump to the world. If you are considering entering America illegally, don't even think about it. Let me be clear: If you come to our country and you break our laws, we will hunt you down. 

AL: The administration quickly tried to paint poet and artist Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti — the two people killed by ICE and Border Patrol Agents this month in Minneapolis — as "domestic terrorists."

KN: If you look at what the definition of "domestic terrorism" is, it completely fits this situation on the ground. This individual, as you saw in the video that we released just 48 hours after this incident, showed that this officer was hit by her vehicle, she weaponized it …  

Reporter: The White House has labeled the man who was killed in Minnesota a "domestic terrorist." Is that something you agree with? And have you seen any evidence?

KN: When you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of "domestic terrorism."

Gregory Bovino: This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.

AL: But video evidence circulating online and digital investigations from various news outlets flatly refuted those claims. After massive outrage from the public and even some of Trump's Republican colleagues — several of whom are now joining Democratic calls for him to fire Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — Trump has, as of Monday, appeared to backtrack on some of his bluster.

After having attacked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz publicly and blaming him and other Democrats for the killing of Pretti, Trump spoke by phone with Walz and said they "seemed to be on a similar wavelength." For his part, Walz said Trump had agreed to look into reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota.

By Tuesday, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino and several agents were set to leave the state. Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, is expected to take over. The two agents who fired at Pretti — whose identities are still not public — have been placed on administrative leave as of Wednesday.

Meanwhile, local and state law enforcement have accused federal agents of stymying investigations into the killings of Good and Pretti, and have sued to stop the feds from destroying evidence in both cases. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who oversees criminal cases in Minneapolis and has come under attack from Trump's Department of Justice, has called Trump's decision not to conduct a federal investigation into the killing of Renee Good "incomprehensible." Moriarty's office has jurisdiction to investigate both killings. 

Now, we're joined by Minneapolis's chief prosecutor, who's part of the team of state and local officials investigating the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Welcome to the show, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.

Mary Moriarty: Thank you so much.

AL: We're speaking on Wednesday morning, and your office just held a press conference announcing the formation of the "Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach." Can you tell us about what the aims of this group are? Who's in it?

MM: It was formed to support prosecutors around the country with resources and just a collaboration should the federal government come into their cities or their jurisdictions, because these issues can be complicated and sometimes resources are scarce and it's helpful to have the support of other people around the country. 

The other goal, I think, is to really assure the public. One of the things that we've seen here in Minneapolis, and in Hennepin County and in Minnesota, is that people are seeing federal agents engage in behavior which seems unlawful or at least inappropriate, and they aren't seeing any consequences or accountability.

I have tried to make it very clear that as Hennepin County attorney — and by the way, that's Minneapolis and its many suburbs — that our office does have jurisdiction over shootings, any kind of homicide that happens in Hennepin County. It does not matter where you work, if it's federal government or not. We do have jurisdiction. 

There are some more complicated issues involving potential federal defenses, but those are something we would face in court. And so I think it's helpful for us as prosecutors to be collaborating across the country to ensure our communities that we will stand up and we will hold people accountable should they engage in unlawful behavior in our cities.

AL: In that vein, can you tell us about the investigations you're conducting into the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti?

MM: So, as you know, and as I think the country probably knows, the federal government has blocked our state BCA, so that's the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. They are the state law enforcement agency that has authority to investigate any kind of deadly use of force involving police. Now their authority is statutory for Minnesota Peace Officers, but they still have the expertise. This is all they do.

And I had talked to the FBI, I had talked to the U.S. attorney, I had talked to the head of the BCA when Renee Good was killed. And we all had an agreement — which was unsurprising because all of us work well together — that there would be a joint investigation into the shooting and killing of Renee Good. And then suddenly, the BCA got kicked out. We were told that came from Washington, the administration, essentially. And so we were determined to do as much investigation as we could in conjunction with the BCA. 

We set up a portal and asked the community to send any kind of videos or any other kind of evidence so that we could collect absolutely everything that we possibly could. And the whole goal is to try to collect enough evidence to make a decision about whether charges are appropriate or not. And we are actually doing the same thing in the shooting of Alex Pretti; the BCA is conducting an investigation there. They were also blocked physically, actually, by federal agents from processing the scene where Alex Pretti was shot.

That actually led us to get a search warrant. The BCA drafted a search warrant. We made sure a judge was available. And so a judge signed a search warrant, and federal agents would not allow access to the scene even with that. And so that is why we filed the lawsuit in federal court Saturday. And we asked also for a temporary restraining order to force the government to preserve and not alter any of the evidence in that case. Later Saturday evening that was granted by a federal judge. And then there was a hearing two days later on Monday for the judge to hear from both parties to decide whether that TRO should be permanent — and we're waiting to hear the judge's ruling on that.

AL: So your office and the BCA sued the Department of Homeland Security, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel. It's my understanding that in this hearing that you're talking about, the judge didn't issue an immediate decision, but it's still ongoing and you have this temporary restraining order to provide access to evidence. Have you been able to access it?

MM: No. So actually the temporary restraining order was actually just to force the federal government to preserve and not alter.

AL: Mmm, OK. 

MM: We're not at the point of getting access or asking the court for access yet. It was because they were, like I said, physically preventing the BCA from processing the scene.

I have heard various officials in the administration make the claim that it was actually the public that prevented the BCA from entering the scene. I don't know if that's a lie, or they just don't know what they're talking about, but we had a prosecutor there. I was in contact with the BCA. I was watching livestream video, and you could see federal agents standing about 2 feet apart with large batons. And so there's absolutely no way the community prevented the BCA from getting there.

But because they went to such great lengths to block the BCA from trying to just do what they normally do — what their job is — and because of hearing very plainly that the administration has no intent to investigate the shooting of Renee Good — in fact, bizarrely, they were going to investigate her and her widow —we are taking this step by step. And so the first step was to ask a court to order the federal government to preserve that evidence and not alter it in any way.

AL: You've said that you have substantial evidence to consider charges in the case. Are you going to charge the officers in — I'm talking about both cases — in Good's case and in —?

MM: My goal was to collect as much evidence as we possibly could and then make a decision about whether charges are appropriate or not. I'm not going to say what we're going to do or promise that we are going to do it because it really is important to gather as much evidence as we can.

We still don't have the autopsy results in either case. That's not unusual because the medical examiner does not issue preliminary results. They're very cautious; they do a bunch of testing. I understand what it's going to say in the Renee Good case, and I know that the family has released the results of an independent autopsy.

But I think both autopsies will be very important evidence — maybe even more than, say, in most cases, we would want the gun, we would want the shell casings, we want the car in the Renee Good case. But we get cases submitted to us every day that don't have all of the evidence that we would want. That's just not how things work. And so the goal is to get as much as we can and to get to a point where we feel like, OK, we've got enough here to make a decision. 

"BCA, when they complete an investigation and once the case is closed, whatever that looks like, they post the investigation on their website."

The important thing, I think, for the public here and across the country is that the BCA, when they complete an investigation and once the case is closed, whatever that looks like, they post the investigation on their website. Anybody can take a look at it. And our goal, also, is very complete transparency. We make a decision, and we explain to people what evidence we were relying on, and I think that's the only way people have trust in their government — the only way they can have trust in their government if they can actually see what the evidence said and understand why a decision is made.

So that's really important. We have not made a decision about whether charges are appropriate, but I do believe, and my statement was that we are going to get enough evidence to be able to make those decisions.

AL: On Tuesday, Customs and Border [Protection] notified Congress that two agents fired their guns during the killing of Pretti. Was your office aware of that prior to that statutory? This was like a statutory notification that The Associated Press obtained and reported. 

MM: Yes. We've got videos, many different videos, and we've looked, we've synced them. We've looked at it from many different ways, and it certainly appeared that way.

But one interesting thing is, we've not gotten anything from the federal government. So I was asked recently about "Have we received the body cam from the federal agents?" Well, I have no official notification that the federal agents were wearing body cam. So, I mean, to tell you how odd this situation is: We are getting our information from the media or from that report; we are not getting that from the federal government.

AL: Similarly, there's been some discussion around figuring out the identity of the officers who shot Alex Pretti. I'm assuming that your office is aware of the identity of these officers?

MM: No — they haven't shared that with us. And so this is a question that people have asked me that I think people probably have interest in. They'll say, "Why don't you just subpoena records? Why don't you just subpoena the identities?" that kind of thing.

If this was state, if we were trying to seek information from a state agency or records or something like that, it would be very straightforward. We could subpoena it. There's a body of law by the U.S. Supreme Court that if you are seeking information from a federal agency, you can't just issue a subpoena. You have to make the case — and to bore everybody to tears or to get into the weeds, it's called — 

AL: Please do.

MM: TOUHY, T-O-U-H-Y. It outlines a process that you have to go through to ask for information. So it doesn't mean you're actually going to get it. So we're taking this step by step.

We've gotten very well versed in the federal law. And so we're just making sure that we are doing all the things that we need to do, trying to collect all the evidence we need to collect. But no, we do not know the identification of the people who shot Alex Pretti.

AL: I also just want to mention for our listeners that with the law enforcement killings of Good and Pretti, nine people have died so far this year — either ICE shot them, or in Pretti's case Border Patrol, or they died in ICE custody.

MM: The BCA is actually doing another use-of-force investigation because a man was shot in the leg on January 14; he fortunately survived. But that is another shooting, and that is a third investigation that the BCA is doing, and I expect they'll submit their investigation to us for consideration of charges as well.

AL: Has there been the same sort of efforts by fed federal agents to stymie that investigation or has that been an easier —?

MM: Yes. No, same lack of cooperation or response. And the BCA had the same problem with that scene too. So it's been very consistent, non-cooperation, and I won't even say non-cooperation, but just blocking every attempt by the BCA to do what they're supposed to do by law and what is best practices.

AL: There was a story that I saw in Slate that mentioned that observers on the scene — after BCA had been blocked from the Pretti shooting scene — that they saw the federal agents leave. And you've mentioned like they're not investigating it, so I don't know why they would stick around, but that was just shocking to me that they were, and if that's accurate, that they were blocking — not shocking, but adding to the things that are frustrating about this, that they're blocking and then they're leaving the scene so that they're not preserving it.

MM: Correct. People may have seen videos of people with BCA written on their jackets. They did go out there when they had the opportunity, and they did do as much as they could. But of course the best practice would be that you arrive at the scene as soon as — or shortly after it happens, and process everything there before people have gotten into the scene.

AL: Right. On Tuesday night, also in Minneapolis, someone sprayed an unidentified substance on Rep. Ilhan Omar during her first town hall of the year. What can you tell us about that incident, and is your office investigating it?

MM: So the Minneapolis Police Department is investigating it. It will be submitted to our office, I anticipate. The man who was seen on video doing that is in jail. We do have a period of time to make a decision and look at all the evidence, and I think MPD is still doing the investigation. So I think we have probably until later today or tomorrow to make a decision about whether charges are appropriate. 

And I should say: Our office prosecutes felonies in Hennepin County. (We do all youth, so juvenile, so it can be a misdemeanor, low-level crime.) If something is a misdemeanor or gross misdemeanor, a lower level crime, that is charged in the particular city where it happened. So we would be reviewing for potential felony charges.

AL: The entire premise of these raids and Trump's attacks on Minneapolis in particular is to go after Somali immigrants, and much of that rhetoric has been directed at Somali residents in Minneapolis, including Omar herself. I wonder if you can talk about how that political rhetoric is fueling violence and the consequences here?

MM: It is. We have a very vibrant immigrant community. Many immigrants from many countries are here, including our Somali neighbors. They are mostly peaceful, just like other immigrants. 

Before all of this started, before they took down these numbers from their website, the federal government had numbers that showed that American-born citizens committed crimes at a higher rate than immigrants.

To be clear, as the prosecutor for all of Hennepin County here, first of all, there was no influx of immigrants that were coming here to commit violent crime. In fact, violent crime has gone down here. And that's not because of ICE's presence — that was going down, as it is around the country. So there's no justification for ICE to be here because we have "violent crime."

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And the whole idea — at least what they claim, what they say it is — it's about fraud. Well, this is not how you investigate fraud. Investigating fraud involves looking, I'm dating myself, I always want to say bankers boxes of documents but — 

AL: I know what that is. [Laughs]

MM: It's really meticulous! It's really painstaking and tedious, and you have to look through records. It isn't snatching people off the street. So this has nothing to do with our immigrant community, and it has done tremendous damage. When you target a particular community and make ridiculous claims about what they're doing, that can and has led to violence here against Somali neighbors.

And so it's very damaging, and Ilhan is my representative. She has been, I think, the recipient of the worst, just terrible rhetoric, violent by the president on down. And it's just, especially after what happened to [Minnesota state Rep.] Melissa Hortman and her husband who were assassinated, and another legislator was shot along with his family — there are consequences for the things that people say. 

There are people out there that are really struggling with mental health. We in fact have set up, and we partner with other agencies, to do threat assessments when we get people who are making threats against electeds. And a lot of these people are struggling with mental health. Some of them aren't; some of them are radicalized, and they get the idea in their head that doing something to someone is somehow a good idea. And so there are consequences for words.

And it's been devastating for our Somali community to have all of this hatred directed at them. And, Ilhan, I see her at events. We're at the same events. She's the last one there talking to her constituents. She has more public town halls than anyone I've ever seen. She has more public town halls than anyone in the state. She's courageous to show up. She's always there to talk to her constituents, and obviously what happened last night is extremely alarming. I'm grateful that she is OK. And we have, I think, reports that the substance was not toxic. So that's good.

But the violent rhetoric, the lies, I would say, just has to stop. I know it isn't going to, but I want people to know it has consequences and sometimes those are very violent consequences.

AL: Thank you also for mentioning the assassinations of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman.

I also want to mention this is — aside from the political violence that we're talking about — that shooting was carried out by someone who was posing as a police officer, in the midst of this situation where as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in a recent interview, local law enforcement are being overwhelmed by thousands of these immigration agents who are not clearly identified. They're not wearing badges, and people don't know who they are. And so that contributes to the sense of not knowing who is protecting you, right?

MM: Yes. It's frightening. And there, I think, will be legislation in our session, which starts next month about creating greater laws to penalize people who impersonate police officers.

It is frightening. All of the ICE presence, most of them are masked. And so do you know who this person is when they're giving you commands? It's hard to describe how frightening it is here, how much this dominates everybody's existence right now.

I know of no parent who hasn't had to have some kind of conversation with their child — and I'm talking about 4, 5, 6, and older — because that child is frightened that ICE is going to hurt them or hurt their family or hurt their classmate. ICE is sending brochures into schools promising families that are having food security problems access to food. They're doing that in schools. 

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And we've all seen the videos of the Hmong gentlemen, elder gentlemen. And by the way, the Hmong — I think we have the second highest population of Hmong in the country — but for those who don't know, they fought for the United States in the war in Laos. And so they are here because they were going to be killed and persecuted in Laos. So they helped us, they're here. 

And yet we have situations where we had this Hmong elderly gentleman who was marched out of his house. And just noticing it's 5 degrees here today. 5. And that's been the consistent temperature in January. So they marched this gentleman out in his boxers and Crocs, and his family was able to throw a blanket around his shoulders.

They drove him around for an hour and evidently dropped him back off. He is a citizen. And he has no record. They mistook him for somebody who's actually in one of our prisons, and the prison had notified ICE that the man was in prison. 

And we all have seen the boy, the precious boy, with the bunny hat. His father was here seeking asylum. And so he jumped through all of the legal hoops that he was supposed to, relying on our government, doing what he was supposed to do. Then they swoop in, and they snatch his 5-year-old boy and him. And I think they sent them to Texas.

"They use this word like, 'detain,' which sounds pretty antiseptic, right? We're talking about a cage. We're talking about a jail, a prison."

And they use this word like, "detain," which sounds pretty antiseptic, right? We're talking about a cage. We're talking about a jail, a prison — for a 5-year-old child. And to have the administration say, "Well, he is in better hands." And who would want their 5-year-old child in the hands of ICE and then in a cage or a jail?

And we've seen these incidents over and over where I don't know if you saw the video that came out recently. This was actually after there were some hopes here, I guess, that the ICE presence would diminish. But that same day we see videos of an ICE agent saying to somebody, "If you raise your voice, I will erase your voice." 

Unknown agent: I will tell you this, brother, 

Unknown man: What? 

Unknown agent: I will tell you this: You raise your voice, I will erase your voice.

Unknown man: If I raise my voice, you'll erase my voice?

Unknown agent: Exactly. 

Unknown man: Are you serious? You said, if I raise my voice, you'll erase my voice?

Unknown agent: Yeah. 

MM: We saw another video that same day of a woman sobbing, and she has a small child in her arms, because ICE is hauling away someone in her family. We see these, and it's like the administration says, don't believe your eyes.

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But everybody can see the videos here, and we can see what's going on. And this isn't about public safety. And I could go on and on about how what's happening is really preventing our office from prosecuting people. But I'll stop.

AL: No, actually, I'm curious what you have to say about how this is stymieing being able to actually investigate things. But secondarily, is law enforcement and your office equipped to handle these forms of violence fueled by political rhetoric, especially when it's coming straight from the top?

MM: You know, for our office, we're reactive in many ways, right?

AL: Yeah.

MM: We try to be proactive in prevention, but that's very difficult here. And so we are often reactive. I think, I have reflected a lot on the role of local law enforcement here. I've had conversations — we have something like 38 different jurisdictions here in Hennepin County, and I have talked to them. I've sent them an email. And I've made it clear to them that they do have jurisdiction to do investigations just like they normally would, and they should submit potential cases to us. And some of the things I hear are, "What about sovereign immunity?" and that kind of thing. And we have said repeatedly, "That's legal stuff. Let us deal with that."

But I'll just say that we haven't had a single case referred to us by local law enforcement this entire time. And I think that there's a role there — and I acknowledge that we're in unprecedented times — but that, I think, there's a role that local law enforcement should be playing here.

I know there have been discussions about, well, we don't want to get into it with federal law enforcement. And at the same time I'm listening to the interview that's come out of the woman — people are calling her the woman in the pink coat — who is videotaping what happened to Alex Pretti, and she's talking about how frightened she was, how frightened everybody is, but they feel compelled to bear witness and be there.

And so I have tried to challenge our local law enforcement: You know, you're here to protect and serve. Sometimes they've said, well, we don't want to be political. And I've said, this isn't about politics. You can think it's a good thing that ICE is here. What we're talking about is if members of your community are being — if excessive use of force is being inflicted upon them, what are you going to do? Are you going to investigate?

And sure, blockades there, you may not know who the agent is. And I've also heard fear on the part of police that they may get arrested for obstruction or worse. But I think we're at the point where they need to make some decisions: Are they here to protect and serve the community? And that means their community members. Even if that means intervening when they see ICE engaging in unlawful behavior and doing investigations and submitting cases to us.

I can't help but think having been living with this since the federal agents have been here, if they thought there would be accountability, if that would end some of the behavior, if that would deter some of the behavior, because I know the administration has said, "You have absolute immunity. Nobody can do anything to you." And that is simply not the case. 

But we haven't gotten to the point where there has been accountability for any of the behavior that we've seen. And I continue to encourage local law enforcement to intervene, to investigate, to send us cases, even if they're not sure what it is. But to this point, we haven't received a case.

[Break]

AL: There is a dynamic here that I want to touch on and that I've covered, with respect to your office, which is that both local and federal law enforcement and Republican officials have targeted you throughout your time in office, in part for your reform policies, but also in response to you charging a police officer in 2024 for killing a driver, Ricky Cobb II. How is that playing out here? Is that dynamic generally? Is that affecting any of the efforts on behalf of your office or these other Minnesota law enforcement agencies to respond to these two killings?

MM: No, it isn't, and I think I will have plenty to say about the way I would say Renee Good and Ricky Cobb situations have been approached by many — very differently at some point — perhaps when I'm out of office.

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And I said this when I campaigned and I'm very proud of this: I have not let politics enter into any of our decisions. We charged the officer who shot and killed Ricky Cobb because we very much believed we had a case — a good case — and we knew it would be difficult, but we thought it was appropriate to attempt to hold the state trooper accountable.

There were a lot of politics involved there. But ultimately, we ended up dismissing. And I know sometimes it's reported that I got pressure from the governor. We dismissed it because it was the ethical thing to do. Certainly the governor at some point was threatening — was, I guess, going to take it away from us, I can only guess for the purpose of dismissing it. 

But I'm pretty immune to political pressure because I very much believe — I fundamentally believe — that a person in this situation, when we're talking about prosecution and justice, I mean, we do things that matter, that matter to people's lives. That goes for law enforcement and community members. And I think it's extremely important that we not be swayed by politics, that we do the best we can and we make the right decision. And I continue to believe that we made the right decision in charging the trooper, [Ryan] Londregan, in Ricky Cobb's death. We made the right decision to dismiss it when there were many complications with the lack of cooperation by law enforcement in that case. 

And we are going to do the right thing in this case. We're collecting all of the evidence so we can make sure we're making a decision with as much as we can possibly get, and then we will sit down and see, is it appropriate to charge or not?

AL: Speaking of politics, getting involved in things — the Department of Justice is also investigating your office. My understanding is that there are multiple probes going on, one of which is unrelated to ICE, but related to your office's policies to address racial disparities in charging. The other came as a result of your role in the Good and Pretti cases. Can you walk us through that?

MM: Sure. I'll talk about the subpoenas because there's been a lot on those. That subpoena actually was not served on me. It was served on Hennepin County. As the county attorney, we have a civil division here as well as a criminal division. Our civil division represents Hennepin County.

So we advise, my office advises the county on that subpoena. I don't even think it was necessarily the people that got subpoenaed, but they were — I've seen some of the other subpoenas — they're looking for records about immigration. But I view those efforts as just being attempts at intimidation.

What I'll say about that is, I was actually in a meeting about the Renee Good case, when suddenly I was inundated with texts from reporters asking me about being subpoenaed, and I had no idea what they were talking about. So it seemed that the administration was leaking that I personally had been subpoenaed.

"That's, I think, another intimidation tactic. You can't even be honest about what you're actually doing."

And then we found out I actually wasn't. It was Hennepin County, and my office does represent Hennepin County. But that's, I think, another intimidation tactic. You can't even be honest about what you're actually doing.  

And why on earth would you be claiming that you're subpoenaing me and the attorney general and others when we are investigating this case, or we were, just that case at the time. So I think it's pretty clear that it's politically motivated. I also learned about the DOJ investigation via Twitter. I guess I'll still call it Twitter. 

AL: I do, too. [Laughs]

MM: And that's ongoing. I can't talk about that, but yeah, Minnesota has been under constant attack by this administration. That's been clear for quite some time.

AL: After a call with Trump on Monday, Governor Tim Walz said Trump "agreed to look into reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota and working with the state in a more coordinated fashion on immigration enforcement regarding violent criminals." I want to ask you, what does a more coordinated fashion look like given that per Minnesota officials, they've already been doing their statutory requirements as far as transferring legitimate cases to immigration?

MM: Well, first of all, I don't believe anything until I see it with my own eyes. And the same day that happened, or the day after that happened, we saw this ICE agent telling somebody, if they raise their voice, he will erase their voice.

So we've seen no change here on the ground. So immigration, as you know, is civil. The law does not require the state to participate in federal civil enforcement. But that's what this administration wants. 

Now, there are good reasons not to do that. And you'll hear a lot of law enforcement talk about how what a bad idea it is for local law enforcement to be participating in civil enforcement of immigration law because that means that victims of crime — who are often immigrants because they get targeted — will never call you, will never call the police. They won't be witnesses for our cases. If they're domestic violence victims, they won't call. So there are very good policy reasons and practical reasons — you want trust in the community for local law enforcement to not participate in something you are not, you don't have to participate in, because it's civil.

And Minnesota has, as you said, has been doing its statutory responsibility, but they want more than that. And this continual refrain of violent criminals is ridiculous. If an immigrant commits a crime, if law enforcement brings us a case, they're held accountable. And then typically what's happened is that ICE decides, if they go to prison, do they want to deport them after that. That's the way it's always worked. It's not been a problem here.

Like, how is this about violent criminals when — and I haven't looked at this for a while, but at one point, given the administration's own numbers — over half of the people that they have detained have no criminal record. It's not about violent criminals. So it seems as though the administration wants information that legally the state is not required to give. And if handing that information over actually hurts public safety, so I don't see, hopefully, the state switching positions on that. 

It always has been a political question, but I think the question is, is it starting to look so bad for Republicans in this administration that for political reasons, they'll stop doing this or withdraw? I think that's what it comes down to. I mean, I thought I heard Trump saying in Iowa that this is just bad for us, not for him. 

Every day we hear something new. And so as I said, and I think Minnesotans believe this too: We will believe it when we see it here on the ground.

AL: I'll just mention, what the administration wants local police to do in terms of doing immigration enforcement is part of this massive increase in 287g agreements that the administration has been signing with local police departments and state departments around the country.

Minnesota has eight of them, none of which are in Hennepin County. But I read into that statement that they would be potentially trying to push more of those agreements. I don't know if you're hearing anything to that effect.

MM: I think they have. I cannot remember what community it was in, but they were trying to push some kind of facility on a community. And community members showed up and said no. And I think it's very unlikely that community here in Minnesota, after what they've seen, would voluntarily want to do that anyway. The reason I think communities do that, or different counties do it, is to raise money. They get money from ICE by housing people.

And so that's not something that Hennepin County is ever going to do. And I'm sure it's not something other counties are going to do, but they do need places to house all of these people they are picking up, even though they have no records.

And I should tell people too, we have restaurants closing because there's no one to work there. We have abandoned cars that are still going in the middle of the street because somebody's been dragged out of it and taken away. This has been devastating to the community. And at the same time, Minnesotans know how to protect one another. That is why they're showing up in droves.

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That is why they showed up on the Friday with the march. I've heard everything from upward of 15,000 to 50,000 people showed up. I think that day was below zero. The temperature was below zero. Minnesotans care about their neighbors. They're delivering meals to people. They are there and they do not approve of the fact that their federal government is attacking them and their neighbors. And they are resisting in pretty remarkable but probably not surprising ways.

AL: We're going to leave it there. Thank you for joining me on the Intercept Briefing, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, 

MM: Of course. 

AL: This was a great conversation. Really appreciate your time. 

MM: Thank you.

AL: All eyes are on Minnesota. But ICE is continuing to sweep cities around the country, expanding its efforts most recently in Maine. Elected officials are warning that however the courts respond to what they describe as extreme and dangerous federal overreach in Minnesota could portend what's next for other cities. In a letter supporting the lawsuit brought by Minnesota officials including Moriarty, who we just heard from, against DHS, 20 attorneys general wrote: "If left unchecked, the federal government will no doubt be emboldened to continue its unlawful conduct in Minnesota and to repeat it elsewhere." 

Next, we'll hear from someone who has been preparing communities for just that. Jill Garvey is the executive director of States at the Core, an organization that leads and runs ICE Watch training programs. Welcome to the show, Jill. 

Jill Garvey: Thanks for having me.

AL: Over the last few weeks, concerns about safety have hit a high point after immigration agents killed observers Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. How are you talking to people about being safe when observing and documenting agents activities, particularly when law enforcement is blatantly breaking the law?

JG: When we talk to people and we train people to be observers or to document what's happening in their communities, we really focus on three things. One is documentation, how important it is to have as much footage as possible, as much evidence as possible about what is happening, but to do it as safely as possible.

So it's a core piece of the training that thousands of people are getting right now and are joining, essentially. We find thousands of people from all over the country every week are doing what we call ICE Watch training or documentation training. What we find is that people are scared for their safety, but that they are resolved to do this anyway.

And so we talk a lot about maintaining a safe distance, maintaining nonviolence, not interfering, not getting between an agent and their target — because that's not just dangerous for the observer, but it's dangerous for the people directly being targeted and other potential vulnerable people in the area.

But we also talk about doing this in community. The beating heart of what we are seeing happen in cities and people getting prepared is their sense of community. So this isn't an individual activity. If you do it together, you are much safer and it is much more effective.

"This isn't an individual activity. If you do it together, you are much safer and it is much more effective."

AL: And the idea being that if you're in community that disincentivizes agents from retaliating? Or can you tell us more about how that strengthens?

JG: I think it's a few things. One is the more people, the more eyes on the scene, whatever the operation or activity is, the more people watching, the less likely that there will be an escalation of violence. What we see most of the time is that ICE agents or Border Patrol agents don't want to be filmed. They don't want to be documented, and they certainly don't want a crowd of people watching them even from a safe distance. 

A lot of the footage that people around the country have seen have been these sort of violent confrontations or clashes in certain cities, and so those do develop, but it is typically after ICE agents have already escalated some aggression against a community member.

Maybe they are targeting children for arrest or detention. Maybe they are smashing somebody's window and trying to take them out of a vehicle. More often than not, having more people on the scene means that ICE agents pull out of that neighborhood and try to find a place that is quieter.

"The more people watching, the less likely that there will be an escalation of violence."

We also know that we can't stop all this aggression. The aggression is the point of these operations. So we can't guarantee that people aren't going to be targeted with violent actions from federal law enforcement. What we can say is, if you're doing this in community, other people are going to be watching.

We wouldn't know what really happened to Renee, we wouldn't really know what happened to Alex Pretti if their neighbors hadn't been bravely recording these incidences all the way through.

AL: And you're talking about documentation, it sounds like mostly video recording, audio recording. Are there other forms of documentation that you're training people on, or can you tell us more about exactly how people are documenting these instances?

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JG: Primarily it is video documentation with their phones. One thing that we talk about that I think is a surprise to people is how much we want them to narrate or create some audio documentation while they are using video. So what we find in this new wave of ICE enforcement and it being documented by residents, is that people are often taking videos, or at least a couple months ago in Chicago and some other cities — people were taking videos, and it was really hard to tell what was going on just from the visual. So increasingly people are learning that they take the videos, but they also calmly narrate everything that they're seeing just in case, their hands are shaking and the camera's kind of migrating over here, but they're seeing something really important, right?

So that audio, that eyewitness accounting of what is happening is also really important.

AL: Can you tell us what you've learned from the people in the communities participating in these trainings?

JG: So I think what I've learned is that this is a multigenerational pretty broad spectrum of people who are getting engaged and going out there and doing this. So we're hearing from people who are young, we're hearing from people who are old. We have people who join our trainings who say, "I'm 83. How do I do this safely and effectively?" We hear from a lot of people in rural and more remote areas and we hear from people who have not previously been involved in any sort of protest or political activity.

The reason they're coming to these trainings and the reason they're going out with their cellphones and whistles in some places is because they're having some, I think, base reaction that is transcending typical politics to what they're seeing and what they understand the threat is.

We hear a lot of people talking to us about how they understand the threat from the administration or from DHS on their neighbors and on their communities. And it's really much more rooted in an understanding that they think their freedoms are under threat, even if they are not an immigrant or even if they don't really have deep ties to immigrant communities, that this really matters to them and it really bothers them. So we hear a lot from folks who just haven't been engaged previously. But this for all those reasons is enough for them to step up.

AL: On the right, some people, including the administration, claim that the individuals and the communities participating in these kinds of activities and protests are — they accuse them of being paid agitators or astro-turf groups. What do you say to that?

JG: I think the numbers don't really support that. The numbers don't lie. Even if you look at the footage, at the number of neighbors, residents who come out of their homes prepared to document what they're seeing in lots of places, Charlotte, North Carolina; Columbus, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans; Chicago; LA; D.C. It's not possible that there's that many paid agitators.

I also think it's just another part of the propaganda machine, right? They need an explanation for why they're losing. And they need an explanation to pull people off the the sense that "Hey, this isn't really about immigration. This is about authoritarian overreach. This is about militarizing certain cities that are political opponents or where democracy thrives."

It's a weak argument that there's some major sophistication happening behind the scenes. I assure you there is not. 

AL: [Laughs]

JG: [Laughs] This is a very basic training that we're providing and that most other people are providing to folks rooted in how to be a good neighbor, frankly. How to assert your rights, how to protect your neighbor's rights. So I think it's a little bit laughable. I also think it's a little bit desperate.

AL: Speaking of authoritarian overreach, Trump invoked the Insurrection Act once again after an ICE officer killed Renee Good. What would happen if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act yet again? Would your advice change? If so, how are you all talking about this?

JG: I don't think our advice really changes other than for those people who live in places where the Insurrection Act could be invoked, understanding what that actually means. This is a pretty vague thing to invoke, or to enact, activate. So I do think it's people really understanding what it means. Does it mean that local law enforcement, local governance is disempowered in some ways? Yes, and that should be a concern for folks. But it doesn't strip you of your rights. Doesn't strip you of your First Amendment rights or your Fourth Amendment rights.

AL: Were you doing these trainings prior to January of 2025, and what the timeline is there? 

JG: So my organization, in partnership with some community defense networks in Chicago, started training more robustly in January 2025. 

AL: OK, got it. 

JG: But there's roots in this training all the way back to 2017 when various groups started adapting other documentation training, and know-your-rights training into what a lot of people now refer to as ICE Watch or Migra Watch. But I think we saw a big uptick in interest from across the country in July of 2025. For various reasons, people started to get very concerned — and now, in hindsight, very good reason — that the Trump administration was really going to operationalize this playbook around surging immigration enforcement officers into certain places. 

We had probably 100 people per training in the beginning, and now, like tonight, we have 7,000 people registered for training. 

AL: Is there anything else that I haven't asked you about that you think is important for people to know on these topics?

JG: So the recent news is that Bovino has been demoted, and his sort of brand is being dismantled. But he's not a decision maker. He's not the architect of these strategies. So until we get to a point where Kristi Noem or Corey Lewandowski or Stephen Miller are really held to account for what they are doing in American cities people should be staying as vigilant as possible. Keep training, keep organizing their communities to respond when they come to Ohio or Pennsylvania or other states and cities.

AL: Many Democrats and even some Republicans now are calling on Kristi Noem to be impeached and all this stuff, and it's the lowest-hanging fruit here obviously for people. They can take Bovino out of Minneapolis, but they're just going to go on to the next city and continue doing the same thing with whoever they put in place next. So I think that's an important and fitting note for us to end on.

Thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing, Jill Garvey,

JG: Thank you for having me.

AL: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

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Until next time, I'm Akela Lacy.

The post Even the Top Prosecutor in Minneapolis Doesn't Know the Identity of the Agents Who Killed Alex Pretti appeared first on The Intercept.

Member of London's Irish community gathered on 29 January to mark the anniversary of the UK government's Bloody Sunday massacre of innocent civilians in Derry.

Skwawkbox's friends 'BetterThanReal' and Chiara Contrino were there to make a recording of the event for Skwawkbox and the Canary readers. It was the first such commemoration since a British judge acquitted 'Soldier F', one of the British troops who perpetrated the massacre. Solidarity with Gaza was another strong theme at the commemorative event.

Sinn Féin MP John Finucane — whose father Pat was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries working with the British government — spoke about the families' quest for "justice and dignity" and government-directed disinformation and smears against the 26 unarmed, innocent victims of the massacre.

Finucane told how eight British soldiers — who had lied to the Bloody Sunday inquiry — were just told that they'll not be prosecuted for their perjury:

https://www.thecanary.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Finucane-Bloody-Sunday-hb.mp4

Chiara Contrino's photographs, published with permission:

BetterThanReal captured these images:

Thanks to the intrepid photographers and solidarity with the Bloody Sunday families.

Featured image via Skwawkbox

By Skwawkbox

To find the best power bank out there, I tested more than 60 portable chargers and batteries from big brands like Anker, Belkin, UGreen and Mophie — as well as from smaller players such as Biolite, Nimble and Satechi. I tested the batteries on a number of devices including iPhones, Galaxy phones, an iPad, a MacBook and even my ereader and a PlayStation controller. If you just want a brick that can charge anything, go for Anker's 25kmAh Laptop Power bank. It has two built-in USB-C cables, a massive capacity and super fast charging speeds. But if that's not quite what you're looking for, you can check out our other picks for the best power banks below.

Best power banks for 2026

What to look for in a portable battery pack Battery type

Nearly every rechargeable power bank you can buy (and most portable devices) contain a lithium-ion battery. These beat other current battery types in terms of size-to-charge capacity, and have even increased in energy density by eight fold in the past 14 years. They also don't suffer from a memory effect (where a battery's lifespan deteriorates due to partial charges).

Flying with portable batteries

You may have heard about lithium ion batteries overheating and catching fire — a recent Hong Kong flight was grounded after just such a thing happened in an overhead bin. Current restrictions implemented by the TSA still allow external batteries rated at 100Wh or less (which all of our recommendations are) to fly with you, but only in your carry-on luggage — they can't be checked.

Recently, Southwest Airlines was the first in the industry to take that rule one step further. Now, flyers on that airline must keep power banks in clear view when using them to recharge a device. If the portable charger isn't actively in use, however, it can stay in your carry-on bag in the overhead bin.

Capacity

Power bank manufacturers almost always list a battery's capacity in milliamp hours, or mAh. Smaller batteries with a 5,000mAh capacity make good phone chargers and can fill a smartphone to between 50 and 75 percent. Larger batteries that can recharge laptops and tablets, or give phones multiple charges, can exceed 25,000mAh and we have a separate guide that covers that entire category. 

Unsurprisingly, the prices on most batteries goes up as mAh capacity increases, and since batteries are physical storage units, size and weight go up with capacity as well. If you want more power, be prepared to spend more and carry around a heavier brick.

You might think that a 10,000mAh power bank could charge a 5,000mAh phone to 100 percent twice, but that's not the case. In addition to simple energy loss through heat dissipation, factors like voltage conversion also bring down the amount of juice that makes it into your phone. Most manufacturers list how many charges a battery can give a certain smartphone. In our tests, 10,000mAh of battery pack capacity translated to roughly 5,800mAh of device charge. 20,000mAh chargers delivered around 11,250mAh to a device, and 25,000mAh banks translated to about 16,200mAh of charge. That's an average efficiency rate of around 60 percent.

Wireless

Wireless charging, whether through a bank or a plugged-in charging pad, is less efficient than wired connections. But it is convenient — and in most cases, you can carry around and use your phone as it refills with a magnetically attached power bank.

Power banks with wireless charging are far better than they once were. Just a couple years ago, the ones I tested were too inefficient to recommend in this guide. When batteries adhering to the Qi2 wireless charging standard started arriving in 2023, performance markedly improved.

To gain Qi2-certification, a device has to support speeds of up to 15 watts and include magnetic attachment points. The MagSafe technology on iPhones were once the only handsets that were Qi2-compatible, but now Google's Pixelsnap tech brings both the higher speed and magnetic grip to Pixel 10 phones. Samsung may follow up with its own version in future releases.

The latest wireless charging standard, Q12 25W, is supported by the new iPhone 17 phones as well as the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL. Battery packs that are Qi2 25W-enabled are starting to hit the market as well, and the Ugreen MagFlow was the first on the scene.

Ports

USB-C ports can deliver faster charges than USB-A ports, and most of the portable chargers we recommend here have Type-C connections. But Type-A jacks are still handy if you need to use a specialized cable for a certain device (my camera's USB-A to micro USB cable comes to mind).

There's also variation among USB-C ports. Larger banks with more than one port will sometimes list different wattages for each. For example, a bank with three ports may have two 65W ports and one 100W port. There will also be at least one in/out port on the bank, which can be used to charge the battery itself or to deliver a charge to your device. Wattages and in/out labels are printed right next to the port — and always in the tiniest font possible (remember, your phone is an excellent magnifying glass if you ever have trouble reading them).

As with standard wall chargers, the port's wattage will determine what you can charge. A phone will happily charge off a 100W connection, but a 15W plug won't do much for your laptop. And remember, the cable has to match the maximum wattage. A cable rated for 60W won't deliver 100W speeds.

Luckily, some of the best power banks include a built-in USB-C cable. That'll not only ensure you have the right cord, it's one less thing you have to remember to bring along.

Design

Once, most rechargeable batteries were black with a squared-off, brick-like design, but now they come in different colors and shapes with attractive finishes and detailing. While that doesn't affect how they perform, it's a consideration for something you'll interact with regularly. Some portable power banks include extra features like MagSafe compatibility, a built-in wall plug or even a kickstand. Nearly all have some sort of indicator to let you know how much available charge your power bank has left, usually expressed with lighted pips near the power button. Some of the newer banks take that a step further with an LED display indicating remaining battery percentage.

How we test best power banks

First, I considered brands Engadget reviewers and staff have tried over the years and checked out customer ratings on retail sites like Amazon and Best Buy. Then, I acquired the most promising candidates and tested them in my home office.

Amy Skorheim for Engadget

For testing, I used each battery to charge both an iPhone and an Android phone, as well as an iPad and a MacBook Pro for the larger portable chargers. I let the devices get down to between zero and five percent and charged them until the devices were full or the power bank died. 

For reference, here are the battery capacities of the device I've used for testing over the years:

• iPhone 11: 3,110 mAh

• iPhone 14 Plus: 4,325 mAh

• iPhone 15: 3,349 mAh 

• iPhone 16: 3,561*

• Galaxy S22 Ultra: 4,855mAh

• iPad Air: 7,729mAh

• 16-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro: 27,027mAh

*The iPhone 17 has a slightly larger battery at 3,692mAh

I continuously update this guide as companies release new products.

Other power banks we tested

Here are a few picks that didn't quite make the cut, but are worth mentioning. 

Belkin Stage PowerGrip

If you're into iPhonography, this clever accessory could be worth a look. Belkin's Stage PowerGrip is a 9,300mAh power bank that has both a wireless charging pad and built-in cable. But it's also a Bluetooth shutter with a quarter-inch tripod thread. The design resembles a standard digital camera and provides a sturdy grip once you magnetically attach your phone (make sure you're either using a MagSafe case or no case to ensure a solid connection).

The shutter is conveniently placed and the remote speed was quick enough to capture the cute things my cat was doing. The accessory can even act as a stand while it charges in either landscape or portrait orientation. As a power bank, it's slow, taking about two hours to get my iPhone 16 from three to 98 percent, but it has enough juice for a full refill plus a little more, which could help if you're out taking pictures all day.

Anker MagGo for Apple Watch power bank

The Anker MagGo for Apple Watch power bank combines a 10K battery with a built-in USB-C cable and a pop-up Apple Watch charger. I didn't formally test it as it's a little too niche, but it deserves a mention for saving my keister on two occasions. Driving to a hike, my watch told me it was down to 10 percent. Thankfully, I had this and could refill the watch before I got to the trailhead. Later, on an interstate trip, I realized the travel charging station I'd brought was a dud. This kept my watch alive for the week I was away. It does a good job simply charging a phone via the handy on-board cable, too. But for those with an Apple Watch, it's extra useful.

HyperJuice 245W

Hyper's massive-but-sleek brick is one nice looking power bank. The HyperJuice 245W packs a hefty 27,000mAh capacity, enough to refill my tester phone about four times and get a MacBook Pro from near-dead to 75 percent. It only has USB-C ports, but you at least get four of them. USB-C only is probably fine for most situations, but a USB-A port would be nice for charging the occasional older peripheral. The 245 wattage is pretty high for a power bank and it was indeed speedy. It filled a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra in just over an hour. But it's the same price and capacity as our Mophie Powerstation pick for laptop banks, and that one has a better variety of ports. Hyper's battery is also comparable to Anker's laptop battery, which is cheaper, has built-in cables and has nearly the same capacity. Plus, that bank is just as swanky looking.

EcoFlow Rapid magnetic power bank

I was curious to try out the first power bank from EcoFlow, a company that primarily makes larger power stations and whole-home backup batteries. The first offering in the brand's Rapid series is a Qi2-enabled magnetic charger with a 5,000mAh capacity. It looks quite nice with shiny silver accents and soft-touch grey plastic on the MagSafe-compatible front. There's a little pull-out leg that sturdily displays your phone as it charges and the attached USB-C cable lets you refill devices directly, then tucks out of the way when it's not in use. But it didn't outperform our top pick in the MagSafe category, in terms of both charging speeds and the amount of charge delivered.

Mophie Snap+ Powerstation Mini

The Mophie snap+ Powerstation Mini is terribly well-built. It feels premium with a rubberized contact point for the MagSafe charging pad and a stand that runs the entire width of the bank itself, making it extra sturdy. It's compact, too, but only carries a 5,000mAh capacity, which gets you a partial charge on most newer or larger phones. Our current MagSafe/iPhone pick has double the capacity, a stand and a digital display — for just $20 more than the Powerstation Mini.

Power bank FAQs What's the difference between a portable power bank and a portable charger?

A slew of terms are used to describe power banks, including portable batteries, portable chargers, external battery packs and even, somewhat confusingly, USB chargers, which is what wall chargers are often called. They all mean the same thing: a lithium ion battery that stores a charge so you can refill a smartphone, tablet, earbuds, console controller, ereader, laptop, or just about any other device with its own built-in, rechargeable battery. 

There's little difference between the terms, so the specs you'll want to pay attention to are capacity (expressed in mAh), size and weight so you can find the right balance between recharging what you need and portability.

Power stations, on the other hand, are distinct. These are bigger units (often around the size of a car battery) that can be used to charge multiple devices multiple times, but notably, they can't be taken on airplanes.

Does fast charging actually ruin your battery?

Not exactly. The real enemy of a battery's longevity is heat. The faster you charge a battery, the more heat is generated. Modern phones have features that keep the battery cool while charging, like physical heat shields and heat sinks, as well as software features that slow down processes that generate too much heat. Phone manufacturers are keen to promote a phone's fast-charging abilities, so they had to figure out ways to make faster charging work.

While there aren't long-term studies on what fast charging does to a phone, a study on EV batteries (which use the same general concept of charged lithium ions flowing from one side of the battery to the other, absorbing or releasing a usable charge) showed a very slight decrease in capacity over time with only fast charging — though what actually made a larger difference was how hot the battery itself was, due to ambient temperatures, when it was charged.

In short, fast charging could be slightly harder on your battery than normal charging. But the safeguards most smartphones have make that difference fairly negligible. To really ensure you're optimizing charging capabilities, limit your phone's heat exposure overall.

Can you use a power bank for all your devices?

That depends on the size of the bank and the size of your device's battery. A small 5,000mAh battery isn't strong enough to charge laptops, but a portable charger with a 20,000mAh capacity will give your computer a partial refill. You also have to consider port compatibility. If your device has a USB port, you'll be able to easily find a cable to connect it to a battery. If your device has a more unique port, such as a DC port, you won't be able to use a battery. Devices with an AC cable and plug can be charged, and sometimes powered (such as in the case of a printer or speaker), by larger laptop batteries with AC ports.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/accessories/best-power-bank-143048526.html?src=rss

Spot's new cleanup gig involves gamma rays, alpha particles, and considerably less PPE than fleshy colleagues

Bark!Bark!Bark! Sellafield Ltd is to use Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dogs in "routine, business-as-usual operations" amid the ongoing cleanup and decommissioning of the notorious UK nuclear site.…

£1.3B over budget and four years late, bank searches for a way to not to bust new timetable and funding pot

A British state-owned bank is reconfiguring its modernization project, including considering reducing connections with legacy systems, as it tries to claw back schedule and budget overruns that are far beyond early plans.…

Managing your finances doesn't have to be a headache — especially with the right budgeting app at your fingertips. Whether you're trying to track everyday spending, save for a big purchase or just keep a closer eye on your subscriptions, there's an app that can help. With Mint shutting down, plenty of users have been looking for the best budget apps to replace it, and luckily there are plenty of solid alternatives.

From AI-powered spending trackers to apps that break down your expenses into easy-to-follow categories, the best budgeting tools help you take control of your money without the hassle of spreadsheets. Some focus on automating savings, while others give you a deep dive into your finances with powerful analytics and custom reporting. If you're still searching for the right Mint alternative, check out our guide to the best budgeting apps to replace Mint to find the best fit for your needs.

If you're not sure where to start, we've rounded up the top budgeting apps to help you track spending, save smarter, and stick to your financial goals.

Best budget apps of 2026

Other budgeting apps we tested PocketGuard

PocketGuard used to be a solid free budget tracker, but the company has since limited its "free" version to just a free seven-day trial. Now, you'll have to choose between two plans once the trial is over: a $13 monthly plan or a $75 annual plan. When I first tested it, I found it to be more restricted than NerdWallet, but still a decent option. The main overview screen shows you your net worth, total assets and debts; net income and total spending for the month; upcoming bills; a handy reminder of when your next paycheck lands; any debt payoff plan you have; and any goals. Like some other apps, including Quicken Simplifi, PocketGuard promotes an "after bills" approach, where you enter all of your recurring bills, and then PocketGuard shows you what's left, and that's what you're supposed to be budgeting: your disposable income.

Although PocketGuard's UI is easy enough to understand, it lacks polish. The "accounts" tab is a little busy, and doesn't show totals for categories like cash or investments. Seemingly small details like weirdly phrased or punctuated copy occasionally make the app feel janky. More than once, it prompted me to update the app when no updates were available. The web version, meanwhile, feels like the mobile app blown up to a larger format and doesn't take advantage of the extra screen real estate. Ultimately, now that the free tier is gone, it just doesn't present the same value proposition as it once did.

How we test budgeting apps

Before I dove in and started testing out budgeting apps, I had to do some research. To find a list of apps to try out, I consulted trusty ol' Google (and even trustier Reddit); read reviews of popular apps on the App Store; and also asked friends and colleagues what budget tracking apps (or other budgeting methods) they might be using for money management. Some of the apps I found were free and these, of course, show loads of ads (excuse me, "offers") to stay in business. But most of the available apps require paid subscriptions, with prices typically topping out around $100 a year, or $15 a month. (Spoiler: My top pick is cheaper than that.)

All of the services I chose to test needed to do several things: import all of your account data into one place; offer budgeting tools; and track your spending, net worth and credit score. Except where noted, all of these apps are available for iOS, Android and on the web.

Once I had my shortlist of six apps, I got to work setting them up. For the sake of thoroughly testing these apps, I made a point of adding every account to every budgeting app, no matter how small or immaterial the balance. What ensued was a veritable Groundhog Day of two-factor authentication. Just hours of entering passwords and one-time passcodes, for the same banks half a dozen times over. Hopefully, you only have to do this once.

Budgeting app FAQs What is Plaid and how does it work?

Each of the apps I tested uses the same underlying network, called Plaid, to pull in financial data, so it's worth explaining what it is and how it works. Plaid was founded as a fintech startup in 2013 and is today the industry standard in connecting banks with third-party apps. Plaid works with over 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada and Europe. Additionally, more than 8,000 third-party apps and services rely on Plaid, the company claims.

To be clear, you don't need a dedicated Plaid app to use it; the technology is baked into a wide array of apps, including all of the budgeting apps listed in this guide. Once you find the "add an account" option in whichever one you're using, you'll see a menu of commonly used banks. There's also a search field you can use to look yours up directly. Once you find yours, you'll be prompted to enter your login credentials. If you have two-factor authentication set up, you'll need to enter a one-time passcode as well.

As the middleman, Plaid is a passthrough for information that may include your account balances, transaction history, account type and routing or account number. Plaid uses encryption, and says it has a policy of not selling or renting customer data to other companies. However, I would not be doing my job if I didn't note that in 2022 Plaid was forced to pay $58 million to consumers in a class action suit for collecting "more financial data than was needed." As part of the settlement, Plaid was compelled to change some of its business practices.

In a statement provided to Engadget, a Plaid spokesperson said the company continues to deny the allegations underpinning the lawsuit and that "the crux of the non-financial terms in the settlement are focused on us accelerating workstreams already underway related to giving people more transparency into Plaid's role in connecting their accounts, and ensuring that our workstreams around data minimization remain on track."

Why did Mint shut down?

When parent company Intuit announced in December 2023 that it would shut down Mint, it did not provide a reason why it made the decision to do so. It did say that Mint's millions of users would be funneled over to its other finance app, Credit Karma. "Credit Karma is thrilled to invite all Minters to continue their financial journey on Credit Karma, where they will have access to Credit Karma's suite of features, products, tools and services, including some of Mint's most popular features," Mint wrote on its product blog. In our testing, we found that Credit Karma isn't an exact replacement for Mint — so if you're still looking for a Mint alternative, you have some decent options.

What about Rocket Money?

Rocket Money is another free financial app that tracks spending and supports things like balance alerts and account linking. If you pay for the premium tier, the service can also help you cancel unwanted subscriptions. We did not test it for this guide, but we'll consider it in future updates.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/best-budgeting-apps-120036303.html?src=rss

60-minute SLA was effectively useless and the contractor admitted it

On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of weird and wonderful tech support jobs.…

Tools, agents, UI, and e-commerce - of course each one needs its own set of competing protocols

MCP, A2A, ACP, or UTCP? It seems like every other day, orgs add yet another AI protocol to the agentic alphabet soup, making it all the more confusing. Below, we'll share what all these abbreviations actually mean and share why they are important for the future of AI.…

I've been talking about the Stop Killing Games movement for some time now, so important is its mission to me. This collection of volunteers focused on video game and cultural preservation is attempting to whip up public support for legislation to achieve those goals. Currently focused in the EU, the campaign is built primarily on legislating the following rules:

• Games sold must be left in a functional state
• Games sold must require no further connection to the publisher or affiliated parties to function
• The above also applies to games that have sold microtransactions to customers
• The above cannot be superseded by end user license agreements

If you can find fault in any of the above, tell me what that would be in the comments. I personally see no such flaws. I particularly can't find them in the context of a present reality in which games that people paid very real money for are ripped from their digital hands because publishers simply stop supporting them (online games) or because they were designed with planned obsolescence included (single player games that sunset when they can't check in with servers (hi there, NBA2K games!)).

In order to compel the EU Parliament to take up the issue in session, the petition needed to achieve 1 million signatures. That happened last summer. Step 2 in the process is a review by the EU to validate those signatures, to be sure there is no shady fuckery in them. And that just happened, with the petition boasting one of the smallest percentage of invalidated signatures in memory.

Stop Killing Games volunteer Moritz Katzner has shared an update on the popular European Union Citizens' Initiative to its official subreddit. The EU has successfully verified 1,294,188 of Stop Killing Games' 1,448,270 signatures, easily clearing the one million minimum count it needed to move forward in the process.

In the comments, user MikeyIfYouWanna calculated that about 89% of the submitted signatures were legitimate. Katzner agreed, estimating that Stop Killing Games has one of the top three lowest failed signature rates among EU Citizens' Initiatives.

"We're sitting at around 10%, while the best-performing initiatives tend to fall in the 10-15% range, which puts us firmly in the upper bracket," Katzner wrote. "Some initiatives see failure rates as high as 20-25% and still manage to get over the line, but it's worth noting that the overall sample size is quite small, only 11 initiatives."

Now, I will admit that I am no expert in how the EU legislative process works, nor how it interacts with the laws of its member countries. Over on the Stop Killing Games subreddit, where this signature achievement was announced, several commenters appeared aligned on how this works moving forward. Here is the best of them, from user AShortUsernameIndeed.

There's a few steps. The EU issues regulations (which are EU-wide laws) and directives (which are guidelines for national legislation). Since this initiative is framed as a consumer rights issue, the most that can come out of it on the EU level is a directive (because the EU does not have direct legislative powers on consumer rights). The actual laws will then be written by the legislatures of each member country, separately. So the steps are:

• get the EU commission and parliament to decide to legislate, then
• lobby them to get a directive that actually does what the initiative wants, then
• lobby the parliaments of all 27 member states to get the directive transformed into laws that actually do what the initiative wants.

That's a few years of work ahead, in the best case. We'll see what happens.

That looks correct, from my own poking around. And it does indeed mean that there are both years of work ahead before this turns into actual European laws and there are millions of lobbying dollars to overcome. But it's progress, if only incremental.

And while video game preservation has long been important to me, I will admit I never thought I'd see the day when a governmental body such as the EU Parliament would actually take up the issue. Through the power of the internet, a collective appreciation for the preservation of culture, and volunteer work, however, it appears that will happen at the very least.

Greater Manchester Police has announced that it will be taking no further action on Reform UK candidate Matthew Goodwin's complaint about a Labour party tweet. Goodwin had claimed that a post by Labour misrepresented him and breached electoral law. Goodwin's pearl-clutching disgusted even right-wing hack Dan Hodges:

Next time anyone in Reform bangs on about policing tweets remind them of this… https://t.co/sGjChMy3ZW

— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) January 29, 2026

Goodwin's party boss Farage has his own record of hypocrisy, having promised to stop people doing, if he ever gets into power, exactly what Goodwin did — trying to intimidate people for social media posts:

I don't think enough is being made of this insane turn of events by Reform UK.

This is from the very same source in 2024, talking about how Allison Pearson's police tweet investigation had been dropped.

With a handy contribution from Reform UK leader — Nigel Farage.

"Farage… https://t.co/pcwis6PQZ6 pic.twitter.com/k6fD3PUXMW

— Don McGowan (@donmcgowan) January 29, 2026

Farage's deputy Richard Tice is no stranger to hypocrisy — and no better on this particular form of it:

Tice will be happy pic.twitter.com/vwiW1RJMun

— Sebastian Coe (@SEBdotCOEdotUK) January 29, 2026

And the party's supposed aversion to prosecuting hate speech was also exposed this week when Tory party leader Kemi Badenoch attacked new Tory-to-Reform defector Suella Braverman:

There's this also, and the case Anderson won for someone telling him he was a wa***r.. they hate free speech https://t.co/6q08reFzpa

— Just Laurie (@Birax) January 29, 2026

Braverman herself was no better, at least by the supposed robust free speech standards her new party claims to champion:

Very disappointing that it has come to this.

A false and defamatory statement has been made by the @Conservatives about me.

No private or public apology has been made to me.

And there has been no acceptance that it was false.

Disgusting behaviour by a once great party. https://t.co/6arEwRcSmt

— Suella Braverman (@SuellaBraverman) January 29, 2026

Horrors and hypocrites the lot of them — including Keir Starmer and his lackeys who are always trying to out-fash the fash.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

BellSoft survey finds 48% prefer pre‑hardened images over managing vulnerabilities themselves

Java developers still struggle to secure containers, with nearly half (48 percent) saying they'd rather delegate security to providers of hardened containers than worry about making their own container security decisions.…

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation's Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week's roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by Konstantinos Komaitis, Senior Resident Fellow for Global and Democratic Governance at the Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFRLab) at the Atlantic Council. Together, they discuss:

• Who Owns TikTok in the U.S. Now? (NY Times)
• TikTok is investigating why some users can't write 'Epstein' in messages (NPR)
• TikTok users freak out over app's 'immigration status' collection — here's what it means (TechCrunch)
• TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes (Wired)
• Social network UpScrolled sees surge in downloads following TikTok's US takeover (TechCrunch)
• Europe votes to tackle deep dependence on US tech in sovereignty drive (Computerworld)
• Meta hides followers and following lists for users based in Iran (Iran International)
• Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only (Rest of World)
• The 'Social Media Addiction' Narrative May Be More Harmful Than Social Media Itself (Techdirt)
• Payment processors were against CSAM until Grok started making it (The Verge)

Apple shared its latest quarterly financial results today and the news is once again very, very good for the Cupertino company. The quarter ending December 27, 2025 marked "the best-ever quarter" for iPhones, which generated a record high revenue of nearly $85.27 billion for the business. Apple doesn't disclose the number of devices sold any more, but even with the prices for many of its latest generation of smartphones surpassing $1,000 a pop, that's still got to be a heck of a lot of iPhones. 

"The demand for iPhone was simply staggering," CEO Tim Cook said on the conference call to discuss the results. "This is the strongest iPhone lineup we've ever had and by far the most popular."

That wasn't the only massive number in the earnings report. Services revenue also logged its biggest quarter yet, growing 14 percent over the same period last year to reach just over $30 billion. It was also Apple's biggest quarter to date for total revenue, which was nearly $143.76 billion for the already fabulously wealthy company.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/apple-just-reported-its-best-ever-quarter-for-iphone-sales-234135513.html?src=rss

The story did not begin with Israel's announcement that it had found the body of prisoner Ran Gueli in the Gaza Strip. It began much earlier, underground.

There, where war is meant to end and silence begin, Palestinian cemeteries were turned into sites of military operations. In the search for a single body, hundreds of graves were opened and the dead removed from their final resting places. This rare act in modern warfare raises a chilling question: how far can war go, and do the dead retain any sanctity?

The search that led to the cemeteries of Gaza

According to field data and corroborating testimonies, occupying forces began digging inside civilian cemeteries days before the official announcement.

The operations focused on areas previously subjected to ground invasions in the Gaza Strip.

The exhumations were not isolated incidents. They were systematic and repeated. Graves were opened, remains removed, and bodies transferred for examination in an attempt to locate Israel's last missing prisoner. Palestinian and media estimates indicate that around 250 graves were exhumed during these operations, based on Israel's belief that Ran Gueli was buried in one of them.

The announcement 

When the Israeli army later announced it had identified the body through official matching tests, it framed the event as an "operational achievement" and the closure of the hostage file.

The statement, however, omitted the cost of that outcome: hundreds of desecrated graves and families discovering their dead had not been left in peace. Israel did not disclose how many graves were exhumed, what happened to the remains, or whether bodies were reburied according to humanitarian or religious procedures.

This silence leaves behind a moral and legal void far greater than any military statement.

Among the dead 

The search for Ran Gueli's body was not a forensic process confined to laboratories. It was a brutal journey through Palestinian cemeteries.

Bulldozers tore through soil marked by names, dates, and memories, searching for one body among hundreds.

The dead were not anonymous remains. They were parents, children, and grandparents buried with the hope that death would end their suffering. For their families, this was not a wartime operation. It was a violation of memory and mourning. Death itself was dragged back into the conflict.

Where does the law stand?

International law experts and human rights organisations stress that cemeteries are protected civilian sites.

Exhuming hundreds of graves to locate a single body raises serious concerns of disproportionate force. Even in the most brutal conflicts, the dead are meant to remain sacred. Military necessity does not override this principle when no immediate threat exists.

Human rights groups argue that what occurred may constitute systematic desecration of the dead and a violation of established legal obligations.

Condemnation without accountability

In Palestine, the incident was described as both a moral and legal crime. Calls were made for an independent international investigation.

Internationally, the response has been muted, closer to silence than accountability.

This echoes broader accusations of double standards in responses to violations during the war on Gaza. The absence of consequences risks setting a precedent in which cemeteries, like homes and hospitals, become legitimate targets.

Destroying the memory of the dead in Gaza

The exhumation of around 250 Palestinian graves to recover one Israeli prisoner signals a grim new phase of the war.

When graves are violated in the name of security, the boundary between life and death collapses.

If even the sanctity of graves is no longer respected, what limits remain on the conduct of war?

Featured image via Anadolu Ajansi

By Alaa Shamali

Spanish coach Pep Guardiola, manager of English club Manchester City, has once again shown public support for the Palestinian people amid the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Guardiola made his stance clear today at a conference held alongside a charity campaign supporting Palestine in Barcelona. He wore a Palestinian scarf and opened his speech in Arabic, saying: "Peace be upon you."

His remarks reaffirm his solidarity with Palestinians, draw attention to the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and renew debate over the international community's responsibility toward civilians:

https://www.thecanary.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/WhatsApp-Video-2026-01-29-at-11.01.06-PM.mp4 Guardiola delivers a moving speech 

During his speech, Guardiola spoke about images of Palestinian children who have lost their parents beneath the rubble of bombed homes. He said:

When I see a child over the last two years begging for his mother, buried under the rubble, I feel that we have left them alone, abandoned, neglected

He described children's suffering as a direct appeal to the world:

I always imagine that this child is saying: Where are you? Come and help us. And so far, we have not done so.

Guardiola argued that international silence deepens the harm:

What the bombs cause — and what they want to cause — is silence. They want us to look the other way. That is their only goal.

Strong criticism of political leaders

Guardiola also launched a sharp attack on political leaders, calling them "cowardly authorities."

They send innocent young people to kill innocent people," he said, "while they stay at home with the heating on when it's cold and the air conditioning on when it's hot.

He stressed that taking action begins with refusing to stay silent:

We have to take a step forward. Just being there already means a lot — a lot.

A message of solidarity and humanity

Guardiola concluded with a clear message of solidarity:

We stand before the world to show that we are on the side of the weakest. In this case, that is Palestine — and all just causes.

His intervention highlights his ethical stance as one of the world's most prominent sports figures. It also increases pressure on governments and international bodies to act, warning that silence or indifference amounts to a betrayal of basic human rights.

Featured image via Facebook

By Alaa Shamali

In a rare move that has drawn international attention, former Swedish goalkeeper Hedvig Lindahl has refused FIFA's invitation to join the 'FIFA Legends' team ahead of the Women's World Cup.

Her decision was not merely symbolic. It was a direct protest against the use of sport to whitewash institutions, while Palestinian footballers in Gaza are killed and denied the safety to play.

Rejecting the FIFA award and upholding human values

Lindahl said that taking part in any activity linked to FIFA's 'Peace Award' would exploit her image to sanitise the organisation's actions toward Palestinian athletes.

She stated:

Sport is not about slogans or promotional images. It is a platform for justice and human rights. Remaining silent about the killing of athletes in Gaza betrays the values and spirit of the game.

She added that FIFA lacks credibility if it continues to ignore daily violations against Palestinian players.

An explicit call for FIFA to protect Gaza's players

Lindahl went beyond rejection and issued a direct call for FIFA to act immediately to protect footballers in Gaza.

She noted that hundreds of Palestinian athletes have been killed or injured during the conflict. Any inaction, she argued, amounts to tacit complicity in these violations.

Lindahl stressed that Palestinian athletes must be guaranteed the right to play safely. She urged FIFA to transform sport into a tool for justice rather than a public relations exercise.

A bold stance that exposes sporting conscience

Her stance comes amid growing scrutiny of international sporting bodies operating during conflicts. It places clear moral pressure on FIFA to take a decisive position.

Lindahl has shifted from sporting legend to a global advocate for human rights in sport. She insists that football must reflect justice and humanity, not serve as symbolic cover for institutional silence.

An ethical test for world football

Lindahl's message is stark: players in Gaza deserve life and justice before ceremonies or symbolic awards.

Her stand places FIFA before a genuine moral test and reopens debate about the responsibility of sporting organisations to protect civilian athletes and uphold human rights.

Featured image via Chelsea FC

By Alaa Shamali

In a sane world, this would be shocking. We're not in a sane world. Tory peer and former Cabinet minister Michael Gove is a shameless supporter of Israel who, in government, tried to push through 'friends of apartheid' legislation banning local authorities from boycotting Israel. But he's also not the least bit shy about Israel's grossly undue influence in British politics. So much so that he's happy to admit he wants more of it. On camera:

Instagram seems to have set the 'reel' so it can no longer be opened and embedded, but Skwawkbox was able to retrieve the video file. Well done to the interviewer for holding Michael Gove to account:

https://www.thecanary.co/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/SnapInsta-Ai_3820699131556211059.mp4

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

TikTok has permanently banned Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda, whose documentary It's Bisan from Gaza and I'm still alive won multiple awards and broke millions of hearts. She had more than 1.4m followers on the platform.

The deletion is another assault on decency in the app's war on Palestinian and pro-Palestinian speech. Thousands of creators have seen their content shadowbanned, while even the word 'Zionist' is treated as hate speech. TikTok has installed Israeli cyberspies to run the programme since the Israel-fanatic Ellison billionaires bought it, hiding Israel's genocide in Gaza.

Owda announced the censorship, which follows repeated 'restriction' attacks, in a video via the 'Pulse of Palestine' account. She attributed the decision to a speech by Israeli war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu described the TikTok purchase as the "most important" "battlefield" in Israel's attempts to sanitise its evil, bloodstained image. Not just an image, but a reality:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by PalPulse (@pulseofpal)

The enemy of decency has also planned ahead to try to keep Owda's reporting hidden. The Palestinian-created UpScrolled app is at the top of international app charts as users abandon TikTok's corrupt cover-up — but the occupation has created dozens of 'Bisan Owda' accounts in an attempt to prevent users finding the real Owda on UpScrolled or even identifying whether she has one there yet:

Some of the many Bisan Owda clones - the real one may be among them.

Skwawkbox is trying to find the real one and will let readers know. Israel has murdered hundreds of journalists and their families. It must not be allowed to silence Bisan Owda.

Featured image via UN Women

By Skwawkbox

A new report has found that UK universities still aren't doing enough to support disabled students. The 2025 Access Insights report from Disabled Students UK found that 63% of disabled students have gone without adjustments.

Disabled students

Disabled Students UK surveyed over 1,000 students from over 100 universities about their experiences. This is the third year the study has run and the largest into Higher Education accessibility in the UK. It's particularly relevant now with the government focusing on getting young disabled people into education.

So you'd think with the push to get disabled people into education that it would at least be accessible, right? Wrong.

As the report says

Disabled students are not new in Higher Education. What is new is the growing body of evidence that shows, year after year, where and how our systems continue to fail them.

Attitudes improving, but access worsening

One good thing discovered in the survey is that attitudes from staff are better than in previous years. There's also seemingly a greater understanding of disability now. However, 20% have been made to feel unwelcome by staff. As the report notes, this goes alongside structural barriers that stop disabled people from progressing and doing as well as their nondisabled peers.

The report found that although support can be agreed by staff, it isn't necessarily delivered. Less than half of those surveyed said their approved adjustments were consistently implemented. 63% of disabled students ended up studying without their adjustments. A big reason for this is that chasing them up repeatedly takes too much time and energy. Just 44% said that all their agreed adjustments had been followed through with.

The amount of disabled students being able to get official personalised support from Disability Services fell last year. 66% of disabled students had a support plan, down from 77% in 2024.  The proportion of declared students with a support plan fell from 77% in 2024 to 66% in 2025 and fewer students met with a Disability Advisor, suggesting a shift towards more informal or automated models of support under growing capacity pressure.

Disabled students can't physically get to class

Many students were concerned that measures which came into place at the start of the COVID pandemic are now being rolled back. These of course made studying more accessible for disabled students. The survey found that remote or hybrid lectures are being stopped. Even measures such as lecture recording don't happen as much.

As the report says:

These decisions are frequently justified as restoring educational quality or campus experience, yet they disproportionately exclude already marginalised students.

This represents a failure to learn from evidence. Universities have seen that these measures work. Choosing not to retain them is a choice that prioritises convenience or tradition over accessibility.

On top of this, students are still struggling to physically access lectures. Disabled students are still struggling against inaccessible buildings, unsuitable teaching spaces and inflexible timetabling.

Accessible uni accommodation also a problem. Students report that this is limited and often more expensive than other accommodation options. 47% of disabled students said they had to pay extra for accessible student housing.

Access fails make disabled students feel unsafe

Scarily, the report found a "significant proportion" are not confident that they would be able to safely evacuate their university buildings in a fire.

The report also found that despite all the access failures, many students did not feel safe or confident enough to challenge decisions or chase up support. Awareness of the complaints support is also low, so many do not report issues. Some who did complain said that their treatment had worsened afterwards.

Students also reported that complex systems were hard to navigate. This means those with less capacity for these tasks are less likely to seek help for access failures.

As a result, failures are not formally recorded, so universities are unaware of them. And the only people who face consequences are the disabled people whose lives are made worse by access failures.

Despite this, students said that staff are more supportive and understanding. However lack of training and being unclear about their responsibilities towards disabled students undermined this.

What needs to happen

Disabled Students UK have some recommendations for UK universities to make studying easier for disabled students

They say that agreed support must be met, and this should be monitored across the students' time at uni. There should also be consequences when needs are not met. DSUK also says the administrative burden on students must be reduced. Disability Services should also work alongside other parts of the university, as opposed to being there to compensate for inaccessibility. It must also be easier and safer for disabled students to raise issues, without fear of mistreatment.

The organisation wants universities to take clear ownership of accessibility. It also expresses how important it is that any cost-cutting exercises are assessed on how they would impact disabled students. They also want universities to avoid rolling back measures that clearly help disabled students.

Labour once again proves they don't care about disabled people.

Let's not forget that this is all happening while the government is obsessed with young disabled people who are Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET). You'd think then that they'd be investing more to ensure that disabled people can actually get into education. But that would assume that they actually want to help disabled people into education, instead of just demonising us.

Because it's far easier to call disabled young people lazy, than it is to actually support them to thrive.

Featured image via Studying in the UK

By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

The call is coming from inside the house

opinion Maybe everything is all about timing, like the time (this week) America's lead cyber-defense agency sounded the alarm on insider threats after it came to light that its senior official uploaded sensitive documents to ChatGPT.…

We always knew the narrative was false. The administration's insistence that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) was somehow an international menace always rang hollow — just another way to disappear brown people into an El Salvadoran torture prison.

For months, it's been clear the intelligence doesn't back the claims made by the deliberately stupid leaders of the Trump administration. A leak of intelligence information last May forced the Director of National Intelligence — personified in this administration by the always incredible (in the bad way) Tulsi Gabbard — to forcefully deny the TdA findings compiled by the Intelligence Community she supposedly oversees.

That's on top of the sketchy system run by even sketchier federal law enforcement officers to determine who is or isn't a member of a foreign gang like TdA. The stuff these slackers pointed to — tattoos, having any contact whatsoever with anyone else the government is pretending is a TdA member, etc. — wasn't actually backed by any research or intelligence-gathering. Unlike MS-13 and other gangs, TdA doesn't seem to require permanent skin ink as part of its onboarding process.

This hype about TdA was used to justify everything from the stripping of due process rights to the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to push past whatever minimal resistance was offered by courts or timid members of Congress. The administration may now be more focused on punishing Trump's enemies, but the phrase "enemies both foreign and domestic" is still in play, which means the administration will still leverage "but their gangs" proclamations whenever possible.

But, in order to do so, the administration has to willfully ignore the growing body of evidence generated by its own agencies that contradict this narrative, as Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro report for Wired:

While senior administration officials portrayed TdA as a centrally directed terrorist network active across American cities, internal tasking directives and threat assessments repeatedly cite "intelligence gaps" in understanding how the group operated on US soil: Whether it had identifiable leadership, whether its domestic activity reflecting any coordination beyond small local crews, and whether US-based incidents pointed to foreign direction or were simply the work of autonomous, profit-driven criminals.

These are what the documents acquired by Wired — internal law enforcement documents marked "sensitive" and not intended for public disclosure — actually said about TdA and its alleged international efforts:

While senior administration officials spoke of "invasion," "irregular warfare," and "narco-terrorism," field-level reporting consistently portrayed Tren de Aragua in the US as a fragmented, profit-driven criminal group, with no indication of centralized command, strategic coordination, or underlying political motive. The criminal activity described is largely opportunistic—if not mundane—ranging from smash-and-grab burglaries and ATM "jackpotting" to delivery-app fraud and low-level narcotics sales.

The boots on the ground can't find anything that agrees with what's coming out of the administration's collective mouth on any given day. And the lack of connective tissue between TdA and the Venezuelan government makes Trump' plan to "take over" the country look even more illegal than it already looked, back when Pete Hegseth's Defense Department was limiting itself to murdering people in international waters.

Administration officials — especially those making the most noise about TdA = international terrorism — have always had access to this information. And they've deliberately chosen to ignore it because it undercuts the supposed justifications for their massive, continuous power grabs.

This is the fact-free environment that is being forced on us by an administration that has chosen to only serve itself. Here's America's racist grandpa expounding on his idiotic hatred of one particular nation:

Trump singled out Venezuela in particular. "I was so angry with Venezuela," he said. "They emptied their prisons, almost entirely emptied their prisons, into the United States."

Here's the reality:

Over a 22-month period, CBP's own detection methods identified no more than 83 known TdA members at the border. 

Not quite the prison flooding Trump claimed. And even after CBP engaging in some very imaginative extrapolation of this small number (by simply adding in the unproven assumption that "one-half of one percent" of all Venezuelans seeking to enter the US "had ties to TdA") only raised that number to a little over 3,000 possible TdA gang members, which is far below the number anyone would reasonably believe amounted to an "invasion" by an international criminal cartel with a strong desire to get some terrorism on. It's even more stupid when you add in the other intel: that most TdA activity tends to be random, low-level crimes of opportunity, rather than the sort of coordinated effort you'd find in larger, far more competent criminal cartels.

While it's not that surprising that a presidential administration would filter out facts that don't fit the narratives it's trying to pitch, it's far beyond abhorrent that a president who claims he loves America and Americans more than any president in history would consider them to be nothing more than occasionally useful rubes. But those who continue to love Trump no matter how often he lies to them have proven they don't care what's being said. They only care who's saying it.

History never repeats exactly the same, which is how it can be hard to recognize when it is indeed repeating—too many little things may be different the second time around for subsequent events to be a perfect twin of the previous. But it's the big things that often reappear in similar ways that are meaningful. As they are here, which is why it's time to recognize: for all intents and purposes, how the government of the United States of America is behaving is just like how the German Nazis behaved. It is doing to the people within its national embrace exactly what the Nazis did to theirs. The comparison to 20th Century Nazi Germany is not something that 21st Century America is still working up to; it's where we have already arrived.

That we have not (yet) set up an Auschwitz-Birkenau, replete with crematoria, is not evidence to the contrary. After all, the German Nazis didn't just suddenly start killing millions in the 1940s; their crimes against humanity began years earlier, in the 1930s. Even Hitler himself referred to the mass murder Auschwitz facilitated as the "final solution," because it was the tactic deployed only after he had already committed plenty of other atrocities first—atrocities that look an awful lot like the ones we are inflicting now upon the human beings in our own national midst.

In the case of both nations the atrocities began, as such horrors often do, with the "othering" of people, as if there were those who, by virtue of something about their own humanity, were somehow disqualified from being part of our national community. While the Trump Administration may have begun by ostensibly focusing on "illegal immigrants"—which itself is a grotesquely deceptive label (an immigrant cannot be illegal; an immigrant can only immigrate illegally, and, for the most part, such illegality is but a civil or misdemeanor offense and not the heinously lawless act the administration paints it as)—like the German Nazis it has also stigmatized racial, religious, and ethnic groups comprising America's cultural tapestry, as well as LGBTQ+ people. The rhetoric it espouses is all about conditioning the public to believe that there are some people who belong in America, and some who need to be expunged from it, so that the public will get on board aiding, supporting, and even celebrating the expunging that will soon follow.

The horror in both countries then continues by upending the law such that the targeted people cannot legally belong anymore. In Germany we saw how Jewish families who had been in the country for generations suddenly lost their rights as citizens. Here in the U.S. denaturalization has so far only been threatened, albeit palpably, but for non-citizens whose presence in the country has so far been entirely lawful, the Trump Administration has been unilaterally changing that status, moving people from welcomed additions to our community to accused interlopers who must be expelled and, per the government, right now.

But before the expulsions can happen, first the targeted people need to be rounded up. And so a force of federal police has been showing up at people's homes, schools, jobs, health care providers, bus stops, and anywhere American life takes place to arrest people, without warrants or due process, for no crime at all other than existing. Even if not yet officially prisoners, everyone targeted by the regime has already been made to be, by forcing them to withdraw from life in fear. Governor Walz is absolutely right: there is some child writing a new diary about what it is like to have to hide from a lawless regime incapable of respecting the law and liberties that are supposed to protect them, just like the German Nazis refused to respect any of it either.

After rounding its targets up, the American government then does what the German Nazis did and "concentrate" those they have snatched in detention centers, or, as in the case of some of the larger complexes, "camps," if you will. There these people—even small children—are kept as un-convicted prisoners, unable to leave on their own volition while, just like the Nazis' victims, they are forced to live in inhumane conditions—assuming they manage to stay alive at all. Here history has been loudly echoing once again, as the stories emerging from America's human warehouses are, as the German Nazis' were, tales of inadequate food and healthcare, brutality by the guards, and indifferent murder.

The comparison to history does not even stop there. For instance, German Nazis also liked to banish their prisoners to far-flung nations where they could be imprisoned instead. It is an example the Trump Administration has already followed, such as by sending its own to places like CECOT in El Salvador or other nations around the world where a secret flight could be sent in accordance with a secret deal made with a regime willing to accommodate America's evil. Furthermore, the Trump Administration has continued to walk in the path of the German Nazis in its penalization of any dissenting voice that would challenge its actions. Here, too, opponents of the regime have also become targets of its brutal power, being entered into databases, surveilled, and even summarily executed.

Naturally there are of course some differences between then and now. In fact, one of the biggest differences between what the Germany Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s did then and what the United States government is doing now is that we're mostly using airplanes instead of box cars to traffic innocent people to places where at best they are imprisoned, often tortured, and generally put in mortal peril. And, unlike the German Nazis, who were meticulous in their paperwork, our government can't seem to be bothered keeping track of whom we have sent to their doom. But apart from these differences what is happening now is still fundamentally the same as what happened then. Families are still being broken up, children are effectively being orphaned (even citizen children, who are also being expatriated), and lives and futures are being destroyed, if not ended outright. All without due process, and in grotesque volume, just as during the Holocaust.

However, there is another important difference: that so many in America can see what is happening for what it is and be willing to stand against it. There are of course stories from the Holocaust of people resisting Nazism and trying to save their neighbors—Anne Frank's, for instance—but history lacks good analogs to what is happening now, like in Minnesota, where virtually the entire community has stood in solidarity to shield their neighbors and protest en masse, with even local government pushing back as well.

But that wonderful exception to America's descent into Nazism does not mean the descent hasn't already happened. The comparison remains too apt, and too important to run from. Because it also is instructive for how we got here. After all, how could it have happened here, in a country strong enough to have defeated the actual German Nazis, with its nearly 250-year old constitutional order that should have prevented everything that is now happening. But the answer is revealing: because neither regime committed their crimes with any legitimacy. In both cases, the sitting governments had to destroy the law that would have restricted their evil in order to perpetuate it.

Of course, even if the Weimar Republic had been too weak to resist it, surely America should have been more durable and able to resist such a threat emerging from within. Yet here we find ourselves, which itself adds to the list of reasons why it is so important to realize it: because thinking it can't happen here is precisely why it has happened here. Saying it can't and wouldn't happen here is exactly what ensures that it can and will. It could and it did, because too many ignored one of the critical lessons of the Holocaust, which is that its horrors don't come from nothing. Yes, there are malevolent people, but they only have power over us when good people do nothing with the power they have to stop it. And here far too many people who should have protected us from what is now happening turned a blind eye to it while it was brewing on the horizon and in doing so cleared the way for it.

As history keeps demonstrating, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Which is why it is so important to stop burying our heads in the sand, or, worse, try to excuse the inexcusable by rationalizing, even if only out of some sense of misplaced patriotic vanity, that what is happening is anything less than what we believed should never be able to happen again. It is only by recognizing that this evil has slipped through our defenses that those defenses can be fortified.

And it is important to start now, because, again, the story of Nazi Germany offers even more important lessons. One is that there will come a tipping point after which it may be impossible to stop the horrors the government is perpetuating without risking war. Furthermore, even if the atrocities the American government is committing were to stop today—and at last there finally seems some political enthusiasm for trying to get them stopped—hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people have already been traumatized, tortured, or killed by these monsters we allowed to run around among us for the last year wearing our flag. There is no undo button for what has befallen them. But if we act now we can save others. As well as ourselves.

Because one other key lesson is that this evil doesn't just victimize others; it victimizes everyone. It is not just the targets of the regime but everyone's welfare that is at stake. The history of the Holocaust shows how ultimately every German suffered along with the people the Nazis specifically targeted. There is no allowing this evil to happen to just some among us. We're all in this country and world together with our fates inexorably intertwined. These are crimes being committed against all of us, trying to destroy the fabric of our nation, its values, and all the law that is supposed to protect us all. Saving everyone is the only way to save ourselves.

And the first step to salvation is acknowledging the true danger we face.

Note: I originally started writing this post because I thought it had an important point to make. Then I saw the execrable news that the US Holocaust Museum had the gall to criticize the comparisons being drawn between what is unfolding against the vulnerable among us now, and what unfolded decades ago against the vulnerable in Nazi Germany, as if any victims had some sort of a monopoly on sympathy for being victimized, and it only became more relevant. I may not be a Trump sycophant unlawfully operating one of the nation's most important museums, but I've visited enough Holocaust memorials and museums, studied enough Nazi propaganda in academic environments, and toured enough concentration camps to have learned the lessons that curators in every instance have been desperate to teach the future. The US Holocaust Museum board should think about becoming similarly educated so that they, too, can learn that the point of all these efforts archiving and instructing on the past is NOT to take the Nazis' side.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said it received more than 1 million reports of AI-related child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in 2025. The "vast majority" of that content was reported by Amazon, which found the material in its training data, according to an investigation by Bloomberg. In addition, Amazon said only that it obtained the inappropriate content from external sources used to train its AI services and claimed it could not provide any further details about where the CSAM came from. 

"This is really an outlier," Fallon McNulty, executive director of NCMEC's CyberTipline, told Bloomberg. The CyberTipline is where many types of US-based companies are legally required to report suspected CSAM. "Having such a high volume come in throughout the year begs a lot of questions about where the data is coming from, and what safeguards have been put in place." She added that aside from Amazon, the AI-related reports the organization received from other companies last year included actionable data that it could pass along to law enforcement for next steps. Since Amazon isn't disclosing sources, McNulty said its reports have proved "inactionable."

"We take a deliberately cautious approach to scanning foundation model training data, including data from the public web, to identify and remove known [child sexual abuse material] and protect our customers," an Amazon representative said in a statement to Bloomberg. The spokesperson also said that Amazon aimed to over-report its figures to NCMEC in order to avoid missing any cases. The company said that it removed the suspected CSAM content before feeding training data into its AI models. 

Safety questions for minors have emerged as a critical concern for the artificial intelligence industry in recent months. CSAM has skyrocketed in NCMEC's records; compared with the more than 1 million AI-related reports the organization received last year, the 2024 total was 67,000 reports while 2023 only saw 4,700 reports. 

In addition to issues such as abusive content being used to train models, AI chatbots have also been implicated in several dangerous or tragic cases involving young users. OpenAI and Character.AI have both been sued after teenagers planned their suicides with those companies' platforms. Meta is also being sued for alleged failures to protect teen users from sexually explicit conversations with chatbots.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/amazon-discovered-a-high-volume-of-csam-in-its-ai-training-data-but-isnt-saying-where-it-came-from-224749228.html?src=rss

To what end? Who knows? Tesla isn't even using them in its own factories yet

Elon Musk's car company is getting ready to be Skynet. Tesla, facing an 11 percent decline in automotive revenue in Q4 2025, has committed to $20 billion in capex spending this year on manufacturing and compute infrastructure. The goal: build lots of humanoid robots.…

A Labs prototype turns prompts into short, explorable 3D worlds

Google has put the video gaming industry on notice with the rollout of Project Genie, an experimental AI world-model prototype that generates explorable 3D environments from text or image prompts.…

Congress has two months to decide whether to abandon, renew, or reform a controversial surveillance law at the heart of Edward Snowden's leaks.

Administrations of both parties have taken a lead role in jockeying over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, typically working to tamp down reform talk. Trump officials, however, were absent at a hearing on the subject Wednesday.

The silence continued Thursday, when President Donald Trump's nominee to serve as National Security Agency director dodged a question about FISA reforms at a confirmation hearing.

The White House says it is working behind the scenes, but the administration's lack of a public stance has garnered criticism from Democrats. Even the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, seemed to express frustration with the no-show at his hearing.

"If the administration would like to brief us in an open or closed setting, I will help work to set it up," he said. "In the meantime, the Senate Judiciary Committee needs to move ahead."

Asked for comment, the White House declined to explain why the administration was absent.

"The administration is having productive discussions," the White House said in an unsigned statement.

Grassley and other lawmakers are working ahead of an April 20 deadline to renew FISA's Section 702.

Warrant for "Backdoor" Search?

The provision allows the FBI and other agencies to search through a massive trove of ostensibly "foreign" intelligence gathered when NSA spymasters point their collection tools abroad. Those "foreign" communications, however, include large quantities of information sent from and to Americans.

Civil liberties advocates have long sought to force agents at the FBI and other entities to obtain a court-approved warrant before conducting "backdoor" searches for information on American subjects.

They came within a single vote of achieving their aim in 2024, when a bipartisan coalition banded together to support a warrant requirement. The push failed in the House of Representatives, but Section 702 supporters were forced to agree to a short-term extension that expires this year.

Since the last debate, the advocates' case has been bolstered by a federal court opinion finding that the FBI violated one man's rights by searching a Section 702 database without a warrant.

Trump has at times lashed out at FISA because a separate provision of the law was abused to improperly spy on an adviser to his 2016 presidential campaign. When push came to shove during his first term, however, the Trump administration supported a renewal of the law without warrant protections. His nominees for top posts also lined up to oppose further reforms during confirmation hearings last year.

Trump's nominee to serve as NSA director, Lt. Gen. Joshua Rudd, gave little indication as to where he stood on the issue during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked him whether he would support a warrant requirement, with exemptions for emergency, "four-alarm crisis" situations.

Rudd sidestepped the question.

Related NSA Orders Employees to Spy on the World "With Dignity and Respect"

"Well, senator, that is a topic I would need to look into and get a better understanding of to give you a more fulsome and complete answer on that one," he said. "Again, what I would highlight though is supreme confidence that the men and women of the NSA are committed to protecting civil liberties and privacy of American citizens."

At the separate Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, experts on both sides opined on the controversial law — but no one from the administration attended to answer questions.

"We are three months from the expiration of Section 702 and the Trump administration, as best as I can discern, still has no official position on it. That is stunning," said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who in 2024 voted to extend the law in its current form.

Joe Biden's administration aggressively lobbied lawmakers for months to support a renewal of the law without modification during that go-around.

Coons, for his part, said he did not know how he would ultimately vote on the issue this year.

"Kick the Can?"

Democrats who voted for the law two years ago are under increasing pressure this year — including from primary opponents — to support a warrant requirement as the Trump administration erases privacy protections.

Related Dan Goldman Supported Warrantless Spying on Americans. Now His Primary Opponent Is Hitting Him for It.

To make matters more complicated, Republicans who voted for reforms under Biden could flip back to supporting sweeping powers for the executive branch now that Trump is president.

There are other surveillance powers that could figure into the renewal debate. Civil liberties advocates are also worried about a separate provision created in 2024 that allows the government to force data centers — and, critics fear, anyone with a computer — to hand records over to the government.

Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the security and surveillance project at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, said that he was concerned legislators may be tempted to approve another short-term extension during an election year.

"It's an open question of, are we going to get a reform vote on this in the next couple months, or is Congress going to try to kick the can?" he said.

Trump administration's silent stance may reflect internal debates, Laperruque said.

"I think there's probably just a lot of internal uncertainty on how exactly they are going to come down on this stuff," he said, "and I guess they would rather not engage until they have a set position."

The post Controversial Warrantless Spying Law Expiring Soon and Trump Officials Didn't Show For a Hearing on It appeared first on The Intercept.

Labour's deputy leader Lucy Powell is pushing the idea that only Labour can beat Reform in Gorton & Denton. The problem is she's using a highly dubious poll to make that argument:

This is why I've been saying what I have - only voting Labour defeats Reform. A vote for the Greens or any other party risks a Reform MP in Manchester. https://t.co/7YjTaBum2Q

— Lucy Powell MP (@LucyMPowell) January 28, 2026

What's so dubious about this poll, you ask?

Let's get into it.

Sample size

The eager pollsters among you have probably noticed that Find Out Now used a sample size of 143 people. 1,000 people is considered a good sample size, with the British Polling Council noting:

Statistical theory indicates that the more people who are interviewed in a poll, then, other things being equal, the more likely it is that it will accurately reflect the views of the population.

However, there is a law of diminishing returns. A poll of 2,000 people is not twice as likely to be accurate as one of 1,000 people. As a result, there is no "minimum" sample size which is acceptable. But bearing in mind cost and likely accuracy, the established norm for an opinion poll in Great Britain is that it interviews at least 1,000 people.

A sample size of 143 people is 1.5 tenths what you'd expect; i.e. you should assume a high degree of inaccuracy.

Less than 100 once you exclude undecided voters, completely fucking insane that they think this is at all scientific. They did one like this for Great Yarmouth but that at least was a hypothetical one for GE29, this is for an imminent by-election and it's basically disinformation

— Stats for Lefties

Executed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was known to federal agents before they killed him, sources claim. They also beat him up and broke his rib days before he was shot to death. Sources told CNN that Pretti had a run-in with federal agents prior to them killing him on 24 January:

Pretti's name was known to federal agents.

CNN added:

It's also not clear whether the federal agents who encountered Pretti on Saturday recognized him before they confronted him - eventually wrestling him to the ground, taking a gun from his waistband and then fatally shooting him.

The same report explained:

about a week before his death, he suffered a broken rib when a group of federal officers tackled him while he was protesting their attempt to detain other individuals.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) denied knowledge of the encounter. But CNN said it had seen documents which showed federal agents routinely gathered data on "agitators". Agents reportedly:

capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.

Pretti was even treated for his injuries:

Pretti was later given medication consistent with treating a broken rib, according to records reviewed by CNN.

Days later Pretti was dead, shot by a group of agents in a Minneapolis street in broad daylight. He was legally carrying a sidearm. He made no attempt to draw it and had been disarmed and wrestled to the ground well before before he shot dead execution-style.

Alex Pretti vs trigger-happy paramilitaries

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has fired shots 16 times since July, according to Trump aides.  DHS control the notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The most recent killings in Minneapolis have caused worldwide outrage, but the paramilitary thugs have been trigger-happy for years.

The Washington Post said on 27 January:

At least 10 people have been struck by bullets — including four U.S. citizens. Three people have been killed.

The Trump regime has repeatedly doubled down. The January killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis were both blamed on the individuals killed, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

The Post reported:

None of the officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Border Patrol or Homeland Security Investigations has faced criminal charges in any of the shootings, nor has the administration announced any internal disciplinary measures against them.

Explanations for this culture of impunity have varied. Poor training is one excuse. But now DHS is looking to expand its pool of recruits by pitching to military lovers, combat sport fans and gun enthusiast.

Gun nuts and wanna-be soldiers

Journalist Drew Harwell told Democracy Now that the next big recruiting drive would use fascist-themed marketing to attract gun fans and military lovers:

Harwell was there to discuss his major report into a well-funded recruiting drive for new ICE members.

His December 31 investigation warned:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are planning to spend $100 million over a one-year period to recruit gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts through online influencers and a geo-targeted advertising campaign…

This was:

part of what the agency called a "wartime recruitment" strategy it said was critical to hiring thousands of new deportation officers nationwide.

A leaked government document described how targeted ads would reach:

people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear.

Clearly DHS is looking for quantity, not quality.

Deadly databases

US reporter Ken Klippenstein had more to say about the collection and use of data to crush dissent in the US. He scoffed at Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin's claim:

There is NO database of 'domestic terrorists' run by DHS.

Why? Because two US security officials had told him that was a straight-up lie:

Two senior national security officials tell me that there are more than a dozen secret and obscure watchlists that homeland security and the FBI are using to track protesters (both anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian), "Antifa," and others who are promiscuously labeled "domestic terrorists.

They even named the technology used to gather information:

the secret lists and applications go by codenames like Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta (including the ominous sounding HEL-A and HEL-C reports generated by Sparta).

An anonymous DHS lawyer connected the practice directly to the War on Terror in just the latest expression of the accelerating 'imperial boomerang' effect:

We came out of 9/11 with the notion that we would have a single 'terrorist' watchlist to eliminate confusion, duplication and avoid bad communications

They added:

since January 6, not only have we expanded exponentially into purely domestic watchlisting, but we have also created a highly secretive and compartmented superstructure that few even understand.

DHS, which controls Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, looks less like an immigration department but the day. As well as killing protestors, it has been collecting data into secretive lists. Senior 'immigration enforcement' figures like Greg Bovino have complained about those branding ICE and DHS a modern-day Gestapo. If it bothers them that much there is a simple fix: stop acting like the Gestapo.

Featured image via MedpageToday

By Joe Glenton

Transphobic pressure group Sex Matters has just had its legal case against a London swimming pond dismissed by the High Court.

Sex Matters claimed that allowing trans people to use the changing facilities aligned with their identities at the Hampstead Heath ponds amounted to discrimination. The judge, in reply, told them to take the case to the lower county court where it belongs.

And in a further blow, a consultation published by the City of London Corporation (CLC) — which runs the pools — found that the vast majority of respondents support trans people getting changed wherever they like.

Sex Matters — 'The wrong way for doing these things'

Sex Matters — which is currently under investigation by the Charity Commission — argued that the CLC's trans-inclusive changing policy was unlawful and discriminatory.

They based this assertion on the 2025 Supreme Court ruling that status as a woman is defined by sex as-assigned-at-birth under the Equality Act 2010. This ruling led to an immediate interim ban on trans people using their chosen single-sex spaces. However, the guidance was later taken down, and is currently being redrafted.

Daniel Stilitz KC, representing the CLC, pointed out that the trans-inclusive policy had been in place since 2017. As such, Sex Matters' claims were out of time, along with being:

unhelpful, premature and the wrong way for doing these things.

Justice Lieven, who presided over the case, clearly agreed that with that last point. She dismissed Sex Matter's challenge, informing the group that the "appropriate forum" for their case was the lower-level county court.

'Significant time and resources'

Following Lieven's decision, the CLC highlighted that Sex Matters' case had diverted the corporation's attention and funding away from its actual job. This includes managing charitable funds supporting London communities.

A spokesperson for the corporation announced:

This case has required significant time and resources, which could otherwise be focused on managing Hampstead Heath as a charity and providing high-quality public services.

We have now published the results of a consultation on future access arrangements at the heath's bathing ponds.

The findings will be presented to City Corporation committees, which will consider them alongside legal duties, equality impact assessments, safeguarding responsibilities and operational considerations.

In the meantime, the current admission rules will remain in place until a final decision has been made by members.

The results of that consultation are particularly damning for Sex Matters. The research surveyed more than 38,000 members over the course of two months. It found that the vast majority of respondents backed the corporation's trans-inclusive changing policy.

The CLC also published findings showing that:

Of six options considered for the Kenwood Ladies, Highgate Men's and Hampstead Mixed Ponds, the most popular, with support from 86% of respondents, was retaining the existing access arrangements, in which trans men and women are able to use the pond of their choice.

The same percentage opposed introducing strict single sex access, 90% of people rejected requiring trans swimmers to use separate changing rooms or have separate swimming sessions, while 66% opposed making all ponds mixed sex. […]

Alongside the consultation, feedback was received from pond users via a series of independently-run focus groups. Here also, retaining current trans-inclusive arrangements was the option receiving broadest support, while introducing strict single sex rules or making all ponds mixed-sex ponds received very little support.

Overwhelming support

So, what lessons can we take from both Sex Matters' case itself, and the CLC's consultation results?

First, as the corporation stated, transphobic lawfare like that from Sex Matters is diverting time and resources away from charitable endeavours.

This echoed sentiments recently voiced by third-sector organisers in a recent open letter to the Charity Commission. The signatories stated that transphobic pressure groups were trying to strong-arm their organisations into adopting unwanted trans-hostile policies.

Second, it wasn't even the case that the consultation respondents simply didn't care about having sex-specific spaces at all. Two in every three respondents opposed making all of the ponds mixed-sex.

From this, we can conclude that even when the respondents supported the idea of having pools dedicated to men and women only, they wanted those categories to include trans men and women, respectively.

And so, third and finally, Sex Matters' case wasn't actually representing women at all. Rather, it represented a small group of cis women who were hostile towards the mere presence of trans women and non-binary people. And, as the CLC clearly demonstrated, these transphobes were a tiny minority of the pool-users.

Featured image via the Outdoors Swimming Society

By Alex/Rose Cocker

Two Elon Musk companies are reportedly planning to merge. On Thursday, Reuters reported that SpaceX and xAI are holding merger talks ahead of a planned IPO. Part of their plan is to launch AI data centers into space (but unfortunately, only as far as Earth's orbit).

Last week, it was reported that Musk planned to take SpaceX public despite having once said it wouldn't happen until the company had a presence on Mars. Now, the IPO could happen as early as this year. Shares of xAI would reportedly be exchanged for shares in SpaceX under the merger. Reuters reports that two entities were set up in Nevada on January 21 to facilitate the deal.

If the idea of two Musk companies becoming one sounds familiar, that's because it happened less than a year ago. In March 2025, xAI bought X, putting Grok (known for nonconsensual "nudifying" images) and X (infamous for being a far-right hellscape) together under one unholy roof.

The latest idea Musk is pitching is blasting AI data centers off into space. At last week's gathering of the rich and powerful in Davos, Switzerland, he said, "The lowest cost place to put AI will be in space. And that will be true within two years, maybe three at the latest." The idea is that data centers in orbit could harness solar power and reduce cooling costs. However, industry analysts and executives consider it a risky bet, questioning whether the savings would warrant the massive investment. If or when the AI bubble bursts, the plan could go down in flames — if not literally, then figuratively.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/elon-musks-spacex-and-xai-are-reportedly-holding-merger-talks-211740150.html?src=rss

The Internet Archive has often been a valuable resource for journalists, from it's finding records of deleted tweets or providing academic texts for background research. However, the advent of AI has created a new tension between the parties. A few major publications have begun blocking the nonprofit digital library's access to their content based on concerns that AI companies' bots are using the Internet Archive's collections to indirectly scrape their articles.

"A lot of these AI businesses are looking for readily available, structured databases of content," Robert Hahn, head of business affairs and licensing for The Guardian, told Nieman Lab. "The Internet Archive's API would have been an obvious place to plug their own machines into and suck out the IP."

The New York Times took a similar step. "We are blocking the Internet Archive's bot from accessing the Times because the Wayback Machine provides unfettered access to Times content — including by AI companies — without authorization," a representative from the newspaper confirmed to Nieman Lab. Subscription-focused publication the Financial Times and social forum Reddit have also made moves to selectively block how the Internet Archive catalogs their material.

Many publishers have attempted to sue AI businesses for how they access content used to train large language models. To name a few just from the realm of journalism:

• The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft

• The Center for Investigative Reporting sued OpenAI and Microsoft

• The Wall Street Journal and New York Post sued Perplexity

• A group of publishers including The Atlantic, The Guardian and Politico sued Cohere

• Penske Media sued Google

• The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune sued Perplexity

Other media outlets have sought financial deals before offering up their libraries as training material, although those arrangements seem to provide compensation to the publishing companies rather than the writers. And that's not even delving into the copyright and piracy issues also being fought against AI tools by other creative fields, from fiction writers to visual artists to musicians. The whole Nieman Lab story is well worth a read for anyone who has been following any of these creative industries' responses to artificial intelligence.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/publishers-are-blocking-the-internet-archive-for-fear-ai-scrapers-can-use-it-as-a-workaround-204001754.html?src=rss