US politics

US politics

In December, President Donald Trump called Somali people "garbage." Weeks later, a YouTube influencer began surveilling Somali-run child care centers in Minnesota and making unverified claims of fraud. The San Diego Chapter of the United Domestic Workers of America said it's heard of at least seven incidents since Monday of strangers surveilling, harassing, and even stalking Somali child care providers - and the incidents are likely underreported.

The purge began late Friday night, four days after Donald Trump returned to the White House. Seventeen inspectors general-internal watchdogs embedded throughout the federal government-received emails notifying them of their termination. Three weeks later came the Valentine's Day Massacre: the ousting of tens of thousands of federal employees with little discernible pattern, across agencies and across the country. By April, entire departments-the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau-had been gutted.

This is a drug. It is nothing else but a drug.

"This reflects the direct effects of the tariffs on manufacturing, transportation and distribution, and ag-related businesses, which are steadily losing jobs, as well as the indirect uncertainty hit to hiring by most other businesses," he explained.

As it turns out, neuroscience might be able to explain why. In a new study whose findings will surprise absolutely no one who's endured a fiery holiday dinner debate, researchers discovered that conservative and liberal brains don't just arrive at fundamentally different conclusions, but take strikingly different paths to get there. It's a fascinating piece of research which just might explain something about the yawning political divides currently tearing society apart.

Open up a news story from this past Wednesday, the one-year anniversary of the Palisades and Eaton fires, and the answer to what, precisely, they're made about is muddled. Bloomberg asked its newsletter subscribers What's holding LA back? before trying to peg a decline in property values to climate change and a cooling of investor sentiment, along with $33.9 billion in federal disaster aid being held hostage as possible answers.

In the final moments of a tense, marathon interview on CNN's State of the Union Sunday, Tapper played Jan. 6 footage and compared it to the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Those are law enforcement officers being physically attacked, Tapper said of the Jan. 6 officers. By this standard, would any of those officers be justified in shooting and killing the people causing them physical harm? Noem's answer suggested that she believes the Capitol police would have indeed been justified in shooting Jan. 6 rioters.

As you know, in an undercover operation in 2024, the FBI recorded you accepting a bag, which was determined to contain $50,000 from agents posing as business executives who said you indicated you could help win government contracts in the second Trump administration, Welker said. I want to stress there was an investigation. It was closed, last year. The Justice Department said it found, No credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.'

The freeze could have a major effect on the financial health of child day care centers across Silicon Valley, with the region already struggling with a dearth of providers. One provider who operates a day care center in East San Jose said 80% of her clients rely on these federal subsidies to put their children in her care - and a majority of her business operates with federal dollars.

Over a thousand protests have taken place nationwide as part of a "weekend of action" since the shooting by an ICE agent of Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. A GoFundMe account, paused as of this writing, has raised over $1.5 million for Good's widow Becca, their son, and Renée's two other children. In San Francisco on January 10, demonstrators gathered at Van Ness Avenue and O'Farrell Street. San Francisco Bay Times columnist Joanie Juster, who took this footage, was among the many participants.

Some borrowers told me that they achieved student-loan forgiveness or repaid their loans in full. However, the majority of respondents reported a range of concerns about the future of their balances, including worries about losing a key affordable repayment plan, struggling to get help from their servicers, being in default on their loans, and more. Trump's "big beautiful" spending legislation includes the elimination of existing income-driven repayment plans and replacing them with two less generous options.

Some people choosing to 'self-deport' rather than be arrested and imprisoned for months

After US troops swarmed into Venezuela, seizing the country's president and his wife, there was little to be heard from the Pentagon. Typically, it would be a time for defense officials to talk to the Pentagon press corps: a group of journalists made up of some of the most talented reporters in the US. The Pentagon could have been expected to be held to account over what has been criticized as a violation of international law. Under the Trump administration, that didn't happen.

Donald Trump's allegedly ailing health has been the subject of media speculation for months, which analysts have said is interrupting the president's quest to be seen as an unflinching strongman. Salon writer Chauncey DeVega suggested in a recent column that Trump's invasion of Venezuela was a "prime opportunity" for the president to "get his swagger back." But the problem, he said, is that Trump can't hide his clear mental and physical decline.

Charlie Kirk believed that gay people should be stoned to death, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a "huge mistake," that we should legally be allowed to whip foreigners in the U.S., that Muslims only move here to destroy the country, that American Jews encourage anti-whiteness, that men should physically attack transgender people, that all women should submit to their husbands, and that Black professionals "steal" their jobs from more qualified white people.