The British newspaper Daily Mail is out with a deeply researched investigative report, the result of a long collaboration between columnists Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, along with Mark Hookham (Assistant Editor Investigations), and Daisy Graham-Brown (Investigative Reporter).

It’s shocking in its detail and its implication that Vladimir Putin has basically owned Donald Trump for years, even before Trump ran for president in 2016.

Essentially, they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.

And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate empire and it was all coming from Russia.

...when Donald Trump says housing prices should stay high to protect homeowners, he isn’t offering a bold economic vision — he’s repeating one of the oldest scripts in the country: protect wealth at the top and call it fairness.

And then he said the quiet part out loud: “People that own their homes, we’re gonna keep them wealthy. We’re gonna keep those prices up,” he said. “We’re not gonna destroy the value of their homes so that somebody who didn’t work very hard can buy a home.”

Because... Donald Trump hates the poor. He always has. Which is why he’s spent his entire life working to create this image of opulence that always comes across as overly wrought and tacky....

Affordable housing isn’t a threat to stability. It is stability. And when Trump notes that he doesn’t want to open up the exclusivity of home ownership so that “somebody who didn’t work very hard can buy a home,” it’s because he equates personal economic instability to laziness which is rich coming from a man that has had his whole life from properties to The Apprentice to his current squatting address gifted to him. 

This past weekend, as tensions in Minnesota continued to mount, Springsteen turned to the medium that made him into a household name and recorded a protest composition. “I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday, and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis,” he reported. “It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free, Bruce Springsteen.”

Titled “Streets of Minneapolis,” the song’s very name hearkens back to Springsteen’s 1993 paean to the victims of the AIDS crisis. As with “Streets of Philadelphia,” Springsteen’s latest protest song serves as a call to action by challenging us to see the humanity in our neighbors, both friend and foe. “We’ll take our stand for this land, and the stranger in our midst,” Springsteen sings. “We’ll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis.”

At its core, Springsteen’s populist ethics has long entreated listeners to seek out the humanity in others and find common ground. “Streets of Minneapolis” is no different. Even still, the song joins a scant few artists engaging in protest music. Indeed, in spite of the polarization and rancor that characterize American life over the past decade, there has been an observable dearth of protest songs in stark contrast, say, with the 1960s, when they numbered in the thousands.

The Republican chairman of the House committee that oversees federal elections introduced legislation on Thursday that one analyst characterized as possibly “the most dangerous attack on voting rights ever” put forth in the US Congress.

Led by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), chair of the House Administration Committee, the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act would ban ranked-choice voting and universal mail-in ballots in federal elections, prohibit states from accepting mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day, enable large-scale voter purges, and institute photo ID requirements.

The bill was endorsed by right-wing organizations including the Election Integrity Network, an organization that—in the words of the New York Times—“has done more than any other group to take [Donald Trump’s] falsehoods about corruption in the democratic system and turn them into action.” The Election Integrity Network has received funding from Citizens for Renewing America, a group founded by White House budget director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought.

“There is not a shred of evidence of widespread voter fraud in the United States. Courts, audits, and election officials from both parties have repeatedly proved that,” said Tiffany Muller [president of the End Citizens United Action Fund]. “Yet House Republicans, in their never-ending quest to stay in power, have once again chosen lies over facts to justify making it harder for eligible Americans to vote.”

Buried within a staggering mountain of three million pages of documents released by the U.S. Justice Department on Friday, 30 January, lies a single, harrowing account that has reignited the firestorm surrounding Donald Trump and his past association with Jeffrey Epstein. While the sheer volume of the data dump was intended to provide transparency, one specific, graphic allegation has pierced through the noise, detailing a violent encounter involving a teenage girl, a bite, and (Donald Trump).

The most explosive finding in the newly unsealed cache centres on a disturbing incident alleged to have taken place approximately 35 years ago. According to the files, an unidentified female friend of a witness reported being forced to perform oral sex on Donald Trump when she was just 13 or 14 years old. The encounter, which reportedly occurred in New Jersey, took a violent turn when the young girl attempted to resist or react to the assault in the only way she could.

The complaint reads: '[Redacted] reported an unidentified female friend who was forced to perform oral s-- on... Trump approximately 35 years ago in NJ.' The friend told Alexis that she was approximately 13-14 years old when this occurred, and the friend allegedly bit... Trump while performing oral sex. The friend was allegedly hit in the face after she laughed about [it]. The friend said she was also abused by Epstein.'

However, the Department of Justice took the unusual step of issuing a disclaimer alongside the release. Officials noted that some documents might contain 'untrue and sensationalist claims', specifically defending... Trump against what they termed 'unfounded' allegations. Despite this, the inclusion of such a detailed complaint in the official record ensures it will face intense public scrutiny.

The editors of The Nation magazine are in the process of formally nominating the city of Minneapolis and its people for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. The following nomination statement, which is addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the five-member body that is charged by the Parliament of Norway with selecting the recipient of the Peace Prize, has been prepared for submission on Friday.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who served as The Nation’s civil rights correspondent from 1961 to 1966, said when he received the Peace Prize in 1964 that the award recognizes those who are “moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice.” King believed that it is vital to illustrate “that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.” He declared on December 10, 1964, in Oslo, “Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

They were supposed to be released. ...Donald Trump signed a bipartisan law under intense pressure requiring the Justice Department to make them public. The deadline passed. The files did not appear. The DOJ is now breaking a statute [Trump himself] approved.

And almost no one is talking about it.

That silence reflects [an administration] built on velocity replacing consequence and spectacle replacing governance.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act gave the attorney general 30 days to release all unclassified DOJ material related to Jeffrey Epstein. That deadline came and went in December. The department has released only a sliver of documents, offered no firm timeline, and provided no serious public explanation for its failure to comply. Reporters have not pressed the issue with any persistence. The absence of explanation has become part of the story.

It is one of the oldest tricks in the authoritarian playbook: aesthetic first, policy second. Before the mass arrests, before the street violence, before the bureaucracy hardens into a machine, you soften the ground with imagery that makes the coming crackdowns feel righteous, necessary – inevitable. That is why it matters, urgently, that America’s immigration enforcement apparatus is now recruiting in a visual and rhetorical register that looks, sounds and feels uncomfortably like the 1930s: the decade in which fascism stopped being a crank ideology and became a governing reality.

Let’s be clear: the posters and social-media graphics pushing people towards US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jobs are not merely a bit retro. They are saturated with the grammar of Nazi and far-right propaganda; heroic silhouettes, blunt moral binaries, looming national decline and the call to defend a mythic “homeland”. And this all arrives at a moment when federal agents are killing US citizens on American streets.

The killing of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and US citizen, who was shot by US Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, over the weekend, shocked the world. His colleagues and family describe him as a compassionate healthcare professional, and despite a statement by Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, saying he was armed with a handgun, he was holding a phone, not a weapon, at the time he was pepper-sprayed, tackled and shot by federal agents.

Renée Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, was also fatally shot in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement two weeks before Alex Pretti was killed. These two citizen deaths are unlikely to be the last at the hands of ICE and many more American citizens have been and will be injured. For an increasing number of onlookers, this is all the bloody result of a recruitment drive that prioritises muscle over training, and whose messaging carries serious fascist overtones.

Today is the saddest most depressing day in America since Nov. 5, 2024, when anybody with a brain in their head or a heart in their chest knew what was most assuredly coming.

Somehow that didn’t include myriad universities, corporations, media outlets, and even members of the opposition party, who surrendered to this murdering fascist regime almost before it got going, thus greasing the skids for this homegrown national emergency.

I hold them in contempt, and will do everything possible to make sure these cowardice sellouts pay for their betrayal.
....

Our government — let me type that again — OUR GOVERNMENT has been infiltrated by billionaires and well-paid racists to pull OUR money away from funding good and necessary things like healthcare, daycare, and clean air and water, to pay for murder in our streets, and control over US.

The man that Border Patrol murdered today in Minneapolis was filming immigration agents, as he’s allowed to do, and was killed for helping a woman being pepper-sprayed by the mad king’s private goon militia. 

His name is Alex Pretti, and he was a 37-year-old ICU nurse who previously worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs. You think it can’t get worse, and it does.  

Homeland Security shills claimed he had a gun. He did. He never drew it. He had a license for it. Video shows the immigration goons retrieved it. Then they executed him. 

And this is just the latest of a never-ending stream of outrages. Just another day in Trump’s America.