ICE

The Hill - A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) whistleblower accused the agency of lying about shortchanging its training, including legal training over whether they are permitted to use deadly force, amid a hiring surge of new officers.

Ryan Schwank, a former lawyer for ICE, said training for new officers has been pared down to the point where it is “deficient, defective and broken” during a forum organized by congressional Democrats about “constitutional violations and abuses” within ICE policies. He accused ICE leaders of shielding training shortcuts from the public.

Schwank countered administration claims that it has maintained training standards even as it has condensed some aspects of its program.

“For the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program, cutting 240 hours of vital classes from a 584 hour program, classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, firearms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention and the limits of officers’ authority,” said Schwank, who recently trained cadets at the ICE academy in Georgia.

“They ceased all of the legal instructions regarding use of force. This means that cadets are not taught what it means to be objectively reasonable, the very standard which the law requires them to meet when deciding whether or not to use deadly force. Our jobs as instructors are to teach them so well that they can make split second decisions about what they can and cannot do in life or death situations,” he added.

Iran

Washington Post  - As the Trump administration weighs an attack on Iran, the Pentagon’s top general has cautioned President Donald Trump and other officials that shortfalls in critical munitions and a lack of support from allies will add significant risk to the operation and to U.S. personnel, according to people familiar with internal discussions.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed his concerns at a White House meeting last week with Trump and his top aides, these people said, cautioning that any major operation against Iran will face challenges because the U.S. munitions stockpile has been significantly depleted by Washington’s ongoing defense of Israel and support for Ukraine. Caine’s remarks at the White House meeting have not been previously reported.

The Guardian - Trump Iran airstrikes decision to be guided by Kushner and Witkoff’s advice

President has not yet made a final decision on any strikes as the US prepares for ‘last-ditch’ negotiations on Thursday. Plus, most US adults feel the country is moving in the wrong direction

A bit of presidential history

   

Via Annie

Trump Regime

Shortlysts - The Education Department announced it’s handing over more programs to other federal agencies, moving President Trump closer to his goal of shutting down the department, bypassing congressional approval.

The Department of Health and Human Services will now manage grant programs sending millions to schools for safety and community engagement, while the State Department takes over tracking foreign gifts to universities.

Notably absent from the transfers is special education. Education Secretary Linda McMahon stated her intention to move special education programs, which manage billions in grants and oversee compliance with disability law, to HHS, but the new agreements carefully avoid that third rail. The department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services remains untouched for now.

The future of transferred programs appears uncertain, as Trump’s 2026 budget request proposes zeroing out funding for five of the six programs moving to HHS. In December, some grant recipients were notified their funding would not continue, ending those initiatives as federal support expired.

Polls

Center for Western Priorites  -  Both Project 2025 and the second Trump administration’s actions over the past year are deeply unpopular with Westerners. In the 16th annual Colorado College State of the Rockies Project Conservation in the West poll, conducted in January 2026, 84 percent of Western voters described rollbacks of protections for public lands as a serious problem, and 86 percent described funding cuts as a serious problem—including 75 percent of self-identified MAGA supporters. This is a clear and overwhelming rejection of the Trump administration’s overarching agenda for national public lands.

Similarly, voters are not fooled by the administration’s stubborn efforts to force a return to reliance on coal and other fuels of the past. In the Conservation in the West poll, when asked to indicate their preferred energy source to encourage in their state, a mere seven percent of Western voters ranked coal as their first or second choice. 

The Guardian - Most US adults think Donald Trump is moving the country in the wrong direction during his second presidency, according to a new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released the day before his State of the Union speech. Fifty-five percent of adults feel that Trump is changing the country for the worse, a 13-point increase from around the same time of his first presidency, the survey conducted from 27 to 30 January found.

Axios 

• 58% of Americans don't trust AI much or at all. 63% say AI will decrease the number of jobs in the U.S., according to an Economist/YouGov poll out last week.
• In a separate YouGov survey out in December, 77% of Americans were concerned AI could pose a threat to humanity. It's one thing to fear higher taxes. It's another thing to worry about the existence of your species!
• 79% of Americans don't trust companies to use AI responsibly, a Bentley-Gallup survey found. 

The governor who gets to talk after Trump

The Hill -  Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) is set to take the national stage following Trump’s address when she gives the Democratic response to the State of the Union. Spanberger’s selection continues what has been a notable few months for her.

She easily won Virginia’s gubernatorial race in November to become the commonwealth’s first female governor, flipping the governor’s mansion from red to blue. Her victory was seen as a sign of strong Democratic turnout heading into the midterms, as well as her own political prowess.

Now, she’s the latest in a line of high-profile figures who have given the opposition party’s official response to the president’s address. While those who have given the response have had mixed political futures, they all were seen as rising stars within their party when they were chosen.

Spanberger’s speech is one of several ways Democrats are planning to respond and protest Trump’s address Tuesday.

Several House and Senate Democrats plan to skip Trump’s speech entirely to attend other events opposing his agenda. One of them is a counterrally called the “People’s State of the Union,” held on the National Mall.

Democrats are also expected to invite various guests to the speech to call attention to controversies of Trump’s presidency, including survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and those impacted by immigration enforcement actions.

Meanwhile. . .

NPR - Scientists discovered a new species of large, horned, fish-eating Spinosaurus dinosaur — the first in over a century. The dinosaur species dates back to the Jurassic period, over 140 million years ago.

Immigration

Independent, UK - A former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lawyer who was responsible for training new deportation officers warned Monday that the agency's training program for new recruits is “deficient, defective and broken.”

Ryan Schwank's comments during a forum held by congressional Democrats come at a time of intense scrutiny of the officers tasked with carrying out President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda. Critics, including rights groups and Democratic politicians, have accused deportation officers of using excessive force when arresting immigrants, attacking bystanders who record their conduct and failing to follow constitutional protections of people's rights.

The Department of Homeland Security is rapidly scaling up the number of deportation officers, raising concerns that it will sacrifice proper screening and training of applicants in a rush to get them into the field. The department denied it was cutting corners, saying new officers get trained on firearms, use-of-force policies and how to safely arrest people.

NPR - A new federal class action lawsuit alleges federal agents are unconstitutionally retaliating against observers recording immigration enforcement. The nonprofit Protect Democracy and the law firms Dunn Isaacson Rhee and Drummond Woodsum filed the suit, alleging that federal  agents are gathering information about observers and labeling them as “domestic terrorists” after telling them they would be added to a “watchlist.” After the lawsuit was filed yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security told NPR that it doesn’t have a database for domestic terrorists. DHS also said that it follows the U.S. Constitution in its law enforcement methods.

Donald Trump

NPR - Millions of pages of Epstein files have been released to the public, but an NPR investigation reveals a gap: The Justice Department has removed or withheld dozens of pages related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor decades ago. The Justice Department declined to answer NPR's questions on the record about these specific files, what's in them, and why they are not published.

NPR's Stephen Fowler tells Up First that an NPR review of the files found an FBI email from last July listing various claims and tips it received about Trump. One report accused Trump of sexually abusing a minor around 1983, when Jeffrey Epstein also allegedly abused her. A field office investigated the report, and the records show the FBI interviewed the accuser four times. Only one of the accuser’s interviews was made public, but it doesn’t mention Trump. According to the DOJ’s tracking system, the Justice Department did not make at least 50 pages of the files public. The White House and the Trump administration have consistently stated that nothing in the documents incriminates the president. 

Tariffs

NBC News - FedEx is suing the Trump administration for tariff refunds after the Supreme Court ruled the president had exceeded his authority in deploying sweeping taxes on almost all U.S. trading partners. Trump’s reworked global tariffs took effect today at a rate of 10%, even though he said over the weekend that they would start at 15%.

Presidential candidates

Headline USA -  California Gov. Gavin Newsom drew ridicule Monday after making condescending comments to a crowd at an Atlanta forum with Mayor Andre Dickens.

Newsom was in Atlanta promoting his book, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, reflecting on his upbringing, during which he compared himself to attendees in a way critics called tone-deaf and even racist. 

“I’m not trying to impress you, I’m just trying to impress upon you, ‘I’m like you. I’m not better than you.’ I’m a 960 SAT guy,” Newsom told Dickens, who is black. 

“And I’m not trying to offend anyone. I’m not trying to act all there if you got 940 … You’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech,” he added, as quoted by the New York Post.

Critics pounced on Newsom’s below-average 960 SAT score, noting that his analogy felt especially patronizing coming in Atlanta, a predominantly black city. 

Among the critics was rapper and Trump supporter Nicki Minaj, who wrote on X: 

“His way of bonding with black ppl is to tell them how stupid he is & that he can’t read,” Minaj wrote on X. “This means my first read on him was correct. He’s been handed so many things & put in high positions he never earned or deserved.” 

Trump’s Plan to Twist the News

Trump Insiders Briefing Against the President’s War Plans

.Tom Latchem, Daily Beast -  Trump insiders appear to be running a briefing campaign against the president’s Iran war plans—and they are not being subtle about it.

Over roughly 48 hours beginning Sunday, at least five major news outlets each received strikingly similar tip-offs from anonymous U.S. officials warning that a major military operation against Iran would carry grave risks.

As the Daily Beast reported on Monday, Trump’s indecision over whether to bomb Iran is sending the Pentagon into meltdown.

The USS Gerald R. Ford—the U.S.’s largest warship, already at sea since last June—has entered the Mediterranean and is expected to be within striking distance of Iran within days. Plane-tracking data has registered multiple flights toward Diego Garcia, the U.S. military base in the Chagos Islands, south of Iran across the Arabian Sea.

The U.S. has also moved 13 guided-missile destroyers into Middle Eastern and Mediterranean waters to counter Iranian threats, according to reports. Diplomatic talks between U.S. envoys and Iranian officials are scheduled for Thursday in Geneva.

Trump’s flip-flopping appears to have led officials to begin issuing ominous briefings against an Iran strike on Sunday, when the New York Times reported that the president, 79, was weighing a limited strike “in the coming days,” citing officials and sources familiar with the administration’s internal deliberations, all of whom spoke anonymously.

By Monday, Axios had spoken to two sources with direct knowledge who said Gen. Dan Caine—the Joint Chiefs chairman and Trump’s most trusted military adviser—had privately been warning that any Iran campaign risked dragging the U.S. into a prolonged conflict. The same report revealed that Vice President JD Vance, as well as envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, had each separately urged the president to give diplomacy more time.

Polls

PBS - More than three-quarters of Americans say that the issues that divide the United States pose a serious threat to the future of the nation's democracy, according to the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist Poll. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said there is a serious threat to American democracy, a concern shared by a majority of all political parties.

Interactive Polls
NATIONAL POLL By CNN/SSRS

Pres. Trump Approve: 36% (-27) Disapprove: 63% —— • White: 45-55 (-10) • Black: 21-79 (-58) • Hispanic: 22-77 (-55) — • GOP: 82-18 (+64) • Dem: 5-95 (-90) • Indie: 26-73 (-47) — • College: 28-71 (-43) • No college: 41-58 (-17) --- • Age 18-34: 25-74 (-49) • Age 35-49: 35-64 (-29) • Age 50-64: 46-53 (-7) • Age 42-58 (-16) — • White College: 32-68 (-36) • White no college: 54-46 (+8) — • Men: 40-60 (-20) • Women: 33-66 (-33) https://

Newsweek - A survey by The Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos, found that 60 percent of U.S. adults disapprove of the president while 39 percent approve of him, leaving him with a net approval rating of -21 percentage points.

                                Via The Data of Everything

Via Thursday

Student loan defaults leap

Newsweek - Student loan delinquency has climbed to roughly 25 percent of borrowers with payments due during the first year of the current Trump administration, according to new analysis.

Researchers from The Century Foundation and Protect Borrowers said the sharp rise in missed payments, nearly triple the pre-coronavirus pandemic rate, has pushed millions into default risk and lowered credit scores, warning of broader financial fallout for households and colleges facing higher nonpayment rates. 

More than 42 million Americans hold student loan debts, according to the Education Data Initiative.

The analysis estimated nearly 9 million borrowers, about one in five, are in default, exposing them to potential wage garnishment and tax refund offsets, though some federal collection tools have been paused.

Being in default on a student loan generally means you have failed to make payments for an extended period and the loan is considered seriously delinquent. For most federal student loans issued by the U.S. Department of Education, a borrower enters default after 270 days, about nine months, of nonpayment.

The delinquency rate for borrowers with payments due reached about 25 percent, nearly three times the 2019 rate, after the end of the pandemic-era protections and subsequent policy changes during 2025. 

If AI makes human labor obsolete, who decides who gets to eat?

Judge Bars Release of Special Counsel Report on Trump’s Mishandling of Documents

NY Times - A Trump-appointed federal judge on Monday permanently barred the Justice Department from releasing a report by the special counsel Jack Smith detailing President Trump’s mishandling of reams of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021.

The ruling by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was her latest effort in the past several months to keep the public from seeing Mr. Smith’s sprawling report — one of the most significant parts of his twin prosecutions of Mr. Trump that has yet to see the light of the day.

The order, issued from Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., slammed Mr. Smith for the “brazen stratagem” of drafting his report even after Judge Cannon had dismissed the classified documents case in July 2024 and found that he had been improperly appointed to his post as special counsel.

Money

NY Times - Washington is one of just nine states that does not tax income, and over the years, that has been a lure for people eager to live in a place with socially liberal policies and the culture of a progressive state — but the tax code of a more conservative one.

“It’s who we are,” said John Braun, the Republican leader in the state senate.

Yet last week, in a sign that frustration with the super rich might be rising, even in the state where Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates made their fortunes, the State Senate approved what supporters and opponents alike call the “millionaires tax,” a proposed 9.9 percent annual tax on personal earnings over $1 million, enough to bring in $3.7 billion a year.

Members of the state House must now decide whether to embrace the tax — and the fundamental shift it represents in how Washington pays for schools, health care and other public services — before their 2026 legislative session ends on March 12.

Hospitals shutting down gender intervention programs for minors

Patriotwise - Major hospitals across America are shutting down controversial gender intervention programs for minors as President Trump’s executive order protecting children from irreversible medical procedures finally brings accountability to an industry that has operated with little oversight for years.

NYU Langone Health permanently ended its Transgender Youth Health Program for minors, citing regulatory pressures and federal funding threats

Multiple hospitals including Connecticut Children’s Medical Center and Rady Children’s Health have halted or wound down similar programs

Trump isn't just conservative; he's confused

Sam Smith -  A curious thing about Donald Trump is that he doesn't make much sense.  And given the drop in his polls he's not fooling the public about it. 

Unfortunately, the mainstream press favors power over performance and thus hasn't paid much attention to the fact that some of Trump's alleged solutions to the world's problems are more than a little bizarre. 

For example, according to Pew Research 20% of our workers in January 2025 were immigrants along with 15% of all US residents. As a general principle you don't run a compaign based on pissing off 15-20% of voters unless they always vote against candidates like you anyway. 

Anothe irony about Trump's war on immigrants is that it has helped create ancillary issues that aren't doing him any good, such as tariffs and ICE. And instead of recognizing that those of us who aren't Indians come from families that immigrated here at some point, Trump seems to be saying that our great great somethings shouldn't have been allowed here either. 

We don't have to determine whether Trump has a physical illness that leads to such mental oddities or whether he is just a  jerk. We simply have to keep in mind that he makes little sense on both key and trivial matters  and remind our friends and others that it doesn't help to have a jerk in the White House. 

Weather

The Hill - Millions remain under a blizzard warning from a powerful winter storm that struck the Northeast, forcing considerable disruptions. More than 250,000 households were without power as of Monday morning, according to poweroutage.us.

500 Passengers Forced to Spend Night on Grounded Planes After Heavy Snow Cancels Flights and Airport Staff Go Home

Bloomberg - Delta Air Lines said it expects to suspend operations at New York’s LaGuardia and JFK as well as Boston Logan International Airport into Tuesday.

ICE Tripled Its Reliance on Microsoft in Last Six Months, Leaked Files Reveal

+972 Magazine - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has relied extensively on Microsoft’s cloud storage and artificial intelligence products while escalating its campaign of mass arrests and deportations in recent months, files obtained by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian reveal.

ICE more than tripled the amount of data it holds on Microsoft servers between July 2025 and January 2026, at the same time as the agency’s crackdown on migrants broke new records and sparked mass protests across the United States. Whereas last July the agency was storing around 400 terabytes of data in Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, by the end of January that had risen to almost 1,400 terabytes — equivalent to approximately 490 million images.

The leaked documents do not specify the kinds of information stored by ICE on Microsoft servers, but they do indicate that the agency has used Azure to house large amounts of data, in addition to making use of AI tools that search and analyze images and videos.

ICE employs a powerful arsenal of surveillance technology, reportedly using facial recognition software, drones, phone location tracking, mobile spyware, and even tapping school cameras. The leaked documents show ICE is using Microsoft’s AI video analysis tools including Azure AI Video Indexer and Azure Vision, which enable customers to analyze images, read text, and detect certain words, faces, emotions, and objects in audio and video files.

Confession of a theoretical physicist

Vijay Balasuvramanian, Nautilus  - I remember the day when, at the age of 7, I realized that I wanted to figure out how reality worked. My mother and father had just taken us shopping at a market in Calcutta. On the way back home, we passed through a dimly lit arcade where a sidewalk bookseller was displaying his collection of slim volumes. I spotted an enigmatic cover with a man looking through a microscope; the words “Famous Scientists” were emblazoned on it, and when I asked my parents to get it for me, they agreed. As I read the chapters, I learned about discoveries by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek of the world of microscopic life, by Marie Curie about radioactivity, by Albert Einstein about relativity, and I thought, “My God, I could do this, too!” By the time I was 8, I was convinced that everything could be explained, and that I, personally, was going to do it.

Decades have passed, and I am now a theoretical physicist. My job is to work out how all of reality works, and I take that mission seriously, working on subjects ranging from the quantum theory of gravity to theoretical neuroscience. But I must confess to an increasing sense of uncertainty, even bafflement. I am no longer sure that working out what is “real” is possible, or that the reality that my 7-year-old self conceived of even exists, rather than being simply unknown. Perhaps reality is genuinely unknowable: Things exist and there is a truth about them, but we have no way of finding it out. Or perhaps the things we call “real” are called into being by their descriptions but do not independently exist.

Iran

Bloomberg - Donald Trump said he’s considering limited military strikes on the Islamic Republic to pressure it into signing a new nuclear deal. If that effort fails, he’ll consider a bigger attack aimed at driving the country’s leaders from power, the New York Times reported. The two sides are set to resume talks in Geneva on Thursday. Meanwhile, protests have resurfaced at several Iranian universities for a second day.

Global leaders dreaming of a US-free world order. Do they stand a chance?

The Guardian -  Donald Trump came to believe that every other country treated the US as a chump, free riding on its security guarantee and abusing its open market – no matter that the United States set most of the rules underpinning the postwar architecture, and broke them when it suited its interests, or that the rules enabled an era of remarkable American prosperity.

In an act of bravery not often experienced among the jet setters in the Swiss Alps, the 

Canadian prime minister challenged every other country to accept the loss of American leadership and build an alternative global architecture that might bypass the great powers intent on bending everybody else to their will.

“Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” he said. “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

The analysis is catching like wildfire. A couple of weeks after Carney’s speech, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, opened the Munich Security Conference arguing that “the international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed”. He warned that the “leadership claim of the US is being challenged, perhaps already lost”.

The report prepared for the gathering in Munich articulated well the general feeling of America’s (erstwhile) friends. “For generations, US allies were not just able to rely on American power but on a broadly shared understanding of the principles underpinning the international order,” it noted. Washington has betrayed that understanding. “As a result, more than 80 years after construction began, the US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction.”

How Trump's tariff chaos is affecting UK

Richard Rumbelow, Make UK, - Many UK exporters will be concerned at the further prospect of trade disruption to goods entering the US market. Stability, certainty and clarity are key cornerstones for global trade policy and for UK businesses who plan, invest and conduct trade with partners across the global economy, and particularly with customers in the United States. It’s now important UK exporters work with their US importers to maintain their trading relationships by working through customs guidance as it emerges

Given many companies will have goods at sea clarity is now urgently required on how UK exports will be treated on arrival into the United States, with the imperative being to protect the benefits of the bi-lateral trade framework that was concluded with the United States last year. It is vital government continues to seek gradual reductions in tariffs and other opportunities and seeks a strengthening of trade relations from the current position.

More than 100 lawsuits filed against Trump regime in past year

The Guardian - Donald Trump’s second term has been marked by a rollback of civil liberties.

He has terminated all federal diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility offices and positions. He has declared that the government will only refer to individuals by their biological “sex” instead of their gender identity. He has also set a sweeping anti-immigration agenda, attempting to end birthright citizenship, pausing refugee admissions and increasing immigration enforcement operations around the country.

But many Americans have been using the courts to fight back.

More than a hundred lawsuits were filed against the Trump administration over the past year by people and organizations to restore some of these rights. Among them are Fernando Viera Reyes, who says he was denied proper medical care in immigration detention; Zaya Perysian, who was denied a passport with her correct gender identity; Mohsen Mahdawi, who was detained by immigration officials over exercising his first amendment right to protest over the war in Gaza; and Jon Carlson, a pastor whose place of worship has become a target for immigration enforcement seeking to detain undocumented people.   More on these lawsuits

Reyes, Perysian, Mahdawi and Carson spoke to the Guardian about why it’s so important to fight back, not just to protect their own rights, but the rights of millions of others in the US.

Tariffs

NBC News - The European Parliament halted the ratification process of a sweeping trade deal with the United States, the latest fallout from the Supreme Court striking down most of President Donald Trump's tariffs. The deal reached between Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last July would have eliminated what the White House called "trade barriers" in a variety of sectors for American exporters. The administration hailed the deal as a "generational modernization of the transatlantic alliance." NPR - President Trump announced Saturday that he plans to raise global tariffs from 10% to 15%. The move comes one day after the Supreme Court struck down the president's use of emergency powers to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. After the ruling, the president claimed he had the authority to impose a global tariff using some sections of the Trade Act of 1974.

These sections are more cumbersome than the sweeping powers Trump previously claimed, NPR’s Mara Liasson tells Up First. Some tariffs will only last 150 days before Congress has to weigh in. Others could be permanent, but require months of investigation. The high court’s ruling meant that Republicans wouldn’t have to defend Trump’s extremely unpopular tariffs, Liasson says. But now, Congress will have to show its loyalty to the president by voting to impose new tariffs, which they aren’t interested in doing. A vote would force lawmakers to take more ownership of a policy that voters believe has driven up their costs.  China has been a major target of Trump’s tariffs. NPR’s Jennifer Pak, who is in Shanghai, reports that Chinese businesses that deal with the U.S. are cautiously optimistic about the Supreme Court’s ruling. They have dealt with uncertainty since Trump’s first term. The president has used tariffs against China as a threat to lower the trade deficit, stop intellectual property theft and more. Trump is expected to visit China in the coming weeks. Friday’s Supreme Court decision, in theory, has now weakened his hand, Pak says.