Articles & Videos

23681 items
All PoliticsPolicyEconomyCivil RightsJusticeInternationalConflict & SecurityClimate & EnvironmentTechnologyHealthMediaCulture & Society

Select Date Range

IHIP News: 🚨 Trump ARRESTS Journalist DON LEMON As His WH Descends Further Into TOTAL CHAOS!
20:02
• Jan 30, 2026

IHIP News: 🚨 Trump ARRESTS Journalist DON LEMON As His WH Descends Further Into TOTAL CHAOS!

“Prevent the Bloodshed”: Filmmaker Sepideh Farsi on Iran Protests & U.S. Threats of Military Strikes
9:01
• Jan 30, 2026

“Prevent the Bloodshed”: Filmmaker Sepideh Farsi on Iran Protests & U.S. Threats of Military Strikes

350,000 Haitians in U.S. "at Risk of Losing Everything" After Trump Revokes Legal TPS Status
11:41
• Jan 30, 2026

350,000 Haitians in U.S. "at Risk of Losing Everything" After Trump Revokes Legal TPS Status

"Cold-Blooded Murder": Families of Trinidadian Men Killed in U.S. Boat Strike Sue Trump Admin
7:51
• Jan 30, 2026

"Cold-Blooded Murder": Families of Trinidadian Men Killed in U.S. Boat Strike Sue Trump Admin

Luigi Mangione Won’t Face Death Penalty Despite DOJ’s Best Efforts
• Jan 30, 2026

Luigi Mangione Won’t Face Death Penalty Despite DOJ’s Best Efforts

Luigi Mangione will not face the death penalty. Mangione, who is on trial for the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had his federal murder charges dismissed on technicality by a federal judge who determined that the shooting was not simultaneously committed during another act of violence. Prosecutors argued that stalking fulfilled that requirement, but the judge disagreed. U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett, a Biden appointee, left in place the stalking charges against Mangione, which would carry a maximum sentence of life in prison. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to all charges.Thompson was killed in December 2024 on his way to an investor conference. Mangione, who has a history of severe back pain, noted in an alleged manifesto that the U.S. has the “most expensive healthcare system in the world” but “ranks #42 in life expectancy.”“United [Healthcare] is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but [h]as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it,” he wrote. The U.S. actually ranks even lower in life expectancy at sixtieth in the world. It is by far the most expensive.This is a massive blow for Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department, as they made a spectacle out of seeking the death penalty for Mangione. President Trump even claimed on Fox News that Mangione “shot someone in the back as clear as you’re looking at me.... He shot him right in the middle of the back — instantly dead.... This is a sickness. This really has to be studied and investigated.” All of what Trump is was only alleged, undermining federal prosecutors’ case.So much posturing and tough talk, only to have their dreams of capital punishment deferred by a technicality. It seems like the DOJ will have to go back to the drawing board. Mangione’s attorneys have yet to comment.  This story has been updated. 

"Hostile Takeovers": As U.S. Claims Venezuela's Oil, Trump Seeks "Vassal States" Across the World
15:20
• Jan 30, 2026

"Hostile Takeovers": As U.S. Claims Venezuela's Oil, Trump Seeks "Vassal States" Across the World

Senate Democrats’ ICE Proposals Are a Huge and Inexcusable Whiff
• Jan 30, 2026

Senate Democrats’ ICE Proposals Are a Huge and Inexcusable Whiff

The horrible killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and the resulting national outrage have given congressional Democrats perhaps their best chance so far to rein in President Trump’s misuse of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal law enforcement agencies. But they are totally squandering this opportunity. They have coalesced around a lackluster list of reforms that fully addresses neither the current situation in Minneapolis nor the broader problem of Trump essentially creating a fascist national police force. Congressional Democrats and Republicans are on the verge of a temporary agreement to provide funding for the Department of Homeland Security and several other federal agencies to prevent a government shutdown. But Senate Democrats say they won’t agree to long-term funding for ICE and the broader DHS unless three core Democratic demands are met: a requirement that ICE agents wear body cameras and proper identification and not masks; a new code of conduct for how agents use force and independent investigations if they are accused of violating those rules; and the end of roving patrols by ICE officers and requirements that they have warrants and work with state and local police. That’s not nearly enough. Body cameras are just not useful. As we’ve seen across the country, as local police officers increasingly wear them, law enforcement agencies are able to put up all kinds of barriers to the release of the footage. It’s not an accident that the police violence Americans see often comes from videos taken by citizens. And there is no evidence that officers behave better because they fear abuse being caught on tape. After all, police killings of civilians are at almost the exact same level as they were in 2014, before the Black Lives Matter movement and the resulting widespread adoption of body cameras. ICE agents wearing body cameras isn’t necessarily bad. But it’s the kind of toothless reform that Republicans and the Trump administration should be offering to calm anger from Pretti’s killing, not one of the core demands from Democrats. “Cameras are only worthwhile if they are consistently used, and if the footage is reliably accessible and used to hold officers to account. Officers can, and frequently do, turn their cameras on late, off early, or not on at all,” the liberal group FWD.us concluded in a recent report. Similarly, while I hate the image of masked agents on American streets, many ICE agents seem quite comfortable showing their faces and making threatening comments to people protesting them. There is no evidence that unmasked ICE agents will be less abusive. In terms of codes of conduct, ICE already has restrictions and guidelines on use of force. So do local police departments. These policies always include exceptions if officers feel threatened or unsafe—and officers always plead self-defense after they kill or injure civilians. Law enforcement officers are rarely prosecuted and almost never convicted. So again, this should have been in the Republicans’ counterproposal, not one of three ideas from Democrats. Trying to end roving ICE patrols is a solid idea that actually gets at the abuses of the last year. ICE agents, instead of targeting specific sites or individuals accused of immigration crimes, seem to be essentially driving around cities looking for Latino-looking people. That proposal should have been joined by a long list of substantive demands. Most immediately, there is no way that Democrats should sign onto DHS funding until Customs and Border Protection and ICE personnel are completely gone from Minneapolis. The killings of Renee Nicole Good and Pretti and the siege of Minneapolis are the immediate cause of this crisis. Trump fully withdrawing forces from the city would be an important acknowledgment that his administration’s policies in the Twin Cities have been autocratic and deadly. The Senate Democrats’ demands are so meager that ICE and CBP could likely remain in Minneapolis even if the party’s conditions are met. Second, Democrats should be doing much more to stop ICE from terrorizing communities and creating a climate of fear for not only illegal immigrants but legal ones too. Banning ICE from enforcement actions at houses of worship, day cares, courts, and hospitals is essential. A proposal from House Democrats to bar ICE from detaining American citizens should have been included in the Senate proposal too. Third, Democrats should use this funding fight to limit Trump from using CBP and ICE as a national police force and, really, a standing army. Democrats should insist that Customs and Border Protection agents, whose job is to defend the border, are never be sent to nonborder areas like Chicago and Minneapolis. After all, it was CBP agents, not ICE, who killed Pretti. As law enforcement journalist Jessica Pishko explained in a recent episode of TNR’s show Right Now, CBP agents are even less trained in policing in urban settings than ICE agents and are more violent toward civilians. And combining CBP personnel with ICE gives the Trump administration the ability to send hundreds or even thousands of law enforcement personnel to a city without involving the National Guard, which usually requires the sign-off of a governor. Finally, as long as ICE and CBP exist and Trump is in office, he will use them in dictatorial ways. So while Democrats can’t abolish these agencies, they can try to shrink them. Democrats must demand substantial cuts to the ICE and CBP budgets, at least 10 percent. The Republican-controlled Congress approved a massive increase to ICE and the broader DHS budget last year. The administration is using that money to go on a hiring spree, offering signing bonuses and loan forgiveness for people who sign up to work for ICE. And since immigration levels are low right now, the odds that these officers will show up in blue cities are high. Democrats need to claw back whatever money from ICE they can. This isn’t an exhaustive list. Groups such as FWD.us and Indivisible are also pushing aggressive proposals. But the point is that the Democrats’ opening bid should have been much bolder.“By starting negotiations without challenging the premise that ICE should be the 13th largest army in the world, by refusing to go after the source of their power—their obscene budgets—congressional Democrats begin ‘negotiations’ in an already right-wing, weakened framework,” says left-leaning writer and podcast host Adam Johnson. “Their unwillingness to meaningfully and substantively rein in the power of Trump’s DHS by seeking to slash their $170 billion-plus budget shows they are unable, or unwilling, to meet the moment.” Trump is in a very weak position right now. His administration has killed two people, in videos seen by people across the country. Americans are outraged at ICE. I doubt Trump and congressional Republicans would go along with most of the changes I proposed. But the Democrats’ starting point should have been eight or 10 serious proposals for real change, both to have a strong place to negotiate from and to inform the public what really needs to happen at ICE. Instead, the GOP is likely to adopt trimmed-down versions of one or two of the Dems’ small-bore ideas, Dems will fold, and there will be little change with ICE or CBP’s actions on the ground. We are seeing the usual Democratic fear and reflexive centrism. Party leaders think talking about affordability is their salvation and crime, and immigration their Kryptonite. There is little evidence for that second view. There is a moral case for forcing major changes to Trump’s immigration policies and increasingly an electoral one too. If a newly hired ICE agent kills someone in Chicago or Denver, a body camera will not keep that person alive and almost certainly won’t ensure that their killer faces any jail time. The Democrats are pushing reforms that they know won’t work because they are doing performative, perfunctory opposition to try to quiet their base, instead of real legislating and fighting to dismantle Trump’s ICE and CBP. It’s a huge whiff on one of the defining issues of this era. The time to end invasions of American cities and monstrous raids was yesterday, not 2029.

Michigan Wants to Make Big Oil Pay for Climate Change
• Jan 30, 2026

Michigan Wants to Make Big Oil Pay for Climate Change

We’ve known for a while now that Big Oil is freaking out about climate change lawsuits. For months, their lobbyists have been urging Congress to pass a liability waiver so they can’t be sued for climate damages. Recently, the American Petroleum Institute, or API, the industry’s largest and most powerful fossil fuel trade association, declared that ending “abusive state climate lawsuits” is one of its top priorities for 2026.But if Big Oil was nervous before, they should be feeling absolutely terrified now, following the filing of a new lawsuit last week by Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel. This one uses a different approach, alleging that the fossil fuel industry engaged in anticompetitive conduct, in violation of state and federal antitrust laws.Most of the climate accountability cases to date have been filed under state consumer protection laws; antitrust is not yet a central part of how people understand our climate crisis. But over the last four years, there has been a revolution in the antitrust field. We’ve seen antitrust laws, long semidormant, applied in areas ranging from pharmaceuticals to fast-food wages to housing costs to health insurance—issues that hadn’t been the focus of antitrust challenges before. Michigan’s complaint demonstrates that Big Oil’s climate conspiracy also fits this framework remarkably well.A key purpose of federal and state antitrust laws is to stop businesses from combining “in restraint of trade” to unfairly shut out competitors and deprive society of the benefits of competition. Antitrust laws were designed to protect open, thriving markets. They prevent existing companies from colluding against new entrants in the market, a practice that serves to slow down innovation and freeze technologies in place.Michigan’s lawsuit argues that Big Oil engaged in exactly this kind of shut-out-the-upstarts collusion against renewable energies—a decades-long conspiracy to, according to the initial filing, “forestall meaningful competition from renewable energy and maintain their dominance in the energy market.”First, the lawsuit says, the fossil fuel industry engineered an across-the-board abandonment of renewable energy that only makes sense in the context of anticompetitive collusion. Already in 1980, Exxon scientists had “internally modeled” that avoiding catastrophic climate change would require a transition away from fossil fuels. Under a “competitive scenario,” they predicted, clean energy would achieve a 50 percent share of the global energy market within 50 years. “A self-interested and law-abiding rational firm,” Michigan’s complaint argues, “would have used this insight to innovate and compete in the energy market.” Instead, Michigan alleges, Exxon shared this proprietary information with its ostensible competitors, both directly and through API, choosing to abandon a massive business opportunity in exchange for what Michigan argues amounted to a strategy of collusively restraining innovation to delay the inevitable energy transition. It’s like if in the 1990s, Apple had internally modeled that MP3 players were the next big thing, but instead of developing the iPod, Steve Jobs had taken the information to Sony and other competitors and worked together to collectively keep the market locked into CD players.Michigan’s complaint then argues that Big Oil misused intellectual property rights to suppress the development and spread of clean energy technologies. Exxon, which invented the lithium battery and obtained other electric battery patents, and even developed the first hybrid electric vehicle, sat on these technologies rather than pursuing them. Chevron blocked the use of nickel-metal hydride, or NiMH, rechargeable batteries, another critical E.V. technology, with capture-and-kill tactics to acquire NiMH patents in order to restrict their use in cars. Stanford Ovshinsky, the inventor of NiMH batteries, explained that this technology was never commercialized because he “made the mistake of having a joint venture with an oil company” and “it’s not a good idea to go into business with somebody whose strategies would put you out of business, rather than building the business.”The industry pursued similar strategies, Michigan argues, to restrain the growth of solar energy. Oil companies could have led the solar revolution—indeed, by the early 1980s, they controlled approximately 70 percent of U.S. solar sales, which accounted for 85 percent of global supply. Instead, companies like BP focused on acquiring solar technology patents and then engaging in extensive patent infringement lawsuits to slow the progress and commercialization of the technology, before ultimately closing plants, selling off assets, and exiting the solar business altogether.In addition to these capture-and-kill tactics, the lawsuit states, the fossil fuel industry “orchestrated decades-long campaigns of deception to suppress demand for renewable energy alternatives.” I’ve written previously about this climate-denial conspiracy. But it’s worth stressing that these companies were quite explicit that the goal of their deception was to restrain clean energy competition. For example, a 1988 memo by a senior public affairs manager at Exxon explained that “the petroleum industry position” was to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions” regarding climate change in order to “resist” public understanding of the danger, as this “could lead to noneconomic development of nonfossil fuel resources.” In other words, their plan—written down in black and white—was to lie about climate change in order to block the clean energy transition they knew was necessary to avoid global catastrophe.This strategy was remarkably effective. While the most recent analysis of peer-reviewed scientific literature found that there is greater than 99 percent agreement on the existence and causes of man-made climate change, only one in five Americans understands such a consensus exists. And Big Oil companies continue to misleadingly portray their fossil fuel products as being environmentally friendly, as in their campaigns to falsely advertise natural gas, a fossil fuel product whose destructive climate impact rivals and in some circumstances exceeds that of coal, as a clean energy source. Michigan’s lawsuit also describes Big Oil’s efforts to “infiltrate” critical information-producing institutions—universities, scientific journals, and international climate committees—to reinforce the anticompetitive effects of their misleading claims. For example, between 2001 and 2012, Exxon, API, and other fossil fuel companies paid over $1.2 million to Willie Soon—a climate denialist then based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics—to fund research that undermined the scientific consensus on climate change. “As a contractual condition of this funding,” the lawsuit states, Soon’s Big Oil patrons “retained the right to review Soon’s work” and “demanded that its sponsorship remain secret.” Soon then “failed to disclose his conflict of interest in at least eleven papers”—items one funding contract referred to as “deliverables.” (Soon has repeatedly denied that fossil fuel–industry funding influenced his research and writing. Make of those denials what you will.) Exxon’s chief climate scientist also founded MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and, Michigan argues, directed researchers in the program to emphasize climate uncertainty. Similar programs were set up at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the University of California Berkeley, Stanford, and many other universities, including some where these companies maintain contractual control and approval rights over research projects.These industry-funded programs generated “research” favorable to the fossil fuel industry, allowing Big Oil to disseminate “junk science under the guise of independent commentary.” It’s the same strategy used by Big Tobacco—and, in fact, Big Oil employed many of the same operatives. The industry also extended these tactics to international bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “submitting false evidence ... and fabricated economic models, to taint and mislead U.N. technical bodies’ fact-finding processes.” Michigan argues that these various anticompetitive strategies (and others—it’s a long complaint) allowed Big Oil to freeze the clean energy transition for decades, and that but for this conspiracy, solar, wind, and E.V. technologies would have reached scale years earlier.Big Oil, unsurprisingly, disputes all of this. “This is yet another legally incoherent effort to regulate by lawsuit,” Exxon spokeswoman Elise Otten told The New York Times, saying that “it won’t stand up to the law.” But if the evidence substantiates the lawsuit’s factual claims, then there’s a persuasive legal argument here: Incumbent supermarkets in a small town aren’t allowed to coordinate with each other to stop a start-up new supermarket from gaining traction, or from developing a new method of delivering groceries. There is no Big Oil exception to this principle. Michigan’s lawsuit makes a compelling case that if Big Oil had not colluded to suppress competition, renewables would have begun scaling far earlier than they ultimately did, and we’d likely be on track to avoid the kinds of devastating climate disasters we face today: hurricanes, floods, heat waves, firestorms, droughts, famines, die-offs, mass extinctions, and worse. If proven true, this conspiracy arguably constitutes the most devastating antitrust offense in history—and Michigan’s lawsuit should serve as a model for plaintiffs across the country seeking to hold these corporations responsible for the disastrous consequences of their actions.

12...17531754175517561757...26312632