When we talk about our inability to pay attention, to concentrate, we often mean and blame our phones. It’s easy, it’s meant to be easy. One flick of our index finger transports us from disaster to disaster, from crisis to crisis, from maddening lie to maddening lie.
Each new unauthorized attack and threatened invasion grabs the headlines, until something else takes its place, and meanwhile the government’s attempts to terrorize and silence the people of our country continue.
So let me break it down. There is one story: our country is on the brink of an authoritarian take-over. In Minneapolis an innocent poet and an ER nurse at a VA hospital were both killed in cold blood by federal agents. It is happening now. Toddlers are being sent to detention centers; videos of their gyms for kids recall the youth choruses that the Nazis so proudly showed off at the Terezin concentration camp.
Intimidation and violence are being weaponized against the citizens of Minneapolis, some of whom are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being beaten, arrested and shackled, regardless of whether they are US citizens or asylum seekers or people from another country peacefully living and working here for decades.
That is the news we should be paying attention to. At least for the moment, everything else is a distraction. I’m glad to have been informed about the heavy snow outside my window today and the local weather-travel advisory, but frankly, it’s snowed here before—so why is it leading the news?
At least seven people are dead as the result of a monster winter storm in the US that has brought heavy snowfall and ice from the Gulf coast to the north-east, leaving more than one million in the south without power and cancelling more than 10,000 flights.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the 18-term delegate for the District of Columbia in Congress and a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, has filed paperwork to end her campaign for reelection, likely closing out a decades-long career in public service.
A private jet carrying eight people crashed during takeoff from the Bangor International Airport in Maine on the evening of Jan. 25, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
Over $500,000 has been raised through an online fundraiser for the loved ones of Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old ICU nurse shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis on Jan. 24.
Japan has committed $6 billion in humanitarian and technical aid to Ukraine for the first half of 2026, a senior Ukrainian official has said.
Members of the National Park Service removed signage around the President’s House historic site on Independence Mall on Thursday afternoon, in what appeared to be the fulfillment of an executive order from the White House meant to remove displays in America’s national parks that “disparage” the nation.
