Why de-escalation training and communication matters when federal agents police city streets

 https://www.npr.org/2026/01/25/nx-s1-5687866/why-de-escalation-training-and-communication-matters-when-federal-agents-police-city-streets

WEXLER: Look, what would it take for both sides to ratchet it down? But I think that starts, honestly, with ICE sort of saying look, let's step back, and let's look at how we're doing these kind of cases. How can we do them differently? And if this was a local police department, they would be reaching out to the community. They would get the community involved. They would say, we need you. We need to build trust. But when you have federal agents coming into a community, they can sometimes come off as an occupying army. And in American policing, that's not what we've learned. We know, you know, communication, trust, all of those things are essential.

WEXLER: I mean, that's a good point. American police have recognized it's important for them to have their name, their ID, to be visible, to communicate. American police wear body-worn cameras. All of these efforts have been to try to regain trust and legitimacy with the community. I think when you go into these situations masked, it creates this image - somehow, whatever they're doing is not legitimate. And look, they have a difficult job. I don't envy ICE agents. I think, though, when you put them in these positions and you put masks on their face, and they're not communicating, they have no relationship with the community, it really becomes almost, you know, a recipe for disaster.

ICE 'cowboys' put Americans at risk with bad training as Minneapolis woman killed | Maj. Gen. Enyart

Trump says he shuts eyes in Cabinet meetings because they're 'boring as hell'

 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/01/27/trump-closes-eyes-sleeps-boring-cabinet-meetings-health-fitness-president/88375341007/

President Donald Trump explained that he closes his eyes during Cabinet meetings because he finds them extremely boring, and his aides say he is still listening. He defended his health, saying he feels as fit as 40 years ago, and White House staff described his eye‑closing as a thinking posture rather than dozing.

Trump Finally Admits Why He Was Sleeping in All Those Cabinet Meetings

 https://newrepublic.com/post/205695/trump-admits-asleep-cabinet-meetings

After months of denials, President Trump has finally admitted that he has been falling asleep during Cabinet meetings.

In an interview with New York magazine published Monday, Trump said that he closed his eyes during those meetings because they were “boring as hell.”

It’s a stark admission in an article about Trump’s health that the president agreed to in an attempt to quash negative reports about his age and his visibly declining mental and physical fitness. The president previously claimed to be “resting” or “blinking” his eyes, despite having fallen asleep multiple times in full view of the press and public: in the middle of his own military parade, while meeting foreign leaders, and four different times in the month of December.

Much of the article is Trump telling doctors, staffers, and members of his Cabinet to brag to writer Ben Terris about how healthy and energetic he is. At one point during his interview, he turned to his physicians from Walter Reed hospital and asked, “Real fast. Is my health perfect?

Netanyahu’s incendiary accusation against Biden underlines need for the state inquiry he opposes

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahus-incendiary-accusation-against-biden-underlines-need-for-the-state-inquiry-he-opposes/

Unprompted, the PM alleges that an arms embargo instituted by the previous US administration directly caused the loss of soldiers’ lives. It’s a charge he’s never made before, and it finds no echo in the IDF’s war probes

Even as he claimed central credit for the return of the final hostage Ran Gvili — the police officer who heroically went to war with a broken shoulder on October 7, 2023 and was killed defending Kibbutz Alumim, and whose body was located by the IDF in a Muslim cemetery in Gaza City on Monday — he characteristically refused to acknowledge any direct responsibility for the original sin, the failure to prevent Hamas’s invasion, massacre and mass abductions.

In briefings with military correspondents, officials repeatedly gave assurances that military operations were not affected, and that soldiers would not be sent on missions without adequate means to carry them out. No military probe to date has found that a soldier was killed because the necessary ammunition was not available.

This is the commission that, with its authority to issue subpoenas, is so manifestly necessary to probe everything that went wrong surrounding October 7, and to ensure there can be no recurrence.

This is the independent inquiry that, correctly fearing its conclusions regarding his principal culpability, Netanyahu has stubbornly resisted for the more than 27 months since the gravest catastrophe to befall our revived modern nation.

'False and ungrateful': Biden envoy Hochstein slams Netanyahu’s claim US embargo killed IDF troops

 https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-884837

Former US special envoy Amos Hochstein denounced as untrue Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Tuesday remarks that IDF soldiers died in Gaza due to a partial embargo imposed by the Biden administration.

Later on Tuesday, Hochstein told Israeli reporter Barak Ravid, "Netanyahu is both not telling the truth and ungrateful to a president that literally saved Israel at its most vulnerable moment."

“After more than $20 Billion military support, largest in #Israel's history, 2 aircraft carriers rushed to the region, deterring a massive regional war, defeating Iran missile/drone attack x2, defending israel at most vulnerable moments, after SAVING countless lives of Israelis,” Hochstein wrote in a subsequent post to X/Twitter.

MAGA lies IMPLODE!! See appalling DHS cover story shredded in Ari Melber’s Fox debunking

Assume this loutocracy is lying about ICE until proven otherwise

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/27/trump-noem-deportation-ice-border-control-minneapolis/

Minneapolis is today’s Birmingham. Citizens with smartphones are supplementing journalists in gathering facts. It is infuriating, yet grimly sublime, that the current national administration, which will not stop banging on about how it is restoring America’s greatness, is incessantly embarrassing (about Greenland, vaccines and much else). The administration requires an addition to the typologies of government: loutocracy.

For a glimpse of what government of, by and for louts looks like, find on the internet the video, taken by a citizen in Minneapolis, in which a participant in the excitement of a melee — tear gas and other instruments for combating citizens — exclaims: “It’s like ‘Call of Duty’! So cool huh?” “Call of Duty” is a video game, away from which some new agents were perhaps lured by the signing bonuses, some up to $50,000, that have fueled the agency’s breakneck expansion.

Policing is a hard, dangerous profession. Done well, it demands of its practitioners discipline and judgment, and deserves from society a respect approaching reverence. The current administration, by erasing the distinction between police work and military operations — by allowing marauding ICEmen to pose as police — has grievously wounded the dignity of policing.

This is unsurprising. In a July 2017 speech to a law enforcement audience, President Donald Trump urged police, “don’t be too nice” to suspects taken into custody. The International Association of Chiefs of Police responded tartly:

Some administration louts have said that the most recent (as of this writing) person killed in Minneapolis by a federal officer was a “would-be assassin” and, of course, a “domestic terrorist.” Because Republicans control congressional committee gavels, and because today’s president controls congressional Republicans, there will be no oversight of ICE’s rampages. The Senate, which disgraced itself by confirming Noem and others unqualified for Cabinet positions, is especially unlikely to suddenly acquire the inconvenience of a conscience.

So, expect more killings, and more political smearing of the victims. That ICE’s disgraces will continue is, in its revolting way, a promise kept: loutocracy.

Notorious NYC pedo nearly walks free — till he ‘forgets’ details of his crimes at hearing, infuriating ADA

 https://nypost.com/2026/01/27/us-news/notorious-nyc-pedo-nearly-walks-free-till-he-forgets-details-of-his-crimes-at-hearing-infuriating-ada/

A notorious Brooklyn Hasidic pedophile nearly walked free during a resentencing Tuesday — till he pretended to forget details of his crimes and the furious prosecutor reversed course and pushed for more time.

Nechemya Weberman ended up with a sentence slashed down from 103 years to 18 years, although with time served, that amounts to just five years left on the clock for the pedo — and with good behavior, he could be out by 2028.

Weberman, a former counselor at a Williamsburg yeshiva now in his 60s, appeared vivacious, smiling and jovial on video feed from the maximum-security Shawangunk Prison in upstate New York — despite his supporters painting an image of a feeble man at death’s door.

The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office — under pressure from some members of the convict’s religious community for years — was prepared to effectively push to free the convicted sicko, having sought the resentencing on the grounds his 103-year stint was excessive and that he had already served enough time.

But Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Joseph Alexis changed course mid-hearing when Weberman claimed to forget the gory details of his misdeeds.  

Noem faces mounting criticism from Republicans, Democrats after Minneapolis killing

 https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5709357-kristi-noem-criticism-minneapolis-shooting/

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed dismay with Noem’s comments immediately after a Border Patrol agent fatally shot Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at a local Veterans Affairs hospital, as she compared him to a “domestic terrorist.” 

Senate Republicans other than Tillis also indicated they are frustrated at the missteps, with some members arguing she is hemorrhaging support from the conference. 

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who has sided with Republicans on key votes, on Tuesday lobbed a “direct appeal to immediately fire” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary. 

'Must be held accountable': Trump admin. sued over deaths in boat strike off Venezuela's coast

 https://www.jpost.com/international/article-884721?utm_source=jpost.app.android&utm_medium=share

Family members of two men killed in a US missile strike against a suspected drug boat near Venezuela filed a wrongful death lawsuit on Tuesday, alleging the pair were murdered in a "manifestly unlawful" military campaign targeting civilian vessels.

"These are lawless killings in cold blood; killings for sport and killings for theater, which is why we need a court of law to proclaim what is true and constrain what is lawless," Baher Azmy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a statement.

In Wake of Alex Pretti Shooting, Trump Is Betraying His Base on Gun Rights. They’re Not Happy

 https://time.com/7357961/ice-shooting-alex-pretti-guns-trump/

"Any gun owner knows that when you are carrying a weapon, when you are bearing arms, and you are confronted by law enforcement, you are raising the assumption of risk and the risk of force being used against you,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters during a feisty briefing on Monday. 

This he-had-it-coming mentality is one that stems from the top of this administration. After the Saturday killing of Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis—one filmed from just about every possible angle as officers shot him at least 10 times in five seconds—administration officials sought to cast Pretti as the aggressor, an “assassin” aiming to “massacre law enforcement.”

It’s almost impossible to square support for Second Amendment rights for the likes of McCloskeys and Rittenhouse alongside a denial of them when employed by Pretti. For decades, guns have been a birthright among conservatives. (To be fair, it’s the top issue for few voters, usually in the 3% to 5% range in polls.) Any challenge to gun rights was immediate heresy, disqualifying in any measure. Yet here is Trump, elected with strong support of those who cited his support for guns, undermining that very orthodoxy in the name of suppressing growing dissent in Minneapolis.

This all might sound like some of the country’s most prominent Republicans have rethought their views on the Second Amendment. But intellectual consistency is often optional in Trump’s orbit. The President himself has shown an open indifference to absolute truths. If it sounds good, it’s true enough, he likes to say.

Five moments in the Alex Pretti shooting that raise red flags for policing experts

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/interactive/2026/alex-pretti-minneapolis-border-patrol-tactics/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f004

The tactics U.S. Border Patrol agents used against Alex Pretti in Minneapolis probably violate modern policing guidelines, several experts said, and add to a growing body of evidence that federal immigration officers are deviating from professional norms.

Just as the officers secured Pretti’s weapon, another officer could be seen unholstering his own firearm from his right hip and pointing it toward Pretti’s back. In a split second, the first crack of gunfire erupts.

But Mannino noted that multiple rounds were fired after Pretti was lying motionless.

“It’s difficult to articulate a reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm at that point,” he said.

Donald Trump Contradicts Stephen Miller on Alex Pretti

 https://www.newsweek.com/trump-disputes-assassin-claim-alex-pretti-stephen-miller-11425513

President Donald Trump on Tuesday publicly rejected a senior aide’s characterization of slain Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti as an “assassin,” even as his administration navigated backlash over the fatal shooting that has highlighted tensions over gun rights and federal protest enforcement.

The shift marked a step back from initial statements by senior administration officials following Pretti’s death. It came the same day Trump dispatched border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, a move that appeared to place him above Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino, who had been overseeing federal operations in Minneapolis.

No publicly released video shows Pretti unholstering his concealed firearm, which he was legally permitted to carry under Minnesota law. In several clips, an officer appears to remove Pretti’s gun and walk away with it just before shots are fired.

“Showing up at a protest is very American. Showing up with a weapon is very American,” said Tennessee state Rep. Jeremy Faison, the GOP caucus leader, in a social media post.