‘Our cities are no longer safe’: GOP mayors condemn Trump immigration enforcement

 https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/28/republican-mayors-trump-ice-00754195

At a gathering of mayors in Washington on Wednesday, Republicans criticized the White House’s recent immigration crackdown as chaotic and damaging.

A number of Republican mayors are condemning the Trump administration’s hardline immigration enforcement tactics in Minnesota, as they call on the president to pull back from Minneapolis and worry their cities might be next.

The Republican leaders’ calls for Trump to deescalate after the fatal shootings of two Minnesotans by federal agents show the GOP’s deepening fissures over the administration’s aggressive immigration agenda, even as the mayors and Republicans broadly offered support for the president’s overall goal. And their alarm comes as ICE ramps up operations in other states, including Arizona and Maine.

I was a Marine in Afghanistan. ICE’s tactics are strategically incoherent.

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/28/minnesota-ice-unrest-reader-reaction/

In 2009, I was a Marine in Helmand province during the height of the shift to counterinsurgency operations. We were heavily armed and trained for violence, as Marines are expected to be.

But when we encountered local Afghans, we took off our helmets. We removed our sunglasses. We put a hand over our hearts, we looked the Afghans in the eye and said Salaam Alekum, or “peace be upon you.” If the situation allowed, we sat down. We drank tea. We talked. This wasn’t weakness or wokeness. It was strength, discipline and strategy.

We were still Marines. When it was time to fight, we did so decisively. But we also understood something essential: You cannot intimidate your way into lasting security. You cannot terrorize a population into cooperation. And you cannot claim moral authority if your posture communicates only contempt or fear.

I reflect on those lessons as I watch an anti-immigration agenda in the United States that has gone badly off course. Masked officers in military-style gear, conducting raids with theatrical dominance rather than measured authority. Communities treated as hostile terrain rather than neighborhoods. I find this not only disturbing but also strategically incoherent.

In Afghanistan, we understood that showing up as faceless, armored enforcers was a fast way to lose the population’s trust. We knew that intimidation buys compliance only temporarily, and resentment compounds faster than control.

If Marines could understand this in a war zone, we should be able to understand it in our own country.

Opposition MKs send ‘deep regret’ to Biden for PM blaming ’embargo’ for IDF deaths

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/opposition-mks-send-deep-regret-to-biden-for-pm-blaming-embargo-for-idf-deaths/

Lawmakers pen letter thanking former US president for post-Oct. 7 support, say he is ‘one of Israel’s greatest friends’; senior Israeli security officials said ‘furious’ with PM’s claim

Biden has not commented on Netanyahu’s claim, though when he was in office, his administration denied the premier’s previous allegations that the US had placed an “embargo” on arms shipments to Israel, saying that it had only withheld one batch of 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs amid concerns about how they would be used in the southern Gaza city of Rafah at that time.

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.