9 h. ago Masked government thugs snuffed out Alex Pretti’s life in broad daylight | Moira Donegan

If they’re trying to eliminate witnesses, they cannot eliminate us allHis last words, spoken to a woman who had been tackled to the ground and pepper-sprayed by nearby ICE agents, were “Are you OK?” Alex Pretti was an intensive care nurse at a VA hospital; those who knew him recalled, among other things, his devotion to his elderly dog, Joule, who died about a year ago.In bystander videos taken of Pretti’s death, he can be seen holding up his phone to video ICE agents operating in Minneapolis, and waving cars around him to avoid the officers as they attack other onlookers. After he is dragged away from the woman he was trying to help, a gaggle of ICE officers surround Pretti and force him to the ground, beating and restraining him there as he struggles to free himself. Continue reading...

Politics

58 h. ago The taking of Liam Ramos reveals the sheer sadism of ICE | Moira Donegan

It has become difficult to feel shock at the actions of the Trump administration. But this useless cruelty is shamelessLiam Ramos is five. In photographs of his arrest on Tuesday, released by the school district where he is enrolled as a preschooler, he is wearing a large blue hat with a bunny face and ears. According to the superintendent, Liam had just arrived home from school with his father when ICE agents apprehended the two and arrested them. Allegedly, one of Liam’s relatives, who was outside at the time, begged for the little boy to be allowed to stay there in their care; instead, both father and son were captured by the federal agents and quickly transported to a detention camp in Dilley, Texas. Liam’s father has no apparent criminal record; he has a pending asylum case. Does it need to be said that the child does not have a criminal record, either? In one picture, a white man’s hand clutches, claw-like, on to the back of Liam’s Spider-Man backpack. In another, a masked man...

Politics

2 w. ago Grok is undressing women and children. Don’t expect the US to take action | Moira Donegan

Elon Musk’s reckless and degrading AI could be built differently. But Americans will have to speak upOver the past year, Elon Musk has made a series of protocol changes to Grok, the proprietary AI chatbot of his company xAI, which runs prominently on his social media site X, formerly Twitter. Many of these changes have been geared to make the bot more amenable to producing pornography. In August 2025, Grok launched an image generator, branded as Grok Imagine, which featured a service geared toward creating nude, suggestive, or sexually explicit content, including computer-generated pornographic images of real women. The feature, which was quickly used to create naked images of celebrities like Taylor Swift, also allowed users to create brief videos, complete with animations and sounds.Musk also rolled out AI girlfriends on the platform: animated personas – including female characters with exaggerated breasts and hips – that interacted in sexually explicit ways with users. One of the...

Politics

2 w. ago ICE agents have killed – again. The Trump administration blames the victim | Moira Donegan

An agent shot a woman in Minneapolis, causing vast and needless grief. Our country is diseased – but that is not the only truthA woman in Minneapolis has died as her neighbors fought Donald Trump’s mass deportation operation. On Wednesday morning, a group of local civilian protesters gathered around a site where several ICE agents were attempting to abduct migrants. The agents were part of a surge of roughly 2,000 deportation officers who have been sent to Minneapolis as part of Trump’s effort to persecute the Somali community there. In a disturbing incident caught on video by multiple onlookers, a woman driving in an SUV covered in bumper stickers blocked traffic on the residential road – perhaps as part of an effort to keep ICE vehicles from passing. In the videos, an ICE agent approaches the SUV, yelling: “Get out of the car. Get out of the fucking car.” He stands at the driver’s side, with his feet clear of the vehicle, and reaches into where the woman is driving. She begins to ...

Events

3 w. ago For Americans, 2026 started with two starkly different visions for the country | Moira Donegan

Zohran Mamdani’s optimistic inauguration contrasted in every single way with Trump’s brazen invasion of VenezuelaThe new year opened with a pair of scenes that illustrated the great divide within the US and the stakes of the ongoing contest over its future. On 1 January, in a star-studded inauguration ceremony of uncommon pomp and optimism, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist, was sworn in as the new mayor of New York and delivered a speech that declared the era of small government and centrist inhibition to be over, and a new dawn of ambitious social welfare programs to begin.The new mayor’s inauguration is the culmination of a decade of growth from the Democratic party’s insurgent left wing, and results from a feat of organizing within the country’s largest city that relied upon mass mobilization from downwardly mobile and economically disenfranchised millennial and gen Z voters. It was hailed as a generational shift in US politics, inaugurating a new, 21st-centur...

Politics

4 w. ago As the US media floundered this year, I couldn’t help but think: ‘Thank God I’m at the Guardian’ | Moira Donegan

Other outlets have asked their writers to compromise, but the Guardian has never – and would never – ask me to pull a punchFunded by readers, the Guardian’s fierce independence is guaranteed. Please help us reach our year-end fundraising goal in these final crucial hoursIt might be most generous to characterize the behavior of major US media organizations since 2024 as negotiating between competing incentives.On the one hand, billionaires have consolidated their ownership over major news outlets and platforms. The Murdochs are squabbling over Fox. Jeff Bezos has remade the Washington Post in his own image. The pharmaceutical magnate Patrick Soon-Shiong places a thumb on the scale at the Los Angeles Times, and the Trump-aligned Ellison family has taken over Paramount and CBS, and spent the final weeks of this year making hostile takeover bids for CNN owner Warner Bros. The influence of these billionaire personalities has often reshaped their organizations’ newsrooms and editorial boa...

Politics