Another southern winter storm

Newsweek - A powerful winter storm is sweeping across the South and Mid-Atlantic, triggering winter storm warnings and advisories in at least 16 states, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

NWS forecasters warn heavy snow, fierce winds and treacherous travel conditions will take hold through Sunday. Some areas are expecting up to 13 inches of snow, prompting urgent calls for residents to delay travel and prepare for conditions that may become life-threatening. 

The highest snowfall totals—between 8 and 13 inches—are expected in East Carteret County, North Carolina, with similarly heavy amounts across eastern and coastal North Carolina. 

Republican's Save Act would cut the votes of women and blacks

The Guardian -  That thing is called the Save Act and, if the Trump administration gets its way, it could have an oversized impact on the November midterms, particularly when it comes to minorities and married women being able to vote.

A good rule of thumb when looking at a Republican-drafted bill or campaign is that its name is directly the opposite of whatever it is meant to achieve. If there is something about ‘protecting women’ in the title, for example, then it’s probably actually about controlling women or bullying transgender people. The same is true of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, which would change the way US citizens register to vote. The purpose of the bill doesn’t seem to be to safeguard democracy but to help destroy it through stealth disenfranchisement.

If it became law, the Save Act would require Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or other citizenship document to register or re-register to vote. Per one Brennan Center Study, more that 21 million American citizens, many of whom are engaged voters, do not have easy access to these documents. While just over 8% of self-identified white American citizens don’t have these documents readily available, the Brennan Center found the number is nearly 11% among Americans of color.

Women who changed their name when they got married may also face a logistical nightmare: reports show that as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name don’t have a birth certificate that matches their legal name. “The legislation does not mention the potential option for these Americans to present change-of-name documentation or a marriage certificate in combination with a birth certificate to prove their citizenship,” the liberal thinktank the Center for American Progress noted.

To make things even more complicated for everyone, the Save Act would also disrupt online voter registration. Americans would have to appear in person, with their original documents, simply to update their voter registration information.

Epstein files

NBC News - President Donald Trump's handling of the Epstein investigation has been widely unpopular, polls show, in part because a notable share of Trump's supporters has disapproved of how the administration has navigated this issue.

 

A New York Times/Siena poll conducted Jan. 12-17 found 66% of registered voters disapproved of how the president has handled the Epstein files, including 28% who said they voted for Trump in 2024. The poll found 22% approved of how the president has handled the issue, while 12% said they did not know or refused to answer the question. The survey's margin of error is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

 

Our NBC News Decision Desk poll powered by SurveyMonkey, conducted Nov. 20-Dec. 8, found 71% of Americans disapproved of how Trump has handled the Epstein files, including 27% of self-described supporters of the “Make America Great Again” movement. Just 29% of Americans in the survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points, approved of the president's handling of the files.

Trump tries to redefine journalists

The Borowitz Report—Hoping to calm nerves after his government arrested reporters Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, on Friday Donald J. Trump reassured the staff at Fox News Channel that he does not consider them journalists.

“It’s true that I’m engaging in a systematic attack on the First Amendment rights of journalists,” he told the Fox employees. “But obviously none of that applies to you.”

.... At the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt revealed that Trump had sent a similar message of reassurance to CBS News chief Bari Weiss

The Republicans are in trouble, but so are the Democrats

Ralph Nader - GOP operatives are assuming the Democrats will take back the House by a comfortable number and now think the Senate, where the GOP holds a three-seat majority. There are six seats in play. The GOP’s biggest fear is that their negatives continue to increase, propelled by a pile of unpopular Trumpian actions, ugly behavior, and corruption. The combination of all these things could create a critical mass and produce a landslide comparable to the Reagan-led victory in 1980. In this election, the Republicans defeated seemingly unbeatable Senate veterans like Senator Magnuson, Senator Nelson, and Senator Church, and gave the GOP control of the Senate.

So, what is the Democratic Party doing during this GOP slump? It is déjà vu all over again. The Dems are furiously raising money from commercial special interests and relying on vacuous television and social media ads. They are not engaging people with enough personal events, and they are not returning calls or reaching out to their historical base – progressive labor and citizen leaders. Most importantly, they are not presenting voters with a compact for American workers. Such a compact would spark voter excitement and attract significant media coverage.

Their aversion to building their own momentum to answer the basic questions “Whose side are you on?” and “What does the Democratic Party stand for?” remains as pathetic as it was in 2022 and 2024. Ken Martin, head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), recently quashed a detailed report he commissioned about why the Democrats lost in 2024. He has refused to meet with leaders of progressive citizen organizations. We visited the DNC headquarters and could not even get anyone to take our materials on winning issues and tactics. We offered the compiled presentations of two dozen progressive civic leaders on how to landslide the GOP in 2022. This material is still relevant and offers a letter-perfect blueprint for how Democrats could win in 2026....

Imagine a mere switch of 240,000 votes in three states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) would have defeated Trump in 2024. That margin would have been easily accomplished had the Democratic Party supported the efforts of AFL-CIO and progressive union leaders who wanted the Dems to champion a “Compact for Workers” on Labor Day, with events throughout the country. 

The compact would have emphasized: raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour, benefiting 25 million workers and increasing Social Security benefits frozen for over 45 years, could have benefited over 60 million elderly, paid for by higher Social Security taxes on the wealthy classes. The compact would also include: a genuine child tax credit would help over 60 million children, cutting child poverty in half; repeal of Trump’s massive tax cuts for the super-rich and giant corporations (which would pay for thousands of public works groups in communities around the nation); and Full Medicare for All (which is far more efficient and life-saving than the corporate-controlled nightmare of gouges, inscrutable billing fraud, and arbitrary denial of benefits).

Droves of conservative and liberal voters would attend events showcasing winning politics, authentically presented, as envisioned for the grassroots Labor Day gatherings, suicidally blocked by the smug, siloed leaders of the Democratic Party in 2022 and 2024.

Clearly, this is a party that thinks it can win on the agenda of Wall Street and the military/industrial complexes...

It is fair to say that, with few exceptions, the Democratic Party apparatus is coasting, playing “it safe,” and expecting that the Trumpsters will deliver the Congress to it in November.

Gaza

The Guardian - Israel’s military has accepted the death toll compiled by health authorities in Gaza is broadly accurate, marking a U-turn after years of official attacks on the data.

A senior security official briefed Israeli journalists, saying about 70,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli attacks on the territory since October 2023, excluding those missing.

It is the first time Israel has publicly estimated the toll from the war in Gaza. Previously the government and military had only provided figures for militants Israel claimed to have killed.

Gaza health authorities said the direct toll from Israeli attacks had exceeded 71,660 people, with at least 10,000 presumed buried in the rubble of bombed buildings.

America's population decline?

Bloomberg -   If the US has one enduring advantage, it’s the ability to draw talent and grow its population. For years, the country largely sidestepped demographic anxiety: As recently as 2023, the Census Bureau projected the first population decline wouldn’t come until 2081. That assumption is eroding fast. As Trump’s immigration crackdown drives net migration down, new research suggests the US could see its first-ever population decline as soon as this year. Trump argues fewer immigrants mean lower costs and more opportunity for native-born workers, Shawn Donann writes, but many economists are unconvinced. 

The effects of population decline on the US economy are likely to be corrosive rather than immediate — a pattern America has seen before. Cover-ups like the Army’s handling of the My Lai massacre in 1969 or the government surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013 can leave lasting damage on a democracy if accountability never follows, says filmmaker Laura Poitras, whose latest film, Cover-Up, profiles investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Mishal Husain spoke to Poitras about mass surveillance, her experience on a terrorist watch list, and the ICE shootings in Minneapolis.

How much has Trump made in the White House?

David D. Kirkpatrick, New Yorker -   -This past summer, I set out to tally up just how much the Trumps have made off the Presidency—to sum it all up in a number. The total then was $3.4 billion. Nearly six months later, at the end of Trump’s first year back in the White House, I am updating my reporting: the total has now reached four billion dollars.

Trump promised at the start of his first term that neither he nor his family would ever do anything that might even be “perceived to be exploitive of the office of the Presidency.” But all the deals I included in my tally do precisely that. A few of the Trump family’s recent deals—such as those with the Saudis, or the crypto exchange—even create the appearance of a potential payoff. When asked recently why he had abandoned his former restraint, Trump told the Times that he had discovered “nobody cared.” Is the public really so nonchalant? A year in, the Presidential money-making continues. More

Minnesota

POGO - Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents have fired shots at people on 16 separate occasions since last July. Each time, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the administration declared the shootings “justified” even before an investigation was completed. These are the actions of an administration that believes it doesn’t have to answer to anyone — that believes the people have no choice but to take its baseless lies at face value. DHS must face accountability for this horrific violence. Thankfully, your senators took a pivotal step in blocking additional funding for DHS in the appropriations process this week, pressuring for urgent reform to rein in ICE. With outrage and pressure mounting across the aisle, Congress must act to protect you and your neighbors.

A federal judge in Minnesota released a list of nearly 100 court orders violated by ICE in January alone. He noted that the volume of violations is more than “some federal agencies have ... in their entire existence.” The president said that federal agents would employ “more relaxed” tactics following widespread condemnations of the deadly operations in Minnesota.... On the ICE memo that gives agents a free pass to skirt the Fourth Amendment: “The idea that the executive branch can unilaterally decide that they don’t need a warrant signed by a judge should be alarming to everyone, no matter their politics,” says POGO’s Don Bell.

Meanwhile. . .

The Trump administration’s controversial deployments of National Guard troops to six American cities since June cost about $496 million in 2025, and continuing the existing deployments as is would cost about $93 million per month, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday. Read more...

Maine News

 Press Herald  

The day federal authorities launched an immigration enforcement operation in Maine focused on catching the “worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens,” agents detained an 18-year-old asylum seeker with no criminal record who had graduated high school two years early. While immigration officials said the operation was meant to target criminals who have terrorized communities, local leaders say agents are also focusing on law-abiding residents.

The Portland City Council will soon weigh a Payment in Lieu of Taxes proposal, a long-debated idea that would ask tax-exempt property owners to make voluntary payments to the city. As of June 30, 2025, Portland had nearly $4 billion in tax-exempt property, prompting city leaders to seek alternatives to relying on residential taxpayers to fund the increased cost of services. 

 More than 1,000 rally in Portland against Trump, ICE

Maine’s top federal judge orders ICE to release woman arrested without warrant

South Portland man notifies ICE he plans to sue for $7.5M

Lewiston asylum seeker arrested at routine check-in: ‘They put chains on me’

National Parks

Inside Climate News -   With the second coming of Donald J. Trump, the first Native American director of the National Park Service packed up his belongings in Washington, D.C., and retreated here to the sagebrush outback of eastern Oregon.

Charles F. Sams III, whose Native name is Mocking Bird with Big Heart and who spent three and a half years in the Biden administration managing 85 million acres of public land, now lives in a modest suburban house not far from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation where he grew up.

From his subdivision with a view of Oregon’s Blue Mountains, Sams has had more than a year to watch, mourn and reflect upon what he and many other experts view as an annus horribilis for America’s national parks under Trump 2.0.

It began with a blitzkrieg of mass firings, buyouts and forced retirements. Within six months, 24 percent of the park system’s permanent staff, about 4,000 people, was gone, according to internal data analyzed by the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association. Public workforce data released by the federal government in January shows a one-year reduction of 16 percent, or 3,076 people.

Gone were 100 park superintendents, as well as legions of biologists, archeologists, climate specialists and other scientists and managers who monitored the health of the parks, planned for their future and accounted for most of the agency’s in-house human expertise.

This sudden hollowing out of institutional knowledge, Sams said during an interview at his kitchen table, was the most pernicious aspect of the attack on the park service—one that cannot be easily righted. “It’s the biggest tragedy I see,” he said.

But gone, too, were park rangers and other staff who collected entrance fees, conducted tours, maintained trails and cleaned toilets. More than 90 national parks (out of 433) reported management and maintenance problems in the first half of last year, according to internal agency data obtained by The New York Times. Admission fees (80 percent of which are used for operating costs at the parks where they’re collected) went unpaid because some entrance kiosks were not staffed. With a shortage of custodial workers, scientists at Yosemite National Park had to pick up shifts cleaning campground bathrooms, according to an internal email shared with SFGate.  MORE

Climate Change

Via Demcratic Conservation Alliance

Inside Climate News -  Wind energy development has all but ground to a halt in the face of community opposition, a phaseout of federal tax credits and the Trump administration’s actions to slow the approval of federal permits. 

Fresh waters are getting browner. What does that mean for fish? 

Don Lemon

NBC News - Former CNN anchor Don Lemon was released by a federal judge after he was arrested yesterday in connection with his coverage of a protest inside a church last month.

Government shutdown

NBC News - Most of the U.S. government is shut down but is expected to reopen early next week. The Senate passed most of their spending bills to fund the government through September, but punted the DHS measure.

Trump's lawsuit against IRS

NY Times -  Federal law fiercely protects the confidentiality of Americans’ tax returns. Not only can improper disclosure of tax information carry criminal penalties, but people can also sue the government if the Internal Revenue Service mishandles their data.

Not until Thursday, though, had a sitting president filed such a suit. President Trump’s complaint, filed in federal court in Miami against the I.R.S. and the Treasury Department, created what legal experts said was the unparalleled situation of federal agencies facing a lawsuit from the head of the executive branch. Mr. Trump has demanded at least $10 billion in damages.

“It’s an enormous conflict of interest,” said Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “His own appointees could turn around and say: ‘Let’s give the Trump family a couple of billion. That’s a fair sell.’” MORE

ICE

Views of key Trump administration immigration policies

NBC News - Immigrant rights advocates filed a lawsuit challenging a recently disclosed ICE policy that allows officers to enter certain homes without a warrant. 

More than 300 anti-ICE protests planned across US this weekend

NY Times - Amid tensions over President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.

The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.

The shift comes as the administration has deployed thousands of masked immigration agents into cities nationwide. A week before the memo, it came to light that Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of the agency, had issued guidance in May saying agents could enter homes with only an administrative warrant, not a judicial one. And the day before the memo, Mr. Trump said he would “de-escalate a little bit” in Minneapolis, after agents fatally shot two people in the crackdown there.

What to Know About the Epstein Documents

NY Times - The Department of Justice on Friday released the largest batch of Jeffrey Epstein files to date, a giant tranche including three million more pages of documents and thousands of videos and images.

The documents shed new light on the disgraced financier’s relationships with several prominent figures, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. They also contain a significant number of uncorroborated tips to law enforcement.

Congress mandated the release in November, and President Trump signed the bill despite initially opposing it, as he has sought to put an end to the accusations and speculation swirling around the case. The latest batch of documents arrived weeks after a Dec. 19 deadline imposed by Congress.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the White House “had nothing to do” with vetting the released documents. “They had no oversight and they did not tell this department how to do our review and what to look for and what to redact or not redact,” he said.  Here’s what else we know about the latest release of Epstein files.

Polls

Number of children per family

Trump stuff

Washington Post cutting itself

NY Times - Fewer reporters are being sent to the Super Bowl. Foreign correspondents are being asked to hold off on trips to conflict zones. And editors are being encouraged to experiment with new forms of storytelling.

They are signs of things to come at The Washington Post.

The Post’s leadership is expected to announce significant layoffs in the newsroom and the business sides of the paper in the coming days, as part of an effort to end years of financial losses, according to three people with direct knowledge of the changes. But the cuts also appear to be aimed at something else: reorienting The Post’s coverage.

The sports, local and international sections are preparing to take a disproportionate share of the pain. At the same time, the paper’s video journalists, as well as reporters and editors focused on politics and national security — two of the paper’s signature coverage areas — are expected to become even more central to the company’s future.

Trump’s Board of Peace Is Anything But

NY Times - The most striking thing about President Trump’s proposal for a “Board of Peace,” a new group he has billed as a global conflict-solving body, is not its billion-dollar permanent membership fee or the eccentric list of nations, such as El Salvador, Belarus and Saudia Arabia, that have apparently signed on. It’s that for the first time, the United States — the primary architect of the United Nations — is openly experimenting with a rival body at least nominally aimed at peacemaking. “I’m a big fan of the U.N.’s potential,” Mr. Trump said last week, “but it has never lived up to its potential.”

This move is best understood, though, not as a sudden break between the United States and the U.N., but as an accelerant. It is the latest chapter in a much longer history of America’s estrangement from its own creation, made possible by a global forgetting, often willful, of how war was once restrained.

For much of the postwar period, the United Nations helped prevent crises from spiraling into wider war, acting as a firewall when bilateral diplomacy failed. As much of that history has faded from view, political leaders from around the world have come to think of the U.N. as an obsolete talking shop of empty words. This amnesia has narrowed the horizons of those shaping foreign policy, leaving them unable to envision a security framework that isn’t a zero-sum game of rival blocs. If we continue to let ourselves forget the lessons of the mid-20th century, when the U.N. was a successful bulwark against conflict escalation, we will find ourselves unable to imagine the kind of international cooperation needed to prevent future catastrophes.

ICE

Washington Post - One industrial building the federal government plans to overhaul into an immigrant detention center, in Roxbury, New Jersey, draws groundwater from a small town that uses nearly all of its daily limit.

Another proposed detention site is a warehouse in Oklahoma City that would hold up to 1,500 people a little more than a mile from an elementary school and a Pentecostal church.

A third location, previously an auto parts distribution center in Chester, New York, became so unbearably hot during summer months that two people who used to work there said it was akin to being stuck inside an aluminum shed.

Community members in Chester, N.Y., joined Rep. Pat Ryan (D) on Jan. 30 to rally against a proposed ICE detention facility in their region. Those are a few of the logistical and humanitarian concerns raised by residents and local officials in some of the 23 towns where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to convert industrial buildings into detention centers that combined would hold up to 80,000 people. ICE has offered few details about its plan since The Washington Post first reported on it last month.

The American Prospect - ICE Agents’ public executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have rightly drawn widespread fury, heartbreak, and action. And they are just two of the at least eight people agents have murdered or caused to die in the field between July 2025 and January 28, 2026. Even more people have died in immigration prison, in an even shorter time. Between July 2025 and January 28, 2026, 35 people have died in Trump’s concentration camps. These are minimum numbers—only the ones that the Trump regime has told us about, only the ones that have made it, sometimes, into the news cycle. And as for the people federal agents have merely injured? An official count doesn’t exist. There is no doubt that the regime is working overtime to hide the full scope of the terror campaign spreading across our country. 

Maine News

Our Maine news page is here. These are some of today's stories

• Today, Hannah LaClaire reports that while U.S. Sen. Susan Collins says ICE’s immigration crackdown has ended in Maine, advocates are urging vigilance. We also have a story on Suburban Propane customers reporting delivery problems in Maine, and on Cooper Flagg pushing through fatigue and injuries in a strong rookie year.
• High school students across southern Maine and Lewiston plan to walk out of class or skip school to participate in a national general strike Friday over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in Maine and elsewhere. At the same time, dozens of Maine businesses plan to participate in a nationwide shutdown in protest of ICE activity by closing their doors or donating sales to organizations that support the immigrant community.
• Suburban Propane customers report delivery problems in Maine
• Maine school buses may soon change after deaths of 2 students
• ICE says it arrested 206 people in first week of Maine operation

The new FBI

Sam Sifton, NY Times - When President Trump returned to office last year, he declared the Federal Bureau of Investigation a “corrupt” and partisan agency and vowed to clean house. Perhaps that was no surprise. The bureau had investigated him several times.

To run the show, Trump appointed Kash Patel, a former public defender and intelligence official who had never worked for the agency, though he had spun conspiracy theories about it.

Patel immediately began to transform the F.B.I. by undoing its nonpartisan rules and norms, alarming many of its 38,000 employees. He fired people who had worked on the Trump investigations. He assigned 20 percent of the agency’s staff to immigration enforcement, meaning that there are now fewer agents and analysts to stop terrorism, drug trafficking, white-collar crime, public corruption and cybercrime.

One thing that hasn’t changed: Employees still can’t speak to the press without permission. But 45 people who work at the bureau or who left last year talked to my colleagues Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser anyway — a sign, they say, of how unnerved many people there are. This new F.B.I., many current and former employees of the agency told them, has made the United States less safe.  MORE

Zoo pandas at play in DC's snowstorm

Coral reefs may succumb to erosion

Science Line - Coral may be in imminent danger, warned a study reported in Nature this September. According to the report, the majority of coral reefs in the Western Atlantic may not be able to keep up with rising sea levels and will succumb to erosion if global warming reaches 2 degrees Celsius, as is expected by 2050.

To understand the impacts, researchers at the University of Exeter in the U.K. gathered eight years of data from over 400 reefs throughout the Western Atlantic, focusing on sites where data is most prevalent. In the Florida Keys, the Gulf of Mexico and Bonaire in the Caribbean, they examined the rates at which coral reefs are growing and eroding, known as reef accretion potential (RAP), to project what may happen as a result of rising temperatures. 

.... They estimated that by 2040, more than 70% of reefs may enter a state of “net erosion,” meaning they will erode faster than they can grow. The trouble will arise from both warmer ocean water and higher sea levels, which the researchers estimate may increase by roughly 10 to 25 centimeters (3.9 to 9.8 inches) above present levels, depending on location and emissions scenario.

Justice Department releases three million Epstein documents

The Hill - The Justice Department said Friday they have completed their review of the Epstein files, releasing 3 million additional documents to the public.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters Friday that the tranche being released will be one of the last steps required under a bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump requiring the publication of the files related to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive documentation – document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people and compliance with the act. The department has engaged in an unprecedented and extensive effort to do so, after submitting the final report to Congress, as required under the Act, and publishing the written justifications for redactions in the Federal Register, the department’s obligations under the under the act will be will be completed,” Blanche said.

First Somali-American mayor drops out of politics because of threats and racism

htNews Center Maine - After two terms at the Maine State House, Rep. Deqa Dhalac will not be seeking reelection, citing threats and racism during her time in office. The South Portland Democrat is advocating for her successor and said she is grateful for her time in the legislature.

Dhalac is currently finishing her second two-year term. She wrote in a statement that after serious reflection and consultation with friends and family, “the climate for Black and Brown public servants has become increasingly hostile and unsafe.”

“Throughout my tenure, I have experienced persistent racism, harassment, and threats that reflect a broader national pattern targeting Black and Brown elected officials,” Dhalac said. “No one should have to endure fear or dehumanization simply for stepping forward to serve their community.”

Before her election to the House, Dhalac served on the South Portland City Council, and in 2021, she made national history as the first Somali-American mayor in the United States.