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Can U.S. & Iran Lower Tensions? Officials Begin New Talks Amid Trump Threats of Military Strikes
8:57
Democracy Now Video • Feb 6, 2026

Can U.S. & Iran Lower Tensions? Officials Begin New Talks Amid Trump Threats of Military Strikes

"Journalism Deserves Better": Ex-Washington Post Staffers Slam Billionaire Bezos for Gutting Paper
13:24
Democracy Now Video • Feb 6, 2026

"Journalism Deserves Better": Ex-Washington Post Staffers Slam Billionaire Bezos for Gutting Paper

Military Lawyers Forced to Work After Mass Resignations in Minnesota
New Republic • Feb 6, 2026

Military Lawyers Forced to Work After Mass Resignations in Minnesota

Military lawyers have taken over prosecutorial duties in the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis due to mass resignations by protesting lawyers who represented the bureau.Judge Advocate General Corps attorneys replaced civilian prosecutors as criminal and immigration cases surge in light of increased ICE activity in Minnesota, Politico reported Friday.The move was first announced last month, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the military to identify a pool of 40 judge advocate general officers, 25 of whom he said would serve as special assistant U.S. attorneys in Minneapolis.“Ideally have significant experience in criminal prosecution, civil litigation, administrative law, immigration law, general litigation, or other related fields,” reads the email request, obtained by CNN.Those individuals have largely been tasked with prosecuting some 16 protesters charged with resisting and impeding federal agents enacting Donald Trump’s immigration agenda in the area, officially referred to as Operation Metro Surge.Further still, the military has involved itself in offering replacements among America’s judiciary, reported Reuters. On Thursday, the Justice Department swore in 33 new immigration judges, many of them temporary installments with military backgrounds, in order to catch up on work left behind by a slew of judges fired by the administration.At least 14 staff members at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis quit their posts in protest after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old local mother Renee Nicole Good in early January. In the weeks since, employees at the state legal office have claimed that they are overwhelmed by the legal challenges to Operation Metro Surge, and that fruitless attempts to get ICE to comply with the law and court orders have pushed them to a breaking point.As a result, workloads have piled up and cases have been backlogged. The overwhelming stress leaked through the cracks Tuesday, when a lawyer volunteering with the short-staffed office begged a judge to put her in contempt of court so that she could “get 24 hours of sleep.”“The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need,” said attorney Julie Le when pressed as to why the government had failed to follow judicial orders. Le has since been removed from the temporary position and has gone back to her normal job with ICE.

Juan González on Lasting Impact of 9/11 Toxic Exposure
6:51
Democracy Now Video • Feb 6, 2026

Juan González on Lasting Impact of 9/11 Toxic Exposure

Tim Scott Has All-Time Pathetic Reaction to Trump’s Racist Obama Video
New Republic • Feb 6, 2026

Tim Scott Has All-Time Pathetic Reaction to Trump’s Racist Obama Video

Republican Senator Tim Scott says the AI-generated clip President Trump posted depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as monkeys is “the most racist thing” he’s seen from the administration.“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” said Scott, the longest-serving Black senator in U.S. history and perhaps the most prominent Black conservative—and Black Trump supporter—in all of Congress. “The President should remove it.”It is not fake, and Trump has yet to remove it as of this writing. Trump initially posted an election-denialism MAGA brainrot video on Truth Social late Thursday. At around the 59 second mark of the video, a short clip of the Obamas’ heads superimposed on chimp bodies appears, mouths agape while the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background. The clip has a watermark from the same account that made the AI-generated video of Trump dropping shit on No Kings protesters from a fighter jet.A video posted on President Trump’s Truth Social account portrays former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes. pic.twitter.com/B6TLnB2Vqm— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) February 6, 2026The White House too has acknowledged the clip and insisted that it couldn’t have been racist because the full clip depicts multiple Democrats as animals from the Lion King movie—never mind that the Obamas are the monkeys.“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Politico. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”Is that supposed to make this better? The current president of the United States—who spent years falsely claiming the first Black president was not an American—posted a clip that is so absurdly, undeniably racist that it really doesn’t matter what’s in the rest of the clip. The outrage isn’t fake; Trump has just done so many casually reprehensible things that this is just another day for him.

Top U.S. & World Headlines — February 6, 2026
10:50
Democracy Now Video • Feb 6, 2026

Top U.S. & World Headlines — February 6, 2026

Rich Liberals: Please, Please Step Up and Save The Washington Post
New Republic • Feb 6, 2026

Rich Liberals: Please, Please Step Up and Save The Washington Post

By far the most widely read piece I’ve written in my time at The New Republic is this one, which I wrote right after the 2024 election and headlined “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” My answer to that question was the media—specifically, that an avowedly right-wing media, which existed not to report the news but to elect Republicans and turn liberalism into a grotesque and indefensible caricature of itself, had grown and grown since the 1990s, finally by 2024 reaching the point where it was more powerful and more agenda-setting than the mainstream media.I wrote: “Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC.… Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.”Here we sit, 15 months later, and 13 months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, and what’s changed? What’s changed, predictably, is that the landscape is even bleaker. CBS News, now run by Bari Weiss, has become part of that agenda-setting right-wing media—which includes Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, and more. And so has The Washington Post, whose rightward turn on its editorial page started becoming apparent late last year. And this week, Bezos moved to assert his personal control not just over the opinion pages. Now he’s decided to start dismantling the news side, with the 300 layoffs he ordered Wednesday. As you’ve no doubt read by now, the Post has suffered admittedly massive losses lately—$100 million in 2024. But as you’ve also surely read, Bezos could cover those losses if he wanted to with what he makes in a few days. If he wrote a check tomorrow to cover those losses, his net worth would drop, as Truthout’s Sharon Zhang observed, from the current Forbes-estimated $248.7 billion—all the way down to a worrying $248.6 billion.So why did he decide not to write that check? I don’t know the man, and of course on some level, rich men hate writing such checks. But if he actually believed in the value of journalism’s role in sustaining democracy, as he appeared to for the first few years after he bought the paper in 2013, he’d have written it happily.So the question arises: What are we to conclude from his refusal to do so? There’s only one conclusion. He doesn’t care about democracy. He sees no vital role for a vigorous free press in sustaining it. And he wants The Washington Post not only to be a right-leaning libertarian newspaper, which, as many have observed, is his right. He wants it to be a lousy newspaper. A weak simulacrum of what it was once and should be. A newspaper that cannot play its time-honored role as a check on abuses of power.I note here, as others have, that the Post still has 500 journalists, which is a lot, and that the layoffs largely didn’t touch the national reporting teams. That’s all good, I guess. But just wait. The guillotine will start finding those necks eventually. Why? Because these layoffs won’t staunch losses over the long haul. Indeed, they may make them worse. More subscribers who decided to give the paper one more chance after Bezos pulled the Harris endorsement will jump ship (in my anecdotal experience, that’s happening to a considerable degree already). Losses will continue. And one day, the Post’s publisher—this horror-show hack named Will Lewis, this meretricious mountebank who was too cowardly to join the staff call announcing the layoffs but who was spotted at a glam Super Bowl–related event in San Francisco the very next day—will announce that more belt-tightening is required.And I submit to you that Bezos at best doesn’t care and, at worst, actually wants this on some level. Once upon a dear old time, he seemed to want a real newspaper. But after he threw in his lot with Trump (or Trumps, plural, given his financing of this embarrassing piece of Melania agitprop), that changed. It’s axiomatic: It is impossible to believe simultaneously in a vigorous press and in the success of Donald Trump. The latter, which is based on the smashing of democratic laws and customs, cannot succeed if the former exists. And, on an emotional and psychic and most certainly pecuniary level, Bezos has made his choice.Rich liberals, I beg of you: Do something. Step in to save The Washington Post. Maybe there’s not a single one of you who has the money to swallow $100 million in annual losses. But maybe five or six of you together do. And by the way: If you do it right, and you hire the right editors and rehire some of the old columnists and do some intelligent modernizing around video and podcasts and are willing to be an unapologetically liberal newspaper, you’ll find an audience again.You’ll be doing a lot more than saving some jobs. “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost,” Thomas Jefferson wrote a friend in 1786. A news outlet isn’t a shoe store. It’s a guardrail against tyranny. It shouldn’t surprise us that a man worth a quarter-trillion dollars, whose wealth has increased tenfold in the last decade, doesn’t care about this. Democracy, tyranny … makes no difference to him. In fact, to the extent that democracy makes room for his employees to try to join unions and so forth, democracy is an inconvenience. So is a free press.So take it off his hands. Make Bezos the proverbial offer he can’t refuse. He may actually refuse to sell to a liberal consortium—his preference for tyranny may now be that stark. But it can’t hurt to try. Your accountants might grouse, but there is no question that history will reward you.This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

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