2026-02-15 04:26:15
The United States military killed three more people on Friday in their 39th boat attack in six months, according to a tracker maintained by the New York Times. All told, the strikes by US forces have killed at least 133 people in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.
President Donald Trump’s administration has maintained, often without evidence, that they are targeting the boats as an anti-drug smuggling measure. Though, even if people on these boats were confirmed to be transporting drugs, a broad array of legal specialists have held that the “strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings” because the military “cannot deliberately target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence, even if they are suspected of engaging in criminal acts,” the Times reported on Saturday.
An 11-second video of the Friday strike, posted by US Southern Command, shows what appears to be a missile hitting a boat in open waters, with a caption claiming without further evidence that the three people killed were “narco-terrorists.”
The Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights advocacy organization, wrote on Friday that those killed by the US military at sea “are denied any due process whatsoever,” and that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “are asserting and exercising an apparently unlimited license to kill people that the president deems to be terrorists.”
The boat attacks have been accompanied by social media posts that include videos of the strikes, including by Hegseth and Southern Command. Multiple of the previous deaths came from a secondary attack on people who were alive after initial strikes, as confirmed by the White House.
“I can’t imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water,” Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College, told the Associated Press in December. “That is clearly unlawful.”
Friday’s strike follows increased US military operations in the region, including the administration’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in early January. According to Venezuela’s Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino López, US forces killed 83 people during the Maduro operation, including multiple civilians. Trump subsequently claimed that his administration will run the country and control their oil.
“Just as the U.S. killings of those aboard targeted vessels are entirely premeditated and intentional,” the Washington Office on Latin America wrote on Friday, “the ongoing attacks at sea appear designed to normalize killings at President Trump’s discretion, both within the U.S. military chain of command and in the eyes of the American people.”
2026-02-15 02:28:46
Hundreds of judges across the nation have ruled over 4,400 times that President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement arm is detaining people unlawfully, according to a new Reuters review of court documents. And that’s just since October.
The Trump administration’s immense increase in detainments rests, in part, on their decision to detain people while their immigration cases are moving through the system—a departure from previous administrations’ interpretation of immigration law. This has led to a steep increase in immigrants petitioning the courts to be released, as Reuters reports, and the thousands of rulings finding that these prolonged detainments were unlawful.
Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, told Reuters that the increase in lawsuits came as “no surprise” because “many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate for mass deportations.” But not all of the judges challenging the Trump administration’s mass deportation mechanism were appointed by Democrats.
Just last week, a judge appointed by George W. Bush ordered the release of a Venezuelan detainee. “It is appalling that the Government insists that this Court should redefine or completely disregard the current law as it is clearly written,” wrote US District Judge Thomas Johnston of West Virginia.
Before Trump 2.0, if immigration enforcement agents detained someone without documentation who had no criminal record, they would typically be released on bond while their case went through the system. Trump officials are now often keeping those individuals locked up indefinitely.
Earlier this month, the conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals handed the Trump administration a win. In a 2-1 ruling, that court held that the administration could hold people whose cases are actively going through the system. It’s a key win, as the circuit oversees Texas and Louisiana, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement has some of its most populated detention centers.
The number of people kept in detainment who have no criminal record—the population petitioning the courts to be released—has increased exponentially under Trump’s second administration. According to a recent report from the American Immigration Council, the Trump administration’s arrest practices have led to a 2,450 percent increase in people with no criminal record being held in ICE detention on any given day.
This mass detention, per the new Reuters review, has spurred detainees to file “more than 20,200 federal lawsuits demanding their release since Trump took office”—an overflow that has created a “legal logjam” and has resulted in people remaining locked up even after judges have ordered their release.
The environment of fear for scores of these detained immigrants doesn’t end after a judge orders their release. That’s true for Joseph Thomas, an 18-year-old who was detained with his father in Wisconsin in December and whose case was highlighted in the Reuters investigation. The pair are both asylum seekers and were driving on the father’s Walmart delivery route. Within a month, another Bush-appointee, Chief US District Judge Patrick Schiltz, ordered that they both be released.
Even though Thomas is out of detention and can return to school, things aren’t back to normal. He’s afraid to go in person to class and is instead learning online.
2026-02-14 20:30:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash reverberated around the world, a group of students at Harvard University walked out of their introductory economics class complaining it was teaching a “specific and limited view” that perpetuated “a problematic and inefficient system of economic inequality”.
A few weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic, economics students at Manchester University in the UK, unhappy that the rigid mathematical formulas they were being taught in the classroom bore little relation to the tumultuous economic fallout they were living through, set up a “post-crash economics society.”
These small acts of discontent found echoes in campuses around the world in the months that followed, as normally staid economics students demanded a broader and more questioning syllabus that more accurately reflected and challenged the world as it was.
These disparate strands came together in early 2013 at the London School of Economics with the inaugural meeting of Rethinking Economics—a student-led organization that has gone on to challenge the way economics is taught at universities around the world.
“That first meeting was a bit chaotic,” recalls Yuan Yang, one of the group’s founders and a Labour MP since 2024. “It was just after our final exams and it was all a bit intense. But I was really surprised with how many students turned up not just from the LSE but from other universities as well.”
Yang, who was studying a masters in economics at the time, said the first meeting was held on a “bit of shoestring,” dependent on volunteers and “some real acts of kindness” from family and friends as well as some of the LSE’s leading academics.
“It is urgent that the economics discipline learn to understand these issues as systemic features of our capitalist economy.”
“It was very volunteer led,” she said. “My dad, bless him, helped out by doing some filming…and we had some of the leading professors helping out. [South Korean economist and academic] Ha-Joon Chang arrived early and helped us make name tags.”
Chang, now a leading author and professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, said the launch came after decades when the neoclassical school of economics had come to dominate universities “like Catholic theology in medieval Europe…a doctrine that fundamentally defines the way humanity sees the world.”
“By demanding that economics education should be more pluralist, more ethically conscientious, more historically aware, and more oriented towards the real world, Rethinking Economics has exposed the staggering deficiency in the way economists are educated and induced some significant, albeit woefully insufficient changes in economics teaching around the world,” he said.
Rethinking Economics has blossomed since the first meeting and now has thousands of members, including several eminent economists, across more than 40 countries.
According to its communications lead, Sara Mahdi, its aim is to make economics education “plural, critical, decolonised and historically grounded” rather than “dominated by a single framework presented as ‘neutral’ or ‘objective.’”
“We are building an international movement of young people who are organizing, educating and agitating for an economics that takes account of the real world we see around us,” she said. “One that portrays the economy as embedded in ecology, power, institutions, history and inequality, and treats competing economic theories and methods as legitimate, not marginal to a sort of classical, almost mathematical view, which has been dominant in many institutions for decades.”
Mahdi, a degrowth, economics and anthropology graduate from University College London and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, says the group has secured tangible changes in the way economics is taught—from full program redesigns to the introduction of new core modules—at scores of institutions.
“Since 2019 alone the movement has supported and recorded more than 80 campaign wins in universities across 35 countries, including 23 major curriculum reforms, impacting tens of thousands of students,” she said. “These are the kinds of reforms that don’t just add ‘one optional lecture,’ they reshape what students learn as mainstream economics.”
Today’s economic system is “showing its most violent face…with rampant militarism and unprecedented, obscene levels of inequality.”
Among the changes highlighted are the launch of a politics, philosophy and economics course at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2014, an interdisciplinary programme at the University of Lille in France in 2020, and an economics and society undergraduate programme and public sector economics masters programme at Leiden University in the Netherlands in 2023.
One of Rethinking Economics’s most active groups is based in South Africa, where the campaign grew out of a wider student protest movement calling for greater access to higher education for poorer communities.
The junior program officer at Rethinking Economics for Africa, Amaarah Garda, said what started as a protest about fees had become a broader critique of the academic system and its colonial outlook.
Initially, universities refused to change mainstream economics teaching, so the campaign changed tack. “We have had to carve out our own progressive courses and events at these universities,” Garda said. “So it is not that everyone who does economics is exposed to a more progressive vision, but those courses are now available.”
The movement was growing, she said, as students sought answers to the issues confronting them in the news and their day-to-day lives, from how war economies work to what is being discussed at UN climate talks.
“In South Africa, and perhaps globally, we can see that our students are finding these ideas not just interesting but more and more urgent given the multiple crisis that we are facing,” she said. “They are approaching us to explain topics because they can see how critical they are to society and they cannot get that information through their usual courses.”
Many academics have welcomed the space the campaign has opened up.
Clara Mattei, a professor of economics at the University of Tulsa in the US and president of the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation (Free), said her group was collaborating with students from Rethinking Economics to “improve economic education and make it a useful tool for expanding economic agency among the general public.”
She said the current economic system was “showing its most violent face…with rampant militarism and unprecedented, obscene levels of inequality with four people owning more wealth than four billion people.”
“It is urgent that the economics discipline learn to understand these issues as systemic features of our capitalist economy rather than as the result of market imperfections or crony capitalism,” she said, adding that students such as those involved in Rethinking Economics were “pushing toward more courageous frameworks within the economic tradition…to prioritize the logic of need over the logic of profit”.
Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US, said Rethinking Economics was forcing established economists to ask the basic questions that many had been trained to overlook.
She said there were still power structures within institutions, think tanks and journals that wanted to maintain a narrower, restricted view of economics, but that the campaign was making headway. “It is a battle, but what I really appreciate about this group is that they go about things in a thoughtful way, they are willing to hear people from the other side.”
She said she had spoken to Rethinking Economics groups around the world.
“They bring in all kinds of people, not just economists and students but activists and others together, and they look at the same questions in such different ways…I have actually learned a lot from them…It has made me realize that economics is too important to be left to economists.”
2026-02-14 16:01:00
Cecelia Lizotte owns Suya Joint, a celebrated Nigerian restaurant in Boston. She’s a rising star in the city who was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2024 and operates two restaurants and a food truck. But last year, a key employee—who happens to be her brother—was detained by ICE.
“I’m not able to operate the establishment, basically,” Lizotte said. “It’s just, it’s crazy.”
Lizotte’s experience got us wondering what it’s like to run a restaurant, or any business, when a key employee suddenly disappears.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.This week on Reveal, producer Katie Mingle and reporter Julia Lurie tell stories about the people swept up in President Donald Trump’s mass deportations and the families that are left behind. We also talk to LA Taco reporter Memo Torres about how immigration raids continue across Los Angeles almost daily, even though the national spotlight moved on months ago.
The first two stories are updates from an episode that originally aired in September 2025.
2026-02-14 05:05:27
Elon Musk, who formally distanced himself from the White House last year, hasn’t stopped trying to influence American politics.
Musk took a step away from the Department of Government Efficiency—the agency he crafted and wielded against long-held federal spending practices. But, contrary to what some expected, that didn’t signal indefinite distance from Republican politics for the South African-born, Texas-voting centibillionaire. To the contrary, campaign finance records and his own social media profiles indicate that he’s ready to wield power whenever, wherever.
His public clash with President Donald Trump also doesn’t appear to be sticking. Musk has dined with the president and first lady Melania Trump and, weeks ago, attended the wedding of Dan Scavino, White House deputy chief of staff, at Mar-a-Lago alongside prominent administration officials.
He’s also been ceaselessly posting political commentary and recommendations on X, which he owns. Including frequent posts about the Epstein files, which he is in but has attempted to distance himself from.
One of his main targets of late has been the SAVE Act, Republican legislation that, if both houses of Congress pass it, could disenfranchise tens of millions of potential voters and uniquely target women through new voter ID requirements.
Republicans have been taking notice.
According to Politico:
The campaign has driven a huge volume of calls to member offices, according to two aides granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, forcing Republican after Republican to publicly state their support for the legislation.
After spending more than $290 million to get Trump and other Republicans elected in 2024 cycle, Musk claimed in May that he’d be cutting back. “In terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg News at the time. “If I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it. I do not currently see a reason.”
His announcement came after pouring money into the high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court election—to no avail.
Seems like he found a reason.
Musk gave $20 million to the two political groups by the end of 2025. With the midterms revving up, Republicans are considering what an influx of money from Musk, a divisive character due to his history of slashing government funding that affected Americans across the political spectrum, could do for their campaigns.
Talking to Politico, Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) worried about how midterms tend to be rough for the president’s party.
“History is not on our side,” Gimenez said. “We’ll take any and all help possible to reverse that trend in history, because I think it’s important for the Republican Party.”
2026-02-14 04:11:24
This past year, official social media accounts from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other government agencies have adopted a distinct voice online. The posts look like memes, utilizing dramatic AI-generated art, general patriotic slogans, and cinematic language about “defending the homeland” and shaping America’s future.
But if you look closer, a pattern emerges.
Many of these phrases, images, and attached media aren’t just regular social media content. They repurpose language, symbolism, and cultural references with direct connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements. It’s content that experts say is instantly recognizable to those who are in the white supremacist know, but can be largely invisible to everyone else.
So, let’s look at a couple of the more egregious examples that reveal this pattern.
There has been not one, but two posts from our government institutions that reuse a phrase ripped straight from William Gayley Simpson’s book Which Way Western Man?. It was published and promoted by the National Alliance—considered one of the “best organized” neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The book is antisemitic, racist, and explicitly states that Adolf Hitler was right.
When reached by email for comment, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said “There are plenty of poems, books, and songs with the same title,” apparently referring to Which Way Western Man?. But a simple search across a variety of online music and literature libraries shows that isn’t necessarily true. One song by the same name did pop up with lyrics like “a war against Antifa, a war against the radical feminists, a war to take back our soul.”
“To cherry pick something of white nationalism with the same title to make a connection to DHS law enforcement. It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she continued.
Just two days after ICE officer Jonathan Ross killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, DHS accounts shared a post with a song titled “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” by the Pine Tree Riots. According to a variety of reports, the track is regularly used in white nationalist circles for its evocation of a race war. And it is easy to see that some of these posts imitate slogans nearly identical to those used by Hitler and the Nazi Party. One of the more brazen examples is from the Department of Labor. It features a bust of George Washington super-imposed over a montage of images the administration regularly use to evoke white Western culture, with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” Reports have noted the resemblance to Hitler’s infamous slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer,” or “One People, One Country, One Leader.” (The White House and Department of Labor did not respond to requests for comment.)
Individually, each post could easily be dismissed, but taken together, they seem to form something more deliberate: a stream of repurposed Nazi propaganda for the everyday person’s feed.
Propaganda scholars say this is how it works. Suggestion, not through obvious symbols, but through repetition, emotional activation, and subtle normalization. Renee Hobbs, a communication professor who studies propaganda and founded the media literacy organization Media Education Lab, describes four pillars: stir emotion, simplify ideas, appeal to fears and hopes, and attack opponents.
It’s been reported that the purpose of these posts is to recruit specific people for specific reasons—a dogwhistle that only some can hear. But, as I point out in my latest video, whatever the actual intention or inspiration behind these posts, the result is a slow drip of extremist rhetoric that becomes familiar, official, and acceptable.
So, when officials like Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem begin talking about things like checking papers, many Americans don’t recoil. They cheer.
