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The strategic importance of Greenland is growing, and NATO has underinvested in Arctic security. But President Trump, intent on ownership, is rebuffing deals with Europe to solve the problem.

As the struggle for control of Greenland intensifies — and with it, the question of whether the Atlantic alliance will suffer a mortal wound — two raw geopolitical realities have come into focus.

The first is that all the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization underinvested in Arctic security for years, as melting glaciers, aggressive Chinese and Russian navies and critical undersea communications cables made one of earth’s coldest landscapes ripe for renewed superpower conflict.

The second is that President Trump has no intention of seeking a common solution to this long-brewing problem.

Instead, he has deliberately opened what could become the largest rift in the nearly 77-year history of the alliance, one that led the German vice chancellor to declare over the weekend that European nations “must not allow ourselves to be blackmailed” by the largest power in the group.

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Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.

Think about where this is leading. One possibility, anticipated this morning by financial markets, is a damaging trade war. Another is an American military occupation of Greenland. Try to imagine it: The U.S. Marines arrive in Nuuk, the island’s capital. Perhaps they kill some Danes; perhaps some American soldiers die too. And then what? If the invaders were Russians, they would arrest all of the politicians, put gangsters in charge, shoot people on the street for speaking Danish, change school curricula, and carry out a fake referendum to rubber-stamp the conquest. Is that the American plan too? If not, then what is it? This would not be the occupation of Iraq, which was difficult enough. U.S. troops would need to force Greenlanders, citizens of a treaty ally, to become American against their will.

*🎁 link

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Black female professionals have seen a steep drop in employment over the last year. They are turning to each other for pep talks and résumé advice.

The job market is not great right now. Hiring has slowed. Artificial intelligence is replacing some knowledge workers. But Black women have been hit especially hard. The unemployment rate for Black women rose significantly from the start of 2025 to December, where it stood at 7.8 percent. That pattern of dramatic job loss was not seen for other groups.

“You don’t see that same loss with Black men, you don’t see that same loss with other groups of women,” said Valerie Wilson, a labor economist and director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “It was a sharp and unique decline in employment for Black women.”

More specifically, it was college-educated Black women — not those with less education or advanced degrees — who lost the most ground. In 2024, 74 percent of Black women with bachelor’s degrees were employed; that rate fell to 71 percent in the first nine months of 2025, while the rate for employed white women with bachelor’s degrees fell less than one percentage point during the same period.

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Temperatures are expected to plunge to around zero degrees this weekend. Minnesotans say they will be out in the street, using the weather to their advantage.

Federal agents flopping on ice and tripping over snowbanks. Snowballs arcing toward ranks of men armored in tactical gear. Protesters gleefully dumping water to make streets even more hazardous.

If there is a third character in the story of immigration agents versus protesters in Minnesota, it is the January weather.

This weekend, temperatures in Minneapolis are expected to plunge even lower, to around zero degrees, an Arctic blast that could hinder the Trump administration’s continuing immigration crackdown and the angry demonstrations over the death of Renee Good, 37.

. . .

But bundled-up residents who have been protesting for days said that a seriously cold stretch would play only to their advantage.

“I want it to get cold,” said Chris Foreman, a military veteran who has joined protesters outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, just outside Minneapolis, for six days in a row. “People know that a lot of these ICE guys are from the South. They’re coming into a different environment and they’re not used to it.”

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Donald Trump has a lot of odd fixations, both as a person and as a president. He tends to focus his tunnel vision on things he wants: the demolishing of the White House’s East Wing, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Many of Trump’s quirks are harmless, if unpleasant. (He seems to hate dogs, for example, but no one is forcing him to adopt one.) Some of his ideas, however, are more destructive: His stubborn and ill-informed attachment to tariffs has brought about considerable disorder in the international economy and hurt many of the American industries they were supposed to protect.

But a few of Trump’s obsessions are extraordinarily dangerous, and likely none more so than his determination to seize Greenland from Denmark, a country allied to the United States for more than two centuries. Perhaps because he does not understand how the Mercator projection distorts size on a map, the president thinks that Greenland is “massive” and that it must become part of the United States. If Trump makes good on his recurring threat to use force to gain the island, he would not only blow apart America’s most important alliance; he could set in motion a series of events that could lead to global catastrophe—or even to World War III.

*🎁 link

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Following the proliferation of the nonconsensual sexual deepfakes on X, the platform has detailed changes to the Grok account’s ability to edit images of real people. They match the changes reported on Tuesday by The Telegraph, as Grok’s responses to prompts like “put her in a bikini” became censored.

But in tests of the feature on Wednesday, we found that it was still relatively easy to get Grok to generate revealing deepfakes, while X and xAI owner Elon Musk blamed the problems on “user requests” and “times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected.” As of Wednesday evening, despite the policy’s claims, our reporters were still able to use the Grok app to generate revealing images of a person in a bikini using a free account.

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California's top prosecutor has launched an investigation into the spread of sexualised AI deepfakes generated by Elon Musk's AI model Grok.

Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement announcing the probe: "The avalanche of reports detailing the non-consensual, sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking."

xAI, which develops Grok, has previously said "anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content".

California's inquiry comes as British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer warns of possible action against X.

In Wednesday's statement, Bonta said: "This material, which depicts women and children in nude and sexually explicit situations, has been used to harass people across the internet."

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Consider your winter dining plans sorted. Bookings are officially open for the 2026 Dine Out Vancouver Festival, returning from January 21 to February 8 with its biggest lineup yet.

More than 450 restaurants and venues are taking part across the city, including over 25 MICHELIN-recognized spots. Fixed price menus fall into three tiers between $20 and $70, while diners ready to splurge can book $110 tasting menus at MICHELIN One Star faves Burdock & Co. and Published on Main.

Running for 19 days, the festival gives locals and visitors alike plenty of reason to plan repeat reservations, with special events and limited-time offers on flights, hotels and attractions rounding out the experience.

One of the most anticipated returns is Street Food City, which rolls back into downtown Vancouver from January 22 to 25. Now in its 14th year, the four-day street food celebration takes over šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl’e7énk Square at the north plaza of the Vancouver Art Gallery, bringing together a rotating lineup of food trucks and mobile eateries.

British Columbia’s human rights commissioner plans to tell the provincial government it should rewrite its laws and rules to more clearly protect the right of journalists to report on police enforcement activities, The Tyee has learned.

The commissioner wants police to stop using “exclusion zones” to bar the media from areas where officers are undertaking enforcement activities, unless they have judicial permission or are facing an immediate public safety threat.

And with police forces continuing to restrict media access despite legal rulings calling the practice unconstitutional, the commissioner is asking the province to formally restrict the practice, while also asking for more education for frontline officers.

The recommendations are to be included in a report expected to be delivered next month. The report has not been published, but the recommendations were included in a letter sent by commissioner Kasari Govender to municipalities around the province in mid-January. The commissioner had asked municipalities not to release the recommendations, but they were included in a recent council agenda for Northern Rockies Regional Municipality.

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I'm sorry! I'm a technology writer, which means I'm supposed to be encouraging you to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the money-losingest technology in human history, AI. No one has ever lost as much money as the AI companies.

There is no way to operate one of Nvidia's big AI-optimized GPUs without losing money. The owners of these GPUs who have lost the least money are the ones who rushed into buying GPUs without ensuring they'd have electricity to power them, and have been forced to leave their GPUs to age in warehouses. The minute they plug in those GPUs, they'll start losing money, and the more they use them, the more money they'll lose.

. . .

I don't have any advice for how to do that. I'm sorry!

As Canada contemplates our response to the collapse of the American empire and its alliances with the world, the cornerstone of our current strategy is sacrificing our dollars, water and energy in order to become more dependent on America, in a weird and improbable bet that we will figure out how to make millions of Canadians unemployed. I'm sorry, that just doesn't sound like a great idea to me.

If I can beg your indulgence, I'd like to propose an alternative.

Several faculty groups have denounced the Trump administration’s efforts to obtain information about Jewish professors, staff and students at the University of Pennsylvania – including personal emails, phone numbers and home addresses – as government abuse with “ominous historical overtones”.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.

. . .

“These requests would require Penn to create and turn over a centralized registry of Jewish students, faculty, and staff – a profoundly invasive and dangerous demand that intrudes deeply into the freedoms of association, religion, speech, and privacy enshrined in the First Amendment,” the groups argued.

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A social media post from the Department of Labor is attracting criticism for appearing to echo a Nazi-era slogan from the early 20th century.

The department posted to X on Jan. 10, "One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American."

Dozens of users commented and reposted, expressing alarm and outrage over what they called an alarming echo of what the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes as one of the central slogans used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. That slogan is, "One People, One Realm, One Leader."

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