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The National Institutes of Health failed to protect brain scans that an international group of fringe researchers used to argue for the intellectual superiority of white people.

Genetic researchers were seeking children for an ambitious, federally funded project to track brain development — a study that they told families could yield invaluable discoveries about DNA’s impact on behavior and disease.

They also promised that the children’s sensitive data would be closely guarded in the decade-long study, which got underway in 2015. Promotional materials included a cartoon of a Black child saying it felt good knowing that “scientists are taking steps to keep my information safe.”

The scientists did not keep it safe.

A group of fringe researchers thwarted safeguards at the National Institutes of Health and gained access to data from thousands of children. The researchers have used it to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart.

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President Trump’s faith in his ability to wring concessions by taking maximalist positions was on full display this week. So were the costs, as he splintered NATO and then undercut his credibility by climbing down from his threats.

Even by President Trump’s own mercurial standards, his whipsawing over the past few weeks on Greenland — insisting on the largest land acquisition in American history and then dropping it without explanation, threatening allies and then reversing himself — was a remarkable and revealing exercise in a new era of American coercive diplomacy.

Mr. Trump began, as always, with a maximalist demand. This time, it was that a small European power, an ally that had shed blood for the United States in Afghanistan and beyond, turn over a vast and icy territory for the sake of U.S. national security. The president was clearly testing the boundaries of the Atlantic alliance, arguing that handing over the land was a small price for lesser powers to pay for continued American protection.

. . .

But this week Mr. Trump also discovered the limits of his coercive powers. After he threatened a wave of new tariffs, markets fell abruptly, which always seizes his attention. Allies objected, this time openly. And by the time the president returned to Washington on Thursday night, it was clear that he had left considerable damage to the Western alliance in his wake.

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Trump launched the new initiative at the World Economic Forum earlier this week

U.S. President Donald Trump said late Thursday that he is withdrawing an invitation for Prime Minister Mark Carney to join his "Board of Peace" initiative for Gaza.

Trump launched the new initiative at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. Its stated aim is to rebuild the war-ravaged territory.

Some 35 countries have signed up to join the board, but Carney had not yet said if Canada would accept Trump's invitation. The prime minister was not at the official launch in Davos and instead was attending the first day of a cabinet retreat in Quebec City.

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Prosecutors said a Chicago carpenter had offered a bounty for killing Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official. Defense lawyers said he was just sharing a social media post.

Gregory Bovino, a senior tactical commander for the Border Patrol, has been the swaggering public face of President Trump’s chaotic round of immigration raids across the country. In the wake of an immigration sweep in Chicago last fall that ignited protests all over the city, federal officials accused a local Latino man of offering a bounty on Mr. Bovino’s life.

At the time, Mr. Bovino cited the case as evidence that the situation in American cities was out of control — “something out of a third world country,” he told Fox News. “It’s a war zone out there.”

But on Thursday, a Chicago jury acquitted the man accused of making the threats, the latest setback for the Justice Department, which has faltered in a number of attempts to prosecute cases related to Mr. Trump’s immigration policy.

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It was a moment of global clarity. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to the world’s political and economic elite gathered in Davos this week described global realities, past and present, with a candour and nuance rarely heard from a serving politician.

The message was twofold.

First, Carney made clear that the world has changed, and the old comfortable ways of global politics are not coming back. Those who wait for sanity to return are waiting in vain. We are in a world increasingly shaped by the threat and the use of hard power. All states must accept that reality.

Despite this, Carney’s second and more hopeful message was that while the globally powerful may act unilaterally, others — notably “middle powers” like Canada — are not helpless.

By finding ways to co-operate on areas of shared interest, states like Canada can pool their limited resources to build what amounts to a flexible network of co-operative ties. Taken together they can provide an alternative to simply rolling over and taking whatever great powers like the United States dole out.

Vancouver councillors voted Wednesday to explore new tenant protections after news reports and increasing complaints about landlords spying on tenants, aggressive eviction attempts and allegations of unsafe room partitions.

Green Party Coun. Pete Fry’s motion calling for increased tenant protections passed unanimously Wednesday at a council standing committee. Just over half of Vancouver residents rent their homes.

The motion asks city staff to report back on the feasibility of a new annual rental business licence for multi-unit landlords to “ensure minimum standards of maintenance, accountability, and enforcement."

The report from the county medical examiner said the detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, was asphyxiated and restrained by law enforcement. Federal officials described his death as a suicide.

A Cuban immigrant’s death in an El Paso detention center this month was ruled a homicide, according to an autopsy report released Wednesday by the county medical examiner’s office.

The detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, became unresponsive while he was physically restrained by law enforcement on Jan. 3 at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility called Camp East Montana, the report said. Emergency medical workers tried to resuscitate him, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.

The autopsy listed the cause of death as “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” The report also described injuries Mr. Lunas Campos had sustained to his head and neck, including burst blood vessels in the front and side of the neck, as well as on his eyelids.

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Finding David Duprey in Mount Pleasant isn’t too difficult if you know where to look.

The longtime entrepreneur could be talking with regulars at Uncle Abe’s. Maybe he’s helping out at the Narrow or putting up a sign outside Slim’s BBQ Joint, applying for a change in how late the restaurant can stay open. And, of course, there’s a chance he’s at one of the many stalled real estate development sites that he leases out to artists, like Main Street’s City Centre.

Duprey, who grew up in Kitsilano in the ’70s and ’80s, runs all of those businesses under the Narrow Group umbrella with the energy and enthusiasm—and, it must be said, angst—of a much younger man.

If you’ve had any run-ins with Duprey or read about the man, you likely know how the old-school entrepreneur operates. Few people live “Don’t ask for permission, beg for forgiveness” like the guy who got caught running the Rickshaw Theatre for two and a half years without a liquor licence.

The United States is a global superpower, and its military trains for war in every domain. During my years as a military educator, I saw American officers wrestle with any number of scenarios designed to challenge their thinking and force them to adapt to surprises. One case we never considered, however, was how to betray and attack our own allies. We did not ask what to do if the president becomes a threatening megalomaniac who tells one of our oldest friends, Norway, that because the Nobel Committee in Oslo refuses to give him a trophy, he no longer feels “an obligation to think purely of Peace” and can instead turn his mind toward planning to wage war against NATO.

As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote today, Donald Trump’s threatening message to the Norwegian prime minister should, in any responsible democracy, force the rest of the U.S. political system to act to control him. The president is talking about an invasion that would require “citizens of a treaty ally,” as she put it, “to become American against their will,” all because he “now genuinely lives in a different reality.” And yet neither Congress nor the sycophants in the White House seem willing to stop him.

*🎁 link

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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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