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  • ICU nurse fatally shot by Border Patrol in Minneapolis cared for veterans

    ICU nurse fatally shot by Border Patrol in Minneapolis cared for veterans

    MINNEAPOLIS — Alex Pretti, the man fatally shot by Border Patrol on Saturday, was a local intensive care nurse dedicated to caring for veterans, according to his family, friends, and co-workers.

    “Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital,” Pretti’s family said in a statement shared with the Washington Post. “Alex wanted to make a difference in this world.”

    Pretti, 37, is the third person shot by federal immigration officials in recent weeks.

    He was shot outside a popular doughnut shop about a mile and a half from his home by U.S. Border Patrol, according to law enforcement officials. The shooting followed a scuffle between Pretti and Border Patrol agents, and Pretti was in possession of a 9mm handgun, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

    Authorities believe Pretti was “a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said during a news conference.

    Trump officials, including Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi L. Noem, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist.”

    Pretti “came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers,” Noem said.

    In the statement, Pretti’s family called the administration’s description of the shooting “sickening lies” and “reprehensible and disgusting.” The family said Pretti was trying to protect a woman who had been pushed down by immigration agents.

    “Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by [President Donald] Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs,” the statement said. “Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”

    The shooting sparked protests and clashes between demonstrators and authorities near the scene, which state investigators said they were barred from accessing Saturday by federal officials.

    Pretti had another physical encounter with immigration officers recently, according to a colleague, Joshua Green, who recalled him coming to work with a bandage on his eye. Pretti said he got a small cut after being struck by an immigration agent, Green recalled.

    Pretti cared about human rights, Green said, and mentioned protesting in the wake of the shooting of Renée Good, who was killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis earlier this month.

    Green said Pretti was not easily provoked or angry. “He was a very calm, collected person and always had a good demeanor,” he said. “He always had a smile. This is quite the shock.”

    Aasma Shaukat said she hired Pretti for a research position at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System about a decade ago. “Alex was the sweetest, kindest, gentlest soul you ever met,” said Shaukat, now a physician and clinical researcher at the Manhattan VA Medical Center.

    “He was very bright-eyed, bushy-tailed. He wanted to get into the healthcare field, work with patients and be a nurse,” she recalled. “He did wonderful. Did his work really well, was a team player.”

    After finishing nursing school, Pretti returned to the Minneapolis VA as an intensive care nurse, she said.

    “He wanted to serve the veterans, just had a high sense of duty and thought they were a vulnerable group in the country who needed our help,” she said.

    Dimitri Drekonja, an infectious diseases physician at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, said he was impressed when Pretti secured a job in the ICU fresh out of nursing school. “It is a testament to his abilities that he felt ready for it, that he was up for that challenge and wanted to help,” said Drekonja, who worked with Pretti.

    Pretti always greeted him by name, Drekonja recalled, and stood out from other nurses for his distinctive beard. They both loved mountain biking and often rode the same trails, he said.

    They never spoke about immigration operations or politics at work, Drekonja said.

    “He was really someone that helped,” Drekonja said. “It’s just impossible to imagine a negative interaction with him. And the fact that he was killed on city streets — as an employee of the U.S. government, by the U.S. government — it’s blowing my mind.”

    Pretti was a member of a local nurses’ union, and its sister union, AFGE Council 238, issued a statement that called his shooting “appalling.”

    “The murder of our union brother Alex Pretti is an unconscionable act of violence and a betrayal of the values federal workers are sworn to uphold,” AFGE Council 238 President Justin Chen said in a statement.

    Pretti was excited about his future, said Shaukat. “Being an ICU nurse is tough — it’s pretty intense. But he was looking forward to getting a place, a car,” Shaukat said.

    The shooting “feels so wrong,” she said. “Knowing Alex, he was probably trying to protect or help or shield somebody from the agents. He had not a single mean bone in his body; always spoke about doing the right thing.”

    His father, Michael Pretti, told the Associated Press that he had warned his son to be careful. “We had this discussion with him two weeks ago or so, you know, that go ahead and protest, but do not engage, do not do anything stupid, basically,” Michael Pretti said. “And he said he knows that. He knew that.”

    Pretti attended the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts and graduated in 2011, a university spokesperson said.

    Pretti lived in a quiet, tree-lined South Minneapolis neighborhood of single family homes and small apartment buildings, where neighbors gather in the street on lawn chairs with food during the warmer months.

    Chris Gray, 41, a special education math teacher, lives in an apartment building near Pretti’s. Gray — who has been patrolling the streets as one of many local volunteers monitoring the federal immigration crackdown — said that while he did not know Pretti well, the shooting felt personal.

    “It feels like [these killings] are just what happens now,” Gray said. “That could have been me or anyone. I’ve rarely felt that way, until today.”

  • Massive winter storm across the U.S. brings ice, frigid temperatures, and widespread power outages

    Massive winter storm across the U.S. brings ice, frigid temperatures, and widespread power outages

    A massive winter storm dumped sleet, freezing rain, and snow across much of the U.S. on Sunday, bringing subzero temperatures and paralyzing air and road traffic. Power lines were draped in ice, and hundreds of thousands of people in the Southeast were left without electricity.

    The ice and snowfall were expected to continue into Monday in much of the country, followed by very low temperatures, which could cause “dangerous travel and infrastructure impacts” to linger for several days, the National Weather Service said.

    Heavy snow was forecast from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast, while “catastrophic ice accumulation” threatened from the Lower Mississippi Valley to the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast.

    “It is a unique storm in the sense that it is so widespread,” weather service meteorologist Allison Santorelli said in a phone interview. “It was affecting areas all the way from New Mexico, Texas, all the way into New England, so we’re talking like a 2,000-mile spread.”

    President Donald Trump had approved emergency declarations for at least a dozen states by Saturday, with more expected to come. The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepositioned commodities, staff, and search and rescue teams in numerous states, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said.

    New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the state was bracing for the longest cold stretch and highest snow totals it has seen in years. Communities near the Canadian border have already seen record-breaking subzero temperatures, with Watertown registering minus 34 degrees Fahrenheit and Copenhagen minus 49 F, she said.

    “An Arctic siege has taken over our state,” Hochul said. “It is brutal, it is bone chilling, and it is dangerous.”

    Storm knocks out power and snarls flights

    As of Sunday morning, about 213 million people were under some sort of winter weather warning, Santorelli said. The number of customers without power topped 900,000, according to poweroutage.us, and the number was rising.

    Tennessee was hardest hit with nearly 325,000 customers out, and Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi all had more than 100,000 customers in the dark. Tens of thousands of homes and businesses were without power in Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, and West Virginia.

    Some 11,000 flights had already been canceled Sunday and more than 13,000 have been delayed, according to the flight tracker flightaware.com. Airports in Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, North Carolina, New York, and New Jersey were hit especially hard.

    At Philadelphia International Airport, inside displays registered scores of canceled flights and few vehicles could be seen arriving Sunday morning. At Reagan National in Washington, virtually all flights were canceled.

    Bitter cold makes things worse

    Even once the ice and snow stop falling, the danger will continue, Santorelli warned.

    “Behind the storm it’s just going to get bitterly cold across basically the entirety of the eastern two-thirds of the nation, east of the Rockies,” she said. That means the ice and snow won’t melt as fast, which could hinder some efforts to restore power and other infrastructure.

    Along the Gulf Coast, temperatures were balmy Sunday, hitting the high 60s and low 70s, but thermometers were expected to drop into the high 20s and low 30s there by Monday morning. The National Weather Service warned of damaging winds and a slight risk of severe storms and possibly even a brief tornado.

    In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at least five people died as temperatures plunged Saturday before the snows arrived in earnest.

    “While it’s still too early to determine the causes of death, it is a reminder that every year New Yorkers succumb to the cold,” he wrote on X.

    The Democrat also announced that Monday would be a remote learning day for students in the nation’s largest school system. Other officials across the affected areas also announced that school would be canceled or held remotely Monday.

    Coping with the storm

    In Corinth, Miss., where power outages were widespread, Caterpillar told employees at its remanufacturing site to stay home Monday and Tuesday.

    “May God have mercy on Corinth, MS! … The sound of the trees snapping, exploding & falling through the night have been unnerving to say the least,” resident Kathy Ragan said on Facebook.

    University of Georgia sophomore Eden England said there was a thin layer of ice on the ground of the campus in Athens and a mist fell as she walked with friends from the campus dining hall to her residence hall.

    “It is definitely a little deserted but plenty of people chose to stay on campus,” England said.

    Recovery could take a while

    Nashville and the surrounding area saw ice accumulations of half an inch or more, with icicles hanging from power lines and overburdened tree limbs crashing to the ground.

    In Oxford, Miss., police on Sunday morning used social media to tell residents to stay home as the danger of being outside was too great. Local utility crews were also pulled from their jobs during the overnight hours.

    “Due to life-threatening conditions, Oxford Utilities has made the difficult decision to pull our crews off the road for the night,” the utility company posted on Facebook early Sunday. “Trees are actively snapping and falling around our linemen while they are in the bucket trucks.”

    Tippah Electric Power in Mississippi said there was “catastrophic damage” and that it could be “weeks instead of days” to restore everyone.

    The Tennessee Valley Authority provides power to some utilities across the region, and spokesperson Scott Brooks said the bulk power system remains stable but overnight icing had caused power interruptions in north Mississippi, north Alabama, southern middle Tennessee, and the Knoxville, Tenn., area.

    Icy roads made travel dangerous in north Georgia, where the Cherokee County Sheriff’s office posted on Facebook, “You know it’s bad when Waffle House is closed!!!” along with a photo of a shuttered restaurant. Whether the chain’s restaurants are open — known as the Waffle House Index — has become an informal way to gauge the severity of weather disasters across the South.

  • Federal, state officials both claim high moral ground after Minneapolis shooting

    Federal, state officials both claim high moral ground after Minneapolis shooting

    MINNEAPOLIS — In dueling news conferences, federal and state officials offered starkly different messages Sunday about the immigration crackdown that has swept across Minneapolis and surrounding cities, with both claiming the moral high ground in the wake of another shooting death by federal agents.

    “Which side do you want to be on?” Gov. Tim Walz asked the public. “The side of an all-powerful federal government that could kill, injure, menace, and kidnap its citizens off the streets, or on the side of a nurse at the VA hospital who died bearing witness to such government,” a reference to the shooting of Alex Pretti on Saturday in Minneapolis.

    At the same time, in a federal office building about 20 miles away, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, the public face of the crackdown, again turned blame for the shooting to Pretti.

    “When someone makes the choice to come into an active law enforcement scene, interfere, obstruct, delay, or assault law enforcement officer and — and they bring a weapon to do that. That is a choice that that individual made,” he told reporters.

    The competing comments emerged as local leaders and Democrats across the country demanded federal immigration officers leave Minnesota after Pretti’s shooting, which set off clashes with protesters in a city already shaken by another shooting death weeks earlier.

    Video contradicts administration statements

    Video shot by bystanders and reviewed by the Associated Press appears to contradict statements by President Donald Trump’s administration, which said agents fired “defensively” against Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, as he approached them.

    Pretti can be seen with only a phone in his hand as he steps between an immigration agent and a woman on the street. No footage appears to show him with a weapon. During the scuffle, agents appear to disarm him after discovering that he was carrying a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun, and then the agents opened fire several times. Pretti was licensed to carry a concealed weapon.

    In the hours after the shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti attacked officers, and Bovino said he wanted to “massacre law enforcement.”

    Bovino was more restrained Sunday, saying he would not speculate about the shooting and that he planned to wait for the investigation.

    Relatives say they are heartbroken

    Pretti’s family said they were “heartbroken but also very angry” at authorities. Relatives were furious at federal officials’ description of the shooting.

    “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He has his phone in his right hand, and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down all while being pepper sprayed,” the family statement said. “Please get the truth out about our son.”

    Pretti was shot just over a mile from where an ICE officer killed 37-year-old Renee Good on Jan. 7, sparking widespread protests.

    A federal judge has already issued an order blocking the Trump administration from “destroying or altering evidence” related to the shooting, after state and county officials sued.

    Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said the lawsuit filed Saturday is meant to preserve evidence collected by federal officials that state authorities have not yet been able to inspect. A court hearing is scheduled for Monday in federal court in St. Paul.

    “A full, impartial, and transparent investigation into his fatal shooting at the hands of DHS agents is nonnegotiable,” Ellison said in a statement.

    Drew Evans, superintendent of the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which investigates police shootings, told reporters Saturday that federal officers blocked his agency from the scene of the shooting even after it obtained a signed judicial warrant. On Sunday morning, bureau officers were working at the scene.

    Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin dismissed the lawsuit, saying claims that the federal government would destroy evidence are “a ridiculous attempt to divide the American people and distract from the fact that our law enforcement officers were attacked — and their lives were threatened.”

    The Minnesota National Guard temporarily assisted local police at Walz’s direction, officials said, with troops sent to the shooting site and a federal building where officers have squared off daily with demonstrators.

    But Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Sunday morning on CBS’ Face the Nation that “it’s back to just the Minneapolis police responding to calls.”

    No evidence that Pretti brandished gun

    O’Hara said he had seen no evidence that Pretti brandished the pistol, and that the crackdown was exhausting his department.

    “This is taking an enormous toll, trying to manage all this chaos on top of having to be the police department for a major city. It’s too much,” he said.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was among several Democratic lawmakers demanding that federal immigration authorities leave Minnesota.

    In a statement, former President Barack Obama called Pretti’s death a “heartbreaking tragedy” and warned that “many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.”

    He urged the White House to work with city and state officials.

    “This has to stop,” Obama said.

    Federal officials have repeatedly questioned why Pretti was armed during the confrontation. But gun rights groups noted that it’s legal to carry firearms during protests.

    “Every peaceable Minnesotan has the right to keep and bear arms — including while attending protests, acting as observers, or exercising their First Amendment rights,” the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus said in a statement. “These rights do not disappear when someone is lawfully armed.”

    Minnesota businesses issue letter urging cooperation

    More than 60 CEOs of Minnesota-based companies including Target, Best Buy, and UnitedHealth signed an open letter posted on the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce website on Sunday calling for state, local, and federal officials to work together, as businesses grapple with how to address tensions in the state and across the country following two fatal shootings by federal agents amid a massive immigration enforcement operation that has spurred protests.

    “With yesterday’s tragic news, we are calling for an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions,” the open letter reads.

    CEOs that signed the letter included 3M CEO William Brown, Best Buy CEO Corie Barry, General Mills CEO Jeff Harmening, Target incoming CEO Michael Fiddelke, UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen Helmsley, and others.

    Before the letter, most of the biggest Minnesota-based companies had not issued any public statements about the enforcement surge and unrest.

    But the issue has become more difficult to avoid. Over the past two weeks protesters have targeted some businesses they see not taking a strong enough stand against federal law enforcement activity, including Minneapolis-based Target. Earlier in January a Minnesota hotel that wouldn’t allow federal immigration agents to stay there apologized and said the refusal violated its own policies after a furor online.

    Meanwhile, the state of Minnesota and the Twin Cities cited devastating economic impacts in a lawsuit filed this month imploring a federal judge to halt the immigration operations. The lawsuit asserted that some businesses have reported sales drops up to 80%.

    “In this difficult moment for our community, we call for peace and focused cooperation among local, state and federal leaders to achieve a swift and durable solution that enables families, businesses, our employees, and communities across Minnesota to resume our work to build a bright and prosperous future,” the letter reads.

  • Republicans took control of education. Can Democrats take it back?

    Republicans took control of education. Can Democrats take it back?

    WATER VALLEY, Miss. — A crowd turned out to hear a politician talk big about improving schools, but it wasn’t a Republican railing about transgender athletes or school vouchers or any of the issues the GOP has used to put Democrats into a defensive crouch.

    On this night, the politician taking questions was a Democrat — former Chicago mayor and President Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel — talking about reading. For the past several years, Republicans have dominated the education debate with a focus on culture war politics. Emanuel, who is exploring a 2028 presidential run, makes the case for returning to the education part of education: achievement and learning rather than book bans and gender identity.

    That would benefit students and, he says, Democrats, who have not led a national conversation about student achievement since Obama was president. Instead, Republicans have been able to make up ground, capitalizing on anger about school closures during the pandemic and heated fights over transgender rights, race and other subjects.

    Emanuel talks about school achievement with a frequency and urgency rarely heard from Democrats in recent years. And he says both parties have wasted time on education culture wars.

    “This distracts us from the priorities of education,” he said in an interview. Questions around gender identity, he said, affect “less than 1 percent of the population and yet dominate 99 percent of the conversation. … You want to pick a pronoun? Great. Now can we focus on the other 35 kids that don’t know what a goddamn pronoun is?”

    While a dozen or more Democratic presidential hopefuls scramble to carve out their identities in advance of the 2028 election, many of them better known than he is, Emanuel is betting that a renewed focus on education can fuel a Democratic victory — and more immediately, his own prospects.

    As Chicago mayor, Emanuel successfully pushed several school reforms, including a longer school day, and saw graduation rates jump. But he had a contentious relationship with the teachers union and his tenure was marred by a seven-day strike. He also angered many Chicagoans by closing 50 schools. He says he has learned from his mistakes and hopes to take some of his successes national.

    Emanuel traveled to Mississippi this month to examine and promote the state’s success in teaching reading. On fourth-grade tests, the state moved from 49th in the nation in 2013 to ninth in 2024 by focusing on what’s called the science of reading — instruction built on sound-it-out phonics. The state combined that with increased funding, a heavy dose of teacher training and support, and a requirement that third graders pass a reading test to advance to fourth grade.

    Emanuel argues that Washington should use federal dollars to incentivize other states to do the same. And he is proposing renewed federal standards and accountability, ideas that faded a decade ago.

    At the town hall meeting in Water Valley, a tiny town in the north of the state, more than 125 people gathered. There were no questions about race, gender or culture wars, giving Emanuel space to drive home his central thesis.

    “We’ve got a 30-year low in reading scores,” he said. “Has a single governor called for an emergency meeting of the governors association?”

    Left unsaid was that he might run against some of those governors in a 2028 Democratic primary.

    Emanuel brought a film crew with him, and within a day of leaving the state, he had posted video from the visit to his social media accounts.

    Rahm Emanuel in 2023, when he served as U.S. ambassador to Japan.

    An education evolution

    Emanuel likes to hark back to an era when education reform was in vogue. A national movement centered on standards and accountability began in the states and culminated with the bipartisan passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. Schools were required to make progress on annual tests or face escalating consequences.

    Eight years later, Obama continued pressing for accountability with the Race to the Top competition that awarded states with extra federal money for adopting favored policies such as Common Core standards and using student scores to measure teacher quality.

    But by the end of Obama’s tenure, opposition had built to the high-stakes testing that the accountability system was built on. The Race to the Top program ended, and most of the requirements under the 2001 law were reversed. The bipartisan consensus collapsed, and soon the political parties gravitated to their partisan corners.

    Democrats backed increased funding for public schools and racial equity initiatives. They adopted policies in support of transgender students. Today, most Democratic governors continue to focus on new funding — for prekindergarten, community schools, teacher pay, free meals, and other priorities.

    Republicans promoted tax dollars for private school vouchers. During the pandemic, they blamed Democrats for keeping schools closed too long and for requiring measures like masks once school buildings reopened. Conservative parent groups that formed around pandemic issues soon used that momentum to build support for book bans and influence how educators address race and LGBTQ+ issues. GOP legislatures and conservative school boards passed laws and policies restricting how those topics could be dealt with in school.

    Republicans began eating into Democrats’ commanding lead on education issues. In 2006, a Fox News poll found Democrats with a 17-percentage-point lead when asked whom they trust on education issues, though their advantage was not that big in other surveys. By 2022, Republicans had narrowed the gap significantly – som— polls found the parties virtually tied. (Several newer polls have found that Democrats regained their advantage following President Donald Trump’s election.)

    In the wake of the pandemic, scores on national math and reading exams slid to a 30-year low.

    The Trump administration repeatedly cites this data in making the case for closing the Education Department and for backing school choice policies. Now, some Democrats are arguing that their party needs its own response to the slide.

    “It is deeply frustrating to me as a Democrat that we completely ceded this issue,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education, and politics at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank. “We have absolutely no ideas on the table.”

    In the 2024 presidential election, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who took his place on the ticket, put forward only vague education goals. One day before the election, the Center for American Progress, a leading Democratic think tank, published a set of education recommendations. Even then, there was not much about student achievement.

    Jared Bass, senior vice president for education at CAP, said the group is now working on a new set of proposals that will squarely address academics.

    “There’s a real sense of humility within the party. We used to be the party that was trusted on education,” he said. “We need to get it right.”

    Even with a hunger for action among Democrats, Emanuel’s ideas are likely to face pushback inside his party and beyond. Many progressives argue that racial inequity and racism are to blame for the low achievement rates of many students of color, and they may resist leaders who want to pivot away from those topics. Teachers unions, who are active in the Democratic Party, strongly oppose the accountability systems that rely on standardized testing that Emanuel hopes to bring back.

    Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a longtime power in the Democratic Party, said she would oppose a return to accountability systems that too often, in her view, devolved into blaming teachers. Still, she agrees that Democrats need a new vision.

    “Democrats are all too reactive and as a result they have lost ground on education,” she said. “It’s very frustrating.”

    A new Race to the Top

    Emanuel is betting that while other Democratic presidential candidates concentrate on standing up to Trump, voters will want a candidate more focused on their daily concerns.

    On his trip to Mississippi, Emanuel toured an elementary school in Hattiesburg, crouching beside children’s desks to peek at their work and hearing from the principal about what has succeeded. And he met with Jim Barksdale, whose $100 million donation beginning 25 years ago set Mississippi on its path to a new reading program.

    “When do we get to geek out?” he asked Barksdale as they took seats in his living room with a trio of people involved in education in Mississippi. He turned to the group and asked, simply, “How did you do it?”

    After a long conversation about the reading program, Barksdale told Emanuel that a lot of people say they want to learn from Mississippi’s success. “They say, ‘I’m all for it. How’d you do this?’” he said. “And then they don’t do it because it costs money.”

    “It also costs guts,” Emanuel replied.

    Emanuel, long known as a partisan brawler, says he is ready to fight for this.

    In an interview, Emanuel sketched the outlines of the federal program he would like to see. He suggested a new version of Obama’s Race to the Top that would incentivize states to adopt science of reading curriculums — what Mississippi uses — and other policy changes.

    The program, he said, also could encourage high schools to offer more college courses, and he favors a policy he advanced in Chicago requiring all seniors to have a plan for college, trade school or the military to graduate from high school. He also wants to incentivize states to replicate Chicago’s promise of free community college for students who graduate from high school with a B average.

    States would have to adopt these types of changes to get the new federal money, he said. He contrasted that approach with the unprecedented $130 billion in COVID funding that went to K-12 schools under the Biden administration, which Emanuel slammed as having too few requirements. For instance, the program was sold as a way to reopen schools, but districts were not required to reopen.

    He argues that the No Child Left Behind system was too test-driven, but that the country “overcorrected.” The right answer, he said, lies somewhere in between.

    As for the culture wars, he is trying to stay far away. He dismisses some of the racial equity efforts that swept through schools, mocking San Francisco’s effort to rename schools, including one named for Abraham Lincoln.

    He also opposes allowing trans athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports, saying it’s not fair to other competitors. But he said he does not know whether he would, if elected president, pull federal funding from schools that resist, as Trump has done, and he said he is not interested in discussing the finer points of these policies. The entire debate, he said, has been a “dead-bang loser” — both politically and for the young people involved.

    As Democrats begin to rethink their positions on education, they will need to weigh whether Emanuel’s prescriptions are the right ones and also whether he is the right messenger for them. For now, though, Emanuel is one of the few people making this case.

    At the town hall meeting, a questioner asked what he had done right and wrong as mayor, and Emanuel replied that he mishandled his relationship with the teachers union at first, specifically by unilaterally canceling a scheduled pay raise.

    “It created a lot of animosity,” he said, describing his first term as “hand-to-hand combat.” He said he should have tried to work with the union president to find a solution together.

    “You can’t drive reform if people don’t feel part of it,” he said. “That’s like 101, and I screwed it up — Mr. Smarty Pants over here. And I learned a lot.”

  • Flamingo fans fight to unseat the mockingbird as Florida’s state bird

    Flamingo fans fight to unseat the mockingbird as Florida’s state bird

    Jim Mooney has launched a high-wattage campaign to elevate the flamingo to Florida’s state bird.

    The Republican has handed out flamingo lapel pins and 11-by-16 prints of flamingo artwork to his 119 colleagues in the state legislature. He sported a suit with a pink shirt, a pink pocket square, and a tie festooned with flamingos to testify on behalf of his legislation.

    But the gangly pink bird must unseat the mockingbird, which has been Florida’s official bird for 99 years, to gain the distinction Mooney says it deeply deserves.

    To accomplish this, the lawmaker is hoping to reach a political compromise with supporters of the sprightly and charming Florida scrub jay, who have torpedoed his legislation in the past. The scrub jay would be honored as the state’s songbird under Mooney’s bill, while the flamingo would become the state bird.

    “It’s unbelievable how this has taken on a life of its own,” said Mooney, a retired high school sports coach and former mayor of Islamorada. “I’m seeing flamingos everywhere I go. Across the state, everywhere I turn around, it’s a flamingo here and a flamingo there. People are sending me texts and letters about it. Everybody is on board for the flamingo.”

    He quickly added, “And the scrub jay.”

    Florida struck a similar deal in 2022 when strawberry growers lobbied the state to honor the strawberry shortcake. Many in the state especially in Mooney’s Florida Keys district — were outraged at the prospect that the key lime pie, the official state pie, could be pushed aside. Instead, state lawmakers just created a new category — state dessert — and awarded it to the strawberry shortcake.

    “There’s room for both, just like there’s room for both the flamingo and the scrub jay,” Mooney said.

    At stake are mostly bragging rights, though supporters also hope to secure more money for the study and conservation of flamingos. The American flamingo is already protected by the U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty Act, but conservationists say it should also be considered a threatened species, offering it even more protection after it was nearly wiped out in Florida in the past century by plume hunters and, later, habitat loss.

    Audubon Florida Executive Director Julie Wraithmell refuses to choose a favorite among the flamingo, mockingbird, and scrub jay — “we don’t choose between our kids” — but hopes the bird competition will lead to them all receiving more recognition.

    “If you’re Team Flamingo, you should put your influence and your support where your loyalty lies and really support Everglades restoration,” Wraithmell said. “If you’re Team Scrub Jay, you need to be paying attention to if the state is appropriating enough funding for upland land management for our parks and preserves.”

    Supporters have been campaigning for flamingos, one of the state’s most celebrated symbols, for years. But a debate among scientists about whether the wading bird, which on average can stand five feet tall, is native to the Sunshine State has hampered those efforts. Skeptics noted that few were seen in the wild, or outside a zoo, for more than 100 years.

    But Mooney, who has sponsored pro-flamingo legislation for four years, said a new University of Central Florida study may finally settle the dispute. Flamingos are native to the state and “genetically fit for restoration,” according to the study released in December. Audubon Florida also found that more than 101 flamingos landed in the state during Hurricane Idalia in 2023 and didn’t leave.

    The exact number of flamingos in Florida is unknown — the state doesn’t keep track — but residents regularly report sightings, including Mooney, who likes to show everyone he encounters a video of nearly three dozen flamingos serenely feeding in the Florida Bay in early January. A scientist spotted a flamboyance of 125 flamingos in the Everglades in July.

    The proposal, being debated during the current legislative session, isn’t as weighty as some of the other topics Florida lawmakers are expected to tackle, including the cost of property insurance, Mooney said, but is still important.

    “We seldom have bills that make you feel good,” he said. “This bill does, and it also has some real intrinsic value. It shows that our restoration projects are bearing fruit, and that flamingos are here to stay.”

    He was thrilled when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gave the birds a shout-out during his State of the State address Jan. 13. “Even the flamingos have returned,” DeSantis said while touting the state’s Everglades restoration work.

    Efforts to elevate the flamingo have overtaken a decades-long pro-scrub jay campaign. The friendly blue-and-white bird has fans among Florida schoolchildren, who have formed clubs and written lawmakers in support of the scrub jay being named state bird. It also has a devoted following among environmentalists who often argue against overdevelopment that would disturb their habitats.

    In 1999, Marion Hammer, the first female president of the National Rifle Association and considered among the most formidable lobbyists in Tallahassee, helped derail scrub jay supporters. They are “evil little birds that rob the nests of other birds and eat their eggs and kill their babies,” she said.

    A northern mockingbird keeps a keen eye out for intruders in 2015 n Houston. After nearly a century on its lofty perch, the northern mockingbird may be singing its last melodies as the state bird of Florida.

    Hammer was on Team Mockingbird and in an op-ed in 2016 noted that they are good parents and also remarkable songbirds, while the scrub jay “can’t even sing — it can only squawk.”

    The scrub jay lets out a soft trill during courtship but is often lumped in with songbirds, like blue jays, that it is related to. Flamingos, meanwhile, make squawky sounds.

    The mockingbird should remain the state bird, just as it has been since 1927, Hammer argued. (It’s also the state bird in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas.)

    Hammer couldn’t be reached for comment on the latest bird competition, but the scrub jay also has adversaries among Florida developers. It is at the center of a federal lawsuit filed in 2024 over homeowner rights in southwest Florida, where Charlotte County officials charge a fee to build in the bird’s habitat.

    “The scrub jay has just been commandeered to really violate property rights across Florida, and I just cannot allow it to be elevated to this level,” state Rep. Monique Miller, a Central Florida Republican, said during a committee meeting in December. “I wish these were decoupled because I want to make the flamingo your bird so badly.”

    Jackson Oberlink, a third-generation Floridian, has testified on behalf of the flamingo for the past three years, only to see his hopes dashed. He’s not nearly as optimistic as Mooney that it will succeed this time.

    “Every year, there seems to be a few more flamingo props in a committee room, and it seems like there’s a bit more enthusiasm. And then every year, it kind of peters out,” said Oberlink, the former legislative director for Florida for All, a liberal lobbying group.

    But he’s not ready to give up.

    Oberlink said he became enchanted with the gangly pink birds when he encountered Pinky, a flamingo that was blown into the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in north Florida by Hurricane Michael in 2018.

    “I have a tattoo of Pinky and the St. Marks Lighthouse. So it definitely left a mark on me, and I’ll always be rooting for the flamingo in Florida.”

  • The man killed by a federal officer in Minneapolis was an ICU nurse, family says

    The man killed by a federal officer in Minneapolis was an ICU nurse, family says

    MINNEAPOLIS — Family members say the man killed by a U.S. Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis on Saturday was an intensive care nurse at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital who cared deeply about people and was upset by President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in his city.

    Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, was an avid outdoorsman who enjoyed getting in adventures with Joule, his beloved Catahoula leopard dog who also recently died. He had participated in protests following the killing of Renee Good by a U.S. Immigration and Customs officer on Jan. 7.

    “He cared about people deeply and he was very upset with what was happening in Minneapolis and throughout the United States with ICE, as millions of other people are upset,” said Michael Pretti, Alex’s father. “He thought it was terrible, you know, kidnapping children, just grabbing people off the street. He cared about those people, and he knew it was wrong, so he did participate in protests.”

    Pretti was a U.S. citizen, born in Illinois. Like Good, court records showed he had no criminal record and his family said he had never had any interactions with law enforcement beyond a handful of traffic tickets.

    In a recent conversation with their son, his parents, who live in Colorado, told him to be careful when protesting.

    “We had this discussion with him two weeks ago or so, you know, that go ahead and protest, but do not engage, do not do anything stupid, basically,” Michael Pretti said. “And he said he knows that. He knew that.”

    The Department of Homeland Security said that the man was shot after he “approached” Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun. Officials did not specify if Pretti brandished the gun. In bystander videos of the shooting that emerged soon after, Pretti is seen with a phone in his hand but none appears to show him with a visible weapon.

    Family members said Pretti owned a handgun and had a permit to carry a concealed handgun in Minnesota. They said they had never known him to carry it.

    Alex Pretti’s family struggles for information about what happened

    The family first learned of the shooting when they were called by an Associated Press reporter. They watched the video and said the man killed appeared to be their son. They then tried reaching out to officials in Minnesota.

    “I can’t get any information from anybody,” Michael Pretti said Saturday. “The police, they said call Border Patrol, Border Patrol’s closed, the hospitals won’t answer any questions.”

    Eventually, the family called the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, who they said confirmed had a body matching the name and description of their son.

    Alex Pretti grew up in Green Bay, Wisc., where he played football and baseball and ran track for Preble High School. He was a Boy Scout and sang in the Green Bay Boy Choir.

    After graduation, he went to the University of Minnesota, graduating in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in biology, society, and the environment, according to the family. He worked as a research scientist before returning to school to become a registered nurse.

    Pretti had protested before

    Pretti’s ex-wife, Rachel N. Canoun, said she was not surprised he would have been involved in protesting Trump’s immigration crackdown. She said she had not spoken to him since they divorced more than two years ago and she moved to another state.

    She said he was a Democratic voter and that he had participated in the wave of street protests following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, not far from the couple’s neighborhood. She described him as someone who might shout at law enforcement officers at a protest, but she had never known him to be physically confrontational.

    “These kinds of things, you know, he felt the injustice to it,” Canoun said. “So it doesn’t surprise me that he would be involved.”

    Canoun said Pretti got a permit to carry a concealed firearm about three years ago and that he owned at least one semiautomatic handgun when they separated.

    “He didn’t carry it around me, because it made me uncomfortable,” she said.

    Pretti had ‘a great heart’

    Pretti lived in a four-unit condominium building about 2 miles from where he was shot. Neighbors described him as quiet and warmhearted.

    “He’s a wonderful person,” said Sue Gitar, who lived downstairs from Pretti and said he moved into the building about three years ago. “He has a great heart.”

    If there was something suspicious going on in the neighborhood, or when they worried the building might have a gas leak, he would jump in to help.

    Pretti lived alone and worked long hours as a nurse, but he was not a loner, his neighbors said, and would sometimes have friends over.

    His neighbors knew he had guns — he’d occasionally take a rifle to shoot at a gun range — but were surprised at the idea that he might carry a pistol on the streets.

    “I never thought of him as a person who carried a gun,” said Gitar.

    Pretti was passionate about the outdoors

    A competitive bicycle racer who lavished care on his new Audi, Pretti had also been deeply attached to his dog, who died about a year ago.

    His parents said their last conversation with their son was a couple of days before his death. They talked about repairs he had done to the garage door of his home. The worker was a Latino man, and they said with all that was happening in Minneapolis he gave the man a $100 tip.

    Pretti’s mother said her son cared immensely about the direction the county was headed, especially the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental regulations.

    “He hated that, you know, people were just trashing the land,” Susan Pretti said. “He was an outdoorsman. He took his dog everywhere he went. You know, he loved this country, but he hated what people were doing to it.”

  • Trump heaps praise on U.K. troops following furor over Afghanistan comments

    Trump heaps praise on U.K. troops following furor over Afghanistan comments

    LONDON — U.S. President Donald Trump heaped praise Saturday on British soldiers who fought in Afghanistan, in a post on social media that represented a partial reversal of comments he made this week that drew a cascade of criticism in the U.K., particularly from families of those killed and seriously injured in the conflict.

    In the wake of a conversation earlier with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump said on Truth Social that the “great and very brave soldiers of the United Kingdom will always be with the United States of America.”

    He described the 457 British servicemen and women who died in Afghanistan and those that were badly injured as “among the greatest of all warriors.”

    Trump added that the bond between the two countries’ militaries is “too strong to ever be broken” and that the U.K. “with tremendous heart and soul, is second to none (except for the USA).”

    Trump’s comments follow an interview with Fox Business Network on Thursday in Davos, Switzerland, when he said he wasn’t sure the other 31 nations in NATO would be there to support the United States if and when requested and that troops from those countries stayed “a little off the front lines.”

    Trump did not apologize directly for those comments, nor retract them, as Starmer had suggested in his initial response on Friday when he described the words of the president as “insulting and frankly appalling.”

    Starmer’s office in No. 10 Downing Street said the issue was raised in a conversation between the pair on Saturday, in which other topics were discussed, including the war in Ukraine and security in the Arctic region.

    “The prime minister raised the brave and heroic British and American soldiers who fought side by side in Afghanistan, many of whom never returned home,” Downing Street said in a statement. “We must never forget their sacrifice.”

    Trump’s view as expressed in the Fox Business interview stands at odds with the reality that in October 2001, nearly a month after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. led an international coalition in Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaida, which had used the country as its base, and the group’s Taliban hosts.

    Alongside the U.S. were troops from dozens of countries, including from NATO, whose mutual-defense mandate had been triggered for the first time after the attacks on New York and Washington. More than 150,000 British troops served in Afghanistan in the years after the invasion, the largest contingent after the American one.

    The Italian and French governments also expressed their disapproval Saturday at Trump’s comments, with both describing them as “unacceptable.”

  • Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commander warns U.S. his force has its ‘finger on the trigger’

    Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commander warns U.S. his force has its ‘finger on the trigger’

    DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The commander of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which was key in putting down recent nationwide protests in a crackdown that left thousands dead, warned that his force is “more ready than ever, finger on the trigger,” as U.S. warships headed toward the Middle East.

    Nournews, a news outlet close to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, reported on its Telegram channel that the commander, Gen. Mohammad Pakpour, warned the United States and Israel “to avoid any miscalculation.”

    “The Islamic Revolutionary Guard and dear Iran stand more ready than ever, finger on the trigger, to execute the orders and directives of the Commander-in-Chief,” Nournews quoted Pakpour as saying.

    Tension remains high between Iran and the U.S. in the wake of a bloody crackdown on protests that began on Dec. 28, triggered by the collapse of Iran’s currency, the rial, and swept the country for about two weeks.

    Meanwhile, the number of people reported by activists as having been arrested jumped to more than 40,000, as fears grow some could face the death penalty.

    Trump’s warnings

    U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly warned Tehran, setting two red lines for the use of military force: the killing of peaceful demonstrators and the mass execution of people arrested in the protests.

    Trump has repeatedly said Iran halted the execution of 800 people detained in the protests. He has not elaborated on the source of the claim, which Iran’s top prosecutor, Mohammad Movahedi, strongly denied Friday in comments carried by the judiciary’s Mizan news agency.

    On Thursday, Trump said aboard Air Force One that the U.S. was moving warships toward Iran “just in case” he wants to take action.

    “We have a massive fleet heading in that direction and maybe we won’t have to use it,” Trump said.

    A U.S. Navy official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military movements, said Thursday that the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and other warships traveling with it were in the Indian Ocean.

    Trump also mentioned the multiple rounds of talks American officials had with Iran over its nuclear program before Israel launched a 12-day war against the Islamic Republic in June, which also saw U.S. warplanes bomb Iranian nuclear sites. He threatened Iran with military action that would make earlier U.S. strikes against Iranian uranium enrichment sites “look like peanuts.”

    Airline jitters

    The tension has led at least two European airlines to suspend some flights to the wider region.

    Air France canceled two return flights from Paris to Dubai over the weekend. The airline said it was “closely following developments in the Middle East in real time and continuously monitors the geopolitical situation in the territories served and overflown by its aircraft in order to ensure the highest level of flight safety and security.” It said it would resume its service to Dubai later Saturday.

    Luxair said it had postponed its Saturday flight from Luxembourg to Dubai by 24 hours “in light of ongoing tensions and insecurity affecting the region’s airspace, and in line with measures taken by several other airlines.”

    It told the AP it was closely monitoring the situation “and a decision on whether the flight will operate tomorrow will be taken based on the ongoing assessment.”

    Arrivals information at Dubai’s international airport also showed the cancellation of Saturday flights from Amsterdam by Dutch carriers KLM and Transavia. The airlines did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

    Some KLM flights to Tel Aviv in Israel were also canceled on Friday and Saturday, according to online flight trackers.

    Rising death toll and arrests

    Although there have been no further demonstrations in Iran for days, the death toll reported by activists has continued to rise as information trickles out despite the most comprehensive internet blackout in Iran’s history, which has now lasted more than two weeks.

    The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency on Saturday put the death toll at 5,200, with the number expected to increase. The group’s figures have been accurate in previous unrest and rely on a network of activists in Iran to verify deaths. That death toll exceeds that of any other round of protest or unrest there in decades, and recalls the chaos surrounding Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

    Iran’s government offered its first death toll on Wednesday, saying 3,117 people were killed. It said 2,427 were civilians and security forces, and labeled the rest as “terrorists.” In the past, Iran’s theocracy has undercounted or not reported fatalities from unrest.

    The activist agency on Saturday also increased the total number of people arrested to 40,879 — a significant jump from the more than 27,700 people in its previous update.

    There have been fears Iran could apply the death penalty to arrested protesters, as it has done in the past.

    Iranian judiciary officials have called some of those being held “mohareb” — or “enemies of God” — a charge that carries the death penalty. It had been used along with other charges to carry out mass executions in 1988 that reportedly killed at least 5,000 people.

    At a U.N. Human Rights Council special session on Iran held in Geneva Friday, Volker Türk, the U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights, expressed concern over “contradictory statements from the Iranian authorities about whether those detained in connection with the protests may be executed.”

    He said Iran “remains among the top executioner states in the world,” with at least 1,500 people reportedly executed last year — a 50% increase over 2024.

  • Trump letter banning DEI in schools is dead after legal appeal is dropped

    Trump letter banning DEI in schools is dead after legal appeal is dropped

    Nearly a year ago, the Education Department sent universities and K-12 school districts scrambling with a sweeping but vague directive. The “Dear Colleague” letter said schools may be in violation of federal law if they consider race in virtually any way — hiring, discipline policy, scholarships, or programming.

    After a lawsuit and a defeat in court, however, the Trump administration says it is dropping the matter entirely.

    That means an August federal court order blocking the “Dear Colleague” letter will stand. The Trump administration had also demanded that schools certify that they are in compliance with the letter, and that demand is now dead, too.

    Still, it is unclear how significant the impact will be. The Trump administration, which made sweeping changes to education over its first year, can still work to impose its view of the law on schools through enforcement actions and other pressure. For instance, in July, the Justice Department published a memo that included many of the same ideas that were in the Education Department’s letter.

    Further, many schools have already changed their diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, wary of running afoul of the administration’s anti-DEI stance.

    In a statement, Education Department spokesperson Julie Hartman said the agency will continue to interpret Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as barring “impermissible DEI initiatives” that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

    “Title VI has always prohibited schools from racial preferencing and stereotyping, and it continues to do so with or without the February 14th Dear Colleague Letter,” Hartman said. She said the agency’s civil rights office “will continue to vigorously enforce Title VI to protect all students and hold violators accountable.”

    The letter, issued by the department last February, laid out the agency’s interpretation of civil rights law and argued that schools at every level had embraced “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination.”

    It said that efforts to consider race in staffing, programming, and other aspects of campus life were unlawful, and that even race-neutral policies aimed at diversity could result in schools, colleges, and universities losing federal funding.

    Soon after, the American Federation of Teachers filed a lawsuit challenging the directive.

    In court, the government argued that it was simply clarifying and reaffirming that schools may not practice racial discrimination. But in August, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher in Maryland struck down both the guidance and the certification requirement, saying the department was trying to “substantially alter the legal obligations” of schools without going through proper procedures.

    “The government did not merely remind educators that discrimination is illegal: it initiated a sea change in how the Department of Education regulates educational practices and classroom conduct, causing millions of educators to reasonably fear that their lawful, and even beneficial, speech might cause them or their schools to be punished,” she wrote.

    The judge pointed to the letter’s suggestion that teaching about “systemic and structural racism” would be discriminatory. That, she wrote, is “textbook viewpoint discrimination” and contrary to law.

    The government appealed Gallagher’s ruling, and the case was proceeding until Wednesday, when the administration informed the court that it was dropping its challenge. That left the August ruling in place.

    The American Federation of Teachers and Democracy Forward, which brought the case, hailed the legal victory as a “final defeat” for the administration’s attempt to enforce what they see as an unlawful interpretation of civil rights law.

    “With the stroke of a pen, the administration tried to take a hatchet to 60 years of civil rights laws that were meant to create educational opportunity for all kids,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the lead plaintiff, said in a statement.

    The government’s decision to drop its appeal should put an end to the assertions in the original guidance since it was so thoroughly rejected by the court, said Michael Pillera, who worked for a decade at the Education Department’s civil rights office before becoming director of the educational opportunities project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

    “The Dear Colleague letter was really their opening volley in their campaign of chaos against DEI, and what we have now is a spectacular failure,” he said. “They could not defend their positions in court. They had no argument to stand on.”

    But he conceded that it’s possible nothing will change and said the administration’s behavior “is often untethered to law.”

    Many schools may continue to comply with the anti-DEI directive in an effort to stave off attention from the administration, said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

    “One of the things we have seen is how reluctant institutional leaders are to get crosswise with the federal government, whether or not it’s clearly aligned with the law,” he said.

    Either way, Hess said, he was pleased that the February letter is no longer in force. That’s because he does not think those types of guidance documents should be used to make policy — something that both Democratic and Republican administrations have done in the past.

    “Dear Colleague letters have become a blunt instrument to move thousands of postsecondary institutions or 10,000-plus school districts in one direction or another, and I don’t think that’s an appropriate use of them,” he said. “I don’t think that’s good for anybody.”

  • Trump threatens Canada with 100% tariffs over its new trade deal with China

    Trump threatens Canada with 100% tariffs over its new trade deal with China

    WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Saturday threatened to impose a 100% tariff on goods imported from Canada if America’s northern neighbor went ahead with its China trade deal, intensifying a feud with Prime Minister Mark Carney, a rising voice in the West’s pushback to Trump’s new world order.

    Trump said in a social media post that if Carney “thinks he is going to make Canada a ‘Drop Off Port’ for China to send goods and products into the United States, he is sorely mistaken.”

    While Trump has waged a trade war over the past year, Canada this month negotiated a deal to lower tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in return for lower import taxes on Canadian farm products.

    Trump initially had said that agreement was what Carney “should be doing and it’s a good thing for him to sign a trade deal.”

    Carney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Trump’s threat came amid an escalating war of words with Carney as the Republican president’s push to acquire Greenland strained the NATO alliance. Trump had commented while in Davos, Switzerland, this week that “Canada lives because of the United States.” Carney shot back that his nation can be an example that the world does not have to bend toward autocratic tendencies. “Canada doesn’t live because of the United States. Canada thrives because we are Canadian,” he said.

    Trump later revoked his invitation to Carney to join the president’s “Board of Peace” that he is forming to try to resolve global conflicts.

    Trump’s push to acquire Greenland has come after he has repeatedly needled Canada over its sovereignty and suggested it also be absorbed the United States as a 51st state. He posted an altered image on social media this week showing a map of the United States that included Canada, Venezuela, Greenland, and Cuba as part of its territory.

    In his message Saturday, Trump continued his provocations by calling Canada’s leader “Governor Carney.” Trump had used the same nickname for Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, and his first use of it toward Carney was the latest mark of their soured relationship.

    Carney has emerged as a leader of a movement for countries to find ways to link up and counter the U.S. under Trump. Speaking in Davos before Trump, Carney said, “Middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu” and he warned about coercion by great powers — without mentioning Trump’s name. The prime minister received widespread praise and attention for his remarks, upstaging Trump at the World Economic Forum.

    The prime minister even spoke of a “rupture” between the U.S. under Trump and its Western allies that would never be repaired.

    Trump, in his Truth Social post Saturday, also said that “China will eat Canada alive, completely devour it, including the destruction of their businesses, social fabric, and general way of life.”

    Carney has not yet reached a deal with Trump to reduce some of the tariffs that he has imposed on key sectors of the Canadian economy. But Canada has been protected from the heaviest impact of Trump’s tariffs by the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement. That trade agreement is up for a review this year.

    In the fall, the Canadian province of Ontario aired an anti-tariff ad in the U.S. that prompted Trump to end trade talks with Canada. The television ad used the words of former President Ronald Reagan to criticize U.S. tariffs. Trump pledged to increase tariffs on imports of Canadian goods by an extra 10%. He did not follow through.

    As for China, Canada had initially mirrored the United States by putting a 100% tariff on electric vehicles from Beijing and a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum. China had responded by imposing 100% import taxes on Canadian canola oil and meal and 25% on pork and seafood.

    But as Trump pursued pressure tactics, Canada’s foreign policy has been less aligned with the U.S., creating an opening for an improved relationship with China. Carney made the tariff announcement earlier this month during a visit to Beijing.

    “The China trade deal is quite limited as is the U.S. deal with China on (semiconductor) chips. The China deal may grow, however. I expect Chinese interest in funding a pipeline to northern British Columbia,” said Nelson Wiseman, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto.

    Carney has said that Canada’s relationship with the U.S. is complex and deeper and that Canada and China disagree on issues such as human rights.

    Canada is the top export destination for 36 U.S. states. Nearly $3.6 billion Canadian (US $2.7 billion) worth of goods and services cross the border each day. About 60% of U.S. crude oil imports are from Canada, as are 85% of U.S. electricity imports.

    Canada is also the largest foreign supplier of steel, aluminum, and uranium to the U.S. and has 34 critical minerals and metals that the Pentagon is eager for and investing in for national security.