Source: Al Jazeera [Qatari state media]
“Hungarian prosecutors have charged Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony over his role in arranging last year’s gay pride march in the capital city, which attracted hundreds of thousands of people despite a ban. Prosecutors have ‘filed charges and seek a fine against the mayor of Budapest, who organised and led a public gathering despite a police ban,’ their office said in a statement announcing the case on Wednesday. … Since returning to power in 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been tightening his grip over the country and has targeted groups advocating for human rights. Orban’s conservative government has also pushed for legislation promoting traditional family values and steadily rolled back LGBTQ rights. In 2025, his Fidesz party amended laws and the constitution to ban the annual pride march, drawing protests from critics and the European Union.” (01/28/26)
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/28/hungary-charges-budapest-mayor-for-allowing-banned-pride-march
Source: The Atlantic
“David Brooks on moral collapse, the limits of politics, and what the neocons got right about America. Plus: Another ICE shooting in Minneapolis and Netflix’s Death by Lightning.” (01/28/26)
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/01/david-frum-show-david-brooks-neocons-democratic-society/685787/
Source: Washington Monthly
by Jonathan Alter
“Philadelphia D.A. Larry Krasner on the ins and outs of prosecuting crimes committed by law enforcement.” (01/28/26)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/01/28/why-minneapolis-indictments-are-coming/
Source: Consent Factory, Inc.
by CJ Hopkins
“Has America been made great again enough for you yet? I asked that question back in May of last year in a column titled The Godzilla Window. It didn’t go over very well at the time, at least not with my conservative readers. … And now, here we are, eight months later, just over one year into The Golden Age of America Made Great Again, and … well, you know what’s happening. … I’m not going to go on and on about all the details of the MAGA authoritarianism on display in the USA currently. It would take an entire column to do that, and you have access to the same news that I do. Instead, I want to urge you to step back from the intense political polarization of the moment and focus on the fundamental forces at play.” (01/28/26)
https://consentfactory.org/2026/01/28/the-golden-age-of-america-made-great-again/
Source: New York Times
“Trump Changes Course in Minneapolis.” (01/28/26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeL1v-E_eHA
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Harry Phibbs
“Like the United States, the United Kingdom has a first-past-the-post voting system. This tends to entrench a two-party system. It takes a lot for other rivals to break through. The resulting culture of complacency and entitlement by the main parties is certainly less than ideal. In the UK, politics has been dominated by the Conservative and Labour Parties for the last century. In 1922, Labour overtook the Liberal Party. By 1924, the Liberal Party’s support had collapsed. Our opinion polling suggests that just over a hundred years later, British politics is having another shake-up. An insurgent party called Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, a friend of Donald Trump’s, has a commanding lead in the polls, and has done so since the end of April last year.” (01/28/26)
https://fee.org/articles/reform-on-the-move/
Source: Common Dreams
by JM Berger
“In principle, extremists primarily seek to harm people who do not share their race, religion, or nationality. In practice, they often harm the very people they claim to serve and protect, people with whom they share some supposedly sacred demographic. Consider Minnesota, currently under siege by anti-immigrant extremists in the employ of the federal government, with ICE and CBP at the forefront. Immigrants have indisputably suffered the most from this program of harm, but we have seen a recent turn toward harming non-immigrants.” (01/28/26)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/extremism-ice-enforcement
Source: Politico
“The group behind the nationwide ‘No Kings’ protests are planning their fourth demonstration of President Donald Trump’s second term — and are anticipating even greater turnout than their earlier rallies. Ezra Levin, a rally organizer and the co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible, said in an interview that the planned third ‘No Kings’ protest on March 28 is in response to a ‘secret police force terrorizing American communities.’ … Indivisible estimated 3 million protesters turned out for its ‘Hands Off’ rally in April 2025, while 5 million showed up in June as part of the first ‘No Kings’ protest and 7 million for the second ‘No Kings’ demonstration in October. Organizers said they are aiming for nearly 9 million people to turn out in March.” (01/28/26)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/28/no-kings-protest-march-00750265
Source: Reason
“The Real Reason You Pay for NFL Stadiums.” (01/28/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/01/28/the-real-reason-you-pay-for-nfl-stadiums/
Source: Understanding AI
by Kai Williams
“Protein-folding models are the success story in AI for science. In the late 2010s, researchers from Google DeepMind used machine learning to predict the three-dimensional shape of proteins. AlphaFold 2, announced in 2020, was so good that its creators shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with an outside academic. Yet many academics have had mixed feelings about DeepMind’s advances.” (01/28/26)
https://www.understandingai.org/p/an-unlikely-ally-for-open-source
