New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has tackled his first major test since he was sworn into office, readying the city for a historic winter storm that dropped more than a foot of snow in some areas over the weekend.

Winter Storm Fern, which forecasters predicted could affect more than 230 million people across the country, brought heavy snowfall, damaging ice, and below-freezing temperatures to a number of states over the past few days. The inclement weather led to thousands of canceled flights, as well as power outages that affected more than 1 million people. More than a dozen people died during the storm, including seven in New York City. The deaths in New York City are still under investigation.

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“It is still too early to share a broader diagnosis or a cause of death,” Mamdani said during a press conference. But, he continued, “We haven’t seen this kind of cold for eight years, and it is debilitating.”

Read more: ‘A Politics of No Translation.’ Zohran Mamdani on His Unlikely Rise

The storm was the first significant weather event in the city since Mamdani succeeded former mayor Eric Adams on Jan. 1. And, according to many residents and prominent local figures, Mamdani proved up to the task of handling it.

Here’s how the new mayor responded to the storm.

What steps did Mamdani take to prepare for the storm?

In the days leading up to the storm’s arrival in New York City, Mamdani held several press briefings, appeared on multiple news networks, and posted many videos on his social media platforms to keep the public updated on the forecast and how the city was preparing for the anticipated storm. He urged New Yorkers to stay home on Sunday, when the worst of the storm was expected to blow through the city—and he did so with some humor.

“I can think of no better excuse for New Yorkers to stay home, take a long nap, or take advantage of our public library’s offer of free access to Heated Rivalry on e-book or audiobook for anyone with a library card,” he said during a press conference on Sunday.

Under his leadership, the city opened 10 warming centers across all five boroughs for residents who needed a safe and warm space. And staffers at the Department of Homeless Services “relaxed intake procedures” and conducted “intensified outreach across all five boroughs,” in an effort to connect people who are unhoused with shelter and warming centers, the city said.

The city also set up an informational hotline of sorts—residents could stay up-to-date on the storm and the city’s response by texting NOTIFYNYC to 692-692. 

Read more: ‘Historic’ Storm Leaves Several Dead, Thousands of Flights Canceled, and a Million Without Power

Department of Sanitation workers started pre-salting streets, highways, and bike lanes on Friday, before the worst of the storm hit. The city said the department would deploy about 2,000 workers on 12-hour shifts, and that it would be plowing streets with 700 salt spreaders and more than 2,000 plows. Thousands of the department’s trucks were converted into snow plows, according to Mamdani. The mayor said that crews would begin salting neighborhoods in every borough as soon as snow started falling, and that plows would start rolling out in the city once there was more than 2 inches of snow on the ground.

The mayor also advised families that the inclement weather might force New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) to shift to remote learning on Monday—and ultimately, he and the NYCPS chancellor decided on Sunday to make that call.

“As snowfall begins to blanket our city and conditions become hazardous, closing school buildings is a necessary step to keep New Yorkers safe,” Mamdani said in a press release. “Over the past week, my administration has prepared for this moment—ensuring devices are in hand, families are informed and educators are ready to welcome students online. Our school system, and our city, is prepared to weather this storm together.”

Mamdani also repeatedly reminded New Yorkers to call 311 if they saw anyone who needed assistance during the storm.

“We will get through this storm the way we always do—by looking out for one another,” he said in a press release on Saturday.

What local groups and leaders have said about Mamdani’s handling of the storm

Overall, the response to Mamdani’s handling of the storm was fairly positive.

A video of Mamdani shoveling snow in Brooklyn to help a driver whose car appeared to be stuck in the snow circulated on social media over the weekend, generating praise from some users.

“Wow—that’s hand on leadership!” the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg and North Brooklyn said when reposting the video on X. “Thank you @NYCMayor for being out on the streets ensuring that the city is moving.” The following day, the group went on to thank the Department of Sanitation for the “great job in clearing the streets, and continuing to clear them,” as well as Mamdani’s administration for its “close cooperation, checking in that all OK (in addition to mayor’s personal visits and assisting those stranded).”

The new mayor even received approving nods from some of his critics.

“Credit where due, looks like @NYCMayor is handling this storm very well so far,” Benny Polatseck, an aide to Adams who has criticized Mamdani in the past, said in a post on X on Sunday. Polatseck, though, later posted on X on Monday afternoon that he was “hearing from some outer borough folks that they haven’t seen a plow truck yet,” asking people to share their experiences. The city has created a website that gives residents real-time updates on whether their street has been plowed yet.

The city’s response to the storm wasn’t without hiccups. Some families told Gothamist they had issues accessing remote learning for their kids on Monday, although school officials said that there was a “smooth start to the day” and that the majority of students and teachers were able to access the portal.

Julie Menin, the City Council speaker, praised the city’s response, while also pointing out some flaws.

“There are areas where emergency response has been stretched and needs to improve, and the Council will be closely engaged in addressing those gaps,” she said in a statement to the New York Times. “But the scale of the effort today reflects how seriously our essential workers take public safety, and the crews on the ground deserve real credit and gratitude from the millions of New Yorkers who rely on them.”

Federal health care workers condemned the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) following the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents, accusing the department of causing a “growing public health crisis.”

“We cannot pursue our mission to improve the health and well-being of all Americans while DHS agents are murdering, assaulting, and terrorizing people who call this country home,” a coalition of current and former Health and Human Services (HHS) staffers wrote in a letter released by the group Save HHS on Monday. 

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The letter writers said they had been “deeply shaken” by what they described as the “execution” of Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis who they called “our colleague.” Multiple videos of the incident show Pretti attempting to help a female protestor who was being pushed by a federal agent. A Border Patrol agent then sprays Pretti in the face with a substance and a larger group of agents pins him to the ground. Not long after that point, the fatal shooting occurs: multiple gunshots can be heard and officers move away, leaving Pretti motionless on the ground.

Read more: Alex Pretti, Man Shot By Federal Agents in Minneapolis, Wanted to ‘Make a Difference’

Aryn Backus, a founder of the National Public Health Coalition—the organization behind  the Save HHS initiative—and a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employee, tells TIME that both documented and undocumented Minnesotans are skipping medical appointments, keeping their children out of school, and staying away from grocery stores out of fear of being prosecuted by federal agents, which she says is contributing to a health crisis. 

“Even if they’re not afraid of potentially being deported, they’re afraid that they could be assaulted by ICE, just for being out and about or for expressing their First Amendment right,” Backus says. “And when people are afraid, they’re not safe and they’re not healthy.”

She adds that the health community, including current and former HHS employees, is angered, frustrated, and shocked by Pretti’s shooting, but that the concerns being raised about the killing on both sides of the political aisle make her believe change is imminent. 

“There does seem to be a little bit more hope because the response from this has seemed to be bigger, and in some cases, a little bit more bipartisan than some other events that have happened over the past year. So even though it’s a really dark and frustrating time, I’m hopeful that maybe something will change.”

Pretti’s death follows the shooting of another Minneapolis resident by an ICE officer just weeks earlier. Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and U.S. citizen, was shot by an immigration officer on Jan. 7 in her car while attempting to drive away from the scene of a protest against the agency. Her death has sparked demonstrations in Minnesota and beyond. On Friday, a day before Pretti’s shooting, thousands took to the streets in mass protests in the heart of Minneapolis. 

Save HHS laid out specific demands in its letter. The organization called for members of Congress to halt ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) operations “until these agencies justify their activities to Congress and the American people.” It also demanded that Congress refuse ICE and CBP funding until both agencies “immediately halt the invasion of American cities,” agree to being investigated, and adopt new protocols “that do not violate the Constitution.”

The demands come as the Senate is set to vote this week on an appropriations bill including $64.4 billion in DHS funding—$10 billion of which would go to ICE—that key Democrats have vowed to oppose following Pretti’s shooting. The legislation needs 60 votes to pass, meaning some Democrats would need to join Republicans’ narrow 53-seat majority to approve it. And with federal funding for the government set to expire at the week’s end, the growing opposition to the measure has increased the likelihood of a partial government shutdown. 

“Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the D.H.S. funding bill is included,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement, calling the events in Minnesota “unacceptable.”  

Save HHS expressed concern that a potential shutdown could threaten public health by prompting the Administration to furlough staffers in a number of positions. 

“If the bill fails to pass by January 30, many of us will be placed in unpaid furlough status and barred from providing essential services that support the health and well-being of the American people,” the letter states. 

But, it added, “We believe ICE and CBP are a greater threat to the health of our nation than the lapse of HHS services.”

The Trump Administration has sought to defend federal immigration agents in the wake of Good and Pretti’s shootings and portray the killings as acts of self-defense. But witnesses and video of the incidents have contradicted federal officials’ accounts. Several congressional Republicans have joined Democrats in calling for an investigation into Pretti’s shooting

Amid the bipartisan backlash, Trump has deployed White House border czar Tom Homan to oversee federal immigration operations in the area, the President announced on Monday. Trump said in a Truth Social post that he would have Homan call Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who the President said was “on a similar wavelength” to himself. 

President Donald Trump attempted to quell growing bipartisan backlash to his immigration crackdown on Monday following a second fatal shooting by a federal agent in Minneapolis in just over two weeks.

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The President announced on Truth Social that he was dispatching his border czar, Tom Homan, to Minneapolis, where he will manage Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in the city.

He added that Homan, who is considered a proponent of targeted immigration enforcement over the kind of sweeping street grabs that have been a flashpoint for violence in Minneapolis, “has not been involved in that area, but knows and likes many of the people there.”

Read more: Support for Abolishing ICE Is Surging Among Republicans

Separately, Trump said he had a “very good” call with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and they were now on a “similar wavelength” regarding immigration enforcement in the city. Walz’s office said in its readout of the same call that Trump had expressed an openness to reducing the number of federal agents deployed.

The apparent shift in tone from Trump comes as he faces mounting pressure over a spate of violence linked to his Administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.

Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, was killed by a Border Patrol agent as he took part in a protest in Minneapolis on Saturday morning. His death came just over two weeks after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a poet and mother of three, also by a federal immigration agent. 

A city on fire

Minneapolis was already convulsed by protests over Good’s killing in the days before Pretti’s death. Minutes later, the scene of his shooting became a battleground between protesters and federal agents as the city exploded in anger again.

By Saturday evening, the shooting had developed into a political crisis for Trump. In Washington, D.C., Senate Democrats who had previously been reluctant to block funding for ICE now threatened a partial government shutdown rather than pass another spending bill that would give the agency $10 billion more in funding. Several Republicans were calling for an investigation into the shooting.

The anger was fueled not just by the shooting itself, but by the Trump Administration’s handling of its aftermath. Trump and his top officials quickly tried to pin the blame on Pretti, labelling him an instigator and suggesting he had attacked the agents who killed him, despite multiple videos clearly showing otherwise.  

“This is the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go — What is that all about?” Trump posted soon after the shooting. 

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in its initial statement on the killing that Pretti “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun,” and “violently resisted,” suggesting that he wanted to “massacre law enforcement.”  

At a press conference in the hours after the shooting, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem suggested Pretti wanted “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” 

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino claimed that Pretti had approached agents with a handgun, had “violently resisted, and intended to “massacre law enforcement.” 

In several social media posts, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller described Pretti as an “assassin” and a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to murder federal agents.” Vice President J.D. Vance reposted Miller’s characterization of Pretti as an “assassin” on X.

But multiple videos of the incident, released by witnesses to the shooting in the hours after, clearly contradicted those accounts.

They show Pretti holding a phone, not a gun, when an agent approaches him and other protesters and squirts pepper spray in their faces. When Pretti moves to help another protester who has been sprayed, he is tackled and pulled to the ground, where he is struck repeatedly. 

Soon after, one shot rings out, then several more in quick succession. 

In total, at least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds—including several after Pretti is lying motionless on the floor. 

The backlash 

The reaction to Pretti’s killing was more forceful than the one that followed Renee Good’s— compounded by it. On Saturday, responding to a wave of anger from his party, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats would oppose a government spending bill that includes $64.4 billion in funding for DHS, of which $10 billionis earmarked for ICE.

“What’s happening in Minnesota is appalling—and unacceptable in any American city,” Schumer, who represents New York, said on Saturday evening. He added that “because of Republicans’ refusal to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE.”

Before the weekend, Schumer and other Senate Democrats had signaled that they had wanted to avoid a shutdown and the bill looked likely to pass in the Senate. But Pretti’s killing at the hands of a Border Patrol agent, after being pepper-sprayed and shot several times on the ground, prompted a wave of anger in the party.  

The shooting prompted rare statements of condemnation from former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Obama, whom Trump succeeded in 2017, called Pretti’s killing a “heartbreaking tragedy.” In a statement with his wife Michelle posted on X on Sunday, he said Trump and officials in his Administration “seem eager to escalate the situation” instead of “trying to impose some semblance of discipline and accountability over the agents they’ve deployed.”

Several Republicans, too, broke ranks with their party to call for an investigation into the shooting, among them Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas and Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. 

Cassidy, who serves on the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, described the events in Minneapolis as “incredibly disturbing” and said the “credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake” following the shooting. 

Ricketts, who is a staunch supporter of Trump, called for a “prioritized, transparent investigation into this incident,” describing the shooting as “horrifying”.

Sen. Rand Paul, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent letters to the heads of ICE, Border Patrol, and Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on Monday, inviting them to a hearing on Feb. 12. The Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, New York Rep. Andrew Garbarino, requested a similar hearing over the weekend.

Walking back 

By Sunday, Trump appeared to have realized that Minneapolis represented a political crisis. Successive polls have shown his approval rating on immigration plummeting. A YouGov poll taken after the killing of Pretti showed support for abolishing ICE at record highs—with more supporting abolition than opposing it—and nearly 20% of Republicans in favor of shuttering the agency.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he declined to give his backing to the officer who killed Pretti, and said his Administration was “reviewing everything” to do with the incident. 

He also suggested for the first time that he might be looking for a way out of Minneapolis. 

“At some point we will leave. We’ve done, they’ve done a phenomenal job,” he said, without offering a timeline.

On Monday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt distanced Trump from Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem’s description of Pretti, saying she had “not heard the president characterize” Pretti as a domestic terrorist.

Trump and Walz had been heavily critical of each other in recent weeks.

“What’s the plan, Donald Trump? What is the plan?” Walz said during a news conference on Sunday. “What do we need to do to get these federal agents out of our state? If fear, violence and chaos is what you wanted from us, then you clearly underestimated the people of this state and nation.”

But on Monday, his office said in a statement that the two had a “productive call” in which Trump agreed to “look into reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota and working with the state in a more coordinated fashion on immigration enforcement regarding violent criminals.”

Trump said: “I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future.”

AI might not have taken your job yet—but it’s already writing your breakup text.

What began as a productivity tool has quietly become a social one, and people increasingly consult it for their most personal moments: drafting apologies, translating passive-aggressive texts, and, yes, deciding how to end relationships.

“I wholeheartedly believe that AI is shifting the relational bedrock of society,” says Rachel Wood, a cyberpsychology expert and founder of the AI Mental Health Collective. “People really are using it to run their social life: Instead of the conversations we used to have—with neighbors or at clubs or in our hobbies or our faith communities—those conversations are being rerouted into chatbots.”

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As an entire generation grows up outsourcing social decisions to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, Wood worries about the implications of turning the emotional work of connection over to a machine. What that means—for how people communicate, argue, date, and make sense of one another—is only beginning to come into focus.

When AI becomes your social copilot

It often starts as a second opinion. A quick paste of a text message into an AI chatbot. A question typed casually: “What do you think they meant by this?”

“People will use it to break down a blow-by-blow account of an argument they had with someone,” Wood says, or to decode ambiguous messages. “Maybe they’re just starting to date, and they put it in there and say, ‘My boyfriend just texted me this. What does it really mean?’” They might also ask: Does the LLM think the person they’re corresponding with is a narcissist? Does he seem checked out? Does she have a pattern of guilt-tripping or shifting blame? 

Read More: Is Giving ChatGPT Health Your Medical Records a Good Idea?

Some users are turning to AI as a social rehearsal space, says Dr. Nina Vasan, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and the founder and director of Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation. People gravitate to these tools because they’re “trying to get the words right before they risk the relationship,” she says. That might mean asking their LLM of choice to draft texts to friends, edit emails to their boss, help them figure out what questions to ask on a first date, or navigate tricky group-chat dynamics.

Vasan has also seen people use AI tools to craft dating-app profiles, respond to passive-aggressive family members, and set boundaries they’ve never before been able to articulate. “Some use it to rehearse difficult conversations before having them,” she says. “Others process social interactions afterward, essentially asking AI, ‘Did I handle that OK?’” ChatGPT and other LLMs, she says, have become a third party in many of our most intimate conversations.

Meet the new relationship referee

Consulting AI isn’t always a welcome development. Some young people, in particular, now use LLMs to generate “receipts,” deploying AI-backed answers as proof that they’re right.

“They use AI to try to create these airtight arguments where they can analyze a friend’s statements or a boyfriend’s statements, or they especially like to use it with their parents,” says Jimmie Manning, a professor of communication studies at the University of Nevada, where he’s also the director of the Relational Communication Research Laboratory. (None of his students have presented him with an AI-generated receipt yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time, he muses.) A teen might copy and paste a text from her mom into ChatGPT, for example, and ask if her parents are being unreasonably strict—and then present them with the evidence that yes, in fact, they are.

“They’re trying to get affirmation from AI, and you can guess how AI responds to them, because it’s here for you,” Manning says.

Using LLMs in this way turns relationships into adversarial negotiations, he adds. When people turn to AI for validation, they’re usually not considering their friend or romantic partner or parent’s perspective. Plus, shoving “receipts” in someone’s face can feel like an ambush. Those on the receiving end typically don’t respond well. “People are still wary of the algorithm entering their intimate lives,” Manning says. “There’s this authenticity question that we’re going to face as a culture.” When he asks his students how their friends or partners responded, they usually say: “Oh, he came up with excuses,” or “She just rolled her eyes.”

“It’s not really helping,” he says. “It’s just going to escalate the situation without any kind of resolution.”

What’s at stake

Outsourcing social tasks to AI is “deeply understandable,” Vasan says, “and deeply consequential.” It can support healthier communication, but it can also short-circuit emotional growth. On the more helpful side of things, she’s seen people with social anxiety finally ask someone on a date because Gemini helped them draft the message. Other times, people use it in the middle of an argument—not to prove they’re right, but to consider how the other person might be feeling, and to figure out how to say something in a way that will actually land.

“Instead of escalating into a fight or shutting down entirely, they’re using AI to step back and ask: ‘What’s really going on here? What does my partner need to hear? How can I express this without being hurtful?’” she says. In those cases, “It’s helping people break out of destructive communication patterns and build healthier dynamics with the people they love most.”

Yet that doesn’t account for the many potentially harmful ways people are using LLMs. “I see people who’ve become so dependent on AI-generated responses that they describe feeling like strangers in their own relationships,” Vasan says. “AI in our social lives is an amplifier: It can deepen connection, or it can hollow it out.” The same tool that helps someone communicate more thoughtfully, she says, can also help them avoid being emotionally present.

Plus, when you regularly rely on a chatbot as an arbiter or conversational crutch, it’s possible you’ll erode important skills like patience, listening, and compromise. People who use AI intensely or in a prolonged manner may find that the tool skews their social expectations, because they begin expecting immediate replies and 24/7 availability. “You have something that’s always going to answer you,” Wood says. “The chatbot is never going to cancel on you for going out to dinner. It’s never going to really push back on you, so that friction is gone.” Of course, friction is inevitable in even the healthiest relationships, so when people become used to the alternative, they can lose patience over the slightest inconvenience.

Then there’s the back-and-forth engagement that makes relationships work. If you grab lunch with a friend, you’ll probably take turns sharing stories and talking about your own lives. “However, the chatbot is never going to be, like, ‘Hey, hang on, Rachel, can I talk about me for a while?’” Wood says. “You don’t have to practice listening skills—that reciprocity is missing.” That imbalance can subtly recalibrate what people expect from real conversations.

Plus, every relationship requires compromise. When you spend too much time with a bot, that skill begins to atrophy, Wood says, because the interaction is entirely on the user’s terms. “The chatbot is never going to ask you to compromise, because it’s never going to say no to you,” she adds. “And life is full of no’s.”

The illusion of a second opinion

Researchers don’t yet have hard data that provides a sense of how outsourcing social tasks to AI affects relationship quality or overall well-being. “We as a field don’t have the science for it, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on. It just means we haven’t measured it yet,” says Dr. Karthik V. Sarma, a health AI scientist and physician at the University of California, San Francisco, where he founded the AI in Mental Health Research Group. “In the absence of that, the old advice remains good for almost any use of almost anything: moderation and patterns are key.”

Greater AI literacy is essential, too, Sarma says. Many people use LLMs without understanding exactly how and why they respond in certain ways. Say, for example, you’re planning to propose to your partner, but you want to check-in with people close to you first to confirm it’s the right move. Your best friend’s opinion will be valuable, Sarma says. But if you ask the bot? Don’t put too much weight on its words. “The chatbot doesn’t have its own positionality at all,” Sarma says. “Because of the way technology works, it’s actually much more likely to become more of a reflection of your own positionality. Once you’ve molded it enough, of course it’s going to agree with you, because it’s kind of like another version of you. It’s more of a mirror.”

Looking ahead

When Pat Pataranutaporn thinks about the effects of long-term AI usage, his main question is this: Is it limiting our ability to express ourselves? Or does it help people express themselves better? As founding director of the cyborg psychology research group and co-director of MIT Media Lab’s Advancing Humans with AI research program, Pataranutaporn is interested in ways that people can use AI to promote human flourishing, pro-social interaction, and human-to-human interaction.

The goal is to use this technology to “help people be better, gain more agency, and feel that they’re in control of their lives,” he says, “rather than having technology constrain them like social media or previous technologies.”

Read More: Why You Should Text 1 Friend This Week

In part, that means using AI to gain the skills or confidence to talk to people face-to-face, rather than allowing the tool to replace human relationships. You can also use LLMs to help finesse your ideas and take them to the next level, as opposed to substitutes for original thought. “The idea or intent needs to be very clear and strong at the beginning,” Pataranutaporn says. “And then maybe AI could help augment or enhance it.” Before asking ChatGPT to compose a Valentine’s Day love letter, he suggests asking yourself: What is your unique perspective that AI can help bring to fruition?

Of course, individual users are at the mercy of a bigger force: the companies that develop these tools. Exactly how people use AI tools, and whether they bolster or weaken relationships, hinges on tech companies making their platforms healthier, Vasan says. That means intentionally designing tools to strengthen human capacity, rather than quietly replacing it.

“We shouldn’t design AI to perform relationships for us—we should design it to strengthen our ability to have them,” she says. “The key question isn’t whether AI is involved. It’s whether it’s helping you show up more human or letting you hide. We’re running a massive uncontrolled experiment on human intimacy, and my concern isn’t that AI will make our messages better. It’s that we’ll forget what our own voice sounds like.”

In the wake of the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti by federal agents amid the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, voters’ support for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is spiking—including among President Donald Trump’s own party.

A new YouGov poll taken on Saturday, the day of Pretti’s fatal shooting, showed 19 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of American adults across the political spectrum voicing support for abolishing ICE.

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That marks a notable shift from when YouGov pollsters asked the same question last June, as Trump was ramping up his immigration crackdown. At that time only 9 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Americans overall backed abolishing ICE. Support for shuttering the agency has also surged among independents, with 47 percent backing its elimination in the Saturday poll compared to 25 percent in June.

Read More: What Minnesota Tells Us About America’s Future

Good and Pretti’s fatal shootings have heightened scrutiny of the aggressive tactics being used by federal immigration agents under Trump’s second Administration. Following Pretti’s killing, several congressional Republicans have joined Democrats in calling for an investigation into the incident.

Other recent polls have shown support declining for how Trump is carrying out the mass deportation effort that he successfully campaigned on in 2024 as ICE’s operations in the interior U.S. come under fire.

A New York Times/Siena poll conducted from January 12 to 17, after Good’s killing on January 7, found that a majority of voters disapproved of Trump’s handling of several issues—immigration included—and ​​49 percent said the country was worse off than a year ago, compared with 32 percent who said it was better off.

Regarding immigration specifically, 58 percent of respondents disapproved of how Trump was handling the issue, up from 52 percent in a previous Times/Siena poll conducted in September. A larger portion of around half of respondents backed the Administration’s deportation of illegal immigrants and the President’s handling of the U.S.’s southern border in the recent poll. But the reality of ICE’s enforcement tactics drew censure from most Americans: 61 percent—including 19 percent of Republicans, compared to 94 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents—said that ICE tactics had “gone too far.”

Trump attacked the Times/Siena poll on Truth Social the day it was released, calling the results “fake” and “heavily skewed toward Democrats.” (Among the registered voters who responded to the poll, 45 percent identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning compared to 44 percent who identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning.)  In a separate post, he said that “Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense.” 

Yet, the poll is part of a larger trend of surveys that have documented growing disapproval of ICE’s tactics, especially after Good’s deadly shooting, which sparked protests in Minneapolis and around the country, and follows a longer decline in support for Trump’s handling of immigration.

A poll conducted for CNN by SSRS from January 9 to 12 found that 56 percent of respondents said that the shooting was an “inappropriate use of force” by federal officers, and 51 percent said that ICE enforcement actions were making cities less safe rather than safer. More than half of independent respondents were among those who said that ICE enforcement was making cities less safe. And while a majority of Republicans—56 percent—said the shooting represented an appropriate use of force, 21 percent said it was an inappropriate use of force, with 7 percent saying it was inappropriate but an isolated incident and 14 percent saying it was both inappropriate and reflected a bigger problem with ICE’s operations. 

Another survey, taken by Ipsos January 16 to 18, similarly found that 52 percent of Americans felt Good’s shooting marked an excessive use of force, including 19 percent of Republicans and 54 percent of independents.

And a separate poll by Quinnipiac conducted from January 8 to 12 found that 57 percent of registered voters disapproved of ICE’s handling of immigration enforcement, including 64 percent of  independents and 12 percent of Republicans.

Backing for Trump’s broader handling of immigration had also been falling for months even before the recent shootings, according to a number of polls. Recent approval numbers on the issue differ markedly from polling taken in the weeks after Trump took office last year. A Pew Research Center survey taken last February, for instance, found that 59 percent of U.S. adults said they approved of Trump increasing efforts to deport people. In December, in contrast, Pew found that 53 percent of Americans said he was doing “too much” to deport illegal immigrants, with that sentiment rising among both Democrat sand Republicans.

That approval of Trump’s immigration agenda was already waning by the spring and summer. An Ipsos poll from April 2025 found Americans slightly more disapproving (53 percent) than approving (46 percent) of his handling of immigration.

President Trump announced on Monday that he was dispatching border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis that evening, amid a bipartisan outcry over the fatal shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti and signs that the Administration may be open to pulling back federal law enforcement efforts in the city.

Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Trump’s first term, will report directly to Trump, according to Trump’s announcement on Truth Social. 

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In another post, Trump said he has directed Homan to give Minnesota Governor Tim Walz a call, and the Administration is looking for “any and all Criminals” that the state has in possession.

“The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future. He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota, and so am I!” Trump wrote. The tone of Trump’s second post suggested a thawing in his relationship with Walz, after weeks of the two men publicly criticizing each other.

In a similarly reconciliatory tone, Walz said in a statement that he and Trump would look into reducing the number of agents in Minnesota and work with the state in a “more coordinated fashion” during a “productive conversation.” Trump also agreed to talk to DHS to allow the state authority to conduct an independent investigation into the shooting of Pretti.

Read more: How a Partial Government Shutdown Over ICE Would Impact Immigration Enforcement

The White House tells TIME in a statement that Homan would be managing ICE operations on the ground in Minnesota and coordinating with others on ongoing fraud investigations. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during the press briefing that Homan will be the “main point of contact on the ground in Minneapolis,” while Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino will remain in charge of Customs and Border Protection.

The news comes as Trump has been less quick to defend the agents involved in the Pretti shooting than high-ranking Administration officials. In an interview on Sunday with the Wall Street Journal, Trump declined to say whether the federal agents who shot Pretti acted appropriately, only saying the administration is investigating the matter. 

“We’re looking, we’re reviewing everything and will come out with a determination,” Trump said. 

The Administration is scrambling to contain the fallout from Minneapolis, where Pretti’s death was the second high-profile killing by federal agents in just over two weeks, and comes amid other confrontations that have drawn outrage. On Wednesday, two ICE agents were pictured aiming a canister of pepper at a protester’s face while he was pinned down. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said the incident “should alarm every American.”

Tens of thousands of protesters flooded the streets over the weekend to protest against the federal agents’ presence in the Twin Cities, as the legality of the deployment of federal agents is contested in court. On Monday, a federal judge is hearing arguments on whether the immigration operation in Minnesota violates the Constitution. The judge will then deliberate whether the operation should be halted, at least temporarily.   

Up through Pretti’s death this weekend, Bovino was and seen as the face of the immigration operations in Minnesota. On Sunday, Bovino doubled down on his defense of officers who shot Pretti, telling CNN that the officers are the victims of the incident, and that Pretti, who was legally carrying a firearm, was not entitled to the Second Amendment rights.

“Those rights don’t count when you riot and assault, delay, obstruct and impede law enforcement officers and, most especially, when you mean to do that beforehand,” he says.

A filmmaker auditioning leads for his next project has a philosophical insight. “Our ideas about heroes and gods, they only get in the way,” the eccentric Eastern European auteur Von Kovak (Zlatko Buric) lectures the actors assembled in his home for a day of offbeat dramatic exercises. “It’s too difficult to comprehend them. So, let’s get past them. Let’s find the human underneath.” This might not seem like such a profound realization for a lion of the festival circuit. But it feels downright revolutionary when you hear him say it in the new Disney+ Marvel dramedy Wonder Man. The MCU isn’t exactly known for getting past lofty ideas about heroes and gods.

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What is this guy even doing in this world, you might ask. In fact, he’s a key character in a show set not on a distant planet or in a grid of skyscrapers doomed to topple in a superpowered melee, but in a mostly realistic Los Angeles where the entertainment industry is still (and here you might have to suspend your disbelief) based. Wonder Man, whose first season will stream in full on Jan. 27, is not like other Disney+ Marvel projects. Nor is it like the other Disney+ Marvel projects that were hyped as being not like other Disney+ Marvel projects (see: Wandavision) but ultimately abandoned ambitious storytelling in favor of generic, VFX-heavy fight scenes and choppily integrated teasers for the next MCU movie. This alone might’ve made it the platform’s best Marvel show yet. But smart casting, witty writing, lively directing, and artful character development have also yielded the rare superhero riff that, as Kovak puts it, finds the human underneath.

Though its Hollywood is fleshed out with a big, delightful cast, Wonder Man is built on the skeleton of a classic two-hander. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, whose resume in this genre includes the Aquaman movies as well as HBO’s subversive Watchmen series, is our self-sabotaging would-be hero, Simon Williams, a struggling actor first seen getting fired from American Horror Story for overthinking a minor role. A cinephile obsessively devoted to his craft, he’s the kind of guy who makes notes about which books his single-scene character would be reading and expects everyone on set to care about it as much as he does. This same self-centeredness compels his girlfriend (Olivia Thirlby) to move out of their modest apartment without warning.

Drowning his woes in a Midnight Cowboy matinee, he spots a fellow thespian. Marvel fans will also recognize this character, whose sonorous British accent is audible before we see his face. It is Ben Kingsley’s Trevor Slattery, who was introduced as an ostensible villain, the Mandarin, in a series of propaganda videos claiming credit for terrorist attacks in 2013’s Iron Man 3. You can read more than any reasonable person would want to know, on the internet, about the history of this character. But for our purposes, what’s important is that Trevor never masterminded any bombings. He was a pathetic, substance-addicted actor too high to comprehend that he was the frontman for deadly acts of terrorism—a performance he provided for the low price of free drugs.

The past decade, with its rampant conspiracy theories, has clearly taken its toll on the now-sober Trevor. “Whatever theories you’ve seen on Reddit are totally false,” he grumbles when Simon introduces himself. “I had nothing to do with Pizzagate, I’m not a member of the Illuminati, and I did not have my hands replaced by baby hands.” Simon’s surprising reply: “I always dug your performance as the Mandarin.” For both men, the play, as it were, is the thing. They speak the same culturally omnivorous language, savoring Pinter but also reminiscing about Trevor’s stint opposite Joe Pantoliano in a medical soap. (Wonder Man is the kind of show where a mention of Joey Pants reliably leads to a Joey Pants guest appearance.) They’re in similar positions, too, stuck at the fringes of their art form due to their own poor choices.

In a refreshing departure from so many impenetrable Marvel series past, creators Deston Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest expediently fill in viewers on the essential points of Trevor’s backstory. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to reveal that his and Simon’s meet-cute in the cinema is no coincidence; suffice to say that it isn’t so simple to extricate yourself from the grasp of law enforcement once you’ve been the face of a notorious terrorist organization. He isn’t the only half of this buddy comedy harboring secrets, though. In an industry that has reason to be wary of superpowered individuals, Simon’s career depends upon his ability to control his emotions.

Soon, he’s cajoling Trevor (or so he thinks) into admitting that he’s about to read for a role in a reboot of the 1980s superhero flick Wonder Man. Simon has loved the movie since he was a kid and will stop at nothing to audition for the lead. Pity his agent, Janelle, a kind but long-suffering truth teller played by the charismatic X Mayo. “You’re one of the most talented people that I know,” she tells her client. “But there’s a lot of talented people out here who are not pains in the ass.” This doesn’t stop Simon from lying his way into the casting. Trevor is, of course, waiting for him there, and their friendship develops through a series of adventures that feel authentic to the characters and setting. The Englishman tags along to a party at Simon’s childhood home, where a warm welcome from his effusive Haitian mom (Shola Adewusi from Bob Hearts Abishola) and judgmental comments from his more successful, square brother (Justified’s Demetrius Grosse) establishes the family dynamic that has made Simon so desperate to prove himself.

Wonder Man doesn’t just use Hollywood as a backdrop for a superhero story. Cretton, who broke through with the acclaimed indie film Short Term 12 before making his Marvel debut as the director and co-writer of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Guest, a network sitcom alum who scripted some of the best episodes of Community, demonstrate a genuine affection for the setting. As wonderfully portrayed by Buric, the Wonder Man reboot’s director is every European artiste absorbed into the American studio system cut with a dose of Werner Herzog’s gloom; his mansion could be a museum of Hollywood Regency decadence. The show is equally witty about the quirks of the 21st century movie business. Simon takes Trevor to record a self-tape audition at a janky, nautical-themed storefront studio called Ahoy Tapes. In a standalone episode that makes hilarious use of Josh Gad, guest-starring as himself (and recalls Guest’s Community highlights), a nightclub doorman (Byron Bowers) finds stardom when he touches a mysterious goo and his body becomes a literal door that people can pass through.

Judging by the glut of films and series set on studio lots, screenwriters have taken the age-old advice to write what they know to heart. Wonder Man might sound redundant the year after Apple gave us Seth Rogen’s excellent The Studio, which shares its fun guest casting and we-kid-because-we-love approach to Hollywood satire. (One of Simon’s rivals for the Wonder Man role got his start as “Paul Thomas Anderson’s surfing instructor.”) Marvel also feels a bit late to the meta-superhero show concept; Watchmen and Amazon’s The Boys both debuted in 2019. HBO’s dour, short-lived MCU sendup The Franchise came and went in 2024. What makes Wonder Man fresh despite all the competition is the care with which Simon, Trevor, and their fraught relationship are rendered by Abdul-Mateen, Kingsley, and the creators. Characters this vivid and enjoyable to spend time with are hard to find in any genre, let alone superhero fare.  

That’s not to say the show escapes every Marvel (and particularly Disney-Marvel) pitfall. Most of the female characters are underwritten; I don’t see the point of hiring a talented actor like Thirlby when her presence is going to be confined to a few scenes spread out across an eight-episode season. A story adult enough to feature cursing still can’t muster the maturity to resist the old coming-of-age cliché of superpowers as an all-purpose metaphor for the innate differences that make people special. Yet this all feels very forgivable when you arrive at the season finale, and it’s an episode focused on advancing character arcs rather than having those characters shoot lasers at each other from high up in the heavens. More than any live-action Marvel show that Disney+ has produced before, Wonder Man accomplishes what Netflix did with Jessica Jones and FX did with Legion (while also creating a much lighter viewing experience). It gives people with no interest in superheroes for superheroes’ sake reason to watch—all the way to the end.

As Minneapolis reels after a second fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen at the hands of federal agents, some Republicans have joined their Democrat colleagues in calling for a full, urgent investigation into what happened.

Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse at a VA hospital, was shot on Saturday morning after being surrounded by Border Patrol agents amid ongoing protests against President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in the city. Videos of his final moments, showing him being sprayed with a substance and pinned down to the ground, have since gone viral. 

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a statement stating Pretti had “approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun.” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told press that Pretti was believed to be a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry. Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff of policy and homeland security adviser, referred to Pretti as a “would-be assassin.” In the videos circulating online, Pretti is not seen holding the handgun during his interactions with the federal agents.

Trump, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, appeared to criticize Pretti for bringing a handgun to the protest. “I don’t like any shooting. I don’t like it,” Trump said, before adding: “But I don’t like it when somebody goes into a protest and he’s got a very powerful, fully loaded gun with two magazines loaded up with bullets also. That doesn’t play good either.”

The President said his Administration is “reviewing everything and will come out with a determination” about the fatal shooting. On Monday morning, Trump followed up by announcing he is sending his border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota. “Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me,” he said.

Trump previously lashed out via social media at the Democratic leadership of Minnesota and appeared to refer to the shooting as a “cover-up” for the ongoing fraud investigations taking place in the state.

He also suggested Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey had “called off” local police. “It is stated that many of these police were not allowed to do their job, that ICE had to protect themselves,” he claimed. “The Mayor and the Governor are inciting insurrection, with their pompous, dangerous, and arrogant rhetoric.”

Making reference to Renee Good, another 37-year-old U.S. citizen who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, Trump placed the blame on Democrats, claiming: “Tragically, two American Citizens have lost their lives as a result of this Democrat ensued chaos.”

Walz has said America is at an “inflection point” following the fatal shooting of Pretti and asked Americans to “set aside the political side of it and go back and ground in the humanity of this.” The former Vice Presidential candidate also repeated his request for Trump to “pull his 3,000 untrained agents out of Minnesota before they kill another American in the street.”

Late Monday morning, Trump suggested progress had been made in communications between himself and Walz. He said the two had shared “a very good call” and claimed they “seemed to be on a similar wavelength.” Trump hinted at a bipartisan approach to the next steps in Minneapolis, stating his intention for Homan to make contact with Walz as he arrives in his state.

Meanwhile, Democrats over the weekend indicated they are willing to enact a partial government shutdown, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said his party would oppose a funding bill that would allocate over $64.4 billion to the DHS, including around $10 billion for ICE.

Despite Trump’s previous remarks blaming Democrats for the “chaos” in Minneapolis, a growing number of lawmakers within his own party have splintered from his rhetoric. They are instead calling for a “transparent” investigation into the latest Minneapolis shooting and a hard look into the tactics being used by federal agents.

Here are some of the Republicans who are taking that stance:

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska

Lisa Murkowski, who is part of a bipartisan effort alongside Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire to introduce a bill to block Trump from taking over Greenland, has called for a “comprehensive, independent investigation” in order to “rebuild trust.”

She said the fatal shooting “should raise serious questions within the Administration about the adequacy of immigration-enforcement training and the instructions officers are given on carrying out their mission.”

Distancing herself from the DHS and Trump’s focus on Pretti carrying a handgun, she argued: “Carrying a firearm does not justify federal agents killing an American—especially, as video footage appears to show, after the victim had been disarmed.”

Urging Congressional committees “to hold hearings and do their oversight work,” she finished her statement by warning that “ICE agents do not have carte blanche in carrying out their duties.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana

Bill Cassidy, who serves on the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, described the events in Minneapolis as “incredibly disturbing” and said the “credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake” following the shooting. 

“There must be a full joint federal and state investigation. We can trust the American people with the truth,” he urged, echoing Walz’s assertion that the state must be involved in any official reviews of the incident.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine

Susan Collins, chair of the Appropriations Committee, issued a statement calling for the “tragic” shooting to be “thoroughly and transparently investigated to determine whether or not excessive force was used in a situation that may have been able to be diffused without violence.”

Joining the growing number of Republicans to raise concerns about ICE training, she said the shooting “further underscores the importance of equipping federal law enforcement agents with training and body cameras for their safety and the safety of the public.”

Collins implored protesters “not to interfere” with ICE operations, while reminding officers of “the public’s right to protest and the highly charged situation they now face.”

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina

Thom Tillis called for a “thorough and impartial” investigation into the incident and stepped away from issuing blame at Democratic leadership.

He said a full investigation is the “basic standard that law enforcement and the American people expect following any officer-involved shooting” and urged for transparency between “federal, state, and local law enforcement.”

Emphasizing the necessity for the investigation to be carried out uninterrupted, he said: “Any Administration official who rushes to judgment and tries to shut down an investigation before it begins are doing an incredible disservice to the nation and to President Trump’s legacy.”

Tillis, who announced last year that he will not seek reelection after a series of high-profile clashes with the President, has opposed the Trump Administration on several key issues as of late.

Sen. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska

“The nation witnessed a horrifying situation this weekend,” said Pete Ricketts.

The lawmaker stated that his “support for funding ICE remains the same” and argued the enforcement of immigration laws “makes our streets safe” and “protects our national security.” However, he noted that America must “maintain [its] core values as a nation, including the right to protest and assemble.”

“I expect a prioritized, transparent investigation into this incident,” he said, joining several of his colleagues. 

Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas

Michael McCaul said he is “troubled by the events that have unfolded in Minneapolis” and said a “thorough investigation is necessary—both to get to the bottom of these incidents and to maintain Americans’ confidence in our justice system.”

“I look forward to hearing from DHS officials about what happened here and how we can prevent further escalation in the future,” he said, urging “both sides” to turn down the temperature.

Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma 

Kevin Stitt called the shooting of Pretti a “real tragedy” and argued that Trump is “getting bad advice” on immigration.

“Americans don’t like what they’re seeing right now,” he told CNN, in response to the latest fatal shooting. “What’s the goal right now? Is it to deport every single non-U.S. citizen? I don’t think that’s what Americans want. We have to stop politicizing this”

Sen. Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania

Dave McCormick echoed Trump’s rhetoric about Democrats, accusing Minnesota’s politicians of “fueling a dangerous situation.”

He also expressed his support for immigration enforcement, however he called for a review into what happened in Minneapolis and urged for law enforcement that coincides with public safety.

“We need a full investigation into the tragedy in Minneapolis. We need all the facts. We must enforce our laws in a way that protects the public while maintaining its trust,” he said. “This gives our law enforcement officers the best chance to succeed in their difficult mission.”

Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont 

Phil Scott called the killing in Minneapolis unacceptable. 

“At best, these federal immigration operations are a complete failure of coordination of acceptable public safety and law enforcement practices, training, and leadership,” he said. “At worst, it’s a deliberate federal intimidation and incitement of American citizens that’s resulting in the murder of Americans. Again, enough is enough.”

The Governor called on Trump to “pause these operations, de-escalate the situation, and reset the federal government’s focus on truly criminal illegal immigrants.”

In 2026, TIME will publish its first-ever ranking of America’s Top WorkTech Companies, in partnership with Statista, a leading international provider of market and consumer data.

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The application period will be open until March 1, 2026, and the final list will be published in June 2026 on TIME.com.

Following another deadly shooting in Minneapolis by federal officers over the weekend, Senate Democrats are signaling that they are willing to shut down much of the federal government rather than vote to continue funding immigration enforcement absent meaningful reforms. But even if Congress fails to pass the measure before the Friday deadline, a shutdown is unlikely to significantly deter the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement in the short term.

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That’s because the massive domestic policy bill President Donald Trump signed last year, which he dubbed the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” made Immigration and Customs Enforcement the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the nation. Under that law, ICE received a $75 billion supplement on top of its roughly $10 billion base budget, money it could potentially tap if its annual appropriations are interrupted. The measure, enacted with no support from Democrats, set aside roughly $30 billion for operations and $45 billion for expanding detention facilities, giving ICE a deep financial cushion as lawmakers clash over its conduct.

Federal funding expires at the end of the week—at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 31—and the House is in recess until February, leaving the Senate with few options to avoid a shutdown if it can’t pass the current measure.  

The standoff intensified over the weekend after the shooting of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and intensive care unit nurse. Multiple videos show Border Patrol agents spraying Pretti with a substance and pinning him to the ground before the shooting. Moments before the confrontation, Pretti was attempting to help a woman protester who was being pushed by a federal agent.

Following the incident, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Democrats would block a sweeping funding package if it includes money for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

“What’s happening in Minnesota is appalling — and unacceptable in any American city,” Schumer said in a statement, arguing that the Homeland Security funding bill was “woefully inadequate” to rein in abuses by immigration officials. He said Democrats would not provide the votes needed to advance the broader spending package if the DHS bill remained part of it.

Most legislation in the Senate requires 60 votes to move forward, leaving Republicans, who hold 53 seats, in need of some Democratic support to pass the measure, which covers about $1.3 trillion in annual government spending and includes funding for the military, social services, and several major departments. 

Read more: Here Are the States to Watch as Democrats Try to Flip the Senate

Democrats are demanding new constraints on immigration enforcement and more oversight of DHS. Some lawmakers have outlined specific demands: requiring judicial warrants for immigration arrests, beefing up agents’ training, mandating agents wear visible identification, and strengthening accountability and transparency. 

Several senators who had previously broken with their party to keep the government open said the latest shooting shifted their stance. “I have the responsibility to hold the Trump administration accountable when I see abuses of power,” said Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada, who voted last year to end the last shutdown. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, also of Nevada, said agents were “oppressing Americans” and could no longer be funded without new safeguards.

Yet even if Democrats succeed in blocking DHS funding, immigration enforcement may continue largely uninterrupted as ICE is permitted to spend the $75 billion it received under the Big Beautiful Bill over as long as four years. If disbursed steadily, that would amount to nearly $29 billion annually—almost triple its recent funding levels.

By comparison, the Trump Administration’s budget request for the entire Justice Department, including the FBI, stands at just over $35 billion.

The surge in funding has fueled a rapid expansion of ICE’s operations. The agency more than doubled its workforce last year, growing from about 10,000 to 22,000 officers and agents, and launched an aggressive recruitment drive that included signing bonuses and student loan repayment incentives. It has advertised deportation officer positions in at least 25 cities and sharply expanded its detention system.

The new law allocated $45 billion specifically to detention facilities, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying the agency would be able to hold up to 100,000 people in custody daily. As of mid-January, more than 73,000 people were being held in immigration detention, according to CBS News.

That growth has coincided with mounting criticism of ICE’s tactics, as viral videos have spread of masked agents detaining people in unmarked vehicles, and reports of a spike in deaths of people taken into custody. But it has also left the agency unusually insulated from the budget brinkmanship now gripping Congress.

Republicans have largely backed the Trump Administration’s approach, though cracks have emerged. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana called the Minneapolis shooting “incredibly disturbing” and urged a joint federal-state investigation, saying the credibility of DHS and ICE was at stake. Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska called for a “prioritized, transparent investigation into this incident.” Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said that the shooting “should raise serious questions within the administration about the adequacy of immigration-enforcement training and the instructions officers are given on carrying out their mission.” Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has asked top DHS officials to testify.

Still, voting against the DHS funding bill may do little to curb enforcement quickly. ICE operations are generally designated essential services, meaning agents would continue to work even if a funding lapse forced furloughs elsewhere in the government. And the massive supplemental pot of funding would allow it to continue arrests, deportations, and detention at current levels for months, if not longer.

Where the shutdown threat may have more impact is politically. By tying immigration enforcement to the broader funding fight, which also includes money for the military and social services, Democrats are attempting to raise the political cost for Republicans and the Trump Administration. The pressure could force negotiations over guardrails on ICE or prompt internal reconsideration of its tactics, particularly as public scrutiny grows.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

Less than two months before the primary season opens, it seems that both parties have a general sense of the Senate map. 

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Conversations with about two dozen strategists, lobbyists, donors, and rank-and-file Hill staffers reveal the current lay of the land: Democrats see an incredibly narrow path back to the majority, one that will require the kind of luck that has been in short supply for the party of late.

Republicans, meanwhile, see a more favorable map that will likely result in them retaining Senate control, although the latest polling and voter registration trends are certainly making party leaders skittish.

For the GOP, the biggest wild card is the leader of their own party, as Donald Trump has a history of backing the less-electable horse in pivotal primaries. Strategists are hoping Trump will do better this cycle at maintaining his neutrality, or at least avoid elevating the kind of candidates who are so toxic they hurt Republicans in other races.

While the Senate map remains in Republicans’ favor, non-presidential elections are famously tough to predict, and there is a political lifetime between now and November. Just the events of the last few weeks—the military seizure of Venezuela’s autocratic leader, Trump’s threats to Denmark over Greenland, a mounting national anti-ICE backlash—suggest any prediction about the midterms made in January of 2026 are slightly better than pure bunk.

First, let’s dissect the Democrats’ map. In a recent strategy memo, Senate Democrats’ campaign arm firstly and optimistically assumes the party will hold Michigan and New Hampshire, where Democratic incumbents are choosing not to seek another term, and Georgia, where Sen. Jon Ossoff is. (To recap: the current trio of Democratic Senators previously won those seats with an average of 52% of the vote.

That holds the status quo. To move Democrats back to holding the Senate’s gavels, Democrats’ official playbook is to pursue flips in Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio. Six years ago, Republicans won those first three seats with 54%, 51%, and 49%. The fourth, Ohio, is going to be a special election to fill the remainder of Vice President J.D. Vance’s term; he won in 2022 with 53% of the vote. 

Put candidly, the Democrats’ plan for those four states is ambitious—but the trends are on their side. Special elections since November 2024 have delivered a slate of wins for Democrats, who have outperformed expectations and historical trajectories. 

Then there are seats in Iowa and Texas that are viewed as more dreamy pick-up opportunities for Democrats. More on that below.

Some of the Democrats’ open doors are thanks to Trump’s fickle nature. For instance, in North Carolina, Sen. Thom Tillis would have been on a glidepath to re-election. But Tillis ran afoul of Trump during the President’s first tour of Washington for such sins as working with Democrats on reforming immigration policy and defending Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 elections, and opposing Trump’s effort to tap emergency budget powers to bypass Congress and build the border wall. But the final blow came last summer when Tillis voted against Trump’s mega-spending package, the One Big Beautiful Bill. The next day, Tillis announced he would not seek a third term.

It’s a similar situation in Texas, Maine, and Louisiana, where Trump is bedeviling party leaders by his decision to not endorse the incumbents viewed as best positioned to keep their seats red. 

That said, the map is decidedly in Republicans’ favor. Just holding GOP seats in Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio is the whole ballgame. Republicans are thirstily looking for some flips of their own, like New Hampshire, where former Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts and former Sen. John E. Sununu of New Hampshire are both running for an open seat. In Georgia, it’s a smorgasbord of GOP talent. And in Michigan, a Never-Trumper-turned-convert in former Rep. Mike Rogers is primed to face whoever emerges from a three-way primary that will serve as a litmus test for the Democrats.

Oh, that’s right. Primaries! None of these nominees are officially set. That doesn’t start happening until March. The first major test will come in Texas, where everything—including risk—is always bigger. 

Let’s take a tour of the 10 states where control of the Upper Chamber will be decided.

Texas

Sen. John Cornyn, a former member of GOP Leadership and a guiding voice for pragmatic conservatives on the Hill, faces a real challenge to even win his party’s nomination for another six-year term when his state holds its primary on March 3. Emerson College’s polling this month shows Cornyn locked in a tight primary against Attorney General Ken Paxton, with Rep. Wesley Hunt running about 10 points behind both. Still, the plurality of voters there remain undecided. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has told reporters that Trump would not be making an endorsement in that race, although it’s far from assured that the President will keep his end of the bargain. Trump is fond of Paxton’s pluck and Hunt’s ambition. Some strategists worry that Texas Republicans may be about to trade away a reliably Republican seat if Paxton or Hunt emerge as the nominees.

The Democratic primary is also competitive, featuring feisty rising star Rep. Jasmine Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico, who has drawn national attention for his blending of Christian faith with a pragmatic policy raft. Trump absolutely loathes Crockett, who might bait the President to intervene in the GOP primary.

North Carolina

A sneaky and pricey addition to the map this year, North Carolina’s Senate race is the one that Republicans feel least confident defending. Michael Whatley, who served for 17 months as Trump’s hand-picked chairman of the Republican National Committee, had been expected to coast into the seat being vacated by Tillis. The reasoning was sound: the last Democrat to win a Senate seat in North Carolina was elected in 2008.

But Democrats landed a major recruiting win with former Gov. Roy Cooper, who ran ahead of Hillary Clinton by 4 points in 2016 and by 6 points over Joe Biden four years later. Every single poll has shown Cooper besting Whatley. But holding the seat is a top priority for Thune and Senate Republicans’ campaign arm. The fact that Whatley is one of Trump’s favorites is lost on no one, as is the fact that Democrats have won the state’s presidential vote just twice since LBJ.

Ohio

Oh, Ohio. The one-time swing state has sided with the presidential winner every time except for 1944, 1960, and 2020. But its status as a bellwether is far from its heyday. Sen. Jon Husted is seeking to defend the seat he inherited when J.D. Vance won the vice presidency in 2024. In picking Husted, Gov. Mike DeWine cleared some potential strife inside the state GOP he controls and set in motion what should have been a fairly easy hold.

But former Sen. Sherrod Brown had other thoughts. Brown, who lost his seat in 2024, is the lone Ohio Democrat who has proven to be able to win statewide since the 2006 wave election, Brown has a machine in the state. And without Trump at the top of the ticket driving turnout, there’s a good shot that the 73-year-old fixture in Ohio politics can come back to Washington.

Louisiana

Louisiana should be an easy hold for Republicans, but who occupies the seat has become a moving target now that Trump decided to mess with Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-nomination. The President’s unexpected endorsement of Rep. Julia Letlow—before she even joined the race, mind you—added a complication for Cassidy, who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol yet set aside his own reservations as a doctor over the nomination of an anti-vaxxer to be the nation’s health secretary. Not even that concession—which has dogged Cassidy ever since—was enough to satiate Trump’s mounting obsession with revenge.

Thune had desperately hoped Trump would stay out of Louisiana. Just this month, Thune popped down to the state to stand with Cassidy and make stops to boost his standing. After all, Cassidy chairs the Senate health and education committee and is already playing a crucial role in steering Senate Republicans’ agenda. Poking Cassidy out of spite is a very Trumpian move but not one that leaves Democrats eyeing the race with any seriousness. After all, the last time Louisiana voters sent a first-term Democrat to the Senate was 1996.

Georgia

This is the race that keeps Democrats up at night. Jon Ossoff is far-and-away this cycle’s biggest fundraiser, hauling in $54 million for the cycle and showing no signs of slowing. Still, this is Georgia, a state that has voted for a Democratic White House contender just twice since Jimmy Carter’s days.

Trump is the big unknown here. He has yet to make an endorsement and his record in Georgia is mixed at best. (He delivered NFL player Herschel Walker the Senate nomination in 2022 but failed to kill Gov. Brian Kemp’s re-nomination that same primary.) This year, it’s Reps. Mike Collins and Buddy Carter hoping to trade in their House seats for the next prize, while former football coach Derek Dooley is looking to trade his headset for a members’ pin. Polling suggests Collins is the favorite to emerge as Ossoff’s foil after the May 19 primary, but Trump’s inclinations to make every race about him could foul this for the GOP.

Iowa

This is one of two states—Texas being the other—that could come into play if Democrats get luckier than lucky. Sen. Joni Ernst, a member of the GOP Leadership and a savvy pol, decided not to seek a third term and seemed ready to cede the seat to Rep. Ashley Hinson, a former newscaster who is running with Trump’s endorsement and the backing of the Senate Republicans’ establishment. It is widely seen as a hold for the Republicans, but the GOP has seen other safe seats get dicey if treated with indifference. (Senate Republicans just last cycle had to send an eleventh-hour rescue mission to Nebraska.)

The June 2 primary will sort out which Democrat will face Hinson. Former state Senate Minority Leader Zach Wahls seems to be the favorite in the race but some Democrats in Washington are still watching Josh Turek, a moderate Democrat who played on the U.S. team at the Summer Paralympics four times, winning medals in wheelchair basketball in 2012, 2026, and 2020.

Maine

Susan Collins might just be the shrewdest incumbent Republican on this year’s map. Seeking her sixth term representing a state that voted against Trump all three times he appeared on the ballot—a distinction she holds alone among Republicans in the Senate—she has figured out how to give just enough to Democrats while not alienating her fellow Republicans. To be sure, Democrats often find her Lucy-and-the-football routine exhausting, as she suggests she might tank some Trump priorities before falling in line, but they also see her as a potential ally. Last year, for instance, she proposed an amendment to get money for rural hospitals included in Trump’s massive domestic policy bill. When that failed, she got it shoehorned in through another mechanism. The move helped her standing with Maine’s left, even as she voted for a bill they hated.

Complicating matters, though, is the Democratic primary, slated for June 9. Gov. Janet Mills is looking to become the oldest freshman Senator in history at age 79, while oyster farmer Graham Platner has attracted plenty of attention—not all of it positive. The primary could become a proxy fight between the party’s establishment, which recruited Mills heavily and believes she would be a viable Collins slayer, while progressives have embraced Platner despite a digital trail of problematic breadcrumbs.

Michigan

This is going to be a tricky one for Democrats hoping to hold their own turf. Sen. Gary Peters’ retirement has set in motion a three-way primary among the Democrats, and it’s one of the most dynamic contests in the still-forming map. Rep. Haley Stevens is a favorite of the establishment and a moderate technocrat, although in private meetings party leaders are starting to hedge their bets and expressing an openness to state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who has carefully positioned herself as a compromise between Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed, a public health official who is the progressive wing’s favorite.

Whoever emerges from the Democratic rubble after the Aug. 4 primary is likely to face Mike Rogers, the former Congressman who came within 20,000 votes of winning a Senate seat in 2024. Rogers, who had pointed criticism for Trump after Jan. 6 but found his way back into good standing and an endorsement, is a tough campaigner and national security hawk who is the GOP’s prime pick-up vessel.

Alaska

Again, this was not a race on the GOP list of problem children a year ago. Sen. Dan Sullivan was expected to coast to another term in a state that only occasionally likes to flirt with Democrats’ agenda. But former Rep. Mary Petola, the first Democrat to win statewide since 2008, is looking to get back to Washington. Democrats took a second look at the race and are seeing it as part of their core strategy to make it back to the majority.

Alaska is a unique campaign environment, for sure, and the primary is not until Aug. 18. That’s a lifetime in politics these days, and Democrats are hoping the sulfur of Washington is enough to sour voters on Sullivan.

New Hampshire

The Granite State remains one of the last truly purple ones on the map, so much so that Democrats aren’t really trying to challenge popular Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s bid for re-election. Yet it’s a different story with the Senate seat being vacated by Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s retirement. Rep. Chris Pappas is the party’s favorite there and could make history as the first openly gay man elected to the Senate. 

Republicans, though, could find themselves in yet another pickle of Trump’s brine. Most of the GOP establishment has lined up behind former Sen. John E. Sununu, whose father and brother both have been Governor of the state and who has a reputation in Washington as a sharp operator who understands how real power is wielded. Sununu has a clear lead in polling but Trump holds his family in contempt; on the eve of New Hampshire’s primary in 2016, Sununu published a scathing op-ed in The Union-Leader under the headline Donald Trump is a Loser. Meanwhile, Scott Brown is still in the mix. Brown, who represented Massachusetts in the Senate and unsuccessfully ran against Shaheen in 2014 to represent New Hampshire, remains a popular figure on the conservative flank of the GOP. He served as an Ambassador during Trump’s first term and could be a major factor in this race if Trump wades into it. Still, Trump has likely not forgotten that Brown was critical of Trump’s actions around Jan. 6, saying “his presidency was diminished” by them. Once again, the majority in the Senate might hinge on what grievances Trump nurses or forgives.

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President Donald Trump blamed Democrats for escalating violence after federal agents enforcing his immigration agenda killed another protester on Saturday, which has further fueled rising concern about the direction of the country under Trump.

Alex Pretti, 37, was shot dead by a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis, amid protests against federal immigration operations in the state that had ramped up since the killing of 37-year-old Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent just weeks earlier. 

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The Trump Administration has framed Pretti’s shooting as an act of self-defense. The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Pretti “approached” federal officers with a handgun and “violently resisted” their attempts to restrain and disarm him, while White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller on X called Pretti a “would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal law enforcement.” But videos circulating online, which were also analyzed by news outlets, contradicted the Administration’s claims and showed Pretti was holding a phone in his hand before the fatal confrontation. 

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal on Sunday amid public backlash about the killing and the federal government’s response, Trump said that his Administration is “reviewing everything” regarding the incident.

Then he took to his social media site, Truth Social, to assail Democrats for the violence.

“Tragically, two American Citizens have lost their lives as a result of this Democrat ensued chaos,” he posted Sunday. The President zoomed in on “Democrat run” sanctuary jurisdictions—which limit their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement—for  “REFUSING to cooperate with ICE” and for “encouraging Leftwing Agitators to unlawfully obstruct their operations to arrest the Worst of the Worst People.”

In a separate Truth Social post, Trump also called on the GOP-led Congress to “immediately” pass legislation that would end sanctuary jurisdiction policies, which he claimed “is the root cause of all of these problems.” He also called on Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, Minneapolis’ Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey, and all Democratic mayors and governors across the country “to formally cooperate with the Trump Administration to enforce our Nation’s Laws, rather than resist and stoke the flames of Division, Chaos, and Violence.”

Trump specifically asked Walz and Frey in his post to turn over to federal authorities the unauthorized immigrants in their state prisons and jails, and those with active warrants or known criminal histories, for immediate deportation.

Ex-Presidents speak out

In the wake of Pretti’s shooting, several high-profile Democrats have doubled down on their criticism of the Trump Administration. 

Former President Barack Obama, whom Trump succeeded in 2017, called Pretti’s killing a “heartbreaking tragedy.” In a statement with his wife Michelle posted on X on Sunday, Obama claimed that Trump and officials in his Administration “seem eager to escalate the situation” instead of “trying to impose some semblance of discipline and accountability over the agents they’ve deployed.”

“This has to stop,” Obama said. “I would hope that after this most recent tragedy, Administration officials will reconsider their approach.” 

Former President Bill Clinton, another Democrat, also said in a Sunday statement on social media that the events in Minnesota were “unacceptable and should have been avoided,” adding that “the people in charge have lied to us, told us not to believe what we’ve seen with our own eyes, and pushed increasingly aggressive and antagonistic tactics.”

“Over the course of a lifetime, we face only a few moments where the decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our history for years to come,” Clinton posted. “This is one of them.”

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. And today, the United States is competing economically with China without a clear picture of where it is winning, losing, or falling behind.

This blind spot is not only a concern of national security, it is an economic imperative. 

Tensions between the United States and China are the defining competition of this century. But this competition is not only about tariffs or troop deployments. It is about access: access to markets, to infrastructure contracts, to data, to standards, and to the digital systems that will underpin national economies for decades. In other words, the U.S. is in an economic cold war. And we are fighting it largely on vibes.

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History offers a warning. For years, American policymakers treated Huawei and ZTE routers as cheap, harmless hardware. Only later did we recognize that whoever builds the digital plumbing shapes the system. The same pattern repeated with 5G base stations. Today, it is playing out again with open-source AI models, where many of the most widely deployed systems are Chinese. Each time, the United States wakes up after the fact, scrambling to respond to advantages that accumulated quietly over years.

The problem is not a lack of intelligence collection. The United States tracks an enormous amount about China, much of it classified: supply-chain chokepoints, industrial surge capacity, technology transfer pathways, economic coercion. This work is done across the intelligence community, the Defense Department, the Treasury Department, and others. It is serious and necessary.

But it is optimized to answer one question: What could go wrong? What it does not answer well is a different question: How competitive are we, really?

China measures economic competition relentlessly. It tracks manufacturing dominance, technology self-sufficiency, trade dependence, and infrastructure reach. It compares itself to the United States on scale, control, substitution, and influence. The metrics are imperfect, but they are directional and strategic.

By contrast, the United States relies on backward-looking indicators such as trade balances and foreign direct investment flows. Those still matter, but they capture only a fraction of how power is built in a digital economy. Cloud infrastructure, AI platforms, semiconductor ecosystems, and software standards now function as backbone assets. Whoever embeds them becomes indispensable.

Yet Washington simply does not know how much advanced digital and AI activity runs on American platforms versus non-American ones. That ignorance has consequences.

One useful signal, if handled with care, is AI activity itself. Metrics such as where AI workloads run or how much inference occurs on U.S. versus foreign platforms can offer insight into where value is being captured. These should not be treated as precise measures of advantage. More capable models may use fewer tokens. A hospital diagnostic system is not the same as a casual chatbot. And as inference moves onto devices, visibility will decline.

But this is no different from electricity consumption. It is a rough indicator of economic activity, not a measure of welfare. No one confuses kilowatt-hours with productivity, yet no serious economy flies blind without tracking them.

The point is not to fetishize a single metric. It is to acknowledge that activity signals, properly contextualized, are better than anecdotes and after-action reviews.

President Trump has correctly identified artificial intelligence and infrastructure as central to American competitiveness. From the American AI Initiative in his first term to the more recent executive actions aimed at accelerating adoption and reducing regulatory fragmentation, the strategy is clear. The missing piece is measurement.

If the United States wants to compete, it needs modern economic intelligence to match modern economic statecraft. That means integrating public data, voluntary, aggregated industry reporting, and all-source intelligence into a coherent, forward-looking picture. Not to surveil allies or micromanage companies, but to understand where American firms are winning, where they are absent, and where policy tools actually change outcomes.

China already does this. Quietly. Continuously. Systematically.

Clear metrics do not guarantee success. But without them, America is competing in the dark. In a world defined by economic power, the first act of leadership is measurement.

It is time to measure what matters.

*Disclosure: TIME owner and co-chair Marc Benioff is an investor in January AI.

A couple of years back, when the NHL announced that its players would return to Olympic competition for the first time in over a decade and participate in the 2026 and 2030 Games, the Tkachuk family group chat lit up. Matthew Tkachuk, now 28, was in his second year as a forward for the Florida Panthers: his team has since won back-to-back Stanley Cup championships. Younger brother Brady, 26, is a four-time NHL All-Star now in his eighth season with the Ottawa Senators. Their father, Keith Tkachuk, played 18 seasons in the NHL and represented the United States at four Olympics.

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The Tkachuks are a confident crew, and both Matthew and Brady knew they were solid bets to make their Olympic debuts in Milan. “We were so jacked,” Matthew tells TIME during a joint video interview with his brother. “All right, it’s on. No offense, I don’t really remember much of anything about the last two Olympics without NHLers. I don’t mean that to be a diss on anybody. But this is the right thing to do.”

NHL players did not participate in the 2018 Olympics in South Korea (owners were growing tired of the disruption to the league’s regular season) or the 2022 Games in China (the COVID pandemic was already wreaking havoc on the NHL schedule); their return to the Olympic rekindles the kind of best-on-best global competition sports fans are accustomed to seeing in sports like basketball at the Summer Games or soccer at the World Cup. What’s more, these Games arrive at an ideal moment for hockey, especially for supporters of the United States and Canada. The inaugural 4 Nations Face-Off tournament, which the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association debuted in February 2025 as a temporary replacement for its annual All-Star Game, was a smashing success, in large part thanks to heated rivalry games between the two North American neighbors at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump was saber-rattling Canada, referring to the country as a potential 51st state and threatening a trade war. The U.S. beat Canada in an preliminary-round fight fest in Montreal, while the Canadians exacted retribution in a thrilling final in Boston, which drew ESPN’s largest hockey audience of all time. 

Read More: Inside Lindsey Vonn’s Unprecedented Olympic Comeback

These thrills should carry over into February, when the U.S. gets another crack at its first men’s hockey gold medal since the 1980 “Miracle on Ice.” Canada has won the last two Olympic golds in tournaments featuring NHL players—on home ice in Vancouver in 2010, and in Sochi in 2014—while Finland and Sweden, who also participated in the 4 Nations Face Off, count as threats too. (Finland won Olympic gold in 2022, and the Olympic Athletes from Russia, or OAR, won in 2018; Russia is banned from this year’s Olympics due to its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.) “NHL players from the United States are so prideful of their country, more than any other nation,” says Matthew. “The honor to represent millions at home that are going to be watching, that are either hockey fans or not, that’s what is driving the bus for me. It just doesn’t get bigger than this.”

No two players have done more to create buzz for the U.S. team than the Tkachuks. Before the U.S.-Canada 4 Nations Face-Off game in Montreal, Canadian fans booed during the U.S. national anthem, just as they had two nights earlier before the U.S. beat Finland, 6-1. Tensions between the two nations were high. Trump had enacted an additional 25% tariff on Canadian imports, ostensibly as punishment for fentanyl flowing into the United States from the north. 

Given the charged atmosphere, Matthew believed there was a way to further fire up his team and its supporters: inviting Canada’s Brandon Hagel, who plays for the Tampa Bay Lighting, to throw down seconds after the opening face-off. “It was just a lot of built-up stuff,” says Matthew. “Canada’s had our number for the last number of decades. They’ve earned it. We just wanted to go in a hostile environment and try to flip the script a second in. And we felt that was the way to do it. It didn’t matter who was lined up next to me. They would have been asked to fight.”

Read More: Chloe Kim on Going for Her Third Olympic Gold, Her Pet Snake, and Her NFL Boyfriend

The kerfuffle delighted the crowd: fans roared as Tkachuk and Hagel shed their sticks and gloves, traded blows, and wrestled each other onto the ice. 

Sam Bennett, a Canadian center with a tough-guy reputation, took the next face-off, against Brady. It didn’t matter that Bennett and Matthew are teammates in Florida, and also played four-plus seasons together in Calgary earlier in their careers. He and Brady went right at it. “I know Matthew and him are really tight,” Brady says. “So it was kind of weird in that aspect.”

“[Bennett] is the only guy that’s tough enough to even attempt to fight Brady,” Matthew chimes in. Brady took Bennett down and slapped his brother five as he joined him in the penalty box.

Then J.T. Miller of the U.S. and Canada’s Colton Parayko tussled to a standstill near Canada’s net. Three fights, in nine seconds.

Eventually, a hockey game broke out. The United States prevailed, 3-1. Both teams made the championship game, played less than a week later. The morning of the final, President Trump called the U.S. team to wish them luck. “I realized this is one of the most significant moments of my life,” says Brady. But Canadian superstar Connor McDavid, a three-time NHL MVP, broke America’s hearts in overtime, scoring a championship-clinching goal. Afterward, then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote on X: “You can’t take our country—and you can’t take our game.”  

Read More: ‘I Don’t Believe in Limits.’ How Eileen Gu Became Freestyle Skiing’s Biggest Star

The Tkachuks grew up fighting—with each other. “Every day, there’s a square up at some point, but that didn’t stop us,” says Brady. “It was a quick, probably five-minute TV timeout. Then we’re back playing again.” Their father memorably traded punches with Canadian Claude Lemieux at the 1996 World Cup of Hockey, which the U.S. won. “We watched that video hundreds of times growing up,” says Brady. But they’re more than mere enforcers who can take a hit as well as they deliver it (in December, Brady became the first player in NHL history to be high-sticked in five straight games). The brothers produce plenty of points. “Competitive players with skills is the best way to put it,” says Matthew. “We can play any game, any style out there.” 

In the Olympics, fighting is prohibited. The penalties are severe and can result in ejection and suspension. Still, in June, the brothers were two of the first six players named to the Team USA roster. And it won’t be their first trip to an Olympics in Italy. Twenty years ago, as kids, they tagged along with Keith to the Torino Games and even took pictures with Russian stars  Alexander Ovechkin, the NHL’s all-time leading goal-scorer, and longtime Pittsburgh Penguins center Evgeni Malkin. Brady went on his honeymoon to Rome, Capri, and the Amalfi Coast a few years back; Matthew hasn’t returned to Italy since those 2006 Games.

“Hopefully we can have some Italian red wine after we win it all,” says Matthew. The 4 Nations final loss is fresh enough in their minds to serve as motivation. Meanwhile, the tension between the leaders of the U.S. and Canada has only escalated. “You have to have that extra hunger, and we have that,” says Matthew. “We want to be the greatest hockey nation in the world, plain and simple. We have a chance to do something so special. All you can ask for is a chance. We’re back in it.”

Senate Democrats said they would block a funding bill that includes tens of billions for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after federal agents fatally shot another person in Minneapolis on Saturday, a move that looks likely to cause a partial government shutdown at the end of the week.

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Reacting to a wave of anger from his party over the killing of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats would oppose the package that includes $64.4 billion in funding for the DHS, $10 billion of which is earmarked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“What’s happening in Minnesota is appalling—and unacceptable in any American city,” Schumer, who represents New York, said on Saturday evening. He added that “because of Republicans’ refusal to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE.”

Read more: Why Democrats Fought the ICE Funding Bill—and Why It Passed Anyway

The bill was passed in the House of Representatives on Thursday with few changes after seven Democrats joined with nearly all Republicans to send the package to the Senate and keep the government open past Jan. 30.

Despite a growing national backlash over the actions of immigration agents in the wake of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, the seven Democrats—many of them in swing districts—backed the bill, citing the potential damaging effects of a shutdown.

Before the weekend, Schumer and other Senate Democrats had signaled that they had wanted to avoid a shutdown and the bill looked likely to pass in the Senate. But Pretti’s killing at the hands of a Border Patrol agent, after being pepper-sprayed and shot several times on the ground, prompted a wave of anger in the party.  

Republicans need seven Democratic votes to reach the 60 they need to pass the bill, but several Senate Democrats who previously voted with Republicans to avoid shutdowns, or had indicated they would support the legislation, said they would no longer vote for it.

“Enough is enough,” said Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat from Nevada who voted against her party to end the government shutdown in November last year. “I have the responsibility to hold the Trump administration accountable when I see abuses of power.”

Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico used the same language in announcing his opposition to the bill. 

“Enough is enough. I will not vote to fund the lawlessness of DHS, not by itself and not packaged with other funding bills. We need MAJOR reforms at DHS, and we need them now,” he wrote on X.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington had argued in favor of the legislation before Saturday, but shifted her position after the shooting. 

“Federal agents cannot murder people in broad daylight and face zero consequences,” she wrote Saturday. “The DHS bill needs to be split off from the larger funding package before the Senate — Republicans must work with us to do that. I will continue fighting to rein in DHS and ICE.”

Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, another one of the eight Democrats who voted to end the shutdown in November, said she wouldn’t support the DHS measure.

“The Trump Administration and Kristi Noem are putting undertrained, combative federal agents on the streets with no accountability,” Cortez Masto said in a statement on social media. “This is clearly not about keeping Americans safe, it’s brutalizing U.S. citizens and law-abiding immigrants. I will not support the current Homeland Security funding bill.”

Read More: Photos of Minneapolis Protests As City Erupts in Anger Over Killing By Federal Agent

Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia, Peter Welch of Vermont, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and Brian Schatz of Hawaii all also vowed to vote no.

Independent Maine Sen. Angus King said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday that he would not vote for an ICE package but that “we don’t have to have a shutdown.”

Schumer’s announcement came hours after authorities identified the person killed by federal authorities in Minneapolis as Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, who wanted to “make a difference in this world,” according to his father. His killing marked the second by federal agents in just over two weeks, after Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three.

Senate Republicans are now scrambling to avoid a shutdown. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins told the New York Times she was “exploring all options.”

“We have five other bills that are really vital, and I’m relatively confident they would pass,” she said.

The bill covers around $1.3 trillion in annual spending, and its failure would mean some parts of the government would have to shut down.

Although the move marks a shift in the Democratic Party’s willingness to block funding for ICE, the agency is sitting on tens of billions of dollars from President Donald Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which passed last year—$14 billion of which was to be allocated to deportation efforts.

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More than 1 million people have been left without power and at least 13 people have died during a massive winter storm that has sown chaos across the South and the Midwest and is now barreling toward the East Coast.

Over 200 million people across the country were under some kind of weather alert as of Sunday morning. Power outages mostly affected homes in the South, including in Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Kentucky, where large snowfall is rare. Parts of the U.S. experienced dangerously low wind chills in the minus-20s to minus-30s as Arctic air pushed south. Copenhagen, New York, saw record-breaking temperatures of -49°F, Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Sunday.

The storm’s dangerous mixture of heavy snow, sleet, ice, and bitter cold threatens to trap millions indoors for days. Travel has been severely disrupted, with more than 16,000 scheduled flights canceled from Saturday through Monday, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware. On Sunday, around 11,000 flights were canceled—the most in a single day since the COVID-19 pandemic. Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in the D.C. area canceled all flights on Sunday, and New York’s LaGuardia Airport has reopened after closing on Sunday afternoon, although no flights are expected to take off or land until Monday morning.

Read more: People Are Panic Buying for the Winter Storm. An Expert Explains Why We Do It

President Donald Trump described the storm as “historic” on Saturday and said he had approved federal disaster declarations for several states—including South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, and West Virginia. 

By late Saturday afternoon, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that 17 states and the District of Columbia had declared weather emergencies.

“We just ask that everyone would be smart – stay home if possible,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said.

By Sunday morning, the storm began to hit New England and much of the eastern third of the United States. The National Weather Service (NWS) expects up to 20 inches of snow across New England, while some places, including Boston, could see more. More than a dozen states have already seen more than a foot of snow, according to NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center. Bonito Lake in New Mexico saw 31 inches of snow, Crested Butte in Colorado saw 23 inches, and Clintonville in Pennsylvania saw 20. Extreme cold conditions are expected to linger for days.

Experts warn the storm could become particularly dangerous due to the freezing temperatures forecast to follow closely behind it. As snow turns to sleet and freezing rain, roads could be coated with ice, and powerlines could freeze.

“In the wake of the storm, communities from the Southern Plains to the Northeast will contend with bitterly cold temperatures and dangerously cold wind chills,” the NWS said in its early Sunday morning update. “This will cause prolonged hazardous travel and infrastructure impacts.”

At least 13 people across the country have died in possible connection to the storm. Two people died in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, one in Austin, Texas, one in Emporia, Kansas, one in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and three people died in Tennessee—one in Crockett, one in Haywood, and another in Obion. The causes of death in most cases are still under investigation.

At least five more people were found dead outside in New York City, according to local officials, as feels-like temperatures dropped into the negatives—a season low for the area—and local leaders called for residents to stay home and to take precautions. Warming centers opened across the five boroughs, and other city governments have listed local recreation centers and buildings to serve as heated shelters.

Zohran Mamdani, tackling his first major weather event as NYC Mayor, announced a remote learning day for the city’s schools “to keep everyone safe from hazardous weather conditions.”

“While we do not yet know their causes of death, there is no more powerful reminder of the dangers of the extreme cold, and how vulnerable how many of our neighbors are, especially homeless New Yorkers,” Mamdani said at a news conference on Sunday.

He added on social media that his teams were “scouring the streets, offering shelter to homeless New Yorkers, and helping bring people inside.”

From Atlanta to Washington D.C. to Boston, transit authorities spent much of the weekend before the storm salting roads, sidewalks, and routes, while urging residents to stay home Sunday.

Philadelphia’s public transit, the SEPTA, said in a news release that “it is possible that some services will be entirely suspended” as ice might impact infrastructure, while Atlanta’s MARTA said that the only bus routes available Sunday would be “lifeline routes” that provide direct service to medical facilities and emergency rooms.

—Miranda Jeyaretnam contributed reporting.

On the wall of the entrance foyer of Chinese tech giant Baidu’s cavernous Beijing headquarters hangs a small wooden plaque embossed with the golden number “1417.” It was taken from the hotel room opposite Peking University where Robin Li founded the $50 billion company back in 2000.

Early on, Li was focused on cementing Baidu’s enduring position as China’s top search engine. However, he’d long been intrigued by artificial intelligence (AI) after taking undergraduate classes at Peking and Tsinghua universities. But upon arriving in the U.S. for graduate school in 1991 that interest was put firmly on hold.

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“I told my professor that I was interested in AI, but he told me: ‘Don’t, you will not be able to find a job if you do that!’” Li laughs.

Today, Li’s former teacher has been proven staggeringly wrong. The global AI market was estimated at $244 billion last year, while AI chip pioneer Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company worth over $4 trillion. Li saw the trend early and today Baidu is one of China’s top full-stack AI companies, offering everything from chips and cloud infrastructure to models, agents, applications, and consumer products. 

TIME caught up with Li on the sidelines of November’s Baidu World conference in Beijing while reporting our Person of the Year special feature on the Architects of AI.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

When you started Baidu in 2000 did you have any idea that AI was going to play the role it is today?

No. When I founded Baidu, I realized that the Internet was going to be a big thing in China, and search technology will be very important to the development of the Chinese Internet. But I could not link AI with search engines at that time. Around 2010, we realized that machine learning, which is a branch of AI, started to play a role in the ranking of the search results. We started to invest in AI around that time, so that we learned how many people click on this link. Then in 2012 we realized that deep learning was going to become big. It was able to recognize images much more precisely than the previous generation of technology. And the serious investment in AI for Baidu started around 2012.

You’ve spoken about how numerous thresholds have been broken last year in terms of integrating AI into various sectors of society and the economy. Do you feel that 2025 is a pivotal year for AI adoption?

In terms of adoption, yes. Because for 2024 or 2023, the main theme was the foundation model. The capability of foundation models keeps improving and the inference cost keeps going down. But going forward, people will have to think about the value-add at the application level. And over the past half-a-year or so, we’ve seen all kinds of scenarios that this wave of AI is creating value at the application layer.

You recently unveiled Ernie Bot 5.0, which competes well with ChatGPT and DeepSeek and other large language models on various metrics. But it’s a very competitive field. What makes you feel that Ernie Bot can stand out from the crowd?

We take an application-driven approach when we try to develop our own foundation model, namely Ernie Bot. Especially for the 5.0 version, we didn’t try to be everything for everyone. We have application areas that we care about a lot—for example, search or digital humans. For these kinds of areas, whatever capability it requires from the foundation model level, we will try to train the model to be good at those skills. For example, I think our model is very good at instruction following and also creative writing—we were rated number one for creative writing. Because these kinds of capabilities can be used as a digital human layer, especially when you try to let digital humans do live streaming, e-commerce. To sell things, you need to come up with scripts that are really convincing, so that people are willing to pay for goods. So we try to optimize the model for those kinds of application scenarios. We think going forward, no foundation model can be better than anyone at any aspect. OpenAI cannot do that; Google Gemini cannot achieve that. We cannot achieve that either—but we try to optimize the model so that it performs better at the directions our applications care about the most.

Do you feel that the foundation model space will soon coalesce amongst a couple of champions much like other technologies have done?

Eventually, I think so. This is the case for the desktop internet, for mobile internet, and it’s going to be for AI, too. There will be only a few foundation models left, but at the application layer, there will be a lot of successful players in very different directions. I think that’s where the most opportunities are, because otherwise, this is going to be just a bubble. It’s going to burst sooner or later.

You’ve said that the value in chips is misguided and the application value-add needs to increase. With Baidu being a full-stack AI company are there applications where you see the growth and revenue coming from?

That’s my point. I think right now it’s a pyramid where most value is realized at the chip level, then the model level realizes probably one-tenth, and the application layer realizes even less. This is certainly unhealthy. The reason I said that is because we took a very different approach since the beginning of 2023 when we were working on the foundation model, when everyone’s attention was on Ernie Bot. I publicly said, “Don’t focus on models; focus on applications.” And that’s what we did over the past two, three years. Because I firmly believe that you have to create much more value at the application layer in order to sustain the investment in models, in chips, and so on.

Baidu proudly embraces an open-source model. Why do you think that’s best?

We’ve always embraced the open-source community, especially at the deep learning framework level, where we have tens of millions of developers using PaddlePaddle, which rivals TensorFlow and PyTorch. And at the model level, we also realize that when you open source it, you get more attention so people are more willing to try it and take a look at the effectiveness. Having said that, I don’t think open source is the key for value creation. And to be exact, it’s not really open source, it’s open weight. You know all the weights of those models, but you don’t know the data that train those models, so you cannot really replicate what the model players have achieved. But it doesn’t matter; the model that feeds your application is the best model. It could be a very small model, open source. It could be a very large model, expensive one, closed source. But if it can create much more value than you pay for the inference and training, then it’s worth it. So we are at this stage with many, many models launched almost every week or even daily. Developers have a lot of choices and it’s going to settle down. It’s going to mature as more model developers shift to the application layer to develop agents for all kinds of application scenarios.

I feel the big difference now compared with the last time we spoke is that Baidu is now firmly embarked on international expansion, especially your Apollo Go robotaxis in the Middle East and Europe. How are you negotiating the regulatory and geopolitical challenges of that push?

It’s always been a challenge, either in China or elsewhere. The technology itself is at this tipping point where we are ready to massively deploy robotaxis in very congested urban areas. But many cities don’t allow self-driving on the road yet. We have about 22 cities running Apollo Go robotaxi, and we are quickly gaining scale and expanding, adding cars and taking more rides. So in this aspect, wherever regulators allow us to deploy the cars we are very happy to do so. Of course, sometimes we do it all by ourselves; sometimes we partner with Uber, with Lyft, with all kinds of local partners. We are very flexible and I think our technology is ready for that. Also, because China has a very competitive supply chain, we can manufacture robotaxi cars at a lower cost than Western ones. So we can achieve unique, positive economics in most cities of the world. That’s also the reason why we are ready to deploy wherever regulators allow.

China’s supply chain in terms of sensors and batteries and other EV components is very strong. But chips are one area where the U.S. seems to have a stranglehold. Baidu just announced your new M100 chip and you’re developing new chip clusters. Have we reached a point now where China has broken free of relying on U.S. chips?

No, in terms of GPUs or AI accelerators I think we are probably two, three generations behind the U.S. But that will not prevent us from developing very valuable applications. The chip layer is at the very bottom, and on top you have different frameworks, you have foundation models, then you have the applications. We are probably a few years behind on chips, but we’re not that far behind on the model level. And on top of the models, we have lots of application scenarios you cannot find elsewhere; U.S. people don’t even know that they need to solve these kinds of problems. That’s where the value gets created. So, I’m not so worried about the restrictions on the chip, although I’d very much like to get access to the most advanced Nvidia chips.

Policymakers in the U.S. talk about a “Manhattan Project” push for AGI. But in China, the policy framework is more about diffusing AI technology across society. Do you feel it’s helpful for the U.S. to be talking about AI in terms of an arms race?

On this topic, we do have very different views. The mainstream U.S. people do take it like a Manhattan Project. The state invests hugely to achieve so-called AGI, so that the U.S. will be ahead of China and all other countries. For us, we care more about applications. China is very strong in manufacturing, we have lots of factories, we have all kinds of products that we need to manufacture at a low cost, at a very high efficiency, and we need to use AI to solve those problems. That’s what we care more about. I’m not even convinced that there is so-called AGI that one model fits all and it’s better than anyone at every aspect. I think we do need to bear applications in mind. Even if you are [as smart as] Einstein, if you don’t even know something exists, it’s very hard for you to solve problems.

So are you just putting AGI to one side and just thinking of applications?

I don’t think about AGI a lot. We are training our models, but the reason we train our model is to solve our application problems. I don’t think we should come up with a similar super smart AI that can be everything for everyone.

What are some of the biggest challenges in terms of trying to develop the applications and overcome the regulatory and other headwinds for mass AI adoption?

When you innovate, you almost always need to deal with things that’ve never been dealt with [before], especially when you try to deploy technology into the real world. For example, robotaxis: There are taxi drivers, there are all kinds of human driven cars on the road. It’s something new, and I think that overall the Chinese government is pro-innovation; they always say, “we support your innovation efforts.” But on the other hand, they also need to care about all kinds of concerns from stakeholders, and if no regulation says that you can have a self-driving car on the road, then it means it’s not [possible]. This is a little bit different from the U.S. In the U.S., if no regulation says you cannot have a self-driving car on the road, then you are allowed. In states like Texas or Georgia, there’s no regulation at all for robotaxi operations. But for China, you have to, in a lot of cases, get permission from the regulators on AGI and foundation models. Back in early 2023 a lot of opinion leaders in the U.S. said, “AI is very dangerous, we need to regulate it. We need to delay the development of foundation models by six months so that we can be sure that it’s safe or aligned with our value system.” But nothing really happened in China. We don’t talk a lot about regulating these kind of things, but there are actually regulations that are guiding the development of new technologies.

It now seems that push in the U.S. toward more safeguards and guardrails regarding AI has disappeared and the U.S. is just full speed trying to win the “AI race,” as they frame it. Do you feel that’s reckless? Do you think that perhaps the U.S. should take a step back and do what China’s done by putting in some proper regulation?

I would be very careful about that. On the one hand, I do think there should be guardrails; but on the other, because the technology moves so quickly, it improves so fast, you need to be careful to put regulations that do not hurt the pace of innovation. It’s very hard to expect regulators to have a very deep understanding, or better understanding, than the foundation model developers. Having a pre-emptive attitude is probably not good. You want to regulate it, a half step back, watch how it evolves and put in the right regulation. You don’t want to be one step or a half-step ahead of the technology map—because that will be a speed bump for innovation.

What would you say to people who are worried about AI taking jobs and displacing humans? Do you understand those fears?

Yes, both China and the U.S. face a similar issue. In the longer term, I think there’s a consensus that new technology will create a lot more job opportunities for people. But in the near term, we do face a challenge—because of the productivity improvement caused by AI, there will be downward pressure for employment, and we need to find ways to handle this. In the U.S., people talk about UBI; here in China, we talk a lot about new job opportunities, like data labelling, this kind of thing. For Baidu, we helped many cities establish data labelling centers that hire thousands of people. And I think going forward, we will be able to create a lot more jobs we have never thought of.

Another big concern is a huge amount of energy which has been consumed for data centers. How do you see that problem being solved?

We faced that problem a long time ago—10, 15 years ago—when we started to build massive data centers of so-called PUE. We spent a lot of effort to make sure that it’s energy efficient. We’re still on probably the most energy efficient data centers here in China, and as AI scales up we do need much more compute and much more power. So this effort becomes more and more important, and also kind of different. In the GPU age, there are a lot of different ways for you to save energy. But probably the most obvious one is to make your model smaller, make the inference costs cheaper. If you can achieve that, it naturally requires less power. On this aspect, China is way ahead; we can come up with models that the inference cost is one-tenth or one-hundredth of U.S. counterparts. I think the U.S. is more focused on coming up with the most powerful AI models and China, on the other hand, probably because we have less buying power and steeper competition, we always have to drive down the inference cost. And just as a side effect, it saves energy.

What do you make of the fact a company like DeepSeek can create its V3 model for $6 million, whereas Meta has plowed billions into AI with dubious results? Do you think that the U.S. is stuck in a bubble where they’re just throwing money at research and development without really focusing on the gains?

I think there are two different directions. On the Chinese side, we try to make the models more efficient—we have to because we don’t have access to the most advanced chips. On the U.S. side, you do have more advanced chips, you are very willing to invest in advancing cutting-edge technology. I think that’s good, too. That helps humanity to achieve, to explore the ultimate possibilities. I’m very interested in watching that effort, and we are following that also very closely. And like I said, we probably cannot match the investment of Google and OpenAI in training models, but we are closer to the applications. We know what problems to solve. We hope to solve those problems before the U.S. people realize there’s that kind of problem.

What do you think is one of the least understood or more surprising ways that AI is going to transform society in say 10 years’ time?

There’s huge uncertainty on that because the technology just evolves so quickly. It’s very hard to imagine 10 years down the road, because if I look back one year I couldn’t even imagine that AI technology looks so powerful today. So we’ll just watch what’s possible and try to find ways to leverage the innovation.

As many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone, two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health told TIME—indicating a dramatic surge in the death toll. So many people were slaughtered by Iranian security services on that Thursday and Friday, it overwhelmed the state’s capacity to dispose of the dead. Stocks of body bags were exhausted, the officials said, and eighteen-wheel semi-trailers replaced ambulances.

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The government’s internal count of the dead, not previously revealed, far surpasses the toll of 3,117 announced on Jan. 21 by regime hardliners who report directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. (Ministries report to the elected President.) The 30,000 figure is also far beyond tallies being compiled by activists methodically assigning names to the dead. As of Saturday, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said it had confirmed 5,459 deaths and is investigating 17,031 more.

TIME has been unable to independently verify these figures.

The Health Ministry’s two-day figure roughly aligns with a count gathered by physicians and first responders, and also shared with TIME. That surreptitious tally of deaths recorded by hospitals stood at 30,304 as of Friday, according to Dr. Amir Parasta, a German-Iranian eye surgeon who prepared a report of the data. Parasta said that number does not reflect protest-related deaths of people registered at military hospitals, whose bodies were taken directly to morgues, or that happened in locales the inquiry did not reach. Iran’s National Security Council has said protests took place in around 4,000 locations across the country.

“We are getting closer to reality,” Dr. Parasta said. “But I guess the real figures are still way higher.”

That appears to be the reality implicit in the government’s internal figure of more than 30,000 deaths in two days. A slaughter on that scale, in the space of 48 hours, had experts on mass killing groping for comparisons.

“Most spasms of killing are not from shootings,” said Les Roberts, a professor at Columbia University who specializes in the epidemiology of violent death. “In Aleppo [Syria] and in Fallujah [Iraq], when spasms of death this high have occurred over a few days, it involved mostly explosives with some shooting.”

The only parallel offered by online databases occurred in the Holocaust. On the outskirts of Kyiv on Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, Nazi death squads executed 33,000 Ukrainian Jews by gunshot in a ravine known as Babyn Yar.

In Iran, the killing fields extended across the country where, since Dec. 28, hundreds of thousands of citizens had assembled in the streets chanting first, for relief from an economy in freefall, and soon for the downfall of the Islamic regime. During the first week, security forces confronted some demonstrations, using mostly non-lethal force, but with officials also offering conciliatory language, the regime response was uncertain. That changed during the weekend commencing Jan. 8. Protests peaked, as opposition groups, including Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s former shah, urged people to join the throngs, and U.S. President Donald Trump repeated vows to protect them, though no help arrived.

Witnesses say millions were in the streets when authorities shut down the internet and all other communications with the outside world. Rooftop snipers and trucks mounted with heavy machine guns opened fire, according to eyewitnesses and cell phone footage. On Friday, Jan. 9, an official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned on state television to anyone venturing into the streets, “if … a bullet hits you, don’t complain.”

It took days for the reality to penetrate the internet blackout. Images of the bloodied bodies trickled out via illicit Starlink satellite internet connections. The task of counting the dead was hampered, however, because the authorities had also cut off lines of communications inside Iran. The first firm information came from a Tehran doctor who told TIME that just six hospitals in the capital had recorded at least 217 protester deaths after Thursday’s assault. Health care workers in Iran estimated at least 16,500 protesters had been killed by Jan. 10, according to an earlier report by Dr. Parasta in Munich. Friday’s update built on that research, he said.

“I am genuinely impressed by how quickly this work was pulled together under extremely constrained and risky conditions,” said Paul B. Spiegel, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University International School of Health. Like Roberts, he expressed wariness of extrapolating from the figures provided by hospitals. 

Roberts, who traveled into war zones to research civilian death rates in Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo, said, “the 30,000 verified deaths are almost certainly an underestimate.”

The emergence of the Ministry of Health numbers appears to confirm that—while underscoring the stakes for both Iranians and a regime that, in 1979, came to power when a sitting government was confronted by millions of people demanding its downfall.

On Friday, Jan. 9, Sahba Rashtian, an aspiring animation artist, joined friends on the streets in Isfahan, a city in central Iran famous for its beauty. “Before anyone started chanting,” a friend told TIME, “Sahba was seen collapsed on the ground. Her sister noticed blood on her hand.”

Sahba died on an operating table at a nearby hospital. She was 23.

“She always joked about her beautiful name,” her friend said. “She’d laugh and say, ‘Sahba means wine, and I am forbidden in the Islamic Republic.’”

At the burial, the friend said, religious rites were barred, and Rashtian’s father wore white. 

“Congratulations,” he told mourners, according to the friend. “My daughter became a martyr on the path to freedom.”

The man fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday morning has been identified as 37-year-old Alex Pretti.   

Pretti was an intensive care unit nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, the city where he lived. He was a keen outdoorsman and biked trails near his home. 

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Pretti’s father, Michael, said he wanted to “make a difference in this world.”

“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,” he said in a statement shared with several media outlets. 

“Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact,” he added. 

Multiple videos of Saturday’s shooting show Border Patrol agents spraying Pretti with a substance and pinning him to the ground before the shooting. Moments before the confronation, Pretti was attempting to help a woman protester who was being pushed by a federal agent.

Pretti’s family said he had been motivated to join the protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the killing of another Minneapolis resident, 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Nicole Good, by a federal agent just over two weeks ago.

Read more: Federal Agents Kill Another Person in Minneapolis Immigration Crackdown

“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,” Michael Pretti told the Associated Press. “He felt that doing the protesting was a way to express that, you know, his care for others.”

He said he had a conversation with his son earlier this month in which he told him to be careful while 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.”

At a news conference on Saturday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Pretti was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit to carry a firearm in public and only had a few parking tickets.

Dr. Dimitri Drekonja, a former colleague of Pretti’s at the VA Hospital, described him as “a kind person who lived to help.”

“He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together,” Drekonja said in a post on BlueSky. “Will never happen now,” he added. 

Born in Illinois, Pretti graduated from Preble High School in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 2006. He went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota in 2011, before attaining a nursing license. 

Pretti was devoted to his patients at the VA hospital. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents professional employees affiliated with the Minneapolis VA Hospital, said Pretti “dedicated his life to serving American veterans.”

“While details of the incident are still emerging, one fact is already clear: this tragedy did not happen in a vacuum. It is the direct result of an administration that has chosen reckless policy, inflammatory rhetoric, and manufactured crisis over responsible leadership and de-escalation,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said in a statement.

After watching coverage of the shooting on the news, Mac Randolph recognized Pretti as the man who cared for his father, Terry Randolph, during his final days in December 2024.

“He spent three, four days in the ICU and explained everything that would happen when they turned off the oxygen,” he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “He was as compassionate a person as you could be.”

After his father passed, Randolph said Pretti took his father, an Air Force veteran, on an “honorary walk” around the facility on his gurney, draped in an American flag.

“You could see that it wasn’t the first time he had done that,” he said.

Randolph said he felt compelled to share a video on social media in which Pretti reads a final tribute to his father, Terry, who passed away at 77-years-old.

“Today, we remember that freedom is not free,” Pretti says in the video. “We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it.”

Minutes after federal agents killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday morning, the second fatal shooting by immigration authorities in the city in as many weeks, dozens of protesters arrived at the scene.

A tense stand-off ensued with immigration agents who had cordoned off the intersection. Demonstrators called the agents “Nazis” and told them to “go home.” The agents responded by mocking the protesters.

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Just a day earlier, tens of thousands of Minnesotans had filled the same city’s streets in a mass protest against the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown in the state and the killing of Renee Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three, by an immigration officer less than two miles away from Saturday’s shooting. 

Read more: Federal Agents Kill Another Person in Minneapolis Immigration Crackdown

Organizers estimated that 50,000 people attended the “Ice Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom” demonstration, organized by community leaders, clergy members, and labor unions.

Those demonstrations passed peacefully, but on Saturday, protesters clashed with federal agents for hours as the city convulsed with anger over the killing of Pretti. Federal agents fired tear gas, flash bang grenades and pepper balls.

By the afternoon, protests had taken over the intersection where the shooting had taken place and turned it into a makeshift memorial to Pretti.

Pretti was a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse who worked at the Veterans Affairs in Minneapolis. His family said he was motivated to join protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis after the killing of Renne Good on Jan. 7.

He was killed after being pepper-sprayed and tackled to the ground by Border Patrol agents on Saturday morning. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Pretti was armed and “violently resisted,” but video of the incident shared by bystanders later contradicted that claim.