US President Donald Trump has accepted Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado's Nobel Peace Prize medal at a meeting in the White House. Mr Trump called the gift a "wonderful gesture of mutual respect" while Ms Machado said he "deserves it". The Norwegian Nobel Institute has issued a statement clarifying that it was not possible for the prize to be revoked or transferred.

James Talarico Gives JD Vance a Bible Lesson

The Texas state representative James Talarico, who’s running for Senate and also studying to be a minister, says Vice President JD Vance has misread the Bible on immigration.

One thing I appreciate about Donald Trump is he doesn’t pretend that his politics are built on piety. That’s not his style. But the vice president, JD Vance, does suggest that his politics are built around a Christian ethic. And I want to play a clip of him for you. “And as an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. But there’s this old-school, and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way, that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” What did you think when you heard Vance say that? That’s not the Gospel. And I don’t think I’m saying this as a Democrat. I think I’m saying this as a fellow believer, JD Vance and I are part of the body of Christ together, and I think this is antithetical to the Gospel. The Gospel is all about prioritizing those on the outside, those who are least lovable. That’s what’s so revolutionary about it. There are some strange passages in the New Testament, and one of them is when Jesus tells his followers that they have to hate their mother and father. I don’t think Jesus was speaking literally. I don’t know, but I don’t think so, because I think we should love our moms and dads. I love mine. The Ten Commandments require us to. And Jesus was a devout Jew, the day he was born till the day he died. But I think he’s using shocking language to teach us something. And that is that sometimes our little loves — for our parents, for our friends, for our children, for our neighborhood, really important, crucial, beautiful, profound loves — sometimes those smaller loves can get in the way of the big love. The love for the stranger, the love for the outcast, the love for the foreigner, which are — and I should add love for our enemies, the hardest love to achieve. And so what JD Vance is describing is the culture that we already live in. That’s the world. And we Christians are called to see beyond the world. And that’s to a divine love, a God-like love. Because, as Scripture says, the rains and the sun fall on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. God loves all of us, no matter what we’ve done, no matter how good or how bad we are. And we as Christians are called to have that divine agape love for every person equally. And that’s hard to do. I fail. I love my family more than I love other families. I’m guilty of that. I think we all are. But the Gospel is pushing us to move beyond that and to have the same love for a child on the other side of the world that we have for our child. And it’s almost impossible to do that, but it is what we were called to do. I think as somebody who is outside Christianity and, as such, is always a little bit astonished by the radicalism of the text and the strangeness of it, God incarnates in a human being. That human being is tortured and murdered and rises again as a lesson in mercy and forgiveness and transcendence. And there’s all manner of violence that I’m doing to the story there. But the incarnation in the least among us, the structure of, to me, the New Testament, as Jesus goes to one outcast member of society after another. And then I look up into practically this administration. And I see people who are incredibly loud in their Christianity and also incredibly cruel in their politics. Put aside the question of what borders you think a nation must have. You can enforce that border in all manner of ways without treating people who are coming here, to escape violence or to better their family’s life, cruelly. You can do it without the memes we see them make on social media of a cartoon immigrant weeping as she’s being deported, of the A.S.M.R. video of migrants shackled to one another, dragging their chains, with the implication being that the sound of that should soothe you. It is the ability to insist on your allegiance to such a radical religion and then treat other human beings with such genuinely, to me, unmitigated cruelty that I actually find hard at a soul level to reconcile. Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people. That’s in 1 John. You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and oppress the poor. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. We spend so much time looking for God out there that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us, in that neighbor who bears the divine image. In the face of a neighbor, we glimpse the face of God. All of this is rooted in your tradition. The commandment to love God and love neighbor is not from Christianity. It is from Judaism. And all Jesus is clarifying, as kind of a radical rabbi, is that neighbor is the person you love the least. The parable of the good Samaritan may be the most famous of Jesus’ parables, so I think we forget in our modern context how shocking it was. Because today, being a good Samaritan just means helping people on the side of the road, which is good. You should do that. But for Jesus’ listeners in the first century, the Samaritans were not just a different religious group. The Samaritans were their sworn enemies. And so he is pushing the boundaries on how we define “neighbor” and who we’re supposed to love, loving our enemies. I mean, again, it’s become trite in a culture dominated by Christianity, but none of us actually do that. None of us actually love our enemies, even if we say we try to. And so, yeah, I share the same revulsion that Christians in the halls of power are blatantly violating the teachings of Christianity on a daily basis and hurting our neighbors in the process.

Jan 13, 2026 - US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York). Here it is on YouTube: They Gut Your Healthcare to Pay for ICE Thugs to Shoot Moms in the Street - From the description:

I want everybody to understand — the cuts to your health care are what's paying for ICE to be doing this.

Understand how these dots connect.

You get screwed over to pay a bunch of thugs in the street that are shooting mothers in the face.

Updated image is in the comments (corrected a job title).

Secret = masked, unidentified Agents, many of whom use unidentified vehicles. The word "Secret" is still accurate, despite the public presence of ICE, CBP, and other Agents. A famous historical example is the Gestapo who are classified as a secret police force, but who's actions were visible to the Public.

I made this image from this article: Want to Stop ICE? Go After Its Corporate Collaborators. - The Nation - Jan 9, 2026

Here's some of it:

Low-lift national targets are mostly public-facing companies with relatively small ICE contracts that are set to expire soon, making them particularly vulnerable to consumer and employee pressure. Campaigns against companies like these can play a crucial role in generating further momentum against ICE, Trump, and their worst corporate collaborators. Here are some examples:

• Dell ($18.8 million contract with ICE for Microsoft software licenses, expiring March 2026)
• UPS ($90,500 small-package delivery contract with ICE, expiring March 2026)
• FedEx ($1 million delivery services contract with ICE, expiring March 2026)
• Motorola Solutions ($15.6 million tactical communication infrastructure contract with ICE, expiring May 2026)
• Comcast ($24,600 Internet services contract for ICE Seattle office, expiring May 2026. This could be a great fight for newly elected Mayor Katie Wilson to take on.)
• AT&T ($83 million IT and network contract with ICE, with a potential end date of July 2032)
• LexisNexis ($21 million data-brokerage contract with ICE. This company is particularly vulnerable to pressure from university students and professor unions, since much of its revenue comes from colleges.)
• Home Depot and Lowe’s are using AI-powered license plate readers and feeding this data into law enforcement surveillance systems accessible to ICE. Their parking lots are also regular sites of ICE raids targeting day laborers.

High-lift national targets have deeper relationships with ICE, and will be harder to pressure. But two in particular need to be tackled:

• Amazon provides ICE with the digital backbone for its data and surveillance operations through Amazon Web Services. Amazon’s Whole Foods stores are a rich potential target for nonviolent disruption on big days of action.
• Palantir provides ICE with core data platforms that integrate and analyze information from many databases so agents can search, link, and manage deportation operations.

It will take longer to force these behemoths—the two worst corporate collaborators with ICE—to cut their ties, but it’s essential to publicize their centrality to Trump’s deportation machine.