ArcelorMittal confirms long-stalled French steel plant revamp

By AFP
February 10, 2026


President Emmanuel Macron, right, taking selfies with employees at ArcelorMittal's Dunkirk site on Tuesday - Copyright AFP/File Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV

ArcelorMittal said Tuesday that it would build a low-carbon electric furnace at its steel mill in northern France, after months of wrangling with officials over the project’s economic viability.

Unions feared the company would drop the plan announced two years ago to “decarbonise” the Dunkirk site by replacing two coal-fired furnaces with electric arc models.

But with President Emmanuel Macron in attendance, Arcelor executives said 1.3 billion euros ($1.55 billion) would be invested to replace one of the coal furnaces with an electric model coming online in 2029.

Half of the funding will come from Energy Efficiency Certificates (CEE), a scheme financed by contributions from energy suppliers.

“With this strategic investment, ArcelorMittal confirms… its committment to France and Europe,” the company’s head of flat steel products in Europe, Reiner Blaschek, said during Macron’s visit.

The company has been pressing European officials to protect the steel sector as it faces intense competition, in particular from Asian rivals not subject to strict emission regulations.

While posting a rise in 2025 operating profit to $2.9 billion this week, it welcomed in particular reforms to an EU “carbon tax” to offset the CO2 emissions of foreign firms

Arcelor’s Dunkirk site is among the 50 biggest industrial sources of greenhouse gases in France, the government says.

With employees worried of job cuts if Arcelor scales back its European operations, leftist lawmakers have proposed nationalising the French operations, with a bill set for debate in the Senate on February 25.

“I must thank President Macron and the French government who — very early on — understood the challenges the European steel industry was facing,” Arcelor’s CEO Aditya Mittal said in a statement.

“Their support, and in particular their efforts to drive changes to the mechanisms defending the steel market, will benefit the entire steel industry in Europe, starting here in Dunkirk.”

Till death do us bark: Brazilian state lets pets be buried with owners

By AFP
February 10, 2026


A woman walks her dog at sunset in Porto Alegre, Brazil - Copyright AFP STRINGER

In pet-mad Brazil, the state of Sao Paulo will allow animals to be buried in family graves starting Tuesday, with a law recognizing “the emotional bond” that exists between humans and their household critters.

Brazil has the world’s third largest pet population, with 160 million animal companions, according to data from the Pet Brasil Institute.

The law was inspired by local dog Bob Coveiro, who lived for 10 years in a municipal cemetery after his owner was buried there.

When the dog died in 2021, he was allowed to be buried alongside his human.

Conservative governor Tarcisio de Freitas on Tuesday signed the so-called Bob Coveiro law that will allow pets to be buried in family graves or mausoleums across Sao Paulo state.

The measure comes as the country of 213 million people has been gripped by outrage over the death of a beloved community street dog named “Orelha” (Ear) in the southern coastal city Florianopolis — who was brutally killed by a group of teenagers, allegedly from wealthy families.

The case — which even drew the attention of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — sparked protests in several main cities, and local media are following every twist and turn in the investigation.

With a declining birth rate and burgeoning middle class, Brazil’s strong pet culture is reflected in a growing range of services for pets, from luxury spas to hotels.

In January, Sao Paulo passed another law recognizing the “cultural significance” of the ubiquitous caramel-colored Brazilian street dog known as a “Caramelo” — which featured in a 2025 Netflix film.

The goal of the law was to “combat prejudice against animals without a defined breed.”

The secret to an elephant’s grace? Whiskers

By AFP
February 12, 2026


The whiskers on the trunks of elephants have unique properties that grant them a highly evolved sense of touch - Copyright AFP John MACDOUGALL

Maggy DONALDSON

An elephant’s trunk can surpass a human’s height and lift trees — a marvel of strength that’s conversely so gentle it can grasp a tortilla chip without breaking it.

So how do the thick-skinned animals with poor eyesight pull off such delicate tasks? In a word, whiskers.

New research published Thursday in the journal Science details how the whiskers that cover an elephant’s trunk have unique properties that lend the largest land mammals remarkable dexterity.

Elephants are born with about 1,000 of these bristles, lead author Andrew Schulz told AFP, many of them anchored in the trunk’s wrinkles to act like feelers and help the animals assess their surroundings.

A team of engineers, materials scientists and neuroscientists analyzed the geometry, porosity and material properties of these whiskers, and expected them to mimic the whiskers found on mice or rats — circular at a cross-section, solid and uniformly stiff.

In fact, elephant whiskers are almost blade-like, with a porous architecture similar to sheep horns, which helps with shock absorption while eating.

And a gradiated shape and structure from base to tip allows for an amplified sense of touch, Schulz said.

“The craziest finding that we had, I think, was that these whiskers have this transition from a really, really rigid base to a very, very soft tip,” said the researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany.

Part of elephants’ whisker evolution is to prevent breakage, said Schulz. Unlike most mammals with whiskers, those of elephants don’t grow back.



– Elephant-inspired advances –



Many animals have sensory hairs that can act as a radar, but few quite so precise as the elephant’s.

Schulz said a rat’s whiskers, for example, also picks up vibrations — but it’s akin to smashing down a handful of keys on a piano.

To an elephant’s whiskers, it’s more like hitting specific notes.

Researchers voiced excitement that cat whiskers have a similar kind of material intelligence and stiffness gradient.

The elephant’s gradiated structure can help with things like object differentiation while foraging and eating — which they spend the vast majority of their time doing.

Elephants are also well-documented using their trunks for social touch — “they’re using the outside of their trunk,” Schulz said, “so they’re using those portions that are covered in the whiskers.”

Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell — a behavioral ecologist and elephant expert who has focused on how the giant mammals communicate and detect signals through their feet — called the findings “fascinating.”

“This is really exciting for me to see just more affirmation of how sensitive their trunks really are,” she told AFP.

“There’s some really interesting, intriguing thoughts for the next steps, for what one could ask in terms of the behavioral application of this,” O’Connell-Rodwell said.

“Not only would this allow them to say, reach up into a tree and feel around for fruit or a seed pod with better agility, but it also has implications for communication.”

There’s also a wealth of technological possibilities elephant whiskers could inspire, not least when it comes to robotics, Schulz said.

And “part of the novelty of this work is functional gradients exist everywhere in biology,” the researcher said.

The stiff base-to-soft tip structure also appears in rotator cuffs or ACL ligaments, he said for example — and better understanding those structures and how they might impact sensing could perhaps allow for improved repair techniques.

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Trump’s Concentration Camp Build-Out Includes Nearly $40 Billion for Warehouse Conversions

“Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours,” wrote talk show host Thom Hartmann recently. “History isn’t whispering its warning: It’s shouting.”


An empty warehouse is seen in Chester, New York on February 8, 2026. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement proposes a facility at a warehouse roughly two hours from New York City, but many locals and officials have objected to the plan.
(Photo by Matthew Hoen/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Feb 13, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda has supercharged opposition in cities where he has deployed federal agents to conduct raids, and communities in states including New York and Missouri are already working to block the next step the Department of Homeland Security plans to take in its push for mass deportations: acquiring massive warehouses across the country to use as immigrant detention centers.

US immigration and Customs Enforcement documents that were provided to Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire—one of the states where ICE aims to acquire a building and retrofit it to house at least 1,000 people at a time—show that the administration plans to spend $38.3 billion on its mass detention plan.

US Military Helping Trump to Build Massive Network of ‘Concentration Camps,’ Navy Contract Reveals


It would buy 16 buildings across the country to use as “regional processing centers” that could hold 1,000-1,500 people. Another eight detention centers would hold as many as 10,000 people at a time, with the detainees awaiting deportation.

The Washington Post reported that a review of state budget data showed that the amount of money the White House intends to pour into the project over the next several months is larger than the total annual spending of 22 US states.

“Thirty-eight billion dollars,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.). “That’s what Trump is spending to turn warehouses into human holding facilities. Not on schools. Not on healthcare. Not on veterans. On warehousing humans.”

Moulton also condemned ICE’s claim that the new network of detention facilities will ensure the “safe and humane civil detention” of immigrants.

At least six people died in ICE detention centers in January, and one of the deaths, that of Geraldo Lunas Campos at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, was ruled a homicide.

Medical neglect and abusive treatment—including some that amounts to torture—has been reported at multiple facilities.

ICE has already spent more than $690 million purchasing at least eight warehouses in Maryland, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in recent weeks. Documents posted on Ayotte’s website show the agency is pursuing additional acquisitions in New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, and Georgia.

Communities are already rallying against the plan and questioning whether the small towns ICE has selected have sufficient water and sewer infrastructure to support thousands of people detained in a warehouse.

In New York, Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) said last week that 25,000 people in his district have signed a petition opposing the use of a local warehouse to house immigrants and pointed to the “major corruption and graft” evident in the plan to purchase and run the warehouses.

“The site in my district that’s proposed is owned by one of Trump’s multibillionaire donors, who would directly financially benefit from this site,” said Ryan, referring to former Trump adviser Carl Icahn.

As Common Dreams reported Friday, private prison firm GEO Group raked in a record $254 million in profits last year as it secured contracts with the Trump administration to build new ICE facilities across the US.

ICE has attempted to make purchases in Oklahoma City; Kansas City, Missouri; and in Virginia, but those plans have fallen through, with the Kansas City Council passing a five-year ban on new nonmunicipal detention centers after the public learned that DHS was the potential buyer of a warehouse in the city.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has also joined his constituents in speaking out against ICE’s $100 million purchase of a warehouse in his state to house at least 1,000 people at a time.

“This administration is spitting in the face of communities from Minneapolis to Maryland and wasting our tax dollars. We won’t back down,” said Van Hollen late last month.



The details of the administration’s planned conversion of warehouses were reported less than two weeks after Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insider revealed that a US Navy contract originally valued at $10 billion “has ballooned to a staggering $55 billion ceiling to expedite President Donald Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ agenda” and to help build “a sprawling network of migrant detention centers across the US.”

At Common Dreams last week, talk show host and author Thom Hartmann wrote that the warehouses Trump plans to use to hold people—purchased by an agency whose own data shows it has largely been detaining people with no criminal records—are best described as concentration camps like those used in Nazi Germany.

“By the end of his first year, [Adolf] Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps, facilities that were often improvised in factories, prisons, castles, and other buildings,” wrote Hartmann. “By comparison, today ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across America,” with hopes to “more than double both numbers in the coming months.”

“Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem. And that’s exactly what ICE is building now,” he continued. “History isn’t whispering its warning: It’s shouting.”

Servicemembers thrown into chaos as Hegseth blacklists colleges they can attend

Matthew Chapman
February 13, 2026 
RAW STORY

Pete Hegseth (Reuters)

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has created a nightmare for some servicemembers with a new policy that seeks to blacklist several colleges and universities from military tuition assistance, CNN reported on Friday.

Under the new policy, outlined in a memo last week, "Military officers could soon find dozens of top colleges and universities across the United States abruptly off limits for tuition assistance," as a part of Hegseth's "campaign against schools he describes as being biased against the US military and sponsoring 'troublesome partnerships with foreign adversaries.'"

The memo commands the military to “evaluate all existing graduate programs for active-duty members at Ivy League universities and any other universities that similarly diminish critical thinking and have significant adversary involvement, and determine whether they deliver cost-effective, strategic education for future senior leaders when compared to public universities and military masters programs.”

"The uncertainty about tuition assistance and eligible programs for Defense Department funding has led to confusion and concern amongst service members who have already applied or been accepted to these schools," said the report.

Additionally, the report continues, officials "said they were concerned it amounted to an attempt to purge diversity of thought from the military."

This comes as Hegseth, who has styled himself "Secretary of War" by an executive decree that carries no legal weight, got a brutal smackdown in federal court over his attempts to enact military punishment against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for his role in a video reminding active-duty troops they have a responsibility to refuse orders that would constitute war crimes.

Kristi Noem's DHS secretly demands tech giants fork over names of ICE critics: report

Erik De La Garza
February 13, 2026 
RAW STORY




U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gestures during a press conference to discuss ongoing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations, as part of U.S. President Donald Trump's immigration policy, at One World Trade Center in New York City, U.S., January 8, 2026. REUTERS/David 'Dee' Delgado

The Department of Homeland Security has expanded efforts to identify Americans who criticize or track Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sending hundreds of legal requests to major tech companies seeking information behind social media accounts, according to a report in The New York Times.

In recent months, DHS has issued administrative subpoenas to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord requesting names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other identifying data tied to accounts that comment on or monitor ICE activity. Four government officials and tech employees familiar with the requests told The Times the subpoenas have targeted accounts that lack real names and have criticized ICE or shared the locations of agents.

The Times reviewed two subpoenas sent to Meta over the past six months.

“Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said,” according to the Friday report. “The tech companies, which can choose whether or not to provide the information, have said they review government requests before complying.”

In some cases, users were notified and given 10 to 14 days to challenge the subpoenas in court.

“The government is taking more liberties than they used to,” said Steve Loney, a senior supervising attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. “It’s a whole other level of frequency and lack of accountability.”

DHS said it has “broad administrative subpoena authority” but declined to answer questions about the scope of the requests. In court, department lawyers under the Trump administration have argued the subpoenas are necessary to protect ICE agents in the field.

DOJ attorney Sarah Balkissoon said DHS was acting “within their power to investigate threats to its own officers or impediments to their officers,” according to court documents reviewed by the Times.

A Google spokesperson said the company’s review process “is designed to protect user privacy while meeting our legal obligations.” Meta, Reddit, and Discord declined to comment.

'Obama was created': GOP lawmaker claims first Black president 'not organic' man

David Edwards
February 13, 2026 

RAW STORY

 

The Benny Show/screengrab

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) asserted that former President Barack Obama was "created" and not an "organic" person.

During an interview with Burchett on Friday, MAGA influencer Benny Johnson suggested that Obama was implicated in covering up the crimes of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

"Like, Obama's the one, Obama's the one who's, like, sort of skated on this," Johnson argued. "And nobody's really brought up his name. But wait a second, like, the vast majority of Epstein's most heinous crimes took place while Barack Obama was president. Epstein got out of jail right as Barack Obama was being put into office."

"Obama is, like, signing executive orders," he continued. "You can, like, tie all this back to the Rothschild Bank. Like, he's, like, doing all this stuff. And he's, like, somehow, like, Obama's getting zero pushback on this. Why is nobody asking Obama, like, why didn't you do something about Jeffrey Epstein?"

"Because President Obama was created," Burchett alleged. "He was not, he's not organic. I mean, you pick this obscure guy from college who has zero records you have college professors that don't remember him ever being there and he runs and he's and all of a sudden people drop out of races and he's unopposed and he goes from a state senator to a to a U.S. senator to an unknown to be in the United States because he was created."

"They found somebody that fit their mold," he added. "But that's the way Obama was. You know, he fit the suit, and he was, he's a good-looking and articulate guy, and, you know, had a couple of kids and came up through the corrupt Chicago machine."

"And we got to start realizing this. And the conservatives just aren't good at creating anybody."

Seething Trump froze out 2 Senate Republicans after racist video criticism: report

Daniel Hampton
February 13, 2026 

RAW STORY


Donald Trump delivers remarks in the Oval Office. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

A simmering President Donald Trump privately fumed over the weekend at Mar-a-Lago at Republicans who dared to criticize his social media post sharing a racist video about the Obamas, according to a new report Friday.

After refusing to apologize, Trump spent days stewing and plotting payback against GOP allies who spoke out, CNN's Alayna Treene reported.

The targets of his ire: Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), the sole Black Republican senator, and Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL).

“The president felt he could’ve handled that matter privately,” a senior Trump administration official told CNN about Scott. “He was like, ‘We work together all the time. He didn’t need to comment publicly.’”

Trump reportedly questioned the lawmakers' loyalty for publicly condemning the racist video and unleashed expletives while declaring Britt dead to him.

The video depicting the Obamas as apes stayed online for nearly 12 hours before removal — and only after GOP backlash forced the president's hand. Trump refused to accept responsibility, blaming an unnamed staffer while insisting "I didn't make a mistake."

The president and many of his closest aides privately believe Scott’s response led to the story gaining nationwide attention, according to the report.

Far-right activist Laura Loomer fueled his rage by presenting printouts of the senators' critical statements. She then posted that she was "compiling a list" of Republicans who "attacked" Trump with "false accusations of racism."

Trump rewarded loyalist Sens. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) with golf invitations and Super Bowl party access, while freezing out Scott and Britt during the GOP's Palm Beach winter retreat.

Scott's office stayed silent on the report, while Britt's blasted the reporting as "classic fake news," touting her voting record alignment with Trump.

Another trusted institution has bitten the dust under Trump

Robert Reich
February 13, 2026 

RAW STORY

Donald Trump gestures as he speaks in the White House press room. 

REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Producer Alicia Hastey departed CBS News Wednesday, saying the work she came to do was “increasingly becoming impossible,” as stories were now evaluated “not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”

Whose ideological expectations was Hastey referring to? Would it be impertinent for me to suggest it’s the sociopath in the Oval Office?

Hastey’s criticism came a little over two weeks after Bari Weiss, the anti-“woke” opinion journalist who became editor-in-chief at CBS News, unveiled her “21st-century” vision at a town hall meeting.

Weiss told producers and staff they were free to leave if they didn’t like it. Since then, at least six out of 20 CBS Evening News producers have accepted buyouts.

At that town hall meeting Weiss also named a bunch of new contributors — including the anti-aging influencer Peter Attia. In the latest tranche of Epstein files, Attia appears over 1,700 times, including in an email in which he tells Epstein that “p—y is, indeed, low carb.”

In a missive to the newsroom, Weiss declared that “We love America” should be a guiding principle for the relaunch of the CBS Evening News.

Meanwhile, Weiss has replaced Evening News anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois with Tony Dokoupil — who was best known for hassling the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for his “extremist” belief that apartheid is morally wrong.

In one of his first broadcasts, Dokoupil accepted without question Israel’s justification for violating the terms of the ceasefire when it killed three journalists in Gaza, reporting only that “Israel said it was targeting a group operating a drone affiliated with Hamas.”

Weiss faced blowback in December when she shelved a 60 Minutes report about Venezuelans being deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison hours before it was set to air.

Sharyn Alfonsi, a long-standing 60 Minutes correspondent who reported the segment, accused CBS News of pulling it for “political” reasons.

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” she wrote in a note to the CBS News Team. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

The segment later aired on Jan. 18, drawing more than 5 million viewers.

The story CBS posted about Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis reported that “the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot Renee Good last week in Minneapolis, Jonathan Ross, suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident, according to two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition.”

No identifiable source was given for CBS’s assertion of “internal bleeding.” A CBS News staffer reported “huge internal concern” that the source was an anonymous leak by the Trump administration meant for an outlet they could trust to run it, no questions asked.

Weiss doesn’t exactly report to Trump, of course. Trump runs CBS News the way he runs Venezuela — with a widely understood threat that he’ll wreak havoc if it doesn’t do what he wants.

As Trump told Dokoupil recently in a rambling nearly 13-minute interview, if Kamala Harris had won the presidential election in 2024, “you probably wouldn’t have a job right now.”

Perhaps CBS News didn’t edit Dokoupil’s rambling interview with Trump because, moments after it ended, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt conveyed Trump’s threat that “if it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.”

You see the way Trump now controls CBS News. Dokoupil is Weiss’s newly minted anchor. Weiss is David Ellison’s newly minted head of CBS News. David Ellison is his father’s (Larry Ellison) newly minted head of Paramount, which is the new owner of CBS. Larry Ellison is a pal of Trump’s who contributes to Trump’s super PAC. And Trump? He allowed Ellison to buy CBS and now has the power to take the prized Warner Bros Discovery out of the clutches of Netflix and deliver it to Ellison as well.

Among David Ellison’s first moves at CBS was to gut DEI policies, appoint right-wing hack Kenneth R. Weinstein to a new “ombudsman” role, and appoint Weiss.

I’m old enough to remember when CBS News would never have surrendered to a demagogic president. But that was when CBS News — the home of Edward R. Murrow (who also revealed to America the danger of Joe McCarthy) and Walter Cronkite — was independent of the rest of CBS. And when the top management of CBS felt they had responsibilities to the American public that transcended making money for CBS’s investors.

America can survive without a 60 Minutes it can trust, just as we can survive without trustworthy editorial pages of the Washington Post — whose owner, Jeff Bezos, has demanded it reflect right-wing capitalism and whose newsroom he just gutted.

But at some point, as Trump continues to repress criticism of him and his regime, American democracy is compromised beyond repair.

**

Here, in contrast to the Trump suck-up CBS News has become, is the courageous CBS News’s Edward R. Murrow, from April 13, 1954:



Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

These secretive decisions show a citizens' revolt against Trump is gathering serious pace

Robert Reich
February 12, 2026 
RAW STORY

Donald Trump gestures during remarks in Washington, D.C. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque


I wanted to highlight and give you context for some important news that broke on Wednesday.

The news is that Donald Trump’s federal prosecutors have failed to secure an indictment against six Democratic lawmakers — all veterans of the military or the intelligence community — who posted a video in November reminding active-duty members of the military and intelligence community that they were obligated to refuse illegal orders.

The video enraged Trump.

“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” he wrote on his social media site.

He shared another post saying, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

Days later, the six lawmakers disclosed that the FBI had contacted the House and Senate, requesting interviews with them, indicating that a criminal investigation was under way.

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. and a longtime Trump ally, promptly asked a grand jury to indict them.

But the grand jury refused.

I can’t emphasize enough how rare it is for a grand jury to refuse to issue an indictment that’s requested by a federal prosecutor, because prosecutors exert so much control over them.

Grand juries aren’t like juries in regular trials. They meet in secret — 16 to 23 citizens summoned from the community.

No judge is present. No lawyers who represent defendants are present. No witnesses appear. Prosecutors are in total command — presenting evidence of a crime and asking grand juries to indict.

And the evidentiary standard is not whether a crime occurred “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but merely whether there is “probable cause” of a federal crime.

It’s not surprising, then, that federal grand juries have issued indictments in more than 99 percent of cases prosecutors bring to them. (For example, in 2010, of 162,000 federal cases federal prosecutors presented to grand juries seeking an indictment, only 11 resulted in grand juries deciding not to indict.)

As Judge Sol Wachtler, the former New York jurist, famously said, prosecutors are in such complete control of grand juries that they could get them to indict a ham sandwich.

But in 2025, something odd began happening. Federal grand juries in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Virginia refused to indict. At least seven of these cases involved clashes between protesters and federal officers. A grand jury in Virginia twice refused to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Then came yesterday’s grand jury’s rejection of Trump’s demand that the six lawmakers he targeted be criminally prosecuted.

It’s an amazing spectacle. Ordinary people serving on grand juries are refusing to indict people who have become entangled in Trump’s viciousness. A citizen’s revolt.

Because of the secretive nature of grand juries, it’s impossible to know for sure why this has been happening. But the rejections suggest that grand jurors may have had enough of prosecutors seeking harsh charges in a highly politicized environment.

After the grand jury refused to indict him and five others, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) called out “an outrageous abuse of power by Donald Trump and his lackeys. Donald Trump wants every American to be too scared to speak out against him. The most patriotic thing any of us can do is not back down.”

He’s exactly right. The Justice Department and its federal prosecutors have abandoned any pretense at neutral justice. They’re now flagrant flaks for Trump.

On Wednesday, Republican senators weighed in against the regime.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) accused the regime of using “political lawfare” to try to lock up its perceived enemies: “Thankfully in this instance, a jury saw the attempted indictments for what they really were.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the Judiciary Committee Chair, said: “I think our law enforcement people ought to be spending their time on making our community safe and going after real law breakers.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) offered: “That’s the judicial system at work.”

At Trump’s insistence, Pirro has opened a criminal investigation of Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve. The DOJ is also pursuing a criminal investigations of Democratic officials in Minnesota who opposed Trump’s immigration crackdown. It arrested the journalist Don Lemon over his presence at a church protest in Minneapolis. Last week the FBI searched an elections office in the Atlanta area, based on debunked claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Not only are Senate Republicans rising up against this but so are ordinary Americans. They’re — we’re — saying no to Trump’s vicious prosecutions, and no to the federal prosecutors pursing them. We’re saying no to Republican candidates in special elections. We’re saying no to ICE and Border Patrol troops in our cities. We’re shouting “ICE OUT” and “F--- ICE” at sporting events. We’re saying no at marches and demonstrations.

A citizen’s revolt is occurring across America against the mad king, including places — such as grand juries — where revolts almost never occurred before.

Mark my words, friends: We will be stronger for having gone through this.

Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org