Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
The Washington Post on nuclear innovation in the age of AI
As America’s energy demands grow exponentially, the country won’t be able to keep up without more nuclear power. For decades, the climate-friendly industry has been held back by overly burdensome regulations, but that’s beginning to change.
In the 1960s, plants took about four years to build, and they cost, in today’s dollars, about $1,500 per kilowatt of electricity generated. Now the idea of building a reactor in less than a decade is unheard of, and the cost of construction is six times greater.
The Energy Department took steps this month to exempt certain advanced reactors from duplicative environmental reviews. It’s also flirting with relaxing radiation standards and eliminating some over-the-top security requirements at nuclear plants.
Defenders of the status quo try to prey on people’s fears of nuclear technology. NIMBYs and radical environmentalists pretend that overregulation is not actually the reason for the industry’s malaise and is instead necessary to instill public confidence.
This ignores the many undue burdens that federal agencies have placed on projects. Sometimes, regulators have even forced changes to designs mid-construction, as happened in 2009, when they required containment buildings for reactor developments in Georgia and South Carolina to be able to withstand direct aircraft strikes, driving up costs and delaying construction.
It’s no surprise that regulatory costs surged after the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, but the pendulum has swung too far. Nuclear developers have a point about onerous documentation rules. The administration would do well to emphasize regulatory stability, as well as explore how technology such as artificial intelligence can help alleviate paperwork burdens.
Capital is already pouring into the nuclear industry from big firms like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, which was founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos. Yet billions in new investment won’t mean much if the regulatory state refuses to challenge long-held norms.
Take, for example, the government’s overly stringent radiation standards. The Trump administration has indicated it will reform a decades-old rule requiring nuclear power plants to keep levels of exposure to radiation “as low as reasonably achievable.”
The rule has led hypercautious regulators to mandate that plants minimize exposure to well below levels that people experience annually from the natural world, such as from the sun. That has forced operators to incorporate concrete shields into their reactor designs, which raise costs and limit how long employees can work at a given time.
The science underpinning the radiation rule is mushy, at best. It’s based on a theory that because radiation poses a serious cancer risk at high doses, it must also pose a low risk at lower doses. But researchers have hotly debated whether this is true, which is hard to measure given how many factors contribute to cancer risk. Meanwhile, coal plants are subject to no standards on radiation, even though they release far greater levels of radioactive material to the public than nuclear plants.
No standard should be a be sacred cow, especially as new designs for advanced reactors promise greater safety. Everyone loses when bureaucrats snuff out nuclear innovation.
The New York Times says Pam Bondi’s malice, incompetence protected perpetrators and stripped victims of privacy
The hearing in the House Judiciary Committee room this week offered a grim tableau of the state of American justice. Sitting in the gallery were victims of Jeffrey Epstein, women who have waited decades for clarity and accountability. Sitting before them was Attorney General Pam Bondi. When offered the opportunity to apologize to these women for the Department of Justice’s disastrous handling of the Epstein files, Ms. Bondi didn’t just decline; she sneered. Instead, she demanded that Democrats apologize to President Trump.
She proceeded to subject committee members from both parties to schoolyard taunts. She called the ranking member a “washed-up, loser lawyer.” She derided Thomas Massie — a Kentucky Republican who helped force the release of the Epstein documents after Mr. Trump and Ms. Bondi had kept them hidden — as a “failed politician.” And at one point, in a bizarre non sequitur, she responded to a question she did not like by boasting that the Dow Jones industrial average had surpassed 50,000 points.
Ms. Bondi’s performance was more than just political theater. It was a final indignity in a process that has victimized Mr. Epstein’s victims all over again. Under the guise of transparency, the Justice Department has managed to expose the victims to further humiliation while shielding the powerful behind a wall of redactions.
The department’s release of these files has been dominated by incompetence. Ms. Bondi has long had the authority to make them public, but she spent months refusing and yielded only after Congress forced her hand. Her department was then tasked with a clear mandate: release the information while protecting the victims’ privacy, national security and active investigations. Instead, in a grotesque failure, the D.O.J. uploaded dozens of unredacted images to its website, including nude photographs of young women and possibly teenagers. As Annie Farmer, a survivor who testified against Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s partner and associate, noted, it is “hard to imagine a more egregious way of not protecting victims.” Ms. Bondi’s department shattered the trust of women who had already been betrayed by the legal system once before.
Yet observe the Justice Department’s selective efficiency: While it was careless with the dignity of survivors, it has been more fastidious about protecting the reputations of some members of the elite. Mr. Massie and Representative Ro Khanna, the Californian who has also been central to the release of the documents, have reviewed the unredacted files, and they report that nearly 80 percent of the material remains hidden, including the identities of six wealthy, powerful men. The Justice Department has not even offered a convincing public explanation for these redactions. The Trump administration’s history of disingenuousness around the Epstein files — and its use of the Justice Department to protect political allies and investigate perceived enemies — offers ample reason to be skeptical. This appears to be a weaponized document dump disguised as a reckoning.
A close reading of the released emails suggests that what is being protected is the comfort of a class of people who believed they were untouchable. The files released reveal a merito-aristocracy that traded favors, influence and access. They depict a transactional world where Kathryn Ruemmler, a former White House counsel for Barack Obama, could joke with a registered sex offender, strategize about her career prospects and accept gifts of designer bags. Howard Lutnick, Mr. Trump’s commerce secretary, claimed he “barely had anything to do” with Mr. Epstein but in fact visited his private island. We read of elites seeking entry to golf clubs, advice on dating, introductions to celebrities and college admission for their children.
The files reveal a barter economy of powerful people who, at best, looked the other way. As Anand Giridharadas has noted, these documents show us “how the elite behave when no one is watching.” They reveal a world where character is irrelevant and connection is everything.
Mr. Trump’s role in the selective release deserves attention. While he has railed against the swamp, his administration continues to hide vast amounts of Epstein information. The president’s own history with Mr. Epstein apparently included a bizarre birthday note wishing that “every day be another wonderful secret.” And some of the redactions involved Mr. Trump. A redaction box, for example, appeared over a photograph of him delivering a speech. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said that he also saw redacted pages that involved Mr. Epstein’s lawyers quoting Mr. Trump as saying that he never asked Mr. Epstein to leave Mar-a-Lago — a claim at odds with Mr. Trump’s descriptions.
Ms. Bondi’s refusal to look the survivors in the eye was symbolic of a broader failure. The Department of Justice had an opportunity to finally prioritize the women who were preyed upon by Mr. Epstein and his circle. Instead, through a combination of malice and incompetence, it has done the opposite. It has stripped the victims of their privacy while wrapping perpetrators in a cloak of state secrecy.
Americans should not accept vague excuses for protecting the identities of Mr. Epstein’s associates. A two-tiered justice system that coddles the powerful and revictimizes the vulnerable is a violation of American values. The survivors in that hearing room deserved an apology. More than that, they deserve the truth about Mr. Epstein and his friends, unspun and fully exposed.
The Guardian says the U.S. is in reverse regarding the climate crisis
Devastating wildfires, flooding and winter storms were among the 23 extreme weather and climate-related disasters in the US which cost more than a billion dollars last year – at an estimated total loss of $115bn. The last three years have shattered previous records for such events. Last Wednesday, scientists said that we are closer than ever to the point after which global heating cannot be stopped.
Just one day later, Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, announced the elimination of the Obama-era endangerment finding which underpins federal climate regulations. Scrapping it is just one part of Mr Trump’s assault on environmental controls and promotion of fossil fuels. But it may be his most consequential. Any fragment of hope may lie in the fact that a president who has called global heating a “hoax” framed this primarily as about deregulation – perhaps because the science is now so widely accepted even in the US.
The administration claimed, without evidence, that Americans would save $1.3tn. Never mind insurance or healthcare costs; a recent report found that US earnings would be 12% higher without the climate crisis. The Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse called the decision “corruption, plain and simple”. In 2024, Mr Trump reportedly urged 20 fossil fuel tycoons to stump up $1bn for his presidential campaign – while vowing to remove controls on the industry.
In the same week as this reckless and destructive US decision, it emerged that China had recorded its 21st month of flat or slightly falling carbon emissions. As Washington tears up environmental regulations, Beijing is extending carbon reporting requirements. China remains the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, though its per capita and cumulative historical emissions are still far behind those of the US. But clean energy drove more than 90% of its investment growth last year.
The Carbon Brief website, which published the emissions analysis, says the numbers suggest that the decline in China’s carbon intensity – emissions per unit of GDP – was below the target set in the last five-year plan, making it hard to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement. The shift in emissions may not prove enduring. There is fear that China’s focus may change; the next five-year plan, due in March, will be key. Some subsidies for renewable power have already been withdrawn. The installation of huge quantities of renewable energy infrastructure has been accompanied by a surge in constructing coal-fired power plants, though the hope is that these are intended primarily as a fallback.
There are other grave concerns, including evidence of the use of forced labour of Uyghur Muslims in solar-panel production in Xinjiang. China’s chokehold on critical minerals hampers the ability of others to develop their own technology. And while its cheap renewables technology has resulted in the cheapest electricity in history, it has also hit manufacturers in other countries.
No one can compensate for the grim reversal of belated US action on emissions. There is also a vacuum in climate diplomacy that China shows no signs of filling. But Beijing has a vested interest in encouraging others to cut emissions, even if some nations now want to challenge its “green mercantilism”. In contrast, US billionaires look forward to prospering at the cost of wallets and lives – not only at home, but around the world.
The Philadelphia Inquirer on Trump’s attempt to whitewash the President’s House exhibit
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore the slave exhibits that were removed last month from the President’s House on Independence Mall.
Fittingly, the legal rebuke came during Black History Month as Trump tries to rewrite America’s history of slavery, undermine voting rights and rollback civil rights efforts designed to live up to the Founders’ vision of a country where all are created equal.
Even better, the ruling came on Presidents Day, a federal holiday first set aside to honor George Washington, who voluntarily gave up power, unlike Trump who was criminally indicted for trying to overturn an election he lost.
In a poetic touch that feels conjured by Octavius Catto or William Still, the Trump administration lost in federal court on a lawsuit brought by the City of Philadelphia, which is headed by its first African American woman mayor.
The President’s House exhibit was created to recognize the enslaved people who lived in Washington’s home in Philadelphia while he was president. Like the nearby Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the President’s House is an essential part of American history.
Trump wants to airbrush the parts of American history that do not fit with his racist record and white supremacist messaging. But understanding how slavery shaped the economic, social and political forces across the United States is crucial to addressing the systemic racism and inequality that persists today.
U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe called out Trump’s cruel attempt to take the country backward in unsparing terms. She began her 40-page opinion by quoting directly from 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian novel about a totalitarian regime:
“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.”
She compared the Trump administration’s claim that it can unilaterally remove exhibits it does not like to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts,” Rufe wrote. “It does not.”
Rufe, who was appointed to the federal bench by former President George W. Bush, did not buy the Trump’s administration’s authoritarian argument: “(T)he government claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control.”
She added: “The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power.”
Rufe dismissed those claims and ordered the federal government to “restore the President’s House Site to its physical status as of January 21, 2026,” the day before the exhibits were removed.
But Rufe did not set a deadline to restore the displays. She should order the exhibits restored as fast as they came down.
The Trump administration will likely do everything it can to drag out a resolution.
There is no time to waste in ending this racist charade.
The country is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is a national embarrassment that the President’s House exhibits are missing while the city expects 1.5 million visitors this year.
Philadelphia is the birthplace of America. It is here the Founders declared their independence from King George III. Their list of grievances against the king echo some of Trump’s abuses.
Judge Rufe’s order struck a blow for telling the truth, something Washington would appreciate.
“It is not disputed that President Washington owned slaves,” Rufe wrote. “Each person who visits the President’s House and does not learn of the realities of founding-era slavery receives a false account of this country’s history.”
Somewhere the slaves who labored at the President’s House smiled.
Say their names: Ona Judge, Hercules Posey, Moll, Giles, Austin, Richmond, Paris, Joe Richardson, Christopher Sheels, and William Lee.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune says citizens should demand the truth, accountability as Operation Metro Surge winds down
Whatever their views on immigration enforcement, Minnesotans should welcome the announcement by border czar Tom Homan on Feb. 12 that Operation Metro Surge soon will end, and that a significant drawdown of the more than 3,000 agents who had been sent to the state under federal orders is underway.
They should also welcome the vow by Gov. Tim Walz to focus state policies and legislation on recovery from the impacts of the disruption to normal life. The state’s legislative session begins Feb. 17.
But as the Department of Homeland Security declares its mission accomplished and begins its retreat, many are left wrestling with an infuriating if not incendiary question. What was the point of the bloody spectacle? Stripped of politics and posturing, a state and a nation deserve clear answers.
When Operation Metro Surge descended on Minnesota, it was described by its champions as a mission to combat fraud tied to Somali American communities and to make the Twin Cities safer. That’s not remotely close to what we witnessed over the course of the past 70 days.
Indeed, it is the stunning gap between the stated purpose of the federal invasion of Minnesota, the campaign’s actual execution and the outcomes that occurred that completely undercuts the notion of a focused federal law enforcement operation. What we witnessed was a campaign steeped in blame and punishment. The fraud-based premise of the surge was arguably never more than a Trojan horse.
Homan, who said that DHS agents will now be redeployed to other cities, lauded the Minnesota mission as a law enforcement win and said that a deeply shaken and fatigued Minneapolis is now a much safer place.
By what immediate or lasting measure, we ask? There has been little to no transparency to the spectacle we have just endured.
How many violent offenders were actually removed? If the goal was rooting out fraud or targeting dangerous individuals, why were broad sweeps conducted that netted people with little or no criminal history? If the goal was safety, why were these heavily armed and masked agents deployed in a manner that visibly destabilized neighborhoods, shuttered business and splintered families who had committed no crimes?
Both of their deaths, officially ruled homicides, deserve a full investigation by the U.S. federal government. To date, the federal government has shown little to no interest in determining whether the deaths were legally justified. Good and Pretti will not be forgotten, and an accounting for their killings is not optional.
There is no mistaking the reality that the harm that Minnesota will continue to bear goes beyond the abduction of children, the hollowing of schools, the wanton street persecution of Americans or even the two deaths. We will now be forced to grapple with “generational trauma” that goes beyond far beyond immigrant communities, as Walz aptly put it.
Trust in government — already fragile — has been further eroded. But trust can and must be rebuilt. There’s no doubt that Operation Metro Surge induced people to take sides. Which side can declare victory will be in the eye of the beholder, but the many Minnesotans who dedicated themselves to peaceful resistance to aggressive policy can be proud.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, ever the Minnesota booster and who’s now running for governor, offered this observation with which we wholeheartedly agree:
“Our state has shown the world how to protect our democracy and take care of our neighbors. ICE withdrawing from Minnesota is just the beginning. We need accountability for the lives lost and the extraordinary abuses of power at the hands of ICE agents, and we must see a complete overhaul of the agency.”
Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer, meanwhile, a Republican, laid blame on Minnesota Democrats for the unrest during the ICE surge. He called it “a direct result of radical sanctuary state and city policies in Minnesota by preventing local law enforcement from working together with federal law enforcement,” while testifying Feb. 12 in front of a Senate committee about the shootings of Good and Pretti.
There are those who undoubtedly agree with him. But as federal agents depart, the state still awaits answers — ones that will require far more than withdrawal. Minnesotans should not cease demanding truth, accountability and reckoning equal to the damage done and lives lost by an ICE surge that never needed to happen.
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Photos You Should See – Feb. 2026