23 Jan 2026

Trump steals the show in Davos with a mixed bag of rhetoric and results at elite gathering

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By JAMEY KEATEN, Associated Press

DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump took center stage in his whirlwind visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, overshadowing the yearly gabfest among national leaders, executives and other elites in the Swiss Alpine snows.

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While some experts highlighted business leaders’ ambitions to leverage AI for productivity, efficiency and profits or a boom in renewable energy investment led by China, Trump largely stole the show when it came to politics. Climate and other concerns didn’t draw the same attention as in past years at the event that ended Friday.

“I think there were two Davoses,” said Jane Harman, a former Democratic Congresswoman. “One of them was very senior industrial leaders talking about AI. … The second was foreign policy, or geopolitics, and that was dominated by one person.”

On his third visit to Davos while president, Trump came and went over about 24 hours. He delivered a rambling and at times hyperbolic speech that touted America’s global role.

Unlike his previous trips to Davos among adoring corporate chiefs, Trump faced criticism from the likes of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who repeatedly spoke to media scrums in the Congress Center.

Still, others were more congratulatory: NATO chief Mark Rutte and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who met with Trump in Davos, praised his efforts to help end Russia’s war in Ukraine, boost Western defense and deliver security guarantees to Kyiv.

One narrative that emerged in Davos: The U.S. under Trump and its Western allies have grown too divided. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke of a “rupture” that would never be repaired.

A backpedal on Greenland

In the runup to his trip to Davos, Trump sowed new discord with America’s longtime allies in Europe by announcing plans to set new tariffs on eight European countries who opposed his takeover bid for Greenland — a semiautonomous territory of NATO member Denmark.

By Wednesday, amid an uproar at home and abroad, Trump had backed off in a dramatic reversal — not long after insisting he wanted to get the island “including right, title and ownership.”

In a post on his social media site, Trump said he had agreed with NATO chief Rutte on a “framework of a future deal” on Arctic security, potentially defusing tension that had far-reaching geopolitical implications.

‘Board of Peace’ lures some, bristles others

Trump launched his Board of Peace to spearhead efforts at maintaining a ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas, and eventually help underpin efforts to map a future of the war-torn Gaza Strip.

The idea drew support from countries as diverse as Belarus, Kosovo, Indonesia and Argentina, but critics — including longtime U.S. allies in Europe — oppose it. They reject his claim that it could rival the United Nations one day.

Some critics said details were scarce about how the Board of Peace will work — under the chairmanship of Trump himself — and suggested the better move would be to reinforce and improve current U.N. structures, not replace them.

“I think they were trying to duplicate — replicate — what happened when the United Nations came about,” Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnes Callamard said in an interview. “But frankly it was a very poor and sad attempt to repeat what happened in the 1940s.”

AI an alternative

Artificial intelligence was — as usual in recent times — a hot topic: Billionaire Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made their Davos debuts.

Musk, who had previously called the WEF event “boring,” jetted in with little advance notice to discuss robotics, address AI’s electricity demands and gently rebuke the Trump administration for imposing tariffs on Chinese solar panels.

Huang pushed back on fears that the AI boom might wipe out jobs, saying it would create work for people building out its infrastructure, such as “plumbers and electricians and construction and steel workers and network technicians.”

The U.S.-China rivalry got a mention from another AI chieftain: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei compared the Trump administration’s move to green-light sales of an advanced Nvidia chip to selling nuclear weapons to Pyongyang.

But overall, it was can-do optimism among technology, AI and other business executives encapsulated the stated motto and mindset of the forum to improve the world and promote dialogue — not fear and doom-and-gloom predictions about the future.

“I want to end this forum with the quote that Elon Musk said in closing yesterday’s session — that it’s better to be an optimist and wrong than be a pessimist who’s right,” said forum co-chair Larry Fink, the BlackRock chairman and CEO, at the closing ceremony.

Associated Press writer Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.

23 Jan 2026

5 Democratic states asking judge to keep Trump from withholding money for child care

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By GEOFF MULVIHILL, Associated Press

Five Democratic-controlled states are asking a judge Friday to order President Donald Trump’s administration to keep money flowing for child care subsidies and other programs aimed at boosting low-income families with children.

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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it was pausing the funding because it had “reason to believe” the states were granting benefits to people in the country illegally, though it did not provide evidence or explain why it was targeting those states and not others.

The states say the move was instead intended to damage Trump’s political adversaries.

A judge previously gave the states a reprieve to the administration’s plan to halt funding for the states unless they provide information on the beneficiaries of some programs, including names and Social Security numbers. The temporary restraining order is set to expire Friday.

The request under consideration now is to keep the programs funded while a legal challenge to the administration’s plan moves ahead.

The states in question are California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York. Around the same time as the actions aimed at the five states, the administrations put up hurdles to Minnesota for even more federal dollars. It also began requesting all states to explain how they’re using money in the child care program.

The programs are intended to help low-income families

The programs are the Child Care and Development Fund, which subsidizes child care for 1.3 million children from low-income families nationwide; the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides cash assistance and job training; and the Social Services Block Grant, a smaller fund that provides money for a variety of programs. The states say that they receive a total of more more than $10 billion a year from those programs — and that the programs are essential for low-income and vulnerable families.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sent letters to the states on Jan. 5 and 6 telling them they would be placed on “restricted drawdown” of program money until the states provided more information.

For TANF and the Social Service Block Grant, the request required the states to submit the data, including personal information of recipients beginning in 2022, with a deadline of Jan. 20.

States call the action ‘unlawful many times over’

In court papers last week, the states say what they describe as a funding freeze does not follow the law.

They say Congress created laws about how the administration can identify noncompliance or fraud by recipients of the money — and that the federal government hasn’t used that process.

They also say it’s improper to freeze funding broadly because of potential fraud and that producing the data the government called for is an “impossible demand on an impossible timeline.”

The administration says it’s not a freeze

In a court filing this week, the administration objected to the states describing the action as a “funding freeze,” even though the headline on the Department of Health and Human Services announcement was: “HHS Freezes Child Care and Family Assistance Grants in Five States for Fraud Concerns.”

Federal government lawyers said the states could get the money going forward if they provide the requested information and the federal government finds them to be in compliance with anti-fraud measures.

The administration also notes that it has continued to provide funding to the states, not pointing out that a court ordered it to do so.

23 Jan 2026

In Dallas, Spanish-Inflected Shakespeare Adaptations Experiment with Language

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In September, two new Shakespeare adaptations used the Bard’s canonical plays as jumping-off points to bring stories infused with Hispanic culture to Dallas audiences. 

Echo Theatre’s world-premiere production of El Rey del Pollo by Anna Skidis Vargas, an adaptation of King Lear, and Shakespeare Dallas’ The Taming of the Shrew used the Spanish language to build settings and characters. It was both entertainment and evidence of a cultural shift: In Texas’ strictest English-only schools, students were punished for speaking Spanish through the 1970s; on these stages, Spanish is spoken proudly alongside Elizabethan English poetry. Experimenting with language and plot, these adaptations each hold a conversation with Shakespeare’s original scripts, revising them to tell stories for audiences of 2025. 

“It’s my dad. My apá, he… 
He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again. 
O al menos ya no como su empleado.” 

El Rey del Pollo is a comedy, and it does not purport to match Shakespeare scene for scene. Set among family members running a Mexican restaurant chain, patriarch Reymundo Lear retires from running his fried-chicken empire, and three franchises (rather than sections of the kingdom) stand to be divided among his daughters. But, after failing to give her beloved father the effusive praise he demands, devoted Cordelia is fired instead. 

The dialogue is a mix of modern Spanglish (the younger cousins use slang like “TBH,” “gurrrl,” and “bro”) and Shakespeare-isms borrowed from across the plays, not just Lear, that root the play in its dramatic form. The narrator, for instance, adapts the Romeo and Juliet prologue. In other scenes, Shakespeare’s heightened language allows characters to express the big emotions that the stage is a natural home for, often with a telenovela-style twist. When conniving Edmundo, portrayed by Ron Fernandez, schemes to take his more qualified brother’s job with the exaggerated gestures of an anime villain, the humor is in the contrast between his intensity and the absurdity of his dream to bring cashew-based queso to the menu. 

The play is slightly experimental: There’s presentational doubling of roles and tongue-in-cheek fourth-wall breaks in which characters acknowledge the paucity of the scenic budget. But it’s also apparent that Vargas has a bone to pick with Shakespeare: Cordelia makes a girl-power defense of her role here, whereas in King Lear, she has much less stage time. 

Ultimately, compared with Shakespeare’s, Vargas’ play is centered more tightly on family. A heart-to-heart that Cordelia shares with her cousin Edgardo motivates her to repair the relationship with her father. At the same time, Vargas reins in the cruelty enough that reconciliation is possible. Her plot twists reduce barbaric violence to mean-spirited humiliations that tear at the pride of the older generation. This pride is the theme from King Lear that Vargas draws out to greatest effect, creating in Reymundo a believable mix of love and machismo. 

While it’s still “sharper than la chupacabra’s tooth” to have a thankless child, compromise wins the day. 

“Her name is Katerina Minola, renown’d en la frontera for her wild tongue.”

While Vargas plays fast and loose with the structure and dialogue of Lear in her adaptation, Shakespeare Dallas partnered with Play On Shakespeare, an organization that commissions modern-language versions of Shakespeare plays, for a reimagined, bilingual production of The Taming of the Shrew by Pulitzer Prize finalist Amy Freed. Freed is also the author of an original play titled Shrew!, but for this version, Freed has, supposedly, merely clarified the staid verse of Shakespeare so that it hits our modern ears the way it did audiences in Shakespeare’s day.

Under Ryan Matthieu Smith’s direction, the play’s setting moves to 1880s San Antonio. The use of Spanish reflects this milieu, the backgrounds of the performers, and the linguistic diversity of Dallas audiences.

Freed’s text is marketed as a “translation” of The Taming of the Shrew into modern verse, rather than an adaptation, indicating that it stays close to the text (although Shakespeare’s “induction” is, per usual, cut). In practice, Freed and Spanish translator Virginia Grise’s script makes it screamingly obvious to the modern ear that this is a sex comedy, inserting double entendres with words like “erect” and “shaft” and not just in places where Shakespeare’s dirty jokes are now obscure. Petruchio’s line “O, how I long to have some chat with her!” for instance, becomes “Oh, I long to have some intercourse with her!” 

As performed by Liz Magallanes as Kate and Omar Padilla as Petruchio, the central pair’s first meeting sizzles with chemistry and wit. As the two fly at each other in highly physical performances, Kate ends up straddling the man she meant to insult.

Kate and Petruchio’s punning scenes are largely in English, but when suitors visit Kate’s sister, Bianca, in disguise to woo her, they speak in Spanish. The language is modern enough that Bianca compares her situation to a “telenovela.” (While set in the 1880s, the production has some flexibility with time; in a weird sequence immediately after intermission, there’s a dance party involving an Aztec and a modern break dancer.) In theory, the modernized English helps the modern Spanish slide in more smoothly, but some of the changes modernize the script just for the sake of doing so, resulting in clunky Yoda-speak. Baptista’s line “Señor, perdóname if to the chase I cut,” for instance, has been adapted from Shakespeare’s perfectly clear “Sir, pardon me in what I have to say.” 

In a bustling opening scene, Kate comes out in red boots, cracking a whip (a reversal of the traditional use of this prop by Petruchio), and dismisses the suitors hanging around for her sister, who are too old to be attractive options. Against the backdrop of patriarchal 1880s Texas, Kate’s indomitable spirit makes her both a believable frontier character and “shrewish” compared with her sister, whose demure personality is more in line with gender expectations. In this version, the character Baptista is Kate’s mother, not father. With this strong woman at the helm of the family, it’s easy to see where Kate gets her independence. 

The play is billed as a satire in which the two smartest people in town come together to tame the society that surrounds them, but since the source material is Shakespeare’s most controversial comedy, and Freed’s commission involved using as light a touch as possible, the plot points that make the original play challenging remain unresolved. Quick-witted Petruchio marries the acerbic Kate and deprives her of food and sleep until she plays along with his jokes.This treatment is supposedly a taste of her own medicine that shows the two are evenly matched, but to achieve a happy ending with Kate and Petruchio together, modern productions have to find ways to get past the cruelty and signal Kate’s self-possession and marital happiness at the end.

Here, as both performers are so likable, even after Petruchio shows up to the wedding late and in a crazy outfit involving a pink sombrero, it’s easy to root for him and Kate to buck convention together. It gets harder as Kate’s taming seems to come through her gradual exhaustion. Afterward, when she and Petruchio find their playful sides together, they’re a great pair, two against the world.

In Kate’s final speech, Petruchio puts his hand under Kate’s foot, while she sermonizes about her willingness to perform that gesture of submission toward him. The words don’t match the action, subverting the script. But is it enough? The play ends as a disconcertingly fun parable about give-and-take in relationships and the slipperiness of the roles we play within them. But there’s still a problem at the center: The ends don’t justify Petruchio’s means.

The post In Dallas, Spanish-Inflected Shakespeare Adaptations Experiment with Language appeared first on The Texas Observer.

23 Jan 2026

‘The ultimate insult’: Trump downplaying NATO’s Afghanistan involvement causes distress in UK

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By PAN PYLAS, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump provoked outrage and distress in the U.K. on Friday with his suggestion that troops from NATO countries stayed away from the frontline during the war in Afghanistan.

In an interview with Fox News in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, Trump said he was not sure NATO would be there to support the U.S. if and when requested.

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“I’ve always said, will they be there if we ever needed them and that’s really the ultimate test and I’m not sure of that,” Trump said. “We’ve never needed them, we have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that, and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.”

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In the U.K., which backed the U.S. in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and more controversially in Iraq two years later, the reaction was raw. Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair said after 9/11 that the U.K. would “stand shoulder to shoulder” with the U.S. in response to the al-Qaida attacks.

More than 150,000 British troops served in Afghanistan in the years after the U.S.-led 2001 invasion, the largest contingent after the U.S., and 457 died in the campaign.

“Those British troops should be remembered for who they were: heroes who gave their lives in service of our nation,” U.K. Defense Secretary John Healey said.

Ben Obese-Jecty, a lawmaker who served in Afghanistan as a captain in the Royal Yorkshire Regiment, said it was “sad to see our nation’s sacrifice, and that of our NATO partners, held so cheaply by the president of the United States.”

It was not the first time that Trump downplayed the commitment of NATO countries over the past few days. It has been one of his pivotal lines of attack as he escalated his threats to seize Greenland, a semiautonomous territory belonging to Denmark.

Trump’s view that NATO countries won’t be there when requested stands in stark contrast to reality.

The only time Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty has been used was in response to the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. The article is the key mutual defense clause obliging all member countries to come to the aid of another member whose sovereignty or territorial integrity might be under threat.

“When America needed us after 9/11 we were there,” former Danish platoon commander Martin Tamm Andersen said.

Denmark has been a stalwart ally to the U.S. Forty-four Danish soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, the highest per capita death toll among coalition forces. Eight more died in Iraq.

The latest controversy surrounding Trump comes at the end of a week when he has faced criticism — and pushback — for his attempts to take control of Greenland.

Trump’s threat to slap tariffs on European nations opposed to his ambitions to annex Greenland raised questions over the future of NATO. Though Trump backed down after a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in which he said they formed the “framework” for a deal over Arctic security, trans-Atlantic relations have taken a hit.

His latest comments are unlikely to improve relations.

Diane Dernie, whose son Ben Parkinson suffered horrific injuries when a British Army Land Rover hit a mine in Afghanistan in 2006, said Trump’s latest comments were “the ultimate insult” and called on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to stand up to Trump over them.

“Call him out,” she said. “Make a stand for those who fought for this country and for our flag, because it’s just beyond belief.”