Springsteen releases Minneapolis protest song, sings ‘ICE out now!’
(Reuters) — Bruce Springsteen on Wednesday released a protest song honoring Alex Pretti and Renee Good, two Minneapolis residents killed in what he called the “state of terror” visited on the city by President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration raids.
Springsteen said he wrote “Streets of Minneapolis” on Saturday, the day Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot dead by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. Good, 37, a mother of three, was shot dead by an ICE agent on Jan. 7.
“It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good,” the singer wrote in a social media post.
In “Streets of Minneapolis” the 76-year-old star sings of the immigration crackdown in the Minnesota city where residents like Pretti and Good have followed federal agents to record their operations and confront officers. The song lauds Minnesotans for resisting “smoke and rubber bullets” and using “whistles and phones” against “Miller and Noem’s dirty lies.”
Stephen Miller is President Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor and Kristi Noem is U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security.
A chorus joins him on the line “ICE out now!”
Known by his fans as “The Boss,” the rocker has also written songs that critique mistreatment of veterans and the working class. His 2001 “American Skin (41 Shots)” attacks police brutality and racism, and was inspired by the killing of immigrant Amadou Diallo by New York police.
His latest song ends with the refrain “we’ll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis,” and the sounds of protesters chanting.
Doomsday Clock ticks closer than ever to apocalypse
(NYT) — The Doomsday Clock, a metaphorical timepiece meant to depict how close humanity is to destruction, ticked closer than ever to midnight on Tuesday: 85 seconds to the stroke of doom.
It is the grimmest outlook yet on Earth’s future from the clock’s creators, a nonprofit organization and publication called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that has set the clock each year since 1947.
Tensions between nuclear powers, failures in climate action, disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence and the rise of autocracy are among the reasons that the Bulletin’s experts in global security, climate and nuclear science cited for advancing it four seconds from last year.
“Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline, and we are running out of time,” said Alexandra Bell, president and chief executive of the Bulletin. “Change is both necessary and possible, but the global community must demand swift action from their leaders.”
Antinuclear activists were paying attention to the Doomsday Clock — especially those working with survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan at the end of World War II.
“This is a warning that we need to take urgent action to avoid global catastrophe,” Hideo Asano, coordinator of the Japan Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Tokyo, said in an interview. “We should know that the risk of nuclear war is the highest since the end of the Cold War.”
The clock was first set at seven minutes to midnight and has fluctuated throughout its nearly 80-year history.