• Hegseth and Noem confirmed: Pete Hegseth was confirmed as the new U.S. secretary of defense on Friday, though Vice President JD Vance was forced to cast the tiebreaking vote after three Republican senators sided with the Democrats, deadlocking the decision at 50-50. Former Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell joined Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins in opposing Hegseth. After his confirmation, Hegseth committed to reestablishing the U.S. military’s focus on “lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards, and readiness.” Also confirmed over the weekend was Donald Trump’s choice for DHS secretary, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. She received votes from all 53 Republicans as well as six Democrats. Noem will have a lot of work to do — namely, refocusing the department on actual immigration enforcement and border security. Thus far, the Senate has confirmed four of Trump’s picks.

• Cotton urges Trump to “revisit” his decision to pull protective details off people targeted by Iran (Daily Wire)

• Chinese app DeepSeek hammers U.S. stocks with cheaper open-source AI model (Fox Business)

• CIA now favors lab leak theory on origins of COVID (WSJ)

• Colombia caves to Trump: With apologies to Juan Valdez, this ain’t your grandfather’s Colombia. For a few hours this weekend, the country’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, was feeling froggy — so much so that he refused to accept two generous military planeloads of his countrymen, whom President Donald Trump was helpfully repatriating. “The US cannot treat Colombian migrants as criminals,” he posted. “I deny the entry of American planes carrying Colombian migrants into our territory.” Petro also demanded “dignified treatment” of these Colombian criminals, after which Trump promised an immediate 25% tariff on all Colombian goods and a raising of that tariff to 50% after a week. Trump also ordered visas revoked and future travel banned for Colombian government officials. He said, “We will not allow the Colombian Government to violate its legal obligations with regard to … the Criminals they forced into the United States!” In response, Petro caved with head-snapping speed, dispatching his presidential plane to scoop up the illegals. So, how goes Trump’s “shock and awe” deportation strategy more broadly? Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports it made “nearly 1,000 new arrests Sunday, bringing the four-day total to nearly 2,400.”

• Feds round up 50 Tren de Aragua members in Denver (NY Post)

• Emergency C-sections as a birthright citizenship workaround? Donald Trump issued more than 200 executive orders last week, but none of them stirred the flurry of oppositional activity quite like his order banning birthright citizenship. Not the Bee reports on perhaps the most shocking case in point: “Those on visiting visas and presumably others in the country legally and illegally are frantically trying to give birth in the United States ASAP so that they can drop anchor with an anchor baby, using their child as leverage to stay in the country.” The anchor baby angle is nothing new, of course, but we tend to think of it mostly in terms of immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere in Central America, but many Indian immigrants take the same approach. With the Trump administration’s enforcement deadline less than a month away, the Times of India reports: “Now, pregnant women who are due by March or April are seeking premature delivery before February 20. Sounds bizarre? While women often route for normal delivery across the world, Indian women in America are deliberately opting for C-sections just to ensure that their kids get US citizenship” before Trump’s executive order can deny them.

• Big moments in the pro-life movement: The annual March for Life took place last Friday in Washington, DC. Speaking at the event was Vice President JD Vance, who pledged that the Trump administration would uphold the right to life at all stages of development. Noting Trump’s recent pardon of pro-life activists who were convicted of FACE Act violations by the Biden administration, Vance stated that the Trump administration would protect pro-life advocates against prosecution for protesting and praying in front of abortion facilities. Furthermore, the Trump administration will prioritize pro-family policies. In that vein, it has shut down Team Biden’s “abortion rights” website. Recall that in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, Biden set up reproductiverights.gov, which pushes a pro-abortion agenda. Now it is no more.

• Good news: DOJ drops politicized trans case: Donald Trump’s Justice Department has dropped its Biden-era case against Dr. Eithan Haim, the Texas doctor who blew the whistle against Texas Children’s Hospital over its violating a state law forbidding “gender-affirming” procedures on children. When the Texas attorney general launched an investigation into Texas Children’s Hospital over Dr. Haim’s allegations, the Biden administration responded by targeting him and another whistleblower, a nurse, with its own investigation over dubious concerns about HIPAA violations. Then, last June, the Biden DOJ indicted Dr. Haim on four counts of HIPAA violations for his passing of internal hospital records to the Texas government. Biden’s DOJ went even further by sealing all documents related to the case and getting a gag order placed on Dr. Haim. Now, those indictments have been dropped.

• Trump’s Ed Department drops school book bans investigation: After reviewing 11 complaints against schools over so-called book bans, Donald Trump’s Department of Education has dismissed them as “meritless.” Attorneys within the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) determined that “books are not being ‘banned.’” Instead, school districts have implemented “commonsense processes by which to evaluate and remove age-inappropriate materials,” the department noted. “The complaints alleged that local school districts’ removal of age-inappropriate, sexually explicit or obscene materials from their school libraries created a hostile environment for students — a meritless claim premised upon a dubious legal theory.” The Education Department also noted, “Effective Jan. 24, 2025, OCR has rescinded all department guidance issued under the theory that a school district’s removal of age-inappropriate books from its libraries may violate civil rights laws.” Additionally, the OCR “will no longer employ a ‘book ban coordinator’ to investigate local school districts and parents working to protect students from obscene content.” Parents will once again be recognized as the primary directors of their children’s education.

• “Clever” Trump executive order shrouds DOGE from public scrutiny (The Dispatch)

• Trump orders massive overhaul of FEMA (Daily Mail)

• Costco affirms DEI while Target dumps it: Is the Seattle-based wholesaler Costco a bizarre outlier amid a nationwide movement away from racially discriminatory corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives? It sure seems so. Last week, Costco shareholders voted against a proposal urging it to reevaluate its DEI policies. But the shareholders didn’t merely vote against the proposal; they voted 98% against it. It’d be one thing if shareholders narrowly approved or overturned Costco’s DEI programs, given that DEI is a political proxy and ours is a narrowly divided country. But 98%? That’s just plain weird. Meanwhile, Minneapolis-based big-box retailer Target, of the grotesque “tuck-friendly” swimwear, recently announced that it’s dropping both its DEI program and its race-based vendor-preference practices.

• A grim remembrance: Auschwitz at 80: Today, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and this particular date marks 80 years since Soviet Red Army troops arrived at Auschwitz and uncovered its atrocities. As NBC News reports, “Inside the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, the soldiers liberated roughly 7,000 prisoners who had been brutalized by a Nazi regime hell-bent on exterminating the Jewish people. The horrors there defied comprehension.” As author Elie Wiesel, a survivor and chronicler of the Auschwitz death camp, put it, “I saw myself in every stiffened corpse. Soon I wouldn’t even be seeing them anymore; I would be one of them.” Never again. That’s the two-word phrase most closely associated with the Holocaust. But remembering alone isn’t enough. As NBC adds, “Even given what has been established about the Third Reich’s crimes against humanity, some of the most vital information has still not been uncovered. Notably, the names of more than a million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis are still unknown.”

• Trump floats plan to “clean out” Gaza, send Palestinian refugees to Jordan, Egypt (National Review)

• Trump releases weapons to Israel that Biden withheld for political reasons (Daily Wire)

• Impeached South Korean president indicted on insurrection charges (National Review)

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