The Reckoning Begins

Days 25–31 — January 25–31, 2026

The Gate

The Department of Justice opened a federal civil rights investigation into the killing of Alex Pretti.

The announcement came on the thirtieth, six days after Border Patrol agents shot the nurse four times in the back as he stood on a Minneapolis street. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the FBI would lead the inquiry. The investigation would examine not only the shooting but "the days and weeks that preceded" it.

The same day, a federal judge found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had violated at least ninety-six court orders in Minnesota since the first of January. The court allowed Operation Metro Surge to continue regardless.

Bruce Springsteen released "Streets of Minneapolis" and performed with Tom Morello at First Avenue. Protesters demanded a national shutdown.

The federal government called Pretti a terrorist. A federal investigation would now determine whether his killers committed civil rights violations.

The Uprising

In Pakistan, the Balochistan Liberation Army launched coordinated attacks across the province at three in the morning on the thirty-first.

The operation struck at least nine districts simultaneously—police stations, paramilitary outposts, civilian vehicles, a high-security prison in Quetta. The attackers used guns, grenades, and suicide vests. Videos showed female fighters participating.

The government called it Operation Herof 2.0, a follow-up to the August 2024 attacks. By the first of February, at least forty-eight civilians and security personnel were dead. The military launched Operation Radd-ul-Fitna-1 and claimed to have killed more than two hundred militants. The final toll exceeded two hundred twenty-five dead.

It was the worst attack in Pakistan in years. The internet went dark across the province. Section 144 was imposed for a month.

The War

Russia unleashed three hundred seventy-five drones and twenty-one missiles against Ukraine overnight on the twenty-fifth. At least one person killed in Kyiv. Thirty wounded in Kharkiv, including a child. One point two million properties lost power. Temperatures fell to minus twenty-three degrees Celsius.

Then came a pause.

Trump announced he had personally asked Putin to halt attacks on energy infrastructure during the freeze. Zelenskyy agreed to reciprocity. The Kremlin said the pause would last only until the first of February. It did. Attacks resumed.

The trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi continued. American officials described the atmosphere as positive. Russia said it would keep fighting until Ukraine withdrew from eastern territories. A second round was scheduled for early February.

Combined casualties since the invasion began exceeded one and a half million. Ukraine operated on fourteen of its prewar thirty-four gigawatts of generating capacity.

The Silence

The death toll estimates continued to diverge. The government acknowledged three thousand one hundred seventeen dead. Human rights groups counted more than twenty-two thousand. Opposition media, reviewing documents, claimed thirty-six thousand killed in the massacres of the eighth and ninth alone.

A senior official confirmed that forces had been given a "blank check" to kill protesters. The supreme leader himself had ordered the crackdown crushed by any means necessary.

The judiciary promised more punishment. The internet remained dark.

The Cold

A winter storm swept the American South.

At least eighty dead across Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Nashville recorded its worst ice storm in decades. Nearly a million customers lost power. Damage exceeded four billion dollars. More than forty states felt the impact.

In Chile, wildfires continued to burn. Forty-five thousand hectares consumed, twenty-one dead, more than fifty thousand displaced. In Argentina's Patagonia, fifty thousand hectares burned, threatening Los Alerces National Park.

The Human Cost

In Sudan, the World Food Programme announced it would cut food rations by seventy percent.

One thousand days of war had produced twenty-one million people facing acute hunger. More than twelve million displaced. The UN halved its 2026 appeal to twenty-three billion dollars—donor fatigue amid the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

A UN team gained access to El Fasher for the first time since its fall in October. They described the city as a crime scene. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab documented a systematic RSF campaign to burn bodies and destroy evidence of mass killings. Reports emerged of children abducted during the takeover—taken after their parents were killed.

In Gaza, Phase Two of the ceasefire had been announced. Since October, Israeli forces had killed at least five hundred fifty-six Palestinians. Only forty-three percent of promised aid trucks had entered. On the thirty-first, at least thirty-one Palestinians were killed, including six children.

In Haiti, armed clashes since the new year had killed at least fifty in Port-au-Prince alone. The transitional council ousted the prime minister two weeks before it was scheduled to dissolve. Gangs controlled ninety percent of the capital. Elections remained materially impossible.

In eastern Congo, landslides buried the Rubaya coltan mines. More than two hundred dead. The mines produce fifteen percent of global coltan supply and are controlled by M23. The rebels reopened them within days.

The Machines

Big Tech faced its reckoning.

Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla reported earnings the same week. Investors demanded proof that billions spent on artificial intelligence infrastructure would produce returns. The narrative shifted from capability to monetization. Wall Street grew anxious for signs of payoff.

In Britain, the Competition and Markets Authority proposed requiring Google to let publishers opt out of AI Overviews—the summaries that had reduced click-through traffic since their rollout. The age of scraping without consent faced its first regulatory test.

DeepSeek updated its optical character recognition system, swapping its prior architecture for an Alibaba Qwen-based model. The Chinese lab continued to iterate while the world debated what its earlier breakthroughs meant.

The Passing

Sly Dunbar, the prolific reggae drummer who formed half of Sly and Robbie, died on the twenty-sixth at seventy-three. He had played on thousands of recordings and shaped the sound of an era.

Catherine O'Hara, the actor and comedian known for Beetlejuice, Home Alone, and Schitt's Creek, died on the thirtieth at seventy-one following a brief illness.

The Ledger

A federal investigation into a federal killing. The machinery examines itself. In Minneapolis, the courts found ninety-six violations and let the operation continue. In Balochistan, two hundred twenty-five dead in a single night. In Iran, the judiciary promised to punish those who survived the bullets. The wars ground on—frozen in Ukraine, starving in Sudan, dying in Gaza under a ceasefire that killed thirty-one in a single day. Big Tech faced questions about returns on billions spent. The cold killed eighty in the American South. The World Food Programme cut rations by seventy percent. The record played on.

Here continues the account of the year 2026.