Análisis por Aaron Blake, CNN

El presidente Donald Trump y su administración han adoptado una postura bastante confusa sobre sus polémicas redadas migratorias.

Por un lado, parecen reconocer que las acciones de ICE se están convirtiendo en un problema político creciente para ellos, ya que las encuestas muestran que 6 de cada 10 estadounidenses dicen que la agencia ha ido “demasiado lejos”. Tanto Trump como el vicepresidente J. D. Vance han comenzado a reconocer que se han cometido “errores” o que podrían cometerse en el futuro.

Pero aparte de esos cambios retóricos, hay poca evidencia de que la administración realmente esté cambiando sus prácticas. De hecho, esta misma semana la administración ha redoblado una de sus medidas más agresivas hasta ahora: afirmar tener el poder de entrar en los hogares de las personas sin una orden judicial, lo cual se expuso en un memorando de mayo de 2025 revelado esta semana.

Todo esto sugiere que la administración sigue apostando por un camino agresivo.

Pero hay muchas pruebas de que ese camino podría seguir causando problemas políticos para la administración. Las encuestas sugieren que la narrativa de extralimitación y exceso de agresividad ya está bien establecida, con un volumen creciente de videos e imágenes que probablemente refuercen esas percepciones.

Esto es lo que realmente está impulsando esa narrativa en este momento.

Este sigue siendo el punto crítico porque, en muchos sentidos, ejemplifica lo que puede significar cruzar la línea entre tácticas agresivas y tácticas excesivas.

El tiroteo y muerte de Good por parte del agente de ICE Jonathan Ross en Minneapolis sigue siendo polémico. La principal pregunta es si realmente temía que Good lo atropellara.

Pero más allá de eso, sus tácticas han sido criticadas, incluyendo el hecho de pararse frente al auto de Good (algo que generalmente se aconseja a los agentes de ICE no hacer) y continuar disparando desde el costado del auto, cuando objetivamente no corría peligro de ser atropellado.

Lo que está claro es que el pueblo estadounidense se ha manifestado decididamente en contra de ICE y de la defensa que hace la administración de las acciones del agente. Una encuesta de CNN mostró que los adultos en EE.UU. dijeron en un 56 % contra 26 % que el uso de la fuerza por parte del agente fue inapropiado. Otras encuestas mostraron lo mismo, aunque con márgenes ligeramente menores.

Las encuestas también muestran que el tiroteo en Minneapolis recibió gran atención, con una encuesta de la Universidad Quinnipiac que encontró que el 82 % de los votantes registrados dijeron haber visto el video del tiroteo.

Y finalmente —quizás lo peor para la administración—, la mayoría de los estadounidenses no vio esto como un incidente aislado, según la encuesta de CNN. Mientras que el 56 % dijo que el uso de la fuerza fue inapropiado, el 51 % dijo tanto que fue inapropiado como que “refleja problemas más grandes en la forma en que opera ICE”.

Estos hallazgos sugieren que este episodio se ha convertido en símbolo de la controversia más amplia sobre ICE, y no de una manera favorable para la administración.

Este es quizás el desarrollo más importante y reciente. Y Michael Williams de CNN Read more

By Betsy Klein, CNN

(CNN) — First lady Melania Trump and Amazon MGM Studios face a high-stakes test this week with the release of the “Melania” documentary: Will the multimillion-dollar investment pay off?

Approximately $35 million has been spent on marketing “Melania,” a film documenting the 20 days around Trump’s return to the White House, according to a source familiar with the matter, with ads featuring images of the first lady on television, on billboards, in subway stations, plastered on buses across the country, and even encompassing the Sphere in Las Vegas.

That’s in addition to the roughly $40 million deal Amazon MGM Studios struck with the first lady, marking a blockbuster budget for the documentary, which releases in theaters Friday.

“After I structured the record-breaking deal for her with Amazon, she got to work,” Trump’s agent and senior adviser, Marc Beckman, said in an interview this week with One America News.

The first lady serves an executive producer on the project — meaning it was made with her full participation and editorial control. And she has been deeply involved in the process.

“She was involved in the production, the postproduction, all of the ad campaign, the trailer. … And when I say involved, I mean she’s not just approving. She built that trailer. She created the cliffhanger, she selected the music. Same thing with the ad campaign that we’re seeing worldwide now in almost 30 countries,” Beckman said.

The significant marketing budget, according to documentary filmmaker Stefano Da Frè, is likely bolstered by metrics and a belief by Amazon that the film will be a box office and streaming success. Da Frè, who was not involved in the project, has directed multiple films streaming on Amazon and other platforms, including “Stolen Dough,” a 2023 documentary about a man whose patent for stuffed crust pizza was stolen by Pizza Hut.

Amazon, he told CNN in an interview, “is a data-driven company. With all their tools, all their AI, Amazon Web Services — they didn’t just come up with that number randomly. They believe, through their metrics, that it’s worth that amount.”

Events around the film’s debut kicked off Saturday night as the first lady and President Donald Trump hosted a private showing in the White House East Room with a small group of friends and family, according to a White House official.

Melania Trump has kept a relatively low profile in her second term, picking and choosing her engagements as she largely splits her time between New York and Florida. However, she has scaled up her public appearances ahead of the documentary’s release and is expected to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday morning.

On Thursday, the Trumps will walk the red carpet and attend a screening event at the Kennedy Center, newly renamed the Trump Kennedy Center by its board.

There will be 21 invitation-only concurrent screenings at cities across the country, including New York, Boston, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, according to the source familiar.

The film lands in theaters on Friday. Its streaming date has yet to be announced.

Media observers will be paying close attention to the film’s box office draw and whether the first lady can mobilize her supporters — and the curious — to cinemas, which have been struggling to draw consumers in recent years.

Donald Trump — a former reality star — has not been a popular figure in Hollywood since entering politics in 2015. But Amazon’s decision to license the project indicates the streamer recognizes many Americans’ fascination with the first family.. A

By Hanako Montgomery, Junko Ogura, Chris Lau, CNN

Tokyo (CNN) — Japanese fans rushed to farewell the country’s last two pandas on Sunday ahead of their return to China, in a departure that highlights strained relations between the two countries.

Twin cubs Xiao Xiao and Lei Lei will leave Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo Tuesday after meeting their fans for the last time on the weekend.

They were born in the Japanese capital, but China retains ownership over them, under the rules of Beijing’s “panda diplomacy.” The government there treats pandas as national symbols and goodwill ambassadors, loaning them to countries with which they wish to strengthen ties.

The duo’s departure leaves Japan without any pandas for the first time in more than five decades, at a time when relations between Asia’s two biggest economies are at their lowest point in years.

And politics wasn’t far from visitors’ minds when they paid last visits to the pandas over the past week.

“I’m really sad,” visitor Shoken Ikeda told CNN during a recent trip to the zoo with his wife. “We always said, ‘There’s a panda here, so we’ll get to see it sometime,’ and then this happened. I wish I’d come more often.”

Long lines began to form in the weeks leading up to the pandas’ last encounter with the public, prompting the zoo to switch to a lottery system for tickets.

Another panda fan Yukie Kuyama said she lined up for five hours to see the animals in early December. After winning the lottery, she came to see them again last week.

“That’s very disappointing. It feels sad that such cute, innocent animals are being used as a trump card – or even a tool – in diplomacy,” she said.

The siblings have different personalities, according to their keepers; Xiao Xiao is timid while his sister Lei Lei is fearless and adapts to changes quickly.

The two pandas were born in 2021 at the Ueno Zoo, to mother Shin Shin and father Ri Ri. The parents were returned to China in 2024, a year after the twins’ sister Xiang Xiang was also sent back.

Japan welcomed its first pandas in 1972 to mark the normalization of diplomatic ties with China. Since then, more pandas have arrived or were born locally, gaining a huge following.

But remarks from Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi – suggesting that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could trigger a military response from her country – has recently drawn ire from China.

Beijing has responded with a flurry of economic pressure, including cutting flights and warning citizens against traveling to Japan. The number of Chinese tourists in Japan dropped by almost a half last month year on year, to around 330,000, Tourism Minister Yasushi Kaneko said last week.

Chinese authorities have also suspended seafood imports and banned exports of rare earth elements with military uses, as they demand that Takaichi withdraw her comment. The Japanese leader said in November that her remarks were “hypothetical” and that she would avoid making similar comments again.

Meanwhile, Takaichi has called an election on February 8 in a bid to reinforce her mandate on a range of policies, potentially including her tougher stance on China, having secured the office by winning an internal contest among her Liberal Democratic Party in October.

Last year, China also took back four pandas from the zoo of a Japanes

CNN

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — Four decades ago, 126 of Nan Goldin’s snapshots of love and loss became one of the most influential photo books ever made.

“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” published by Aperture in 1986, follows Goldin and her friends through darkened nightclubs, daylit bedrooms, and late-night car rides around New York’s East Village, unfurling over time and space to Chicago, London, Berlin and Mexico City. The searingly intimate body of work seems to place the viewer inside the scenes, as she and her friends find belonging and desire and heartbreak. Though the group is predominately queer and was deeply impacted by the AIDS crisis, Goldin has said that her work is often incorrectly misunderstood as being about marginalized people.

“We were never marginalized because we were the world,” she told the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2013. “We didn’t care what straight people thought of us. We had no time for them, they didn’t show up on our radar, so we weren’t marginalized from anything.”

This month in London, Gagosian is exhibiting all 126 prints from the book, its first full showing in the United Kingdom. But the “Ballad” extends beyond the book and has been shown in many formats; it actually includes several hundred images and has expanded over time.

Before the book was published, to experience the “Ballad” was fleeting, rare and often, emotionally intense. Goldin originally conceived of it as a slideshow timed to songs by The Velvet Underground and Dionne Warwick, played in nightclubs around New York, and eventually, in the Whitney Biennial in 1985. In this version of the work, the images flash: Friends on the sand at the beach, or splayed together in bed. Their gazes are bright, or disaffected, or longing. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air. Goldin’s best friend Cookie falls in love; she marries; she and her husband die.

“It is a work that I love because it occupies a space that is both photographic and time-based, but it also ends up functioning a bit like a piece of immersive cinema or installation art,” explained Katherine A. Bussard, the curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum, which recently acquired a version of the slideshow. “The slideshow originally was really a live performance. So it was the artist standing there, dropping the slides in, DJing the soundtrack…for those who have seen it that way, they talk about the alive feeling of that experience.”

The book is its own form of intimacy, and has its own self-guided rhythm, Bussard pointed out. The Table of Contents takes the form of song titles to pair the music, if desired, and (unofficial) Spotify playlists have sprung up to assist.

Today, we expect art to be deeply personal to the artist, but Goldin was tapping into something novel as image-making shifted across the 1970s and ’80s, Bussard said. There was skepticism that “serious art could be made from one’s own lived experience” and that serious photography could be made in color. Styled like snapshots, the “Ballad” helped break both molds.

“There is a way in which the compositions, the subjects, even sometimes the blur of the camera conjures images that we’ve taken, or that our families took of us that that are the repository for our memories,” Bussard said. At the same time, she added, “people don’t make family albums about heartbreak. They didn’t pull out the Koda

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — Four decades ago, 126 of Nan Goldin’s snapshots of love and loss became one of the most influential photo books ever made.

“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” published by Aperture in 1986, follows Goldin and her friends through darkened nightclubs, daylit bedrooms, and late-night car rides around New York’s East Village, unfurling over time and space to Chicago, London, Berlin and Mexico City. The searingly intimate body of work seems to place the viewer inside the scenes, as she and her friends find belonging and desire and heartbreak. Though the group is predominately queer and was deeply impacted by the AIDS crisis, Goldin has said that her work is often incorrectly misunderstood as being about marginalized people.

“We were never marginalized because we were the world,” she told the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2013. “We didn’t care what straight people thought of us. We had no time for them, they didn’t show up on our radar, so we weren’t marginalized from anything.”

This month in London, Gagosian is exhibiting all 126 prints from the book, its first full showing in the United Kingdom. But the “Ballad” extends beyond the book and has been shown in many formats; it actually includes several hundred images and has expanded over time.

Before the book was published, to experience the “Ballad” was fleeting, rare and often, emotionally intense. Goldin originally conceived of it as a slideshow timed to songs by The Velvet Underground and Dionne Warwick, played in nightclubs around New York, and eventually, in the Whitney Biennial in 1985. In this version of the work, the images flash: Friends on the sand at the beach, or splayed together in bed. Their gazes are bright, or disaffected, or longing. Cigarette smoke hangs in the air. Goldin’s best friend Cookie falls in love; she marries; she and her husband die.

“It is a work that I love because it occupies a space that is both photographic and time-based, but it also ends up functioning a bit like a piece of immersive cinema or installation art,” explained Katherine A. Bussard, the curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum, which recently acquired a version of the slideshow. “The slideshow originally was really a live performance. So it was the artist standing there, dropping the slides in, DJing the soundtrack…for those who have seen it that way, they talk about the alive feeling of that experience.”

The book is its own form of intimacy, and has its own self-guided rhythm, Bussard pointed out. The Table of Contents takes the form of song titles to pair the music, if desired, and (unofficial) Spotify playlists have sprung up to assist.

Today, we expect art to be deeply personal to the artist, but Goldin was tapping into something novel as image-making shifted across the 1970s and ’80s, Bussard said. There was skepticism that “serious art could be made from one’s own lived experience” and that serious photography could be made in color. Styled like snapshots, the “Ballad” helped break both molds.

“There is a way in which the compositions, the subjects, even sometimes the blur of the camera conjures images that we’ve taken, or that our families took of us that that are the repository for our memories,” Bussard said. At the same time, she added, “people don’t make family albums about heartbreak. They didn’t pull out the Kodak camera to record moments of despair or longing or upset or death… so at the same time that the ‘Ballad’ is leaning into snapshots, it’s also changing them into something more expansive.”

Goldin herself has written on the potency of memory and the senses it invokes, calling memory “an invocation