From Pennsylvania to Montana, the White House’s war on ‘woke’ has targeted US monuments that address topics like racism and Indigenous history

Blank spaces now exist where a series of panels about enslavement once appeared on the walls of the President’s House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The site, which honors the home of George Washington and John Adams, is a major landmark that bore artwork and informational signs for more than a decade. But on 22 January, National Park Service (NPS) workers used hand tools to pry off 34 panels to comply with a presidential executive order designed to reframe the national narrative. The panels that highlighted the lives of people enslaved by George Washington when Philadelphia was the US capital in the 1790s are now in storage.

The removal is one of several across the nation, as NPS staff aim to conform with Donald Trump’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” issued on 27 March 2025. Public markers, monuments and statues that the Trump administration considers disparaging to past or current Americans have been flagged at more than a dozen parks. Two exhibits at Montana’s Little Bighorn battlefield national monument that discuss Indigenous history and the Battle of the Little Bighorn have been targeted and deemed noncompliant. Additionally, signage about climate change at Muir Woods national monument in California and visitor brochures at Medgar and Myrlie Evers home national monument in Mississippi that referred to Medgar Evers’s killer as racist were also removed.

Tests on both versions of Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata were unable to detect brushstrokes of 15th-century master

An analysis of two paintings in museums in the US and Italy by the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck has raised a profound question: what if neither were by Van Eyck?

Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, the name given to near-identical unsigned paintings hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Royal Museums of Turin, represent two of the small number of surviving works by one of western art’s greatest masters, revered for his naturalistic portraits and religious subjects.

Philadelphia sheriff Rochelle Bilal’s words have become a rallying cry against Trump’s immigration crackdown

“You don’t want this smoke,” Rochelle Bilal, Philadelphia’s sheriff, warned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during an 8 January press conference. Her words have since become a rallying cry for resistance to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. At the conference with Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s district attorney, and city council members, Bilal spoke out against the 7 January fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. “We stand here today with all those who stand against the made-up, fake, what you can call ICE, professional law enforcement,” she said at the conference. “I don’t call them none of that. I call them made-up, fake, wannabe law enforcement. Because what they do is against not only legal law, but the moral law.”

Bilal is part of a growing body of elected officials who are speaking out against the Trump administration’s immigration policies and ICE’s alleged misconduct and aggressive enforcement tactics. As the first Black female sheriff of Philadelphia elected in 2019, Bilal has faced perhaps the most vitriol from opponents who have targeted her for her race and gender. “Race played a big [role in the] response,” Bilal told the Guardian in a conference room on her Philadelphia office floor. “The negative, nasty messages that are being received is ridiculous.” Since the video of her speech went viral, Bilal told the Guardian that death threats that she’s received have required her to increase her security detail. In a Facebook post, ICE also said that she should resign.

In Philadelphia, protesters demanded ICE leave US communities and Trump end warmongering in Venezuela

On a rainy Saturday in Philadelphia, two separate protests, both with a few hundred people, marched from city hall to the federal detention center. They differed slightly in solutions as well as crowd makeup – white older adults dominated the morning’s march organized by the groups behind the No Kings protests, while a more racially diverse crowd swathed in keffiyehs and N95 face masks led the afternoon’s, planned by the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter. However, both groups shared a goal: for ICE to get out of American communities and to put an end to Donald Trump’s warmongering in Venezuela.

“From Venezuela to Minneapolis, all we’re seeing is a regime that is scrambling, willing to kill its own citizens, willing to kill foreign citizens, to maintain its power,” said Deborah Rose Hinchey, co-chair of the city’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter.

Hundreds came out to protest in large cities coast to coast, even as many in the diaspora celebrated ousting of Maduro

• Top Republicans backpedal from Trump claim that US will run Venezuela

Protests bubbled up in several US cities over the weekend as people demonstrated against the Trump administration’s unilateral military intervention in Venezuela – even as many in the diaspora publicly celebrated the forced removal of president Nicolás Maduro.

Gatherings took place as crowds expressed opposition to a potential war with Venezuela and to declare illegal the US operation to snatch Maduro early on Saturday and bring him to the US to face drug-trafficking charges in court.

Two of the world’s leading cult interventionists live (with their parrot) in Philadelphia. They explain the art of coaxing people out of the most pernicious groups in the world

When the phone rings at Patrick Ryan and Joseph Kelly’s home in Philadelphia, chances are the caller is desperate. One couple rang because their son was about to abandon his medical practice to follow a new-age guru in Spain. Another call came from a husband whose wife was emptying their life savings for a self-proclaimed prophet in Australia. Yet another family phoned about their niece, who was in a relationship with a man stealing from her, maybe drugging her, probably sexually assaulting her.

These families had tried everything else. When nothing worked, they heard there were two men in Philadelphia who might still be able to bring their loved one home.