Dass die Bundesregierung Ende letzten Jahres mindestens 123 Kampfpanzer vom Typ Leopard 2 (A8) sowie 200 neue Schützenpanzer vom Typ Puma bestellt hat und dass die Bundeswehr gar plant, im nächsten Jahrzehnt tausend Leopard-Panzer zu kaufen, ist das vielleicht beste Beispiel dafür, dass es bei der „Zeitenwende“ nicht um Sicherheit oder Verteidigungsfähigkeit geht, sondern ausschließlich […]

In Wilbert L. Cooper’s new memoir, The Black Shield, he tells two intertwining stories: the history of the city’s Black Shield Police Association, one of the country’s oldest Black policing organizations, and the multigenerational narrative of his own family, embedded in the police force. Both of his parents and sister are retired Black Cleveland cops, and on his mother’s side, there’s been a Cleveland cop in the family since 1950. In this book about race, policing, and power, Cooper examines the complex duality of the Black cop, what it was like for his parents to navigate an institution that was hostile to their own community, and, ultimately, what this all has meant for him.

This excerpt combines the prologue and a chapter focused on his mother’s beginnings in Cleveland’s police department. Two individuals mentioned spearheaded legal efforts in the 1970s to diversify the department: Fred Johnson, the association’s president who led a lawsuit over the department’s discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, and Jean Clayton, a policewoman and the organization’s secretary whose parallel lawsuit disbanded the segregated Women’s Bureau and integrated women into the department. Below, Cooper recounts how his mother, Gayle, walked through the door that they opened. But it was not without a struggle.

—Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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The gun was always there. I used to see it in flashes as Dad would get ready to leave the house. After he doused himself in spicy cologne and sliced a plastic comb through the waves of his jet-black Jheri curl, I would catch that 9-millimeter sliding between the small of his back and the belted waistband of his blue jeans. 

Mom had her own. She kept it in her purse. One of those big leather bags, the kind they show behind the counter at Dillard’s, with shiny metal clasps and countless compartments. Her gun would be in there with red lipstick, a double-sided compact mirror, and her bulky pager. I knew the gun was there because I sensed its heft whenever I’d have to move the bag off the kitchen table to do my homework. It felt like a bowling ball in a pillowcase.

Dad used to store his 9-millimeter above the fine china, on top of the large, baby-pink Victorian-style cabinet in our dining room. One time while he was sleeping, I climbed on top of the pink-velvet-upholstered chairs to get a good look at it through the scrollwork. When I came face-to-face with the gun, I was too intimidated to actually pick it up and play with it.

It took a few moments for me to work up the gumption to run my little fingers across the raised bumps of its grip. Then I touched the ridges of the slide and the smooth, cold, hard barrel from where bullets burst. And just that alone felt crazy to me. Even in the dusty, mundane space of the cabinet, the stock-still object pulsated with wild energy. It was like petting a tiger.

Even now, it’s overwhelming for me to imagine that all that calamitous potential to take life, to inflict pain, to inspire fear, to demand subservience, to have your way with the world, to finally be the actor instead of the one who is acted upon—was right there and it was theirs.

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I was 7 or 8 when I saw Dad shoot that gun. It must have been the summer, because I still remember the heavy outside air kissing my arms and legs, the suburban sunlight beaming on me. I see that light reverberating off the concrete, making vivid every blade of green grass in the yard and every goose-egg stone in the gravel strips. But I cannot hear the gunshot. I cannot tune in to the boom. All I sense is the fear, because it is so foreign. I’m still there. Standing in the driveway. Stuck and dumbfounded. Until Dad’s shouts break through, begging me to run inside before those crackers come back, commanding me to have Mom call the cops.

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Have you heard of Pastor Leon McCray? The man of faith who saw two White people dumping a refrigerator on his property. When McCray tried to stop them, the duo threatened him. One of the Whites ran off to grab three more racists. McCray says that’s when they all ganged up on him. That’s when they told him that his “Black life didn’t matter.” The beating didn’t stop until McCray pulled out his gun. When the police showed up at the scene, they handcuffed McCray and put him in the back of the cruiser. His assailants laughed and waved at him as he was taken off.

But at least McCray survived. You know that many of us aren’t so lucky: The police shot and killed the father Philando Castile during a traffic stop after he told them he had a firearm. The police shot and killed the father John Crawford while he was carrying a pellet rifle inside the Walmart that retailed the damn pellet rifle. Police shot Emantic F. Bradford Jr. at a shopping mall while they were responding to a call about gunshots at the mall. Witnesses say they killed Bradford as he was trying to direct shoppers to safety.

These killings now give shape and sharpness to that immense and totalizing fear I felt in the driveway as a child. That American malice is always there anytime we try to commandeer a power that wasn’t intended for us. Black people are killed or incarcerated every day for much less than what Dad did. Simply owning a gun can put a bullseye on your back. Pulling one on a White man can turn you into a hashtag.

So why did Dad want to call 911? I know that he’d tell you it was because his gun was different from Pastor Leon’s. Dad didn’t buy it at Walmart or Bass Pro alongside camouflage galoshes and fly-fishing rods. He didn’t pick it up at a gun shop with a shooting range full of targets depicting men in turbans and hip-hop gear. He didn’t procure it across state lines at a gun show with bundles of cash and no identification or background check. And he didn’t get it off the street, with scratched-out serial numbers and bodies on it.

Dad got his gun from the City of Cleveland. That’s where Mom got hers, too. Both are tools of policing, the Cooper family business. They hold up those guns and their power to use them as symbols of our freedom in a country that will not stop killing or incarcerating Black folks. When I was a child, I never questioned that contradiction. But to become my own man in the America I inherited, I realized I’d have to try to solve the paradox of my parents.

By the time the Black Shield had forced the hand of the Cleveland Police Department in 1977, Gayle had given birth to another child—a little boy named Geoffrey. Now with three kids, she was even more entrenched in a wrathful marriage and farther away from the working world. And losing her uncle Lloyd, which felt a lot like losing a father, only made her feel that much more alone. When he died, the dream of becoming a cop and the freedom the job promised died with him. 

It was at the moment that she’d almost completely resigned herself that it all came raging back. She opened up an issue of the Plain Dealer to find that people who’d taken the test with her and were lower than her on the eligibility list were being appointed to the police academy. And quickly, her despondency turned to confusion. And then her confusion turned to anger. She said to herself, “I know my number is higher than this and they’ve gone eighty past me and I’m not getting called?!” As she started to look into the issue, she found out that the city had expunged her from the eligibility list. “They were trying to lose Black folks’ stuff,” she told me. The city claimed it was because her addresses had changed and she hadn’t notified the civil service. To get back on the list, she had to go to court. “They claimed I had moved, but I owned my own home!” she said. “I told them, ‘I bought this house, I haven’t gone anywhere.’” As soon as she prevailed in her hearing, a White officer walked up to her in court. He simply said, “I’m from the academy.” He took her information. And then he said, “You will start the police academy on Monday.”

Later that same night, Fred Johnson called Gayle’s phone. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to the man. Lloyd was never big on the Shield Club, and Curtis was much closer with her younger brother, his namesake, who would join the police department five years later. Gayle didn’t have a complete idea of what the Shield Club had been up to at that point, or of how much it had shaped the situation she was walking into. Because of all the lawsuits, more than 40 percent of her classmates would be people of color and women. But the department they were entering was only 9 percent Black or Hispanic, and 2 percent women. For his part, Johnson stressed the struggle happening in the city to resist the change that Black women like Gayle represented. The academy was framed as a contentious environment controlled by people who were intent on destroying Gayle’s professional prospects and her spirit.

Despite the reforms that resulted from the Shield Club and the Women’s Law Fund cases, Gayle was still put through a series of tests, during which she could still be expunged. She had to meet with a psychiatrist, who asked her questions about her affiliations. Although this test had been revised thanks to the efforts of Fred Johnson and the Shield Club, it remained biased. As many of us conclude from a life living in this country run by White people, Gayle figured the best way to stick around was to hide herself. Her strategy was to answer every question like a White man of modest intellect.

In the 1970s, Gayle had spent a few years in the Nation of Islam. Although she never really let go of Jesus, she converted aesthetically and culturally to satisfy the whims of her second husband. She traded her hot pants for conservative flowing dresses. And instead of sweet potato pie, she started baking bean pies. When she did make a Polish Boy, she did it with beef sausage. She even traveled to Chicago once for Saviours’ Day to see the honorable Elijah Muhammad with her own eyes. But she put all that behind her when she found out that her proud Muslim husband was sleeping with a fellow “sister.” By the time she took the psych test to become a police officer, she’d gone back to straightening her hair and listening to gospel music. But some of the political knowledge she gained from the Nation, especially its perspective on America, stuck with her. She understood things differently than most—like the “riots” that happened in Hough and Glenville. She saw them as a natural reaction to the way her people had been done in this city and done in America. To her, the people who stormed the streets weren’t criminal. The crimes being committed were by the landlords renting rat-infested apartments and the Board of Education shoving kids into overcrowded schools and businesses charging a premium for rancid meat. She had a lot of ideas about these sorts of things, but none of them could feed her kids or free her from her marriage. And so she kept them to herself during her psych test.

The new hires were also required to do a complete physical examination. This was especially humiliating for Gayle. The whole ordeal was a perverse take on the idea that if women want to be in the academy, if women want to do what the men do, then they have to go through the exact same processes. For the physical exam, this meant standing around nearly nude to be ogled by their peers. “They made us stand up there in paper gowns and these guys were trying to catch glimpses at us. And they make you do stuff in the gowns so the gowns get all torn up. My breasts and everything were just hanging out,” Gayle recalled. She was so thoroughly humiliated that a fellow female in the academy came to her with some Scotch tape to try to cover her up. “They did that kind of thing because they wanted us to quit. The guys didn’t want us, their wives didn’t want us, it was terrible. They treated us like new meat, picking out which one they were going to take.” 

Fred Johnson made himself available to all the Blacks in the academy because he was prepared for the city to try to find excuses to fail them. Gayle didn’t think she’d have a problem. She was voted the vice president of the academy class and consistently scored high on all of the interstitial tests. Those high scores were attained by studying alongside her new girlfriend. But when they both got good grades on a test with similar answers, they were accused of cheating and threatened with expulsion from the academy. Fred Johnson had to step in and help them prove that they’d arrived at the same answers because they’d been preparing together.

After passing the academy, but before they could be sworn in as officers, they were also required to take a qualification test administered by the State of Ohio that evaluated their skills. Cadets could fly through the academy with high marks and still get disqualified to be a police officer. Although policewomen in Cleveland had been in the academy before the 1970s, they weren’t required to take the qualification test because officers in the women’s bureau didn’t carry guns. Anticipating that they would do whatever they could to disqualify her, Gayle prepared for the test with the desperate intensity of a woman fighting for her life. “To prepare for the running test, I used to run up and down the steps whenever I’d put the kids down for nap,” she told me. To make her qualifying time, she outran some Vietnam veterans, who threw up before they crossed the finish line. The state also required people to do a series of chin-ups and push-ups and dips that demanded upper body strength that seemed to favor the male physique, but Gayle fought her way through those. When she finally had to take her shooting test, the last phase, it was 19 degrees below zero. In 1977, Cleveland was in the midst of one of its coldest winters ever. But one of the essential rules of the academy was that it never canceled or postponed qualification tests for any reason, in an effort to help simulate what it’s like to be a police officer and have to work when everyone else gets the day off. And so Gayle stood at the outdoor range with the soft skin of her red-nailed fingers sticking to the ice-cold metal of her gun, her body involuntarily shivering, hoping the icy air didn’t tank her shot.

The first night Patrolwoman Gayle Smith reported to the Fifth District of the Cleveland Division of Police in the winter of 1977, her supervisor showed her two things: the coffee machine and the broom. It was expected that she would be the shift’s glorified janitor. But she bucked back. “I did not go through all that training to do no housekeeping. I came here to be a police officer,” she remembers saying to him, surprised by her own candor. Ridiculous as it seems now, perhaps this kind of insult by her male colleagues should have been expected. After all of the efforts by the Women’s Law Fund and Jean Clayton to break down the formal barriers in the CDP, women still constituted only 2.3 percent of the police force when Gayle started. The assholes she was working with had almost no experience working alongside women as equals and little incentive to see them as such. Gayle was basically a guinea pig. Ironically, it was because of Jean Clayton, Gayle’s initial inspiration to become a lady cop, that the women’s bureau was dissolved and lady cops ceased to exist. Although Gayle had been intent on following Clayton’s path, she found herself involved in something entirely new.

While most of the male cops were unhappy with the gender integration of the department, a lot of the women officers were displeased, too. They were especially pissed at Jean Clayton and her damn lawsuit. These were women who had no interest in being partnered with men and participating in a form of policing that oriented itself around violence and punishment. There were certainly fair criticisms of the women’s bureau, from its troubling focus on purity to the fact that its diversion efforts and empathy weren’t as equally distributed to Black suspects as they were to Whites. But I wonder if the department would be less lethal and repressive today if the men on the Cleveland Police Department had become more like the women and their women’s bureau. Instead, the women became more like the men. After the women’s bureau closed, some of its important work, such as sex crimes, was shamefully ignored or mishandled. Gayle would see this firsthand. But first she needed to get out of coffee duty.

It took some convincing, but eventually Gayle got her first assignment outside the district. After roll call, she would be taken to White City Beach, a former park on Lake Erie that in the 1940s was home to attractions like Bonavita the lion trainer, along with fishing and a yacht club. After natural disasters hurt the park and desegregation saw the City of Cleveland give up on supporting community spaces shared by both Blacks and Whites, White City Beach went the way of Euclid Beach. By the 1970s, it became a dumping ground for garbage and a place where the city parked vehicles that were towed to clear the streets for snowplows or as the result of car wrecks. That year, it was overflowing with gnarled automobiles. It had been the coldest Cleveland winter of the century, complete with “superbomb” blizzards and scores of days that were more than 20 degrees below zero. There were more than one thousand cars down there at White City Beach, but not another soul in sight.

“They dropped me off at White City Beach every night and stuck me in a shell of a car that was up on bricks and cinder blocks, with a wire heater inside of it. There was no bathroom. They’d leave me there all night and they’d come back and get me in the morning. I was just down there by myself in pitch blackness and cold. Even if I had wanted to get out, I couldn’t go nowhere. If someone had tried to steal the cars down there, there is nothing I could have done about it. It was demoralizing.”

Mom told me this in the kitchen, where I’d often heard her talk about the bad early days on the job. I’m not sure whether this was the first time I was really listening, or if she was telling it differently. Usually, her stories were never this detailed and specific. It was just “racism” and “men being nasty.” Perhaps because I was taking a real interest, she started accessing parts of the story she had often left untouched in her recounting.

There is a feeling of humiliation that stings long after an event has passed. It doesn’t just hurt because of what was done, it hurts because you feel as though you had some agency in the matter. That you let it happen. When she started telling me what it was like, I could feel her own surprise at the disregard she had endured. In the zone car with White partners, she was beneath speaking to. These were men who would greet a dog if they saw it on the street, but wouldn’t say one word to her. In this sense, despite the lawsuit and the consent decree, not much had changed on the job since the late 1950s, when White officers would “throw a shoe” to avoid being paired up with Curtis and Fred Johnson.

“When they finally had two guys take me out, they put me in the back seat where a prisoner would sit. And they didn’t let me touch the radio. They were supposed to show me some things. But instead, they got out of the car and went to eat. They just left me locked in the back of that car without saying anything. I’m just beating on the door and everything.”

It wasn’t until an old, White, Catholic officer who looked like Santa Claus decided to take Gayle under his wing that she finally got to learn a bit about real policing. The rotund veteran with snow-white hair explained to Gayle the first time she got in the car with him exactly why he was willing to teach her. It wasn’t that he was pleased about working with Blacks or with women. He simply realized the futility of resistance: “If we get rid of her, they will just send another one of them down here.”

“It was crazy to have me on the job that length of time and nobody taught me nothing except what I learned in the academy,” she remembered of her time wasted on frivolous assignments. “When he took me out, the first thing he ever told me was this: He said, ‘Okay, kid, what time is it?’ I looked for my watch. He said, ‘That is the first rule. Don’t you ever take your eye off anybody. If they ask what time it is, say you don’t know or your watch is broke. But you don’t look down.’”

It was with Santa Claus that she got to see how the men handled sex crimes now that the women’s bureau was closed. The first rape call that they ever responded to together involved a White woman. The lady had walked three doors over from where she lived to bum a cigarette from her neighbor. Before she could get back home, three men had grabbed her off the street, dragged her into a car, and took turns raping her. While Gayle was wrenched by the story, calling back to her own experiences of sexual abuse, the veteran was incredulous. “He talked to that girl so bad, I felt sorry for her,” she remembered. “He asked her, ‘What were you wearing?’ ‘Why were you out at that time of night?’ ‘What did you expect was going to happen?’ It was horrible . . . I will never forget it. That girl ended up not even filing.”

It was also alongside Santa Claus that she finally proved she could be real police, like the men. The call was a robbery at a drugstore that drew several cars to the scene. The suspect was a young Black man who managed to run out the back door. To show her tenacity, Gayle took off after him ahead of the rest of the cops, moving just as she had when she was training for the department’s entrance exam, going up and down those steps. Santa, who was heavy and plodding with bad knees, couldn’t keep up as Gayle tailed this man through an alleyway. And then from behind her, a shot rang out.

When a police shooting happens, officers come together to get their story straight. Although this was an era when it was still legal for officers in Cleveland to shoot fleeing felons, all the patrolmen made sure they agreed on what took place. After they were finished, they looked over at Gayle to see if she saw it the same way they did. Forget the police academy. The offensive rape call was a pop quiz, and this shooting was the final exam of real police shit. And Gayle passed with flying colors. “After that, I started having people to work with,” she told me. “It didn’t feel good, but I had a demon behind me.”

Browse Wilbert L. Cooper’s book-related events and appearances or buy the book today:

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Wilbert L. Cooper grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. He studied journalism at Ohio University and earned a master’s degree in publishing at New York University. He has written for outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Marshall Project, and The Wall Street Journal. His Vice documentary The Cleveland Strangler was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In 2024, he was the recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award. The Black Shield is his first book.

Das beherrschende Thema dieser Ausgabe des Anti-Spiegel-Podcast war mal wieder die Ukraine, weil dort gerade sehr viel passiert, was die deutschen Medien verschweigen. So stellen sie die überraschende Kiew-Reise von Außenminister Wadephul als Akt der Solidarität mit der Ukraine dar, dabei hatte der Besuch offensichtlich ganz andere Gründe. Aber das war nur eines der vielen […]

Da ich letzte Woche bereits beim Homeofffice von NuoViso über all die Themen gesprochen habe, die wir normalerweise bei Tacheles sprechen, haben wir Tacheles letzte Woche ausnahmsweise ausfallen lassen. Aber heute gibt es wieder eine aktuelle Folge von „Tacheles mit Röper und Stein“. Nächste Woche fällt Tacheles übrigens wieder aus, weil NuoViso sein jährliches Sommerfest […]

In July 2025, a protester shot a cop outside an ICE detention facility in North Texas. The federal government alleged the incident was the result of an “antifa” terrorist plot involving a network of friends and acquaintances united in leftist beliefs. The case that ensued was chilling:

It didn’t matter that little evidence of a premeditated attack on law enforcement ever emerged. It didn’t matter that every defendant, except the actual shooter, was exonerated of the original attempted murder charges. It didn’t even matter that prosecutors struggled to show the defendants belonged to an “antifa cell.” In the end, they convinced the jury that Batten and most of her co-defendants were guilty of rioting, conspiracy, using explosives, and supporting terrorists.

In a Fort Worth courtroom in June, a right-wing judge sentenced Batten to 50 years behind bars—a stark warning to others who might challenge the president’s agenda. 

Als ich sah, dass westliche Medien berichten, in Russland würden die Menschen regelrecht die Banken stürmen, um ihre Konten zu plündern, weil sie befürchten würden, der Staat könnte die Gelder zur Finanzierung des Krieges einziehen, musste ich wegen dieser erneuten plumpen Propaganda laut lachen. Der Spiegel titelte beispielsweise „Angst vor Beschlagnahmung – Russen heben offenbar […]

Während deutsche Medien weiterhin behaupten, die Ukraine könne das Blatt im Krieg gegen Russland wenden, wird die Lage in der Ukraine immer verzweifelter, weil die Ukraine unter einem massiven Mangel an Abwehrraketen leidet und der Westen keinen Nachschub mehr liefert. Da man davon in deutschen Medien nur wenig erfährt, übersetze ich hier einen Artikel der […]

Die Ukraine ist vor einiger Zeit dazu übergegangen, nicht nur gezielt Wohngebäude in Russland anzugreifen, sondern auch zivile Busse und Züge. Davon konnte man manchmal sogar in deutschen Medien, wie dem Spiegel erfahren. Der Spiegel berichtete beispielsweise am 8. Juni, dass ukrainische Drohnen auf der Krim einen Passagierzug angegriffen haben. Am 17. Juni gab es […]

Die aktuellen Meldungen wären lustig, wenn sie nicht so ernst wären. Die EU hat beschlossen, gegenüber russischen Schiffen zu offener Piraterie überzugehen und sie produziert und finanziert die Drohnen, die Ziele tief in Russland angreifen, behauptet aber, keine Kriegspartei zu sein. Außerdem leidet die EU unter einer Energiekrise, die durch die Dürre erschwert wird, und […]

Die Ukraine ist Ende letzten Jahres dazu übergegangen, im Schwarzen Meer zivile Handelsschiffe anzugreifen, wobei sie keinerlei Rücksicht auf die Herkunft der Schiffe nimmt. So hat die Ukraine in letzter Zeit sogar türkische Handelsschiffe angegriffen, was in der Türkei für Unmut sorgt, schließlich hat die Türkei immer wieder versucht, in dem Konflikt zu vermitteln und […]

Der Westen ist schon vor einiger Zeit zu offener Piraterie übergegangen. So hat Großbritannien beispielsweise schon 2019 einen iranischen Tanker gekapert, die USA haben 2021 iranische Tanker gekapert und seit 2022 kapern Länder der EU immer wieder Tanker mit russischem Öl. Als Vorwand für diese Piraterie nennen die Länder des Westens ihre Sanktionen, die sie […]

With no secondary school in the southern half of the Isle of Mull, children must leave home for the mainland at the age of eleven, living in a youth hostel during the school week. It’s a system that has existed for generations—but what does sending children away so young do to a community? Fernando Pinho gently follows the families who must navigate this rite of passage, and explores the political decisions that have kept this structure in place.

You know that Monday morning dread, she said, when you hate your job and you can’t face going back? The children get that on a Sunday.

Sunday is the day of washing, drying and ironing, because the clothes that came home on Friday have to be packed again for Monday. And then the bag sits at the bottom of the stairs. You come down, and you see it, she said, and it’s this little reminder of what’s coming.

Sometimes there’s an invitation, a barbecue at someone’s house, all of them welcome, just a couple of hours, you’ll be home in time. But her son doesn’t want to leave the house on a Sunday, and she won’t leave him. How do I say I can’t go, she told me.

Am Dienstag war ich mal wieder im Homeoffice von NuoViso zu Gast und habe mich den Fragen von Frank Höfer, Robert Stein und der Zuschauer im Live-Chat gestellt. Da es dabei um die gleichen aktuellen Themen ging, über die wir auch bei Tacheles sprechen, könnte diese Ausgabe von Homeoffice diese Woche die Tacheles-Sendung ersetzt haben. […]

Die Medien werden die Dürre in Europa für die Ernteausfälle verantwortlich machen. Allerdings ist das nur die halbe Wahrheit, denn die Krise der europäischen Nahrungsmittelproduktion hat weit mehr Gründe, die die EU selbst verschuldet hat. Neben der ideologisch bedingten verfehlten Landwirtschaftspolitik sind das auch die Russland-Sanktionen, die gleich mehrfache Wirkung haben. So haben die Preise […]

Nearly two centuries ago, a strange hill rose above the flat landscape of London's East End. It stood high enough to appear on maps, serve as a landmark for travellers, and offer sweeping views across the city. Unlike most hills, Whitechapel Mount, as this hill was called, was almost certainly man-made. Yet, nobody is entirely sure how it came to be.

Was it a giant rubbish heap? A burial mound from one of London's deadly plague outbreaks? A remnant of Civil War fortifications? Or was it created from debris left behind by the Great Fire of London?

The answers remain uncertain, making Whitechapel Mount one of the most curious lost landmarks in the history of London.

Illustration of the Whitechapel Mount as it appeared on Illustrated London News, 28 April 1862. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In deutschen Medien war der Drohnenvorfall am Flughafen Leipzig in dieser Woche eines der beherrschenden Themen, weshalb wir uns den Vorfall im Anti-Spiegel-Podcast näher angeschaut haben. Außerdem ging es natürlich wieder um die Ukraine, wo – unbeachtet von den deutschen Medien – der „Papp-Maidan“ stattfindet – und wir haben uns angeschaut, was die „Mekka-NATO“ ist. […]

Ich habe schon oft gesagt, dass jeder, der sich informieren will, deutsche Medien meiden muss, weil sie unglaublich viel verschweigen und ihr Publikum dumm halten. Britische und amerikanische Medien verbreiten ebenfalls viel Propaganda, aber sie informieren ihr Publikum trotzdem viel besser als die deutschen Medien. Dass deutsche Medien seit Monaten behaupten, die Ukraine sei dabei, […]

Auf dem Leipziger Flughafen hat ein Busfahrer in der Nacht zum 5. August in der Nähe einer ukrainischen Frachtmaschine eine mit Sprengstoff beladene Drohne unschädlich gemacht und Politik und Medien in Deutschland sind im Panikmodus. Der neu eingerichtete Nationale Sicherheitsrat tagte in einer Sondersitzung, der Bundesinnenminister ist aus dem Urlaub mach Leipzig geeilt und die […]

Diese Woche war Tacheles mit Röper und Stein mal wieder sehr „Ukraine-lastig“, aber es gab auch noch einige andere spannende Themen. Sollte YouTube die Sendung löschen, finden Sie sie auch hier bei NuoViso.

European Union countries are rushing to find a joint response to threats by US President Donald Trump to impose an additional 10-percent tariff on goods from several European allies from February 1.

EU leaders are set to meet in Brussels on Thursday after Trump threatened that eight European countries would face higher tariffs until the United States secures what he described as the “complete and total purchase” of Greenland.

The US repeatedly said it wants the mineral-rich autonomous Danish territory of Greenland for “national security”, despite it already having a base on the island and long established security agreements with fellow NATO ally Denmark, which has controlled the Arctic island for about 300 years.

Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom recently sent a small number of soldiers on a reconnaissance mission to Greenland as a sign of solidarity with Denmark, which is pushing back against Trump’s takeover ambitions.

“We won’t be blackmailed, and we stand together in solidarity in Europe,” said German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil, arriving in Brussels on Monday for two days of previously planned talks  with his EU counterparts. “We don’t want an escalation. We are not looking for an escalation, but we are ready if it comes,” Klingbeil said.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – considered one of Trump’s few allies in the EU – has called the new tariff threat a “mistake”.

In a different threat scenario, Trump also ramped up his rhetoric against France on Tuesday, warning he would impose 200 percent tariffs on French wine and champagne over its intentions to decline his invitation to join his “Board of Peace” set up to oversee the rebuilding of Gaza.

French President Emmanuel Macron said at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos (Switzerland) on Tuesday: “What doesn’t make sense is to have tariffs between allies. We have to fix the war in Ukraine, we have to help the Ukrainians resist, and find a sustainable peace.” 

Macron called the possibility of potentially activating the Anti-Coercion Instrument against the US “crazy” and added: “I do regret that. But this is a consequence of just unpredictability and useless aggressivity.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has warned Trump not to plunge transatlantic relations into a dangerous downward spiral over Greenland. “This is why the proposed additional tariffs are a mistake, especially between long-standing allies,” she said in Davos.

Arctic security can only be achieved together.

This is why the proposed additional tariffs are a mistake, especially between long-standing allies.

The EU and US have agreed to a trade deal last July.

A deal is a deal.

And when friends shake hands, it must mean something. pic.twitter.com/5wpMic148s

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) January 20, 2026

Washington mayhem tests transatlantic alliance and post-WWII order

The leader of global rights group Amnesty International, Agnes Callamard, urged European countries Monday to stop “appeasing” Trump and to resist him and other “bullies” who she said were intent on destroying the rules-based order in place since World War II.

Since Trump’s return to the White House a year ago, he has taken “a range of decisions that have led to the demise of many rules around the world”, while Russia was destroying the system “through its aggression in Ukraine”, the human rights organisation’s secretary general told AFP in an interview in Davos.

The post-WWII order “is also being destroyed by Israel that has completely ignored international law in its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza”, she added.

Furthermore, European powers have been treading a thin line over Ukraine in recent months, relying on Washington to try to help settle the conflict but resisting terms too favourable to Moscow.

Trump meanwhile has put the transatlantic alliance to the test with threats to take over Greenland “one way or the other”, as European countries close ranks against Washington’s designs on the vast Danish autonomous territory.

In a message to Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, Trump said “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace”, citing his failure to win last year’s Nobel Peace Prize despite openly coveting it. He said although peace would still be “predominant”, he could “now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America”.

Store said in a statement: “I have clearly explained, including to President Trump, what is well known – the prize is awarded by an independent Nobel Committee”, not the Norwegian government.

NATO ramps up Greenland presence amid search for unity

Amid the global tensions, Denmark is proposing that NATO start surveillance operations in Greenland, with the support of the Arctic island, Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said Monday after meeting NATO’s chief Mark Rutte. The precise details of the proposal and the response from Rutte remain unknown.

While a number of NATO allies have sent troops to Greenland or have announced plans to do so despite the risk of additional US tariffs being imposed on them, others remain reluctant and divided over the move.

Belgium is sending a liaison officer to Greenland. Despite this decision, the country was not included on Trump’s list of sanctioned countries on Saturday.  “But there is no guarantee that this will not be the case in the future and we must show solidarity with our colleagues”, Foreign minister Maxime Prévot said. He called the American measures “incomprehensible and unnecessarily hostile”. 

Likewise, Slovenia on Saturday announced it would deploy two Armed Forces officers to Greenland to take part in the planning and implementation of the Danish-led international military exercise Arctic Endurance. 

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk – whose country is a staunch NATO ally with the highest defence expenditure as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) in the EU – already said last week the country was “not planning to send Polish soldiers to Greenland”.

Contrary to false claims on social media that Germany had sent warships to Greenland, the country did send 15 soldiers to the island for a reconnaissance mission. The troops however left Greenland on Sunday after the mission was completed on schedule, according to the Ministry of Defence.

Spain has not announced plans to participate in the mission in Greenland. Defence Minister Margarita Robles however said recently that the country could join the group in the future.

At the same time, some NATO allies are still navigating how the Greenland dispute plays out in their domestic political debates.

Asked on Monday whether the government of the Czech Republic supports Greenland, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš said he could not give a clear answer. He added that the United States is the leader of NATO and that conflicts are counterproductive. “We definitely prefer that an agreement be reached within the alliance. It would be very unfortunate if there were to be any conflicts,” Babiš said.

In Bulgaria, political reactions are mixed. The outgoing government has not issued a position on the recent developments around Greenland, but reactions from parliament have begun to emerge.

On the one hand, the leader of Continue the Change – a party affiliated at European level with Renew Europe – Assen Vassilev, said that every country should have the right to determine its own future, rather than having its choices dictated by external powers. 

On the other hand, Revival (Vazrazhdane) – whose MEPs sit with the Europe of Sovereign Nations Group in the European Parliament – backs the US claims over Greenland. Party leader Kostadin Kostadinov reiterated the party’s call for Bulgaria to withdraw from NATO and argued that tensions between Washington and Copenhagen expose deeper structural problems within both NATO and the European Union.

Slovakia’s Foreign Minister Juraj Blanár said “Slovakia considers Greenland to be part of Denmark”. He rejected tariff battles between states: “We prefer diplomacy and peace, not tension or fighting,” he said.

EU “trade bazooka” on standby

EU leaders will meet in Brussels on Thursday to discuss a coordinated response to the prospect of US tariffs – with its most powerful trade tool on the table.

The Anti-Coercion Instrument, a mechanism adopted in 2023, that can be used in cases of economic coercion when a non-EU country attempts to pressure the bloc or one of its 27 members into making a decision through trade restrictions.

Such practices “unduly interfere with the legitimate sovereign choices of the European Union and its member states”, the European Commission says on its website.

France had signalled its intention to request the activation of the instrument after Trump announced on Saturday that he would impose additional tariffs on the eight NATO allies. 

To apply the instrument, the European Commission first has to examine whether economic coercion is present in the case. EU countries must then back the Commission’s conclusion, before the EU’s executive arm ideally enters into talks with the country. If these are unsuccessful, the EU can impose countermeasures.

Retaliatory measures under the ACI however are only a last resort and must be proportionate. Using it against the United States would be ”the very first time” the EU has ever applied the tool, Macron recalled in Davos on Tuesday.

Should the ACI be applied over Trump’s latest trade threats, retaliatory tariffs on imports of US goods are likely. The EU-US tariff agreement concluded in July could also be put on hold.

Under discussion is also the possibility of imposing additional tariffs on a list of goods with a total trade volume of 93 billion Euro (108 billion Dollar), including industrial and agricultural goods such as motorcycles, beef, whiskey and citrus fruits.

This article is an ENR Key Story. The content is based on information published by ENR participating agencies.