What happened
Federal prosecutors in Minnesota yesterday announced charges against 15 people for “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers” and “violently oppose immigration law enforcement” during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge earlier this year. U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen said the defendants were part of two groups aligned with antifa, a loose collective of anti-fascist activists targeted under an executive order President Donald Trump signed last year.

Who said what
The 15 people are accused of “coordinating Signal chats and rapid-response networks to track federal immigration officers,” said MPR News, but Rosen “turned aside specific questions connected to the alleged conspiracy.” They “quite deliberately got together and planned violence, used violence,” he told reporters. “Whether or not they actually at the end of the day caused bodily harm is not the measure” of a “serious federal crime.” 

The charges come at a “fraught moment for Minnesota federal prosecutors, who have had trouble sustaining many criminal cases” they filed against anti-ICE protesters, The New York Times said. At least a third have been dismissed “for a variety of reasons,” said The Minnesota Star Tribune.

What next?
The indictment is “pretty thin,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said to The Washington Post. “The evidence will prove it all out,” Rosen told reporters.

What happened
Federal law enforcement officials yesterday said they disrupted a plot to attack Sunday’s UFC cage match at the White House with explosive-laden drones and “snipers,” after an alleged plotter’s mother called local police last week. FBI Director Kash Patel disclosed on social media that “multiple” arrests had been made in a “multi-state operation.” Hours later, the Justice Department said five suspects had been arrested in Ohio, Nebraska, Missouri and California. 

Who said what
The mother of the Ohio suspect, 19-year-old Tycen Proper, told police that her son had been communicating online with “ex-military and Christian-based” people who “expressed ultra-religious and antigovernment sentiments,” according to an FBI affidavit. Proper allegedly said the attack on the UFC fight was meant to “jumpstart” a revolution. The charging documents “outlined a plot ambitious in scope” but “left less clear that the conspirators had the means to carry it out,” The New York Times said. 

What next?
Secret Service officials are “angry” with Patel for having “prematurely posted” news of the arrests, CNN said. The Secret Service led the “ongoing” investigation “from the beginning,” Deputy Director Matthew Quinn said at a news conference. And to “maintain the integrity” of the investigation, “we chose not to leak it.”

If you have ever felt like you couldn’t stop eating your favorite junk food, that’s by design. According to a series of papers published in the American Journal of Public Health, the tobacco industry employed the same tactics it used to sell cigarettes to promote ultraprocessed food.

In the 1980s, U.S. tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds “made a major entrance into the food industry,” acquiring brands like Del Monte, Kraft, Nabisco and 7Up, said one of the papers. Investing in food and beverage companies was an attempt to diversity and improve their corporate image.

Tobacco companies “spent decades amassing research on how to make cigarettes more addictive with chemical additives,” and according to “internal company records,” they “deliberately applied this knowledge to food manufacturing,” said NPR. Adding sugars and artificial flavorings, additives known to be “hyperpalatable,” activated the same part of the brain as cigarettes or other drugs. And along with changing the composition of the products, they made aggressive marketing the norm.

Big Tobacco eventually “divested from the food system,” but its impact remained, said the papers. Ultraprocessed foods “now account for 70% of packaged foods in the U.S. and 62% of the calories in children’s diets,” said Fast Company. These foods have been linked to obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

There have been growing calls to regulate the production and sale of ultraprocessed foods, notably as part of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Last summer, for example, federal agencies “began a joint effort to define ultraprocessed food,” said Bloomberg.