| I'm Lara Williams and this is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a tournament of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. If you like sports, boy, we've got a good weekend coming up. The Winter Olympics properly kicks off tonight in Milan with the opening ceremony, but it's already provided us with some top-tier entertainment: Snoop Dogg! Injectables! Curling! (Which, by the way, Adam Minter believes has a blueprint to help the US stay competitive as dozens of Olympic sports get cut from college athletic departments.) In the UK, I'll be watching the Six Nations Championship, the annual rugby tournament between the nations of the British Isles, France and Italy. I'll likely have my hands over my face during Wales vs. England on Saturday: My home team, Wales, hasn't won a game in the Six Nations since 2023. But I expect most of our American readers will be glued to rugby's American relative as Super Bowl LX takes place on Sunday. Roughly one-third of the nation tunes in to watch the game, the halftime show and the ads. It's one of the last remaining shared rituals in the US and has historically been a time that presidents have used to remind Americans of what they hold in common, notes Adam in another column this week. President Donald Trump's approach, in contrast, has been to advance political agendas. Which brings us back to Super Bowl LX, to be held in Santa Clara, where residents and officials have been filled with anxiety over cruelly ambiguous comments from Washington about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents' role at the event. Trump has also been critical of the National Football League's choice of headliner – Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny – calling the selection "absolutely ridiculous" and accusing him of sowing hatred. As Ronald Brownstein wrote earlier this week, the feeling is mutual, with Bad Bunny using the Grammys to call out ICE. Though entertainers alone can't transform a political moment, they can certainly amplify sparks that are already there. These tensions will surely be felt on Super Bowl Sunday. It's also not Bad Bunny, known for his upbeat Latin trap music, who has sown hatred, but members of the Trump administration. It's not often, for example, that a federal judge accuses a cabinet secretary of racism, so when it happens, we ought to take note. Judge Ana C. Reyes did just that this week, in a scathing opinion ordering the suspension of the administration's decision to end the temporary protected status for about 350,000 Haitian refugees. Judge Reyes wrote that the plaintiffs charge that Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department for Homeland Security, "preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants. This seems substantially likely." Though Stephen L. Carter prefers more carefully modulated language, he says there's little to be said in Noem's defense. It's worth saying that, in addition to the abhorrent cruelty and racism of the current administration's approach to immigration control, it doesn't make sense economically either. Demographers once predicted that it'd take until 2081 for the number of people in the US to shrink for the first time. Now, Trump's aggressive campaign to attack both illegal and legal migration could ensure it happens this year. Erika D. Smith points to new data from the Census Bureau showing that in the year to July 2025, the population grew by just 0.5% — a slowdown that can be attributed almost entirely to a drop in net international migration. Republicans are taking the opportunity to misrepresent fewer migrants as a good thing, when actually, America needs them. Every year between 1994 and 2023, a report from the Cato Institute showed immigrants paid more in federal, state and local taxes than they received in benefits. Republicans are trying to spur growth via a pronatalist approach. But so far it hasn't worked, and it likely won't, at least not for a long while. That's something that Asian economic superstars have been discovering for themselves. Rapid development and elevated living standards come with a side-effect: ultra-low fertility rates. Singapore, in particular, is in a better place than most as it has historically sought to attract the workers it needs from abroad. Daniel Moss writes that policy makers in the city-state are lamenting the fact that, despite increasing paternity leave, introducing baby bonuses and a raft of tax incentives, Singaporeans still "show more interest in acquiring pets than bringing bundles of joy into the world." Ultimately, as Daniel points out, "shoring up languishing fertility requires extreme patience." It'll take a long time to counter the powerful shift in values that has driven the move to smaller families. As you're watching your chosen sporting event this weekend, take time to reflect on the joy of coming together for a common purpose, in unity and good-natured competition rather than hatred. Peter Mandelson's long friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has potentially sounded the death knell for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. It is specifically the fact that Starmer was warned of Mandelson's connection with the pedophile financier and still appointed him US ambassador that has made his problem Starmer's own. Martin Ivens writes that it is the nature of politicians to gamble — just look at how far Boris Johnson made it, despite everyone knowing he was careless with the truth — but while Mandelson did steady the ship for a while, it wasn't a risk worth taking. The scandal comes just 18 months after Starmer's landslide victory, but it follows a long period of voters losing trust in traditional parties. The PM faces an ocean of troubles at home, and vanishingly few of his own side have faith in his captaincy. Could the UK be getting ready for its sixth prime minister in less than a decade? It's embarrassing to say, but the last leader to complete a full term was David Cameron in 2015. We used to laugh at Italian politics, which seemed wholly unstable and chaotic. We ought to look in the mirror. The S&P 500 Index keeps teasing investors. It made its first approach to break through 7,000 in October, but hasn't quite managed it. Jonathan Levin writes that we can expect more volatility of the variety that investors experienced this week. It follows the fairly standard pattern for presidential terms, where the second year tends to be the worst one for US stocks. But Jonathan notes that Trump has taken this tendency to an extreme – in 2018, the president ramped up his trade war with China and attacked the Federal Reserve. This time round, he's doing all that and more. Meanwhile, Bitcoin has crashed through several psychological price levels, giving crypto evangelists severe heart palpitations and stress headaches. Lionel Laurent writes that while the price is still a long way above zero, a drop of around 20% in three days is reminiscent of when the FTX exchange imploded: "A particularly severe type of crypto winter appears to be drawing in that will test the faith of all but the most committed — or deluded — HODLers to continue holding on for dear life." What's clear is that this shock has shattered some of the narratives that swirl around the cryptocurrency, namely that Bitcoin is a safe haven, like gold. If it really was an escape, then why, during the Greenland drama, did gold soar and Bitcoin not? The digital currency looks more akin to a risky tech stock. Your peptide is a black box the FDA chooses to ignore — Gautam Mukunda AI has turned Bernie and DeSantis into unlikely allies — Mary Ellen Klas Anthropic's secret weapon is its manic productivity — Parmy Olson ACA fraud is real. It's time to get serious about fixing it — The Editorial Board GLP-1 pills are already upending the obesity-drug market — Lisa Jarvis America's big personalities are shrinking its greatness — Adrian Wooldridge The Supreme Court might be the model for the new Fed — John Authers Four fatal problems in the new US approach to China — Hal Brands The new "scramble for Africa" risks becoming divide and conquer — Justice Malala The new office oddity will be co-workers dictating everything to AI. Big banks are boosting their bonus pools. As the AI race intensifies, Big Tech is set to spend $650 billion this year. Curling is the next pickleball? How long it really takes to reach al dente. Baby giggles! Notes: Please send Olympic medals and feedback to Lara Williams at lwilliams218@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and find us on Bluesky, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads. | 
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