Secretary of state Marco Rubio on Sunday slammed Kamala Harris and other Democrats for condemning the US operation that led to the arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, arguing the Biden administration had long sought his capture but failed to act despite offering a multimillion-dollar reward for his arrest.After Maduro and his wife were captured early Saturday during a US special forces raid dubbed Operation Absolute Reserve, Harris quickly denounced the operation after news of the arrest broke.“That Maduro is a brutal, illegitimate dictator does not change the fact that this action was both unlawful and unwise,” Harris wrote on X. “We’ve seen this movie before. Wars for regime change or oil that are sold as strength but turn into chaos, and American families pay the price.”She further alleged the mission was driven by “oil” and “Donald Trump’s desire to play the regional strongman.”
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Delcy Rodríguez is due to be officially sworn in as Venezuela’s president shortly (at 08:00 local time; 12:00 GMT) after the country’s supreme court designated her as interim president over the weekend.
She had pledged loyalty to Nicolás Maduro on Saturday and condemned his capture as an “atrocity”, but on Sunday called for a “balanced and respectful” relationship with the US, which has warned they might make a fresh military intervention if she does not accommodate their demands.
Blow to China From Loss of Venezuela Oil Blunted by Hoard at Sea Bloomberg.com
from news.google.com
The U.S. strike on Venezuela has renewed focus on the country’s oil sector, which includes some of the richest crude reserves in the world.
“We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars, it will be paid for by the oil companies directly. And we’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be,” President Trump said in a public address on Saturday following the attack, in which the U.S. captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
Here’s what to know about Venezuela’s oil industry.
Protests continue in Caracas after Maduro seized by U.S. news.cgtn.com
from news.google.com
Artificial intelligence is easily the most deceptive technological innovation of the 21st century. Its ease of use and the lightning-fast reflexes with which it spits out responses belie its enormous appetite for water and energy.ChatGPT took the world by storm when it launched in late 2023, signalling an era of intelligence demand marked by seamless, conversational interactions between user and machine But behind every smooth exchange lies a complex physical process. Modern AI is built on vast neural networks trained on trillions of words, images, and numbers. This training, to help models learn to predict the next word or recognise a pattern, involves processing colossal datasets repeatedly through graphics processing units, or GPUs. These chips, originally designed for rendering video game graphics, have become AI workhorses because they can perform thousands of mathematical operations simultaneously. But this speed comes at a price: intense heat.
Mass protests erupt in Iran over mounting economic distress World Socialist Web Site
from news.google.com
China Social Media Hails US Maduro Move as a Taiwan Template Bloomberg.com
from news.google.com
Zohran Mamdani, the young upstart of the US left, was sworn to take over as New York mayor for a term sure to see him cross swords with President Donald Trump.
from www.news24.com
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Monday that leader Kim Jong Un observed test-flights of hypersonic missiles and underscored the need to bolster the country’s nuclear war deterrent, as the country dials up weapons displays ahead of its major political conference.
North Korea reported on the drill a day after its neighbors said they detected multiple ballistic missile launches and accused the North of carrying out provocations. The tests came just hours before South Korean President Lee Jae Myung departed for China for a summit with President Xi Jinping.
The Australian government says it is waiting for the US to “set out the facts” on the operation to capture the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, before passing judgment.
The Labor ministers Jim Chalmers and Tim Ayres on Monday stressed the importance of international law after the US military intervention.
But when asked whether the extraordinary operation ordered by President Donald Trump to extract Maduro and his wife, and take them to the US to face charges of involvement in narco-terrorism, breached the United Nations charter, Ayres said the Albanese government was focused on “establishing the facts here and gathering evidence about what has occurred”.
A member of Iran’s security forces was killed during a fourth day of protests in the country, which have been sparked by a currency collapse, the semi-official Fars news agency has reported.
Citing regional official Said Pourali, Fars said the incident happened in the city of Kouhdasht, in the western Lorestan province, adding that a number of members of the security forces were also injured.
Footage verified by BBC Persian appears to show security forces firing at protesters in the city on the same day.
U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Ukraine did not attack one of President Vladimir Putin’s residences earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
Russia claims that Ukraine launched a large-scale drone operation targeting Putin’s Valdai residence in the northwestern Novgorod region between Sunday night and Monday morning. Kyiv has dismissed the accusations as an attempt to disrupt U.S.-brokered talks to end the war.
An unnamed U.S. official told WSJ that the CIA assessed no attack had taken place against Putin’s residence. According to the official, Ukrainian forces had instead sought to strike a military facility elsewhere in the Novgorod region, far from Valdai.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
Scientists working with China’s fully superconducting Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) have successfully reached a long-theorized “density-free regime” in fusion plasma experiments. In this state, the plasma remains stable even when its density rises far beyond traditional limits. The results, published in Science Advances on January 1, shed new light on how one of fusion energy’s most stubborn physical barriers might finally be overcome on the road to ignition.
The research was co-led by Prof. Ping Zhu of Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Associate Prof. Ning Yan of the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. By developing a new high-density operating approach for EAST, the team showed that plasma density can be pushed well past long-standing empirical limits without triggering the disruptive instabilities that usually end experiments. This finding challenges decades of assumptions about how tokamak plasmas behave at high density.
US deploys two aircraft carriers to Western Pacific amid China’s Taiwan drills News On AIR
from news.google.com
In a year when President Donald Trump called Chicago the “most dangerous city in the world” and launched an aggressive deportation campaign, citywide killings ultimately fell to a 60-year low as overall crime continued to drop.
The number of murders in Chicago decreased from 587 in 2024 to 416 last year, a nearly 30% drop, according to Chicago police data. It’s the lowest total since 1965 and the first time in a decade the city has had fewer than 500 slayings in a year.
Violent crime has been declining in Chicago after it peaked during the pandemic in 2021.
China signals it won’t give an inch to the US in Latin America MSN
from news.google.com
President Donald Trump signed a New Year’s Eve proclamation delaying increased tariffs on upholstered furniture, kitchen cabinets and vanities for a year, citing ongoing trade talks
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed a New Year’s Eve proclamation delaying increased tariffs on upholstered furniture, kitchen cabinets and vanities for a year, citing ongoing trade talks.
Trump’s order signed Wednesday keeps in place a 25% tariff he imposed in September on those goods, but delays for another year a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture and 50% tariff on kitchen cabinets and vanities.
‘Doomed to fail’: Trump cautioned his ‘cultural coup’ is backfiring rawstory.com
from news.google.com
Protests erupted in cities such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York City after it was announced that the U.S. captured Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.
Video footage posted to X showed protesters marching through New York City carrying signs that said, “Free Pres. Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, Now!” and “No Blood For Oil.”
According to ABC7NY, “a group of people demonstrated in Times Square” over Maduro’s capture. The protesters claimed that Maduro’s capture was not “about drug trafficking or democracy,” but that it was “about stealing oil and dominating Latin America.”
New details are emerging about Vice President JD Vance and his behind-the-scenes role in the dramatic U.S. military operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, an unprecedented action that has sent shockwaves across Latin America and the world.
In the early hours of January 3, U.S. forces launched a large-scale, highly coordinated military operation inside Venezuela. Explosions were reported in and around Caracas as American aircraft and special operations units struck key military and security targets tied to Maduro’s regime. The operation culminated in the capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were extracted from the country and flown to the United States.
Within hours of news breaking about Maduro’s capture, protests broke out in NYC with professionally printed signs and flags in support of Venezuela and other third-world countries like Cuba and Palestine.
Who paid for all of this?
Real Venezuelans are stormed NYC to counteract the white liberal Democrats protesting against Trump’s Maduro capture and strikes
Actual Venezuelans are ecstatic right now.
The Democrats are apoplectic. Democrats screaming over the arrest of the blood-soaked dictator Nicolás Maduro is the perfect hill for them to die on—after defending Barack Obama, who dropped 26,171 bombs in a single year without congressional approval, and Joe Biden, who launched strikes across Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia the same way—hypocrisy laid bare.
The New York Times is demanding that the Canadian government advances it’s rapid expansion of “assisted suicide” laws in order to swiftly euthanize a woman suffering from mental health issues.
It comes as Canada’s spiraling assisted-suicide program is once again under international fire after the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities called on the Canadian government to repeal its planned expansion of euthanasia for those suffering solely from mental illness, a policy critics warn will normalize suicide as “healthcare.”
The brilliantly executed US operation to snatch Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro benefits American citizens in many different ways.
- It took out the head of a major international organized crime cartel. The cartel, which the US has labeled the “Cartel de los Soles,” or Cartel of the Suns, is responsible for cocaine trafficking into the United States. Maduro had turned the upper levels of the Venezuelan government, military, and security services into a huge organized crime entity. The Department of Justice is prosecuting Maduro and others for running what a federal grand jury indictment calls “a corrupt and violent narco-terrorism conspiracy.” While no evidence indicates that Maduro’s cartel directly trafficked fentanyl into the U.S., the Treasury Department sanctioned the Cartel of the Suns last July for providing material support to the Sinaloa cartel of Mexico, which the DOJ described as “flooding the United States with fentanyl.”
- It took out the leader who flooded the United States with hardened criminals, organized terrorist gangs like Tren de Aragua, and millions of refugees. Once a new leadership is established in Venezuela, the country can take back its criminals and terrorists, and its refugees can return home and rebuild.
San Francisco has been a nutty place for some time now. The city’s been a stronghold of liberals for years, arguably since shortly after World War 2. But over the last couple of decades, the city’s leftist population has crossed over into pure wackadoodle. It’s also a hotbed of Trump Derangement Syndrome; if President Trump found a way to generate clean, free electricity from nothing, the San Francisco left would suddenly be campaigning in favor of coal plants.
Now, in the latest chapter in “San Francisco goes completely bat-guano nuts,” San Franciscans are taking to the streets (I’m sure it’s genuinely spontaneous) to protest Trump’s ouster of Venezuela’s tinpot dictator Nicolás Maduro.
NOW: Massive crowd in San Francisco, CA says “Hands Off Venezuela”! pic.twitter.com/GB5uHe3IGN
— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) January 3, 2026
Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as New York City’s mayor today.
The 34-year-old promised universal childcare for the many by taxing the wealthiest few. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders swore Mamdani into office and even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made an appearance.
A Somali-born Democrat politician and daycare owner in Minnesota is returning to electoral politics even as the state’s childcare sector faces a sprawling fraud scandal that has drawn national scrutiny and could total billions of dollars.
Abdi Daisane, a Democrat, announced on Christmas Eve that he plans to run for the state Legislature again in 2026.
The announcement comes two years after he lost a race to a Republican incumbent.
Daisane previously ran unsuccessfully for the St. Cloud City Council in 2016.
After President Donald Trump ordered the capture and arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro for charges of narcoterrorism, drug trafficking, and other crimes, Democratic lawmakers want to impeach the president and remove him from office. All the while, Venezuelans around the world have been seen celebrating the fall of Maduro.
Early on Saturday, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social, “The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. Details to follow. There will be a News Conference today at 11 A.M., at Mar-a-Lago. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”