World, US, Culture, Market, and Sci-Tech News Aggregation from MSM and Independent News
Someone reportedly fired shots at Vice President JD Vance’s Cincinnati, Ohio, home. The vice president and his family were not in the house at the time.
Local police did arrest a suspect following the gunfire, but there have as yet been no reports of injuries related to the incident, according to Tousi TV. Fox Business, however, reported that the Secret Service detained the suspect.
Xi warns bullying actions undermine global order after US raid Yeni Safak English
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
US capture of Maduro tests limits of China’s diplomatic push Reuters
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
Acting President Delcy Rodríguez struck a more diplomatic tone than she had on Saturday, inviting the United States to “work together on a cooperative agenda.”
from www.nytimes.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.
‘They Won’t Survive’: GOP Lawmakers Reveal 2 New Trump Targets After Maduro Operation
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump launched a sharp attack on Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, accusing his government of producing and exporting cocaine to the United States.“Colombia is very sick, too, run by a sick man, who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States, and he’s not going to be doing it very long,” Trump said.
President Donald Trump said on Sunday night that the United States is “in charge” of Venezuela after its mission that resulted in the arrest of Nicolas Maduro and the fall of his regime.
Initially hesitant to answer a question about who is running the country after Maduro’s ouster, saying it would be a “controversial” answer, Trump ultimately said, “We’re in charge.”
“We’re gonna run it. Fix it. We’ll have elections at the right time,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he headed back to the White House from Mar-a-Lago.
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.
Sunday morning’s cable news circuit once again demonstrated why senior administration officials so often spend more time correcting media narratives than explaining policy.
Appearing across Meet the Press and Face the Nation, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was subjected to a familiar pattern of questioning: assumptions embedded as facts, motives ascribed rather than examined, and repeated demands to justify actions that were already explained. The pushback Rubio delivered was not theatrical, nor was it evasive. It was corrective. And it was necessary only because the framing itself was flawed.
The first line of attack centered on Venezuela’s oil industry, with the implication that American involvement following the capture of Nicolás Maduro must be driven by resource acquisition rather than security.
Marco Rubio is so good.
“This is the Western Hemisphere. We’re not going to allow it to be a base of operations for our adversaries… They won’t come from outside our hemisphere, destabilize our region in our own backyard, and us have to pay the price for it. It’s over.” pic.twitter.com/GzLjNtBV3h
— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) January 4, 2026
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.
Russia on Tuesday released video footage of what it said was the deployment of its nuclear-capable hypersonic Oreshnik missile system in close ally Belarus, a move that would expand Moscow’s ability to strike targets across Europe in the event of a war.State news agency TASS said this was the first time the Russian defence ministry had publicly shown the Oreshnik mobile missile systems. President Vladimir Putin has declared that the missiles are “impossible to intercept”, citing missile speeds reportedly more than 10 times the speed of sound.”A solemn ceremony was held in the Republic of Belarus for the unit outfitted with the Oreshnik road-mobile missile system to assume combat duty.
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.
The Zohran is now the mayor of New York City, and one of his first matters of business was appointing a Communist who wants to seize private property as his, quote, director of the city’s Office to Protect Tenants. Meet Cea Weaver. She says private property should be part of the warm glow of collectivism as opposed to the rugged individualism of being allowed to own your own home, especially if you’re one of them white people.
It will mean families – especially WHITE FAMILIES – are going to have a different relationship to property than the one we currently have.
The streets are saying this clip is from a November 2022 podcast called “Cities After…,” and I know what you’re thinking. “Hey Brodigan, an adult in public policy can’t be expected to be held accountable for the words that came out of her mouth prior to five minutes ago. Also, I get all my news from CNN and have trouble tying my own shoes.”
In that case, you probably won’t be interested in these nuggets from her now deleted X account:
Trump pulls National Guard troops out of major cities after Supreme Court decision Straight Arrow News
from news.google.com
‘Doomed to fail’: Trump cautioned his ‘cultural coup’ is backfiring rawstory.com
from news.google.com