The vice-president went ballistic against the media and the left – a version of Trump with even more menace
It was James David Vance’s pitch to his boss: don’t forget me!
The vice-president was nowhere to be seen last weekend when US special forces swept into Venezuela and snatched its leader, Nicolás Maduro. Instead Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and a potential rival to Vance in the 2028 presidential election, grabbed all the Maga glory.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, has doubled down on her claim that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who shot and killed a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis was acting in self-defense and responding to an “act of domestic terrorism”.
Noem also said that she was “not opposed” to sending additional federal agents to Minneapolis.
Disgraced former movie mogul would avoid a third trial in New York on charges that came to define the #MeToo era
Disgraced former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is weighing a potential guilty plea to resolve an undecided third-degree rape charge and avoid a third trial in New York on charges that came to define the #MeToo era.
Weinstein, in a wheelchair and looking noticeably paler than he did when he was last in court in June, was brought to Judge Curtis Farber’s court on Thursday, seeking to have his latest sex crime conviction thrown out over claims of juror intimidation.
An almost admiring feeling pervaded the early coverage – and not just among right-leaning outlets
If you believe the early public opinion polls, Americans are uncertain about last weekend’s raid on Venezuela and the seizure of the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro.
But many in the media seem to be trying to move that wavering needle to approval.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
City targeted by Trump has seen swarm of immigration agents on the streets – and residents say the tension is palpable
Edwin Torres DeSantiago received a text message on Wednesday morning as he was tracking immigration enforcement across Minneapolis – a person was shot by ICE at 34th Street and Portland Avenue.
He jumped into his car to head to the scene. Torres DeSantiago manages the Immigrant Defense Network, a group that monitors ICE activity and responds to community needs after someone is taken. He has responded to dozens of scenes in the past few months, and even more in the last few days since the federal government surged its presence in the midwestern city.
The Trump administration has said repeatedly that the US needs to gain control of Greenland, a mineral-rich, largely self-governing part of Denmark with foreign and security policy run from Copenhagen.
The White House has said using the US military is “always an option”, but few analysts believe an armed operation is likely and France’s foreign minister has said the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has ruled out the possibility of an invasion.
Donald Trump’s Venezuela policy confirms he has no time for rules or process. America’s allies must find new ways to guarantee their own interests
Occasionally, history generates smooth changes from one era to another. More commonly, such shifts occur only gradually and untidily. And sometimes, as the former Downing Street foreign policy adviser John Bew puts it in the New Statesman, history unfolds “in a series of flashes and bangs”. In Caracas last weekend, Donald Trump’s forces did this in spectacular style. In the process, the US brushed aside more of what remains of the so-called rules-based order with which it tried to shape the west after 1945.
The capture of Venezuela’s former president Nicolás Maduro has precedents in US policy. But discerning a wider new pattern from the kidnapping is not easy, especially at this early stage. As our columnist Aditya Chakrabortty has argued this week, the abduction can be seen as a assertion of American power, but also as little more than a chaotic asset grab.
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The FBI has taken full control of the investigation into the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) officer in Minneapolis, it emerged on Thursday.
In a statement, the Minnesota bureau of criminal apprehension (BCA) said it was initially called upon to help investigate the shooting before federal officials “reversed course” and said the case would be “solely led by the FBI”. With its access to the case materials, witnesses and evidencerevoked, the BCA said it had to “reluctantly” withdraw from the investigation.
Lawsuit accuses AI chatbots of harming minors and includes case of Sewell Setzer III, who killed himself in 2024
Google and Character.AI, a startup, have settled lawsuits filed by families accusing artificial intelligence chatbots of harming minors, including contributing to a Florida teenager’s suicide, according to court filings on Wednesday.
The settlements cover lawsuits filed in Florida, Colorado, New York and Texas, according to the legal filings, though they still require finalization and court approval.
Democratic-led resolution requires US president to seek Congress’s approval to use military against Venezuela
The US Senate on Thursday advanced a bipartisan war powers resolution to prevent Donald Trump from taking further military action against Venezuela, after he ordered a weekend raid to capture that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, without giving Congress advance notice.
The measure passed with 52 senators in favor and 47 opposed. All Democrats voted for the resolution, as did Republicans Rand Paul, Todd Young, Lisa Murkowski, Josh Hawley and Susan Collins.
CIA officer who betrayed western intelligence assets and espionage operations to the Soviet Union and Russia
Aldrich Ames, who has died in prison aged 84, was the most senior CIA officer ever to be exposed as a Russian spy. Ames betrayed more than 30 allied agents, at least 10 of whom were executed by the classic KGB punishment of a bullet in the back of the head, and more than 100 clandestine US and British espionage operations.
The US and British agents betrayed by Ames included Maj Gen Dmitri Polyakov, a senior member of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, who supplied top level information to the CIA, the US foreign intelligence agency, for more than a quarter of a century, and Oleg Gordievsky, an MI6 agent inside the KGB, who, when he was outed by Ames, was the KGB rezident or head of station, in London.
Lloyd’s List analysis suggests 40 suspicious vessels joined Russian registry last year, with 17 reflagged last month
Forty ships accused of belonging to a large “shadow fleet” moving sanctioned oil for Venezuela and others were reflagged to Russia last year in an apparent attempt to gain Kremlin protection from American seizure.
Analysis by the shipping intelligence publication Lloyd’s List suggests that of those, at least 17 suspicious vessels joined the Russian registry over the past month, compared with 15 ships in the previous five months of 2025.
Police close murder case of Alys Eberhardt after confession from Richard Cottingham, known as the ‘Torso Killer’
Richard Cottingham, a US serial killer widely known as the “Torso Killer”, has confessed to the 1965 killing of an 18-year-old woman in New Jersey.
On Tuesday, New Jersey police announced the closure of the murder case of Alys Eberhardt after Cottingham, 79, admitted to killing her nearly six decades ago. Eberhardt, then a nursing student, was found brutally beaten and dead in her family home in Fair Lawn.
Emmanuel Macron’s comments come as Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, warns against turning world into ‘robber’s den’
The presidents of France and Germany have sharply condemned US foreign policy under Donald Trump, saying respectively that Washington was “breaking free from international rules” and the world risked turning into a “robber’s den”.
In unusually strong and apparently uncoordinated remarks, Emmanuel Macron and Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned the postwar rules-based international order could soon disintegrate.
An agent shot a woman in Minneapolis, causing vast and needless grief. Our country is diseased – but that is not the only truth
A woman in Minneapolis has died as her neighbors fought Donald Trump’s mass deportation operation. On Wednesday morning, a group of local civilian protesters gathered around a site where several ICE agents were attempting to abduct migrants. The agents were part of a surge of roughly 2,000 deportation officers who have been sent to Minneapolis as part of Trump’s effort to persecute the Somali community there. In a disturbing incident caught on video by multiple onlookers, a woman driving in an SUV covered in bumper stickers blocked traffic on the residential road – perhaps as part of an effort to keep ICE vehicles from passing. In the videos, an ICE agent approaches the SUV, yelling: “Get out of the car. Get out of the fucking car.” He stands at the driver’s side, with his feet clear of the vehicle, and reaches into where the woman is driving. She begins to drive away, and an officer fires three shots, the last from behind the vehicle as the car pulls away from him. The SUV then crashes into a parked vehicle as onlookers scream in distress. “You did a murder, for what?” one of the protesters calls out to the agents.
The driver, a US citizen who was described by Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar as a “legal observer”, was declared dead. She died less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020. Her name was Renee Nicole Good, and she was 37.
Astronaut aboard the International Space Station is in stable condition, Nasa said, and a spacewalk was canceled
Nasa is considering a rare early return of its crew from the International Space Station (ISS) over an unspecified medical issue involving one of the astronauts, after cancelling a planned spacewalk that had been scheduled for Thursday, the agency said.
A Nasa spokesperson said the astronaut with the medical concern, whom she did not identify, was in a stable condition on the orbiting laboratory.
Trump’s actions at home tell a different story – and they parallel many of Maduro’s own repressive moves
Whatever else the US attack on Venezuela is ostensibly about – oil, drugs, communism – it’s not about the freedom of the Venezuelan people.
If Trump cared about that, he would not have lifted the temporary protective status of the roughly 600,000 Venezuelan refugees in the US, the very people fleeing the tyranny and economic instability he is now supposedly liberating them from.
Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism
In the early fray of foreign interventions, evidence is largely circumstantial. But here the circumstances tell a powerful story
As late as Saturday afternoon, fires continued to smolder in parts of Caracas. Residents throughout the city, stunned and anxious, filled grocery stores and gas stations, stocking up before a future unknown. Everywhere the question hung in the air like the smoke still clouding Venezuela’s capital: what next?
After months of military buildup, deadly strikes at sea and a looming ground war, the United States made good on its threats to attack Venezuela in a dramatic overnight raid that ended with Nicolás Maduro in a New York City jail cell. Yet 48 hours later, little else appeared different in Caracas: Maduro’s inner circle remained in place; state institutions remained in their control; streets were calm, if tense, while authorities called on people to return to their daily lives. In other words: move along, nothing to see here.
Alejandro Velasco is an associate professor of history at New York University
Donald Trump repeated his claims that the ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Nicole Macklin Good acted in self-defense; DHS secretary Kristi Noem expected to speak in New York
Since early December, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations – many of them masked and brandishing rifles – have grabbed people at hardware stores and gyms, or outside homes and schools around the cities.
They have violently tackled undocumented immigrants as well as US citizens, including advocates and protestors.
French president warned the US under Donald Trump was ‘breaking free from international rules’
Another news line dominating this week’s coverage of European politics is to do with Greenland, and the US president Donald Trump’s ambitions to somehow take control of the Danish semiautonomous territory.
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said last night that he had plans to meet Danish officials next week to discuss Greenland as a crisis escalates within Nato over US threats to take over the Arctic territory.
Advocates suing to reverse administration’s surcharge system that has led to passport checks and angry visitors
A new $100 fee for foreign tourists entering US national parks has triggered chaos and frustrating waits, with staff reporting long entry lines as citizenship checks are made and irate visitors regularly ditching plans to patronize some of America’s most cherished landscapes.
The new fee system, introduced by the Trump administration from 1 January, has caught many visitors and National Park Service (NPS) staff off-guard, with checks now having to be undertaken to assess nationality and tourists often turning away from entrances rather than pay the surcharge. The Guardian heard accounts of problems from several NPS staff, speaking anonymously, who work at different parks across the country.
Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI is to go to trial after a US judge said there is plenty of evidence to support the billionaire’s case.
The world’s richest man, who co-founded OpenAI, is suing the ChatGPT developer and its chief executive, Sam Altman, over claims its leaders violated the organisation’s founding mission by shifting to a for-profit model.
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