Venezuela’s interior minister says US operation to abduct Maduro killed 100 people and wounded dozens.
Published On 8 Jan 20268 Jan 2026
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United States President Donald Trump has said that “only time will tell” how long his country will call the shots in Venezuela after the recent abduction of President Nicolas Maduro by US special forces, as the Venezuelan interior minister said 100 people were killed in the operation.
In an interview with The New York Times published on Thursday, the president refrained from giving a precise timescale for his country’s direct oversight over the South American nation but indicated that it was likely to last “much longer” than a year when pushed for a response.
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Since Maduro’s forcible removal on Saturday, the US has repeatedly asserted its dominance over Venezuela, saying it would control the country’s oil sales “indefinitely” despite claims by interim leader Delcy Rodriguez that there is no foreign power governing Caracas.
Trump said the US was “getting along very well” with Rodriguez’s government, adding that Secretary of State Marco Rubio “speaks to her all the time”, according to the newspaper. He had earlier threatened her with a fate worse than Maduro’s if she did not comply.
He did not indicate why he had recognised Rodriguez as leader over opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who led a successful election campaign against Maduro in 2024, and declined to give any commitments on whether new elections would be held.
“We will rebuild it [Venezuela] in a very profitable way,” he said. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”
100 killed in US raid
US troops snatched Maduro and his wife on Saturday in a dramatic attack involving 150 jets taking off from 20 airbases, whisking them to New York to face trial on drug and weapons charges.
Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said on Wednesday that the raid had left 100 people dead and dozens more wounded, adding that Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were injured in the “terrible” attack but were “recovering”.
Caracas had not previously issued a death toll, but the army had posted a list of 23 names of its dead and Cuba had announced 32 members of its military and intelligence services in the country were killed.
Venezuelan officials have said a large part of Maduro’s security contingent was killed “in cold blood”.
Rodriguez, who Cabello praised during his weekly show on state television as “courageous”, declared a week of mourning starting on Tuesday for members of the military killed in the raid.
Cambodia says it has extradited to China a billionaire businessman accused of masterminding a vast cryptocurrency scam in which trafficked workers were lured to forced labour camps to defraud victims globally.
Chen Zhi was among three Chinese nationals arrested on 6 January after a joint investigation into transnational crime lasting several months, Cambodia said.
Cambodian authorities have also suspended the operations of Prince Bank, a subsidiary of Prince Group.
The bank has been placed in liquidation and banned from offering new banking services – though customers can still withdraw money and repay loans, the National Bank of Cambodia said on Thursday.
China’s state media confirmed Chen Zhi’s extradition, describing him as “the head of a major cross-border gambling and fraud syndicate… suspected of multiple crimes, including operating casinos, fraud, illegal business operations and concealing criminal proceeds”.
CCTV said he had been “placed under coercive measures in accordance with the law”.
“The public security organs will soon issue arrest warrants for the first batch of key members of Chen Zhi’s criminal syndicate, resolutely bringing fugitives to justice,” said CCTV.
“The public security organs solemnly warn criminals to recognise the situation, stop their crimes before it’s too late, and immediately surrender themselves to the authorities to receive lenient treatment.”
Last year, US authorities seized about $15bn (£11bn) worth of bitcoin that it alleged belonged to Chen, in what FBI Director Kash Patel described as “one of the largest financial fraud takedowns in history”.
The BBC contacted Prince Group for comment at the time. In the past, the Cambodia-based group has denied any involvement in scams. Its website says its businesses include property development, and financial and consumer services.
Since Chen Zhi was indicted by the US on fraud and money-laundering charges in October, his whereabouts have been unclear.
But on Wednesday, the Cambodian authorities said they had “arrested three Chinese nationals namely Chen Zhi, Xu Ji Liang, and Shao Ji Hui and extradited [them] to the People’s Republic of China”. The interior ministry statement did not say where Chen Zhi had been detained.
His Cambodian nationality had been revoked by royal decree last month, it added. The enigmatic tycoon had given up his Chinese nationality to become a Cambodian citizen in 2014.
The UN estimates that hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked to South East Asia, many of them to Cambodia, lured by the promise of legitimate jobs and then forced to run online scams.
People are held against their will in the scam farms and made to defraud strangers online under the threat of punishment or torture. Many of those trapped are Chinese and targeted people in China.
Chinese authorities have also been quietly investigating the Prince Group since at least 2020. The company is accused of running online fraud schemes in a number of court cases.
The Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau established a task force to investigate the Prince Group, describing it as “a major transnational online gambling syndicate based in Cambodia”.
Cambodia’s ruling elite have been close to Chen Zhi for years. The government has said little since the US and UK sanctioned Prince Group, apart from urging US and UK authorities to be sure they had sufficient evidence for their allegations.
By some estimates, scam businesses may account for around half of the entire Cambodian economy.
“I think it’s the sheer scale of his operations which really makes Chen Zhi stand out,” Jack Adamovic Davies, a journalist who has investigated Chen Zhi, told the BBC last year.
He said it was shocking the Prince Group had been able to build a “global footprint” without raising alarm bells, given the serious criminal charges it now faces.
Air travel in the U.S. last year was defined by chaotic delays and cancellations during the 43-day government shutdown. New global punctuality rankings from aviation analytics firm Cirium show just how dire delays were in 2025.
Cirium analyzes flight data from more than 600 sources including airlines, airports, global distribution systems, and civil aviation authorities. A flight is considered on time if it lands within 15 minutes of its scheduled gate arrival time.
Aeromexico earned the top spot for global airlines for the second year in a row with 90.02% of its flights arriving on time, improving by over 3% from the previous year. The win comes after the airline debuted at $2.8 billion on the NYSE last year and raised $222.8 million.
“Maintaining consistent on-time performance requires sophisticated network planning, operational coordination, and the ability to recover quickly when irregularities occur,” Cirium CEO Jeremy Bowen said in a statement. “These results reflect the operational discipline that defines aviation’s top performers.”
Saudia followed in second with 85.63% on-time, and the Scandinavian airline SAS claimed third with 86.09%.
Delta is the only American company to make the top 10 and has the highest rating of all American airlines. “Delta’s fifth consecutive North American win reflects sustained operational focus that separates industry leaders from competitors,” Bowen said.
The airline — which flies more than three times the number of flights as any other airline in the top 10 — sank in the rankings after placing third last year.
Timeliness improvements from Azul Brazilian Airlines, Spain’s Iberia, and Qatar Airways helped raise their ratings and beat out the Atlanta-based airline.
Here’s how the most on-time airlines placed, according to Cirium’s analysis.
Top 10 Most On-Time Global Airlines
Aeromexico: 90.02% on-time arrivals
Saudia: 86.53%
Scandinavian Airlines: 86.09%
Azul Brazilian Airlines: 85.18%
Qatar Airways: 84.42%
Iberia: 83.52%
LATAM Airlines: 82.40%
Avianca: 81.73%
Turkish Airlines: 81.41%
Delta Air Lines: 80.90%
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As manhunt is under way, police do not believe attack was random but neither was it likely to be attack on religion.
Published On 8 Jan 20268 Jan 2026
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Two people have been killed and several injured in a shooting in the car park of a Mormon church in the Utah capital of Salt Lake City in the United States.
Police said the shooting occurred on Wednesday in the car park of a meetinghouse of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where dozens of people were attending a funeral.
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Three of the six injured victims are in critical condition.
Police confirmed that no suspect was in custody and have launched a manhunt, with the FBI reportedly offering assistance.
While police said they did not believe the shooting was random, Salt Lake City Police Chief Brian Redd told The Associated Press news agency it did not appear to be a targeted attack against a religion.
Church spokesman Glen Mills told reporters there had been signs of a fracas outside the church, where the funeral was taking place.
“Out in the parking lot, there was some sort of altercation took [place] and that’s when shots were fired,” he said.
About 100 law enforcement vehicles were at the scene in the aftermath, with helicopters flying overhead.
“As soon as I came over, I see someone on the ground… People are attending to him and crying and arguing,” said Brennan McIntire, a local man who spoke to AP.
Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said, “This should never have happened outside a place of worship. This should never have happened outside a celebration of life.”
The church, which has headquarters in Salt Lake City, is cooperating with law enforcement.
About half of Utah’s 3.5 million residents are members of the faith. Churches like the one where the shooting occurred can be found in towns throughout the city and state.
The faith has been on heightened alert since four people were killed when a former Marine opened fire in a Michigan church last month and set it ablaze.
The FBI found that he was motivated by “anti-religious beliefs” against the church.
About 82 percent of mass killings in the US in 2025 involved a firearm, according to a database maintained by AP alongside USA Today and Northeastern University.
The shooting in Salt Lake City occurred amid growing unrest in the US, after a federal officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis amid ongoing protests against an immigration crackdown.
Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation have asked a federal judge to throw out the US Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit over ticket resales.
In a motion filed on Tuesday (January 6) with the US District Court for the Central District of California, lawyers for Live Nation and Ticketmaster said the lawsuit “reflects an egregious instance of agency overreach” and that the FTC is in effect attempting to rewrite the law by holding Ticketmaster accountable for the actions of ticket resellers.
The FTC sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster in September, arguing that the ticketing company had violated the BOTS Act by knowingly allowing ticket scalpers to buy up large blocks of tickets during on-sales. The lawsuit comes in the wake of – and is separate from – the Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit filed against Live Nation/Ticketmaster in 2024.
The BOTS Act is a 2016 law meant to prevent the use of algorithms (“bots”) to buy up large amounts of tickets that can then be resold at a markup.
That law “is designed to help ticket issuers like Ticketmaster combat ticket harvesting and scalping, ensuring that tickets are accessible to genuine fans. Plaintiffs now ask this court to take the unprecedented step of applying this law against a ticket issuer for its operation of a resale platform,” Live Nation and Ticketmaster stated in their motion to dismiss, which can be read in full here.
Ticketmaster has long come in for criticism from consumers and consumer groups over spikes in ticket prices during on-sales. There have been numerous complaints about sales for popular artists’ shows, for instance during the Bruce Springsteen on-sale in 2022. Ticketmaster has long argued that it doesn’t set ticket prices, artists themselves do, and that it is actively working against bots and scalpers.
But in its complaint last fall, the FTC said Ticketmaster has an incentive to look the other way because it makes money off tickets that are resold on its platform.
Ticketmaster “can ‘triple dip’ on fees, collecting fees from: (1) brokers when they purchase the tickets on the primary market, (2) brokers, again, when Ticketmaster sells their tickets on Ticketmaster’s secondary market, and, finally, (3) consumers who purchase tickets from Ticketmaster on its secondary market,” stated the FTC’s complaint, which can be read here.
In their motion to dismiss, Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s lawyers said the FTC had failed to show that Ticketmaster violated the BOTS Act because they didn’t allege any “circumvention” of tech designed to prevent mass purchases of tickets. They also argue that the FTC failed to show that Ticketmaster was aware of any such circumvention, and that ultimately it’s the ticketholders and not the ticketing platform that should be held accountable for illegally acquired tickets.
“Our incentives are plainly to favor artists and fans.”
Dan Wall, Live Nation
The FTC’s case “boils down to the idea that Ticketmaster is liable under the BOTS Act merely for knowing that some brokers used multiple accounts or that some accounts possessed more tickets than the ticket limit permitted,” the motion stated. “But that theory does not amount to a violation of the statute Congress enacted. Plaintiffs cannot rewrite that statute through this litigation.”
While Ticketmaster has denied colluding with scalpers, in the wake of the lawsuit the ticketing company told lawmakers it’s planning to tighten its rules around ticket resales. Dan Wall, Live Nation’s EVP for Corporate and Regulatory Affairs, said in a letter to US senators Marsha Blackburn and Ben Ray Luján that Ticketmaster aims to ban users – including ticket brokers – from operating multiple accounts on its platform.
Wall also said the allegation Live Nation colluded with scalpers is “categorically false,” and makes “no economic sense” because ticket resales account for only 3% of Live Nation’s revenue.
“Our incentives are plainly to favor artists and fans,” Wall wrote.
Live Nation has also filed a motion to dismiss the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against the company, arguing the US government is relying on “gerrymandered” evidence to show that the company enjoys monopoly power in the live music business.
Additionally, the concert and ticketing giant is facing a lawsuit from consumers alleging that Ticketmaster secretly provided tickets to brokers via “ticket banks,” while publicly claiming to fight scalpers.
A federal judge in California last month indicated he will likely allow the lawsuit to go forward as a class action, meaning millions of Ticketmaster customers could be eligible to join the suit.Music Business Worldwide
Watch: Police chief describes how Minneapolis shooting unfolded
A US immigration agent fatally shot a 37-year-old woman in the city of Minneapolis, sparking a war of words as local officials rejected the Trump administration’s account that it was self-defence.
The Department of Homeland Security said the woman, Renee Nicole Good, was a “violent rioter” who tried to run over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
But Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said, “This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying”, telling ICE officials in expletive-laced remarks to leave the city.
Hundreds of ICE agents have been deployed to the city as part of the White House’s nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration.
Videos posted to social media by onlookers appear to show the moment of the shooting, which occurred around 10:25 local time on Wednesday morning.
From various vantage points, a maroon SUV can be seen blocking a residential street in Minneapolis.
A crowd of people, who appear to be protesting, are lining the pavement.
Law enforcement vehicles appear nearby. Immigration agents pull up to the vehicle parked in the street, emerge from the truck and tell the woman behind the wheel to get out of the SUV. One of the agents tugs at the driver’s side door handle.
Another agent is positioned near the front of the vehicle.
It’s not clear exactly how close the agent is standing or whether he was struck by the vehicle based on the videos reviewed immediately by the BBC.
That agent opens fire as the maroon SUV attempts to drive off.
Three pops are heard, and the vehicle can be seen losing control and crashing into a car parked nearby along the street.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said an ICE officer was “viciously” run over. “It is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital,” he wrote.
The Republican president also blamed the “Radical Left” for “threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis”.
Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara said the driver was in her vehicle and was blocking the roadway on Portland Avenue. She was then approached on foot by a federal law enforcement officer, “and she began to drive off”.
US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the woman was “stalking and impeding” officers throughout the day and tried to “weaponise her vehicle” in an attempt to run over the officer in an act of “domestic terrorism”.
The federal agent fired “defensive shots” and was himself injured, Noem said, before he was treated and discharged from a local hospital.
The Minneapolis City Council, however, said in a statement that Good was simply “caring for her neighbours” when she was shot and killed.
The same agent was also hit by a car in the line of duty in June, Noem said.
She added that ICE operations in the city would continue, and the FBI would investigate Wednesday’s incident.
Getty Images
Law enforcement surrounds the area where an ICE agent fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis
Emily Heller told CNN she was at home when she saw the ICE agents arguing with protesters outside. She said she heard agents shouting at a woman driving an SUV, then one agent tried to open her car door, and the driver went into reverse and began pulling away.
“An ICE agent stepped in front of her vehicle and said, ‘Stop!’ and then – I mean, she was already moving – and then, point blank, shot her through her windshield in the face,” Heller told the US network.
Minnesota State Governor Tim Walz also pushed back on federal accounts of the incident.
“Don’t believe this propaganda machine,” Walz wrote in response to a Department of Homeland Security post about the shooting.
“The state will ensure there is a full, fair, and expeditious investigation to ensure accountability and justice.”
Top Democrats, including former Vice-President Kamala Harris and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, also released statements. Harris called the Trump administration’s version of events “gaslighting”.
Protests and marches took place in several parts of the city as some outraged Minneapolis residents condemned the shooting and called for ICE to leave.
The main gathering was near the scene of the shooting, which is about one mile from where George Floyd was murdered in 2020 by a city police officer, sparking worldwide anti-racism protests.
Protests were being organised in other US cities, including New Orleans, Miami, Seattle and New York City.
Minneapolis Public Schools announced that classes were cancelled for the rest of the week, “due to safety concern”. It comes after federal agents reportedly made arrests outside a high school on Wednesday.
REUTERS/Tim Evans
People gather during a vigil for a 37-year-old woman who was shot in her car by a U.S. immigration agent, according to local and federal officials, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Wednesday night.
Why is ICE in Minneapolis?
The Trump administration deployed an additional 2,000 federal agents to the Minneapolis area in recent weeks in response to allegations of welfare fraud in the state.
The mayor said in the Wednesday press conference that ICE was not making the city safer. “They’re ripping families apart, they’re sowing chaos in our streets,” he said.
The deployment, which began on Sunday, is one of the largest concentrations of Department of Homeland Security personnel in a US city in recent years.
It follows an immigration enforcement campaign launched by ICE late last year to target individuals in Minneapolis who were issued deportation orders, including members of the city’s Somali community.
That community has been criticised frequently by Trump, who has called them “garbage”.
“I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you,” the president has said. “Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks.”
Trump later doubled-down on his remarks after a YouTube video by a conservative online content creator accused daycare centres run by Somali immigrants of mass fraud.
In response, Trump has withheld federal childcare funds from the state of Minnesota.
The Trump administration has sent ICE agents to other cities across the US, where they have made thousands of arrests as part of what the administration says is a crackdown on crime and immigrants who illegally entered the country.
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Teofimo Lopez has already plotted his next fight, a shot at three-division world championship status, beyond his upcoming showdown with Shakur Stevenson.
Back then, ‘The Takeover’ claimed his world title at 140lbs with a clear unanimous decision victory, before making two unspectacular defences against Jamaine Ortiz and Steve Claggett.
But despite his lack of consistency over the years, along with a shock defeat to George Kambosos Jr in 2021, Lopez always brings out his A game for the big occasions.
That much became apparent following his monumental points victory over Vasyl Lomachenko back in 2020, when Lopez cemented himself as the leading champion at 135lbs.
So now, one can only imagine that the Brooklyn man is approaching his fight with Stevenson, a three-weight world champion who holds the WBC lightweight title, with the same level of tenacity.
But while many feel that Stevenson could have his number, Lopez has already named Devin Haney as a potential opponent for when, in his mind, he takes care of business later this month.
Speaking with FightHype around three weeks ago, Lopez insisted that the American is firmly on his radar.
“All the roads lead to a bigger fight between me and Haney.
“It makes sense now, right? It has momentum, right? It’s got motion, right?”
A fight with Haney, who claimed his WBO welterweight crown by outpointing Brian Norman Jr in November, would certainly represent another opportunity where Lopez cannot afford to make many mistakes.
China has eclipsed its own – and the US – record, building a monster underground hypergravity centrifuge that can model scenarios with 1,900 times the real-world gravitational force of Earth, bending space and time with unprecedented power.
The above-ground facility
Xinhua
Built by Shanghai Electric Nuclear Power Group as part of China’s Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF), CHIEF1900 will soon function at 1,900 g-tonnes, surpassing the previously most powerful centrifuge the CHIEF1300.
“We aim to create experimental environments that span milliseconds to tens of thousands of years, and atomic to [kilometer] scales – under normal or extreme conditions of temperature and pressure,” Chen Yunmin, CHIEF’s chief scientist and a professor at Zhejiang University, told South China Morning Post. “It gives us the chance to discover entirely new phenomena or theories.”
We first reported on the facility in 2024, when the scale of the project was unveiled, but with only the preliminary machinery in place. The impressive CHIEF1300 came online in September 2025, with the ability to generate up to 1,300 g-tonnes of hypergravity. The new centrifuge is about 46% more extreme in its capacity.
The CHIEF1300 centrifuge
Xinhua
Both centrifuges are used to model intense gravity to compress time and scale in experiments – which essentially lets scientists simulate long-term or large-scale physical phenomena such as dam structural integrity, earthquake damage, landslides, nuclear waste storage and more.
By increasing effective gravity, researchers can accelerate years or even decades of structural and geological stress into just a few hours, enabling experiments that would be impractical in the real world.
The CHIEF1900 has been installed 49 feet (15 m) below Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, in order to reduce the vibrational disturbance it’d cause if contained in an above-ground facility. Meanwhile, a vacuum-based coolant and air ventilation circulation system offsets the intense heat generated by the centrifuges operating at high speeds.
The hypergravity facility is reported to have cost around US$285 million to build and is expected to be a beacon of international research, with the Chinese team inviting scientists from around the world to use the technology.
The CHIEF1900 is yet to begin conducting experiments, but it’s expected to be operational soon.
