The killing of a US citizen by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis was a five-alarm fire for the Trump administration. But a torrent of untruths, half-truths, smears and innuendo has been unleashed by the White House, and amplified by its social media and cable television acolytes, in an attempt to douse the flames.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, called the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, a "stone cold liar" on Thursday for her efforts to falsely portray the victim, Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and award-winning poet, as a "domestic terrorist".
The Kennedy Center will host the Jan. 29 premiere of "Melania," the eponymous documentary focused on First Lady Melania Trump, making it the latest event linked to the president's interests to make its way to the newly Trump-branded performing arts center. The announcement was made by Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell in an X post on Thursday. President Donald Trump and the first lady will attend the premiere, according to Fox News. The Jan. 29 event will be one of 20 pre-release screenings that day for the Brett Ratner documentary, before its Jan. 30 wide release. The film will then stream on Prime Video as part of Amazon's reportedly $40 million deal for the doc and a follow-up docuseries. Melania unveiled the film's trailer last month.
Again, this is awful, but it is disingenuous at best to frame what happened simply as though Good was a mother killed by an ICE officer as she was out for a leisurely Sunday drive. Good was directly interfering with federal law enforcement operations and posed a threat, namely because she was driving a massive vehicle. This does not mean that she "deserved" to die or that the ICE agent should have employed lethal force. It just means I can see how the agent fired upon her car, and I am struggling to understand why Good was interfering with ICE agents.
Incredible news for California's water supply entering the new year - not a single square mile of California is categorized as dry for the first time in 25 years, according to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor.
The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption. ICE, said Ellison, is all but telling people, "You want to defend your neighbors, you're going to do it at the risk of your own life.' I think that's the unmistakable message. Just looking at the tape, they could have said, You get out of here,' right? And then she gets out of there. They didn't want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did. And it was all about teaching lessons."
Kentucky Republican legislator Shane Baker (R-Somerset) wants to limit eligibility for almost all elected offices in Kentucky to only natural-born US citizens.
Grok, the AI chatbot launched by Elon Musk after his takeover of X, unhesitatingly fulfilled a user's request on Wednesday to generate an image of Renee Nicole Good in a bikini"the woman who was shot and killed by an ICE agent that morning in Minneapolis, as noted by CNN correspondent Hadas Gold and confirmed by the chatbot itself. "I just saw someone request Grok on X put the image of the woman shot by ICE in MN, slumped over in her car, in a bikini. It complied," Gold wrote on the social media platform on Thursday. "This is where we're at." In several posts, Grok confirmed that the chatbot had undressed the recently killed woman, writing in one, "I generated an AI image altering a photo of Renee Good, killed in the January 7, 2026, Minneapolis ICE shooting, by placing her in a bikini per a user request.
A bodyguard for the family of Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has been arrested on charges of drug trafficking. Justin Salsburey, a 43-year-old resident of Bellefontaine, Ohio, was arrested along with his wife, Urbana schoolteacher Ruthann Rankin, on Dec. 30, according to WSYX-TV. In one parcel, investigators found 119 pills of blue counterfeit OxyContin pills that tested positive for fentanyl, according to the criminal complaint against Salsburey. Investigators let a second parcel be delivered, after which then saw Salsburey and Rankin put objects on their porch that were picked up by multiple people, the complaint stated. One of the people, Tristan Aulds of Belle Center, Ohio, later told authorities that he purchased Adderall from the couple for $5 per pill. Salsburey also mailed dozens of packages to an address in Middlesburg Heights, one of which was found to contain pills that tested positive for fentanyl and methamphetamine, prosecutors say.
Call it recency bias, personal interest, or perhaps just a general concern for society's trajectory right now, but as I followed Wednesday's news of an ICE agent killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, then watched the federal government flatly lie about the sequence of events, the indignant language and informational smokescreens felt nauseatingly familiar. You don't have to leave the city, much less the state or country, to find precedent of law enforcement slaughtering the people they're supposed to protect. It's an American tradition already illustrated by many devastated families and callous police union presidents. But for years now, both in Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli government has modeled how to act with both viciousness and total impunity. That in turn has affected the efficacy of public pressure in other parts of the world. Read more
The Trump administration is reportedly planning a scheme to offer direct cash payments to each resident of Greenland to convince them to secede from Denmark and potentially join America.
Colombia's President Gustavo Petro has told the BBC that he believes there is now a "real threat" of US military action against Colombia. Petro said the United States is treating other nations as part of a US "empire". It comes after Trump threatened Colombia with military action. He said that the US risks transforming from "dominating the world" to becoming "isolated from the world." He also accused US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents of acting like "Nazi brigades".
The person killed was identified as Victor Quispe, 37, of Danbury, according to city spokesperson Erin Henry. Danbury officers were called to a reported shooting at a home on Lake Avenue at 8:37 p.m. Wednesday, Henry said.
Top energy executives are weighing telling President Donald Trump that the industry can increase Venezuela's oil output by hundreds of thousands of barrels per day over the coming months, people familiar with the preparations for Friday's White House meeting told CNN. The pledge would be aimed at setting a realistic initial goal for accelerating the nation's output, while preempting demands by Trump for the companies to make massive new investments in rebuilding Venezuela's energy infrastructure. Read more
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday said he was confident in the ability to reconstitute any lost tariff revenue by imposing duties under other legal authorities if the Supreme Court rules against President Donald Trump's emergency tariffs, but a loss would undercut Trump's flexibility and leverage.
The Iranian regime continues to struggle to contain the protests in the Middle Eastern country, 12 days since they first started. On Thursday, January 8, several new clips emerged on social media, seemingly showing protesters taking to the streets in several cities in Iran despite fears of a crackdown. Read more
What we know: FOX 9 confirmed Ross is the ICE officer who fatally shot Good in south Minneapolis on Wednesday. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed to FOX 9 the officer who fired his weapon on Wednesday is the same officer who was dragged 50 yards by a suspect in a vehicle in Bloomington in June.
Vice President J.D. Vance on Thursday commented on the officer's history. He said the ICE officer "deserves a debt of gratitude," citing the earlier incident in which he was injured by a moving vehicle.
