Renee Nicole Good was Minneapolis ‘ICE Watch’ ‘warrior’ who trained to resist feds before shooting

https://nypost.com/2026/01/08/us-news/renee-nicole-good-was-minneapolis-ice-watch-warrior-who-trained-to-resist-feds-before-shooting/

Good, who moved to the city last year, linked up with the anti-ICE activists through her 6-year-old son’s woke charter school, which boasts that it puts “social justice first” and prioritizes “involving kids in political and social activism,” multiple local sources said.

“She was a warrior. She died doing what was right,” a mother named Leesa, whose child attends the same school, told The Post at a growing vigil where Good was killed Wednesday.

Good and her wife Rebecca, 40, were raising the boy together in the mostly working-class, activist-heavy neighborhood of south Minneapolis, which features tree-lined streets and a large number of homes with windows decked out in LGBTQ+ flags or signs depicting George Floyd.

Just as many others did in the lefty enclave, Good sent her son to Southside Family Charter School, a K-5 academy opened in 1972 which has from its inception been “unabashedly dedicated to social justice education,” according to co-founder Susie Oppenheim.

It was through her involvement in the school community that Good became involved in “ICE Watch” — a loose coalition of activists dedicated to disrupting ICE raids in the sanctuary city.

“From my understanding, she was involved in social justice … we are a tight-knit community and a lot of parents are [activists],” former Southside gym teacher Rashad Rich, who resigned from the school last month, told The Post.

He said current event topics like the killing of George Floyd were regular parts of the curriculum, and that last month students took a field trip where they learned about “aboriginal issues” — a reference to the indigenous people of far-away Australia.

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https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/swiss-face-arduous-task-identifying-victims-deadly-bar-fire-2026-01-01/
CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland, Jan 2 (Reuters) - Dozens of young partygoers hurt in a New Year's Eve bar fire in Switzerland were transferred to specialist burn units across Europe with serious injuries on Friday after being hit by the devastating blaze, which has killed at least 40.
Initial findings showed the fire that spread among the mostly young crowd of revellers in Le Constellation bar in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana was likely caused by sparkler candles being carried too close to the ceiling, the local prosecutor said.
Meanwhile, investigators focused on the painful task of identifying the burned bodies, warning that this process was very sensitive and would take time.
So severe were the burns that Swiss officials said it could take days before they name all those killed in the fire. The official toll is 40 dead, while 119 have been injured, many of them very seriously. Those numbers are not final, officials said.
"Many of those injured are still fighting for their lives today," Valais area chief Mathias Reynard told a news conference.
Around 50 of the injured have been, or will be, transferred to burn units in hospitals elsewhere in Europe, he said. Germany and France are among the countries treating some of the injured.
Initial investigations suggest that the fire which tore through the Swiss ski resort bar started when 'fountain candles' were carried aloft too close to the ceiling, local prosecutor Beatrice Pilloud said.
"Everything suggests that the fire started from the burning candles or 'Bengal lights' that had been attached to champagne bottles," she told the news conference, adding that, while this hypothesis was likely, it was not yet confirmed. "From there, a rapid, very rapid and widespread conflagration ensued."
The investigation was also checking whether the ceiling's insulation foam was to blame for the rapid spread of the fire.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/us/trump-venezuela-drug-cartel-de-los-soles.html
The DOJ has backed off a dubious claim about President Nicolás Maduro that the Trump administration promoted last year in laying the groundwork to remove him from power in Venezuela: accusing him of leading a drug cartel called Cartel de los Soles.

That claim traces back to a 2020 grand jury indictment of Mr. Maduro drafted by the Justice Department. In July 2025, copying language from it, the Treasury Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization. In November, Marco Rubio ordered the State Department to do the same.

But experts in Latin American crime and narcotics issues have said it is actually a slang term, invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s, for officials who are corrupted by drug money. And on Saturday, after the administration captured Maduro, the Justice Department released a rewritten indictment that appeared to tacitly concede the point.

Prosecutors still accused Maduro of participating in a drug trafficking conspiracy but they abandoned the claim that Cartel de los Soles was an actual organization. Instead, the revised indictment states that it refers to a “patronage system” and a “culture of corruption” fueled by drug money.

Where the old indictment refers 32 times to Cartel de los Soles and describes Maduro as its leader, the new one mentions it twice and says that he, like his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, participated in, perpetuated and protected this patronage system.

Profits from drug trafficking and the protection of drug trafficking partners “flow to corrupt rank-and-file civilian, military and intelligence officials, who operate in a patronage system run by those at the top — referred to as the Cartel de los Soles or Cartel of the Suns, a reference to the sun insignia affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials,” the new indictment said.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/06/politics/epstein-files-justice-department-review

The Justice Department on Monday said it has released 12,285 documents – less than 1% – of its Jeffrey Epstein-related files, with more than 2 million documents still being reviewed.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told a federal judge in a Monday court filing that “substantial work remains to be done.”

Looking to update the court on their progress, they told Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York that the 12,285 documents the department has already released contain roughly 125,575 pages.

“There are more than 2 million documents potentially responsive to the Act that are in various phases of review,” they added.

It comes after Congress passed a law in November – with near-unanimous support – giving the Justice Department a December 19, 2025, deadline to release all of its files about Epstein, the convicted sex offender who was accused of abusing dozens of underage girls. Epstein died by suicide in 2019.

The files are made up of papers, videos, photographs and audio files that live within the FBI’s main electronic case management system and largely originate from the FBI’s two major investigations into Epstein, in Florida and New York, spanning decades. A July 2025 FBI memo said that the department had uncovered “more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence” during a review of the investigative materials.

https://apnews.com/article/zohran-mamdani-nyc-housing-official-social-media-54b04c0df38ef6d0374e99ecb02a4040

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is standing behind a newly-appointed housing official as she faces backlash for years-old social media posts, including messages that called for the seizure of private property and linked homeownership to white supremacy.

Cea Weaver, a longtime tenant activist, was tapped by the Democrat last week to serve as executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. The mayor has vowed to expand and empower the office to take “unprecedented” steps against negligent landlords.

But in a sign of the high-level scrutiny on Mamdani’s administration, Weaver’s since-deleted posts have sparked condemnations from officials in the U.S. Department of Justice and the editorial board of The Washington Post.

The posts, which were circulated on social media in recent days by critics of Mamdani, included calls to treat private property as a “collective good” and to “impoverish the (asterisk)white(asterisk) middle class.” A tweet sent in 2017 described homeownership as “a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building public policy.’”

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/06/house-republicans-anxiety-margins-midterms-00713358

Tuesday was supposed to be a rah-rah day for House Republicans — a chance to strategize with President Donald Trump about their agenda for the tough election year ahead.

Instead, 2026 got off to an unexpectedly somber start as they confronted the sudden death of a well-liked colleague and pondered the dire political and policy straits their dwindling majority has to navigate.

Most members learned about California Rep. Doug LaMalfa’s overnight passing as they boarded buses outside the Capitol to head to the Kennedy Center for their annual policy meeting. That news — as well as word that another Republican, Rep. Jim Baird of Indiana, had been badly hurt in a car crash — cast an immediate pall.

“This is coming as a shock to all of us,” said one House Republican who, like others quoted for this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the mood.

Even a characteristically freewheeling speech from Trump — delivered at the performing arts center his hand-picked board had recently renamed for him without congressional approval — hardly lightened the mood. He remembered LaMalfa, a rice farmer who represented a rural northern California district for seven terms, as a loyal supporter and said he considered skipping the speech out of respect for his death.

“But then I decided that I have to do it in his honor,” Trump said. “I’ll do it in his honor because he would have wanted it that way.”

https://abc6onyourside.com/news/local/vivek-ramaswamy-alarmed-over-bodyguards-arrest-justin-salsburey-federal-drug-trafficking-charges

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WSYX) — Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's family said their now-federally charged bodyguard passed all of his background checks and drug tests.

Justin Salsburey, of Bellefontaine, was arrested late last year, accused of using the U.S. postal system for drugs. His wife, Ruthann Rankin, a teacher at Urbana City Schools, was similarly charged in federal court earlier this week.

State and federal law enforcement said they seized counterfeit pills testing positive for the presence of fentanyl, methamphetamine, MDMA, and other "suspected controlled substances and steroids."

Prior to his arrest, Salsburey worked for ARK Protection Group and was on Ramaswamy's security detail, per Connie Luck, spokesperson for Ramaswamy.

"Vivek’s family contracts with a private security firm for protective services and was alarmed to hear this disturbing news. Upon being informed of this matter in recent days, the outside security firm immediately removed the individual from the security detail," she said.

Luck said that Salsburey cleared multiple background checks, including FBI and BCI background checks. He also never failed a drug screening.

"Vivek and his family take matters of safety seriously and support efforts to hold these individuals accountable for these allegations if they are proven."

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Trump-raises-military-budget-to-dollar1.5-trillion/65441921

United States President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that the military budget for 2027 will be raised to $1.5 trillion, instead of the planned $1 trillion.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump revealed that the decision was made after "long and difficult negotiations" with US officials. "This will allow us to build the 'Dream Military' that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will keep us SAFE and SECURE, regardless of foe," he wrote.

Trump claimed that his tariff policy enabled the increase "that would be unthinkable in the past (especially one year ago during the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, the Worst President in the History of our Country!)."

>Fresh data showing US hiring slowed again in December has sharpened fears that the world’s largest economy may be sliding toward a recession.

>Private employers added just 41,000 jobs last month, according to a report from ADP, rebounding from November’s revised loss of 29,000 positions.

>But that still fell short of expectations. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast a stronger gain of 47,000 jobs.

>The weaker-than-expected increase is the latest sign that the labor market — long a pillar of US economic strength — is losing momentum.

>Hiring has slowed sharply as companies grapple with higher borrowing costs, policy uncertainty and cooling demand, raising concerns that a broader economic downturn could be taking shape.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/article-15442195/jobs-report-wall-street-recession-clues.html