NPR News Now - NPR News: 01-04-2026 1AM EST

Episode Date: January 4, 2026

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Live from NPR News, I'm Dale Wilman. Venezuela and President Nicholas Maduro is being held at a detention center in Brooklyn less than a day after U.S. forces captured Maduro and his wife on the military base in Caracas. The military action was quick, and its planning was kept a secret even from members of Congress. Now, members of both parties are complaining about being kept in the dark. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer says Trump's being hypocritical by arresting Maduro while pardoning other convicted leaders. How do you explain?

the bald and glaring contradiction between parting Hernandez of Honduras, who was convicted of, I believe, sending 400 kilos of cocaine into the United States. Russia, meanwhile, is also condemning the U.S. actions against Venezuela. Zempier's Charles Mainz reports from Moscow, Maduro had been an ally of the Kremlin. In a statement, Russia's foreign ministry called the Trump administration's pretext for attacking Venezuela unfounded instead of the U.S. actions marked an unacceptable assault on Venezuela's sovereignty. Despite such expressions of support, Moscow has stopped short of challenging the U.S. more forcefully amid a months-long pressure campaign by the Trump administration against the Venezuelan leadership.

The Kremlin reportedly rebuffed a request by Nicholas Maduro for direct military assistance in the fall, a result, analysts say, of Moscow's desire to maintain good relations with the Trump administration as it tries to broker its own peace deal for Russia's war in Ukraine. in PIR News, Moscow. Protests announcing the Trump administration's military intervention in Venezuela and the capture of its president are being held across the country. Texas Public Radio's Joey Palacios from San Antonio filed this report from a protest that called for the U.S. to remove itself from the South American country's politics.

About with liberation! About 80 protesters from the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the 50-51 movement gathered at a busy San Antonio intersection where an ice rate was held. last year. They held signs that said no blood for oil. Democracy needs your courage and money for health care, not for war and detention. Carrie Rosen, a local organizer with the party, says the goal is to build an anti-war movement. Assuming this is military city USA, this city will be directly impacted if there's escalation in Venezuela, and so we need to build a working class movement that is anti-war. Several other protests are planned in Texas on Sunday, including Houston, Austin, and Dallas.

Paloscios in San Antonio. Officials in Switzerland have opened an investigation into the managers of the bar where a fire at a New Year's Eve party left 40 people dead and injured, more than 100 others. A prosecutor said Saturday that the two are suspected of involuntary homicide, involuntary bodily harm, and involuntarily causing a fire. The fire broke out early Thursday morning at the bar in the ski resort of Cranes, Montana. This is NPR News. Lake effect snow has been dropping on large parts of upstate New York for the better part of a week.

But as Bruce Convizer reports from New York City, that snow Armageddon is finally ending. The hardest hit areas were downwind from Lake Ontario, where multiple towns were buried under three and four feet of snow. But the hardest hit may have been Camden, a town of about 5,040 miles east of Lake Ontario. It was buried under 65 inches of snow. Among cities with populations above 100,000, Syracuse is considered the snowiest city in America. They got two feet of snow in a single day, making it the city's heaviest one-day accumulation in nearly 80 years. Farther west, some towns south of Lake Erie, were also buried under three feet of snow this week. For NPR News, I'm Bruce Convisor in New York.

National Security Advisors from Europe and elsewhere were in Kiev on Saturday to discuss security guarantees. The talks came as a push to end the war in Ukraine grows. European leaders will meet with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky on Tuesday for further talks. Zelensky says he hopes that documents on security guarantees for his country could be completed by the time of this week's meeting. Iran's state television says Russia has sent three Iranian communication satellites into orbit. They were launched from Eastern Russia on Sunday morning. The U.S. says Iran's satellite program defies a U.N. Security Council resolution, and it also calls on Tehran to stop all activities involving ballistic

missiles that could deliver nuclear weapons. I'm Dale Wilman, NPR News.