NPR News Now - NPR News: 01-04-2026 2AM EST

Episode Date: January 4, 2026

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Live from NPR News, I'm Dale Wilman. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife are now being held in a detention center in Brooklyn. A U.S. military operation early Saturday morning seized them, and they'll now stand trial in the Southern District of New York on drug and weapons charges. President Trump says U.S. officials will run the country temporarily. Those involved will include Secretary-State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. U.S. oil companies, meanwhile, will operate Venezuela's oil resources. reserves. M.P.P.R. Franco Ordonias has more. Trump says that the U.S. is going to get very strongly involved. He says companies are going to be

investing millions and billions of dollars. Of course, Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves in the world. And U.S. involvement would be a huge deal for the industry. I mean, though it would be take a long time to reestablish the oil infrastructure in the country. That's NPR's Franco Ordonez reporting. The head of the United Nations, meanwhile, has expressed deep alarm over the U.S. strike on Venezuela and the capture of President Maduro and his wife. As NPR's Jackie Northam reports, Venezuela and Colombia, have requested an urgent UN Security Council meeting for Monday to discuss the U.S. action. In a statement delivered by his spokesperson, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Gutettish said the U.S. strike on Venezuela and the capture of Maduro set

a dangerous precedent and warned of the, quote, whirring implications for the region. Gutierrez stressed the importance of respecting international law. The Security Council met twice recently over the increasing tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela. In a social media post the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Mike Walts, said Maduro was an illegitimate dictator and that the U.S. action in Venezuela is not regime change, it's justice. Jackie Northam, NPR News. A judge in Milwaukee is resigning after being convicted of trying to help a man evade immigration enforcement. In December, a jury found Milwaukee County Judge Hanna Dugan guilty of obstructing an official proceeding.

Sarah Lear of Wisconsin Public Radio has more. Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan's legal troubles started in April when she led a man through a side door of her courtroom. That's after immigration agents showed up at the courthouse to arrest the man for being in the country illegally. The day after the felony verdict against Dugan, Wisconsin's top legislative Republicans announced they would start impeachment proceedings against her unless she resigned immediately. In her resignation letter, Dugan indicated she is still planning to appeal her conviction. But Dugan said she is stepping down to avoid a, quote, partisan fight in the state legislature. Wisconsin's Democratic governor will appoint another judge to replace Dugan. For NPR News, I'm Sarah Lear in Milwaukee.

And you're listening to NPR News. As the government releases troves of documents related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, journalists, including those here at NPR, are racing to understand their contents. Given the huge volume, reporters are getting tech help, which now includes artificial intelligence. NPR's Hoaging Nun looked into how that works. One way to receive a document dump is to divvy it up for a team of reporters and editors to read. Another way is to use the software to extract all the text and then reporters can look up keywords of interest to focus on.

Both are still happening today, but AI adds the ability to go beyond keywords. Dylan Friedman is the AI Project editor at the New York Times. He gave the example of finding emails. Or sometimes it might say from, sometimes it might say sender. And so AI is really good at kind of understanding that fuzzy context. Regardless of what technologies do, Friedman says. people, journalists, are making sense of the story. Hu Jinnan, NPR News.

Two more people were killed Saturday during violence connected to demonstrations in Iran. The protests began a week ago over concerns about that country's crumbling economy. That brings the death told to at least 10 since the protests began. On Saturday, the country's supreme leaders signaled a stronger stance, saying that rioters must be put in their place. North Korea fired several ballistic missiles early Sunday morning, South Korea's military says the missiles were fired in a direction toward North Korea's eastern waters. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff say they're discussing the situation with

South Korean officials. I'm Dale Wilman, NPR News.