NPR News Now - NPR News: 01-07-2026 12PM EST

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

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Live from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Seng. The United Kingdom says it provided support to a U.S. military operation to seize an oil tanker in the North Atlantic, one of two such operations today, targeting Venezuela-linked ships. The other was in the Caribbean. NPR's Lauren Freyer has the latest from London. The U.K. Ministry of Defense says it let the U.S. military launch this attack from British military bases and provided surveillance support. UK defense secretary John Healy says the ship had a, quote, nefarious history,

part of a Russian-Iranian axis of sanctions evasion. The U.S. says it had been monitoring this ship for weeks after its crew rebuffed attempts to board it in the Caribbean. It then changed course toward Europe and changed its flag to a Russian one. Russia's transportation ministry reacted by saying no government has the right to use force against another ships. The U.S. seized the ship between Iceland, Iceland and Scotland, citing what it says are violations of U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan oil. Lauren Freyer and PR News, London.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has just attended a closed-door briefing with members of Congress. He later addressed reporters about the Venezuela operation over the weekend and U.S. interests in that country's oil. It's not just saying or speculating it's going to happen. It's already happening. Like the oil arrangement that we've made with Peta Vesa on their sanctioned oil, that they can't move. Understand they are not generating any revenue from their oil right now. They can't move it unless we allow it to move because we have sanctions because we're enforcing those sanctions. This is tremendous leverage.

European leaders have raised concerns about President Trump's threat that he wants to now gain control of Greenland and its resources. Rubio says, quote, if the president identifies a threat to the national security of the United States, every president retains the option to address it through military means, end quote. The administration says it's freezing billions of dollars in low-income aid for five Democratic-led states. NPR's Jennifer Ludden has more. The funding freeze is for California, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, and New York. The biggest chunk is $7 billion for cash assistance, plus money to help families with child care and other social services. A health and human services official confirmed the move to NPR, but did not say why only these states.

The New York Post first reported the first. freeze, citing claims the money was going to migrants who were in the U.S. illegally, but with no specific evidence. This all follows a wider freeze on child care funding after a right-wing media influencer put a spotlight on alleged welfare fraud in Minnesota. On X, New York Senator Kirsten-Julebrand accused the administration of political retribution. Jennifer Lutton, NPR News, Washington. At last check on Wall Street, the Dow was down 71 points at 49,000. This is NPR News. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is calling for calm after a bus driver ran over and killed a teenage boy during a protest.

Police say they encountered thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jewish demonstrators opposed to a plan to draft them into the military. A boy reportedly became trapped under a vehicle. Police say he was 14 years old. Investigators say the driver alleges he would. is attacked by protesters before his vehicle struck the miner. The driver is being held but has not been charged. Computer chipmaker, Nvidia, is ramping a production of a kind of artificial intelligence chip. The Trump administration recently approved it for sale to China. NPR's John Wuch reports the tech giant says demand is strong.

The chips are called H-200s. They're a type of graphics processing unit that's widely used to run AI models. The U.S. government had banned them from being sold to China, but last month, the Trump administration did in about face, giving NVIDIA a green light to sell H-200s to select customers in China. Speaking at the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says Chinese demand is high and the company has fired up its H-200 supply chain in anticipation.

He says Nvidia is working out the last licensing issues with the Trump administration. Beijing will also have to approve purchases of the chips by Chinese companies, but Huang says he expects that to happen quietly and orders to flow, once the U.S. licensing is worked out. John Rewich, NPR News, Las Vegas. The NASDAQ has risen 157 points more than half a percent. The SMPs gained 17. The Dow is down nearly 80 points.

This is NPR News.