The Headlines - Democrats Push to Impeach Kristi Noem, and Ilhan Omar Is Attacked in Minneapolis

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Plus, the woman who helped make GPS possible.Here’s what we’re covering: Representative Ilhan Omar Is Attacked at Town Hall in Minneapolis, by Reis Thebault, Lauren McCarthy and Ashley Ahn Democrats Push to Impeach and Investigate Noem, by Michael Gold U.S. Population Growth Slows Sharply as Immigration Numbers Plunge, by Jeff Adelson and Sabrina Tavernise Trump Hobbled the I.R.S. This C.E.O. Now Has to Make It Work., by Andrew Duehren Troop Casualties in Ukraine War Near 2 Million, Study Finds, by Helene Cooper Gladys West, Unsung Figure in Development of GPS, Dies at 95, by Michael S. Rosenwald Tune in every weekday morning, and tell us what you think at: [e-mail].   Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Will Jarvis in for Tracy Mumford. Today's Wednesday, January 28th. Here's what we're covering. Ice cannot be reformed. It cannot be rehabilitated. We must abolish ice for good. In Minneapolis last night, Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar

held a town hall meeting to address the ongoing ice operations in the city, parts of which she represents. And DHS Secretary Kristy Nome must resign or face impeachment. A few minutes after she started talking, a man jumped up from the audience, rushed forward, and used a syringe to spray Omar with a substance that smelled strongly of vinegar. I don't know. A security officer tackled the man who police arrested on suspicion of assault. The U.S. Capitol Police, which investigates threats against lawmakers,

said in a statement the attack was unacceptable and would be met with, quote, swift justice. Just give me 10 minutes. Just give me 10 minutes. I beg you. As the man was hauled away, Omar insisted to her staff that she would continue the event. Here is the reality that people like this ugly man don't understand. We are Minnesota strong,

and we will stay resilient in the face of whatever they might throw in us. A few hours earlier. They have to show that they can love our country. They have to be proud. Not like ill hands. Omar. Did you see what? President Trump, who has repeatedly made inflammatory, racist remarks about Omar and her Somali heritage, had mocked her at a rally in Iowa.

You know, she's always talking about the Constitution, you know, the Constitution. She comes from a country that's a disaster. And in a phone interview with ABC News after the attack, Trump, who said he hadn't seen video of the incident, accused Omar of staging it. He said, quote, she probably had herself spray. knowing her. Meanwhile, the backlash to the killings by federal agents in Minneapolis this month has now swept up two key administration officials.

Yesterday, Top House Democrats said that Homeland Security Secretary Christine Nome should be fired immediately, and that if she isn't, they would push to impeach her, though they would need some Republican support to do that. And the Times has learned that the administration has barred Gregory Bovino, a senior customs and Border Patrol officer from his official social media account. Bovino had used the account to promote his work and hit back at critics. He's been recalled from his assignment in Minnesota as the White House tries to do damage control over the aggressive immigration operations in the state.

And in terms of how the administration's immigration policies have been playing out for the whole country, new data from the Census Bureau shows that Trump's approach has contributed to a sharp slowdown in population growth. According to the numbers, from mid-20204 to mid-25, the U.S. had one of the slowest growth rates in the country's history. While part of it is America's declining birth rate, which has been dropping for nearly two decades, other major reasons include Trump's effective shutdown of the southern border, how hard he's made it to get visas, and the fact that a lot of people are simply choosing not to come to the U.S. at all. This week marks the beginning of taxisers. season in the U.S. when the Internal Revenue Service braces for more than 140 million tax returns

to pour in, and many Americans start anxiously waiting for their tax refund. It was a really tough year last year for the IRS. They lost roughly a quarter of their staff under the Trump administration's attempts to reduce the size of the federal workforce. More than half a dozen different people led the agency on a kind of almost rotating basis. And so I wanted to sit down with and get to know and understand the guy whose job it is to make the IRS work this year. My colleague Andrew Duren recently profiled Frank Bizzignano, the head of the IRS, and he says there are three key things to know. The first thing to know about Bizzing Nano is that the stakes are really high for him over the next 10 weeks because Republicans passed a big tax cut last year and they now want people to get that money, basically.

They're hoping that people get refunds this year, notice that they're larger than they have been in the past and that they say, oh, Republicans got me this extra money. I like Republicans more now. And so Bizignano has this kind of political imperative this year to make it work. The second thing to know about Frank Busing Nano is that he does have a lot of relevant experience in payments processing. He was the CEO of a large payment processing company right before he joined the Trump administration. He spent his whole career on Wall Street kind of making sure money gets from point A to point B. And so there's some confidence among, you know, current and former IRS officials that I talked to that BusyNano is someone who can make it work. And the third thing to know about him is that it's not the only job that he's doing right now.

He is also running the Social Security Administration. He is the Senate confirmed commissioner of that agency, which is also a very large and consequential agency. I mean, when I talk to him about this, he said that, you know, he's done other big jobs at the same time before in his career. From what I've heard, he's at the IRS roughly two days a week physically, and he flies there in his private plane from his home in New Jersey. And so it's, yeah, it's certainly an unusual situation. As far as I know, there's never been someone leading the IRS and the Social Security Administration, at least in modern times. And so we'll see if he can handle both jobs at once. A new study published yesterday shows the staggering human toll of the war in Ukraine.

According to the report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the total number of Russian and Ukrainian troops killed, wounded, or missing during four years of war has now climbed to almost 1.8 million. Since Russia is believed to undercount its casualties and Ukraine doesn't publish official figures, researchers relied on U.S. and British estimates, among other sources. They found that roughly 100 to 140,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed since the war began, and that Russia, which has three times their manpower on the battlefield, has suffered more losses than any major world power since World War II.

About 35,000 Russian soldiers have been getting killed or injured every month. The massive loss of life comes as things have largely stalled on the front lines. In the past two years of fighting, Russia has only managed to seize an additional 1.5% of Ukrainian territory. And finally, I never thought that I could sit in a car and, you know, it says, turn left, turn right, no. Gladys West, a mathematician whose work was critical in developing GPS, has died at age 95. Despite the fact that many Americans rely on the tech every day, her role in it went unrecognized for nearly all of her life. West was born in a town of sharecroppers in Virginia in 1930, and when she started her career in the Navy in the 50s, she was one of only four black mathematicians at the whole facility.

There, she went on to lead a group that calculated the precise shape of the planet, accounting for things like tidal forces and the curvature of oceans. That helped her find the accuracy of GPS. Flash forward to 2018, West had never even told her own children about her work, in part because some of it had been classified, in part because that just wasn't her style. When a fellow alum from her sorority offered to help get her story out there by contacting a local newspaper reporter, West asked her, do you think anybody would care? Notably, even though GPS, the system she helped make possible, is now everywhere,

West herself still preferred paper maps, telling the Guardian at one point that she would was a hands-on kind of person. Those are the headlines. Today on the Daily. Now it seems we are at the point where the president has realized that he might have overshot on this agenda item. We're actually, he went so far that now the optics are actually not working in his favor. More on how the Trump administration may be changing course in Minneapolis.

You can find that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Will Jarvis. We'll be back tomorrow.