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The United States hit Venezuela with a large-scale strike early Saturday and said its president had been captured and flown out of the country after months of intense pressure on Nicolás Maduro’s government an extraordinary nighttime operation announced by President Donald Trump on social media hours after the attack. The legal authority for the strike and whether Trump consulted Congress beforehand was not immediately clear. The stunning American military action, which plucked a nations sitting leader from office, echoed the U.S. invasion of Panama that led to the surrender and seizure of its leader, Manuel Antonio Noriega, in 1990 exactly 36 years ago Saturday. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, would face charges after an indictment in New York. Bondi vowed in a social media post that the couple would soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts. Maduro and other Venezuelan officials were indicted in 2020 on narco-terrorism conspiracy charges, but it was not previously known that his wife had been and it wasnt clear if Bondi was referring to a new indictment. The details of the allegations against Flores were not immediately known. Early Saturday, multiple explosions rang out and low-flying aircraft swept through the Venezuelan capital, as Maduro’s government accused the United States of attacking civilian and military installations, calling it an imperialist attack and urging citizens to take to the streets. With Maduro’s whereabouts not known, the vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, would take power under Venezuelan law. There was no confirmation that had happened, though she did issue a statement after the strike. We do not know the whereabouts of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, Rodríguez said. We demand proof of life. Maduro, Trump said, has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. He set a news conference for later Saturday morning. The attack itself lasted less than 30 minutes and the explosions at least seven blasts sent people rushing into the streets, while others took to social media to report what theyd seen and heard. Some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed, according to Rodríguez, the vice president, without giving a number. It was not known if there more actions lay ahead, though Trump said in his post that the strikes were carried out successfully. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, posted on X that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had briefed him on the strike and said that Maduro has been arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States. The White House did not immediately respond to queries on where Maduro and his wife were being flown to. Maduro last appeared on state television Friday while meeting with a delegation of Chinese officials in Caracas. The strike came after the Trump administration spent months increasing pressure on the Venezuelan leader, including a major buildup of American forces in the waters off South America and attacks on boats in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean accused of carrying drugs. Last week, the CIA was behind a drone strike at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. began strikes in September. As of Friday, the number of known boat strikes was 35 and the number of people killed at least 115, according to the Trump administration. Trump said that the U.S. is engaged in an armed conflict with drug cartels and has justified the boat strikes as a necessary to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S. Maduro has decried the U.S. military operations as a thinly veiled effort to oust him from power. Some streets in Caracas fill up Venezuelas government responded to the attack with a call to action: People to the streets! Armed people and uniformed members of a civilian militia headed into the streets of a Caracas neighborhood long considered a stronghold of the ruling party. As daylight broke, some people rallied and yelled Bring back Maduro! while holding posters of the leader. In other areas of the city, the streets remained empty hours after the attack. Parts of the city remained without power, but vehicles moved freely. Video obtained from Caracas and an unidentified coastal city showed tracers and smoke clouding the landscape as repeated muted explosions illuminated the night sky. Other footage showed cars passing on a highway as blasts illuminated the hills behind them. The videos were verified by The Associated Press. Smoke was seen rising from the hangar of a military base in Caracas, while another military installation in the capital was without power. The whole ground shook. This is horrible. We heard explosions and planes, said Carmen Hidalgo, a 21-year-old office worker, her voice trembling. She was walking briskly with two relatives in Caracas, returning from a birthday party. We felt like the air was hitting us. The Venezuelan government’s statement said that Maduro had ordered all national defense plans to be implemented and declared a state of emergency that gives him the power to suspend peoples rights and expand the role of the armed forces. The website of the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela, a post that has been closed since 2019, issued a warning to American citizens in the country, saying it was aware of reports of explosions in and around Caracas. U.S. citizens in Venezuela should shelter in place, the warning said. Reaction begins to emerge Inquiries to the Pentagon and U.S. Southern Command since Trumps social media post went unanswered. The FAA warned all commercial and private U.S. pilots that the airspace over Venezuela and the small island nation of Curacao, just off the coast of the country, was off limits due to safety-of-flight risks associated with ongoing military activity. The Armed Services committees in both houses of Congress, which have jurisdiction over military matters, have not been notified by the administration of any actions, according to a person familiar with the matter and granted anonymity to discuss it. Lawmakers from both political parties in Congress have raised deep reservations and flat out objections to the U.S. attacks on boats suspected of drug smuggling on boats near the Venezuelan coast and Congress has not specifically approved an authorization for the use of military force for such operations in the region. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the military action and seizure of Maduro marks a new dawn for Venezuela, saying that the tyrant is gone. He posted on X hours after the strike. is boss, Rubio, reposted a post from July that said Maduro is NOT the President of Venezuela and his regime is NOT the legitimate government. Cuba, a supporter of the Maduro government and a longtime adversary of the United States, called for the international community to respond to what president Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez called the criminal attack. Our zone of peace is being brutally assaulted, he said on X. Irans Foreign Ministry also condemned the strikes. President Javier Milei of Argentina praised the claim by his close ally, Trump, that Maduro had been captured with a political slogan he often deploys to celebrate right-wing advances: Long live freedom, dammit! By REGINA GARCIA CANO and KONSTANTIN TOROPIN ___ Toropin and Associated Press writer Lisa Mascaro reported from Washington.
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The new year often brings sticker shock. A glance at our bank statements and credit card bills shows just how much we spent during the holidays, serving as a painful reminder that with the festivities behind us, we should work on getting our expenditures under control. A good first step toward doing that is to cancel unnecessary subscriptionswhether thats Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, or any other service you pay for monthly but dont use. These unnecessary subscriptions can add upespecially as prices continue to rise. A 2025 CNET report found that the average U.S. adult spends $17 a month on subscriptions they dont usethats more than $200 a year. (A Self Financial study from the same year found subscribers were wasting less on unused subscriptions$10.57 per monthbut thats still more than $120 per year). Unfortunately, canceling a subscription isnt always straightforward. Yet if you want to stop burning through money in 2026, axing unnecessary subscriptions is essential. Heres how to quickly find and cancel yours. Track down your forgotten subscriptions Ive known people who were surprised to discover theyd been paying for a subscription for years that they had completely forgotten about, and thus had been literally wasting money each month on something they didnt even use. Thats why, if you want to stop wasting money on unnecessary subscriptions, you first need to find all yours. Thankfully, the digital nature of the payment methods we use can help us track down forgotten subscriptions: Check your bank and credit card statements for any recurring fees from the same vendor. This is the biggest tip-off that you have a subscription youve forgotten about. If you tend to subscribe to services via apps on your iPhone or Android, you may have signed up for them using Apples or Googles in-app purchase system. Apple and Google both make it easy to see what recurring subscriptions you are signed up for. Heres how to find those subscriptions on an iPhone and on an Android phone. You may have subscribed to a service via an apps dedicated signup page. You should check your account settings in all apps that offer subscriptions to see if you have any there. People also often subscribe to streaming TV channels (like Hallmark+ or Crunchroll) through third-party services, so its smart to check if you have any recurring subscriptions on those platforms, too. Heres how to see if youre paying for any extra subscriptions through Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, or YouTube. The points above arent exhaustive, but you should be able to find most of your subscriptions this way. Cancel subscriptions using your iPhone or Android Once youve tracked down all your unnecessary subscriptions, the next step is to cancel them. The cancellation process will differ depending on how you signed up. If you signed up via an apps dedicated signup page, open the app and navigate to its account settings. You should see a subscription cancellation option there (sometimes the app may point you to a website, email, or phone number you need to use to cancel). If you signed up via an in-app purchase on the Apple App Store, open your iPhones Settings app, tap your Apple Account name, and tap Subscriptions. Find the one you want to cancel there. If you signed up via an in-app purchase on the Google Play Store, open the Google Play Store app and tap your profile, account, then Payments & subscriptions. Tap the subscription you want to find the cancellation button for. Quickly cancel your subscriptions online Finally, some subscriptions require you to sign up or cancel on a web pageor at least allow you to cancel from any web browser. Here are some shortcuts to help pages for common subscriptions that explain how to cancel them. Amazon Music Standard Amazon Music Unlimited Amazon Prime Amazon Prime Video Apple Music Apple TV Disney+ DoorDash ESPN Grubhub HBO Max Hulu Netflix Paramount+ Peacock Spotify Premium Uber Eats Uber One YouTube Music Premium YouTube Premium
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Every January, leaders are told to do the same thing: set ambitious goals, map out the year, and commit to executing harder than before. We frame this as discipline or vision, but more often than not, it is a ritual of pressure. The assumption is that success comes from wanting more and pushing faster. After years of leading teams, building companies, and advising executives at the intersection of AI, work, and leadership, I realized something uncomfortable. Most people are not failing because their goals are unclear. They are failing because their capacity is already exhausted before the year even begins. That realization fundamentally changed how I approach the start of a new year. I no longer begin January by asking what I want to achieve. I begin by asking how I want to work. This shift might sound subtle, but it has reshaped my leadership, my productivity, and my ability to sustain momentum over time. The problem with goal-first planning Traditional New Year planning assumes a stable environment. It assumes our time is predictable, our energy is consistent, and our attention is ours to control. None of that reflects the reality of modern work. Leaders today are operating in a constant state of interruption. Meetings stack on top of each other. Slack never sleeps. Decision fatigue builds quietly. Add in personal responsibilities, emotional labor, and the cognitive load of navigating rapid technological change, and it becomes clear why so many January plans collapse by March. We set goals in a vacuum, ignoring the systems we will need to support them. We optimize for ambition instead of sustainability. The result is not a lack of discipline. It is burnout disguised as motivation. A different starting question At some point, I stopped asking, What do I want to accomplish this year? and replaced it with a more honest question: What capacity do I actually have? Capacity is not just time on a calendar. It is energy, focus, decision bandwidth, and emotional resilience. It is also deeply personal and deeply contextual. When I design capacity first, I look at four things before I set a single goal. First, energy rhythms. When am I most creative? When do I do my best strategic thinking? When am I drained? Most people know this intuitively, but they plan as if every hour is equal. Second, decision load. How many decisions am I making daily that could be automated, delegated, or eliminated? Leaders often underestimate how much cognitive energy is consumed by low-stakes decisions that pile up quietly. Third, friction points. What consistently slows me down or causes unnecessary stress? This could be meetings without agendas, tools that do not talk to each other, or workflows that rely too heavily on me as the bottleneck. Fourth, leverage. Where can systems, technology, or people multiply my efforts without requiring more from me? Only after answering these questions do I begin thinking about goals. Capacity as a leadership skill Designing capacity is not about doing less. It is about doing what matters with intention. As an AI strategist, I see organizations rush to adopt new tools without addressing the human systems underneath them. The same mistake happens in personal planning. We layer more objectives on top of broken workflows and wonder why execution fails. Capacity-first planning forces leaders to confront trade-offs early. If you want to launch something new, what must be paused? If you want to grow, where must complexity be reduced? This approach also normalizes a truth leaders rarely say out loud: you cannot do everything at once, and trying to do so is not a sign of strength. In fact, the strongest leaders I know are ruthless about protecting their capacity. They understand that clarity, judgment, and presence are finite resources. How this changes the start of the year When January arrives, I do not sprint. I audit. I review what actually worked the previous year, not just what looked impressive. I identify what drained me disproportionately relative to its impact. I redesign my calendar before I redesign my goals. Then, and only then, do I set intentions that fit the container I have created. Some years, that container is expansive. Other years, it is intentionally constrained. Both can be successful if they are honest. This ritual has helped me avoid the boom-and-bust cycles that so many leaders accept as normal. It has also allowed me to build with consistency instead of urgency. A reframing for modern work New Years resolutions are not inherently flawed. What is flawed is treating ambition as the primary variable when the real constraint is capacity. In a world defined by constant change, leaders do not need more pressure. They need better design. The most effective way to begin a year is not by demanding more from yourself, but by building systems that support the work you want to do and the life you want to sustain. Design your capacity first. Let your goals follow. You might find that you accomplish more by asking less of yourself, and more of your systems.
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New York City kicked off the new year with a new mayor in democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, whose inauguration flooded the internet with viral moments. Mamdani took the oath of office via two separate swearing-in ceremonies. The more intimate one took place underground at midnight at a decommissioned City Hall subway station. With just a few hours as mayor under his belt, Mamdani was then sworn in for a second time by fellow democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. Mamdani first reached internet stardom during his mayoral campaign, thanks in part to his campaign’s design and witty social media content, prompting a landslide victory and the highest mayoral race voter turnout in half a century. Unsurprisingly, the viral political figure’s inauguration has taken over social media. We’ve rounded up some of the historic event’s most viral moments. OG progressive stars spotted While U.S. Sen. Sanders (I-VT) swore in Mamdani, he wasn’t the only popular left-wing political figure to take the stage. U.S. Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)who’s also garnered victories and popularity due to progressive pledges and an astute social media campaignintroduced the new mayor before his swearing-in. @cnn Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced Zohran Mamdani before he takes his public oath of office as the mayor of New York City. original sound – CNN In a video of AOC’s speech that has over 1.9 million views, users were divided in the comments, with many sending their best wishes to the new mayor while others expressed concern. “As a Texan, I’m so jealous of NY,” one user commented, while another posted “God help NYC.” Others showed excitement over Sanders and Mamdani sharing a stage, with one TikTok user posting a video of the pair hugging during the event. “A once-in-a-lifetime moment: watching Bernie Sanders swear in Zohran Mamdani as mayor of NYC,” the video said, with a caption reading “R u kidding me. Best day ever.” A headline-grabbing fashion moment Political figures were not the only ones to catch the public’s attention. Artist Rama Duwaji, Mamdani’s wife and now the first lady of New York City, gained attention over her footwear. The New York Post took offense to the first lady’s apparent $630 dollar Miista boots, calling the choice a luxury and more “socialite than socialist.” However, many users have taken social media to defend Duwaji’s choice. “[You] know there’s nothing bad to report when you’re talking about his wife’s boots already,” one user responded via X. “$630 for a shoe at a NYC mayoral signing is not a flex” another user said, adding that “anything less would be disrespect to the city.” "socialism is when nobody can have expensive things" – new york post revealing how low quality their publication is— b (@wwxwashere) January 1, 2026 Another user pointed out that displays of wealth are routine in MAGA culture, calling out the hypocritical stance against Duwaji. “I must have missed the $50,000 watch or $30,000 bracelets I see on MAGA women like Kristi Noem,” a user shared on X. Popular Instagram page Diet Prada also commented on the issue, linking to past coverage on Melania Trump’s $100,000 shoe collection. And others are even catapulting Duwaji to it-girl fashion status, particularly following a recent artistic cover for The Cut. “Instead of functioning as a political accessory to her husband, Rama has 100% retained her identity,” freelance creative director Elysia Berman said on TikTok. “This is a win for weird art school girls.” “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” In another emotive moment, American actor and singer Mandy Patinkin gave a performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” alongside young students from Staten Island’s P.S. 22. “A Jewish man singing at a Muslim man’s inauguration has me all teary-eyed,” one user commented on a video of the performance posted on TikTok. @cbsnewyork Actor and singer Mandy Patinkin performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with students from Staten Island’s P.S. 22 at Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration on Thursday. #newyork #nyc #mamdani #zohranmamdani #mandypatinkin original sound – CBS New York Many users shared a similar hopeful message, with one posting to X: “Mandy Patinkin singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ with these kids is so beautiful and hopeful. I’m in tears.” In the words of Jadakiss In yet another pop-culture moment, Mamdani’s speech included a quote from New York rapper Jadakiss. “Throughout it all, we willin the words of Jason Terrance Phillips, better known as Jadakiss, or J to the Muahbe outside,” the mayor said. Both fans of the mayor and the rapper alike took to social media to express their surprise and excitement over the reference. One user posted on X: “Mamdani quoting Jadakiss in his inauguration speech is why hes my mayor.” Another user on TikTok believes the new mayor, who is notorious for his pop-culture fluency, will continue to reference rappers in the future. “Mark my words,” the user said on TikTok. “He’s going to do it again, and whichever historians or internet historians are out there, y’all stay on deck. Documentation starts today.”
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A California lawmaker has introduced a first-in-the-nation bill meant to ban companies from embedding AI chatbot technology into toys designed for children. Announced on Friday, the measure comes amid growing concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on child welfare, as well as a number of local and federal proposals to limit kids access to large language model (LLM) chatbots. This particular legislation would target toys that simulate friendship and companionship through LLM technology. For toy manufacturers, LLMs can provide an easy, albeit risky, way of creating a personality for a particular doll or character. AI models arent pre-scripted the way most talking toys arewhich means toys integrated with the tech can end up sharing all sorts of inappropriate content with a young child. Case in point: Sales for an AI-enabled teddy bear were suspended in November after the toy, when investigated, started talking about sexual role-play and igniting matches.The California bill, authored by state Sen. Steve Padilla, is designed as a moratorium and would ban, until at least January 1, 2031, the sale of toys that include a companion chatbot meant for children 12 and younger. The proposal defines a companion chatbot as an artificial intelligence system with a natural language interface that provides adaptive, human-like responses to user inputs and is capable of meeting a users social needs. The bill also targets chatbot technology designed to support an ongoing bond with a potential child, including by exhibiting anthropomorphic features and being able to sustain a relationship across multiple interactions. Chatbots and other AI tools may become integral parts of our lives in the future, but the dangers they pose now require us to take bold action to protect our children, Padilla said in a statement. Our safety regulations around this kind of technology are in their infancy and will need to grow as exponentially as the capabilities of this technology does. Our children cannot be used as lab rats for Big Tech to experiment on. Its not immediately clear whether the bill has legs. But the impact of artificial intelligence on kids has outraged local and federal lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. One bipartisan federal proposal from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), for instance, would ban the use of AI companions for minors and punish AI companies that make AI for minors that solicits or produces sexual content. Notably, the White House has pushed back on state lawmakers hoping to regulate AI technology. Late last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would target states that write their own laws with litigation, and take a series of steps to establish one national approach to AI regulation on topics like child safety and alleged censorship. For now, though, its not clear how serious the Trump administrations efforts actually are. Representatives for several organizations focused on digital welfare for kids did not respond to a request for comment on the legislation, which was released Friday, January 2.
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