House rejects Democratic-backed Venezuela war powers resolution

Trump announced on social media that he is sending the vice president to both Armenia and Azerbaijan in February to further efforts from a deal they signed at a White House peace summit in August aimed at ending decades of conflict.

Vance is also scheduled to go to Italy in February as part of the U.S. delegation to the Winter Olympics.

The Pentagon has been sending U.S. military assets into the Middle East this week, including an aircraft carrier group and its thousands of troops, as Trump indicates he is maintaining the possibility of strikes on Iran amid its crackdown on protests.

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and three accompanying destroyers left the South China Sea and began heading west earlier this week, a Navy official said. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military movements, said Friday that the Lincoln strike group was in the Indian Ocean.

When they arrive in the region, those warships would join three littoral combat ships, which were in port in Bahrain on Friday, as well as two other U.S. Navy destroyers, which were at sea in the Persian Gulf.

The arrival of the carrier strike group would bring roughly 5,700 additional service members.

▶ Read more about the military buildup here

U.S. Southern Command said Friday on social media that the boat was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations” and that the strike killed two people and left one survivor.

It said it notified the Coast Guard to launch search and rescue operations.

The U.S. military has focused lately on seizing sanctioned oil tankers with connections to Venezuela since the Trump administration launched an audacious raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this month. The last boat strikes occurred in late December.

Trump has signed an appropriations bill that will fund federal agencies and programs through the remainder of the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

The three-bill package that Trump signed Friday covers various agencies, including the Interior Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the departments of Commerce and Justice. It passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress.

Republicans said the roughly $175 billion price tag for the package generates savings for taxpayers. Democrats say the measure includes legally binding spending requirements that restrain the White House’s ability to withhold or delay funds for programs Trump opposes.

A White House official on Friday disputed Iran’s top prosecutor’s assertion that Trump has falsely claimed that Iran halted the hangings of some 800 protesters there, because the U.S. leader had intervened.

The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, reasserted that planned executions were called off as a result of Trump’s warnings and underscored that Trump was watching the situation in Iran closely and “all options are on the table if the regime executes protestors.”

But the official did not provide any evidence or details backing Trump’s claim.

Earlier Friday, prosecutor Mohammad Movahedi call Trump’s comments about halted hangings “completely false.”

Trump spent days suggesting that the U.S. might strike Iran militarily if its government triggered mass killings during the recent nationwide demonstrations against the Islamic. The U.S. president backed away from taking immediate action after claiming he’d received assurances that the Iranian government was abandoning plans to execute hundreds of protesters.

Read More

2 of 9  | 

Anti-abortion demonstrators walk to the Supreme Court during the annual March for Life, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Read More

3 of 9  | 

Anti-abortion demonstrators prepare to walk to the Supreme Court during the annual March for Life, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Read More

4 of 9  | 

An anti-abortion demonstrator attends the annual March for Life, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Read More

5 of 9  | 

A member of the Patriot Front holds a Confederate flag on the National Mall during the annual March for Life, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Read More

6 of 9  | 

Anti-abortion demonstrators attend the annual March for Life, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Read More

7 of 9  | 

Anti-abortion demonstrators attend the annual March for Life, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Read More

8 of 9  | 

Vice President JD Vance speaks at a rally ahead of the March for Life in Washington, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Read More

9 of 9  | 

Anti-abortion demonstrators are seen before the annual March for Life, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Read More

In his second annual address at March for Life, Vance told activists that Trump administration efforts including Supreme Court appointments that yielded the 2022 Dobbs decision have aimed to “clean up the wreckages of five decades of bad policy on the question of life.”

Vance — who at last year’s march said, “I want more babies in the United States of America” — was cheered by the crowd in mentioning that he and his wife, second lady Usha Vance, are expecting a son in late July, their fourth child.

“Let the record show, you have a vice president who practices what he preaches,” Vance said Friday.

NATO’s top general, U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, is part of President Donald Trump’s team holding three-way negotiations Friday in the United Arab Emirates on ending the Russia-Ukraine war.

The NATO supreme allied commander will be mainly serving as a senior U.S. military representative and has previously attended meetings tied to peace efforts in Geneva, Berlin and Paris as well as President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin last year in Alaska, a spokesman said in a statement.

Grynkewich is at least the second military official to be part of the negotiations. U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll was also tapped to help with such talks after first acting as a negotiator last November.

Seated in the Oval Office, Trump in a message to anti-abortion activists’ annual gathering on Friday recounted his administration’s “unprecedented strides to protect innocent life and support the institution of the family like never before.”

Among his accomplishments, Trump enumerated his appointment of “judges and justices who believed in interpreting the Constitution as written,” reflecting on the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

“Under the Trump administration, we’re strongly defending religious liberty,” Trump said. “We’re bringing back faith in America. We’re bringing back God.”
Vice President JD Vance is delivering this year’s keynote address.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is part of Trump’s team holding three-way negotiations Friday in the United Arab Emirates on ending the Russia-Ukraine war, a U.S. official says.

Special envoy Steve Witkoff asked Driscoll to attend given his experience serving in and leading the Army, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive diplomatic process.

Driscoll was previously tapped to help with such talks last November during a preplanned trip to Ukraine meant to discuss drone warfare.

He met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and joined Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Witkoff and other top negotiators in Geneva for more talks before traveling to Abu Dhabi to negotiate with the Russians on that previous trip.

The U.S. official didn’t have a sense of how long this latest round of negotiating was expected to last. The development was reported earlier by Politico and Fox News.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has urged Trump to apologize for his false assertion that troops from NATO countries — other than Americans — stayed away from the front line during the war in Afghanistan.

Trump said that he wasn’t sure NATO would be there to support the United States if and when requested, provoking outrage and distress among many in the United Kingdom on Friday.

Starmer said Trump’s remarks were insulting and frankly appalling.” More than 150,000 British troops served in Afghanistan in the years after the U.S.-led 2001 invasion, the largest contingent after the American one. More than 450 of them died.

Peru and Saudi Arabia are now officially members of a semi-exclusive club of “major non-NATO allies” of the United States following the publication of formal notices in the Federal Register.

Trump had announced in December that he would add both countries to the group, membership in which allows nations to buy U.S. armaments under the same terms and most conditions as NATO members.

With the formal addition of Peru and Saudi Arabia on Friday, there are now 22 major non-NATO allies on four continents.

The Trump administration has already approved billions of dollars in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and just last week announced a $1.5 billion sale to Peru of design and construction supplies and equipment to upgrade and expand its main naval base.

Trump’s top Supreme Court lawyer told the justices that the map designed to elect up to five more Democratic House members “is tainted by an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

Solicitor General D. John Sauer previously defended Texas’ map, engineered to elect up to five additional Republicans, as a legal partisan gerrymander.
Trump’s push for Texas Republicans to redistrict congressional boundaries led California to redo its own districts, with control of Congress on the line in this year’s elections.

The justices already have allowed Texas to use its new map, blocking a lower-court order that found it was likely racially discriminatory.

Last month, a federal court in Sacramento rejected arguments that the new California districts impermissibly favor Hispanic voters. Voters approved the new districts in November.

Republicans want the court to act before qualifying for congressional primaries begins next month.

Iran’s top prosecutor has called Trump’s claims about halting the hangings of 800 detained protesters “completely false.”

Activists say Iran’s crackdown has already killed at least 5,002 people. The internet blackout in Iran has lasted over two weeks, making it hard to confirm information.

Meanwhile, tensions between the U.S. and Iran remain high as an American aircraft carrier group moves closer to the Middle East. Analysts say this could give Trump the option to carry out strikes, though he has avoided that so far despite warnings to Tehran.

The U.S. has finalized its withdrawal from the World Health Organization, one year after Trump announced America was ending its 78-year-old commitment, federal officials said Thursday.

But it’s hardly a clean break.

The U.S. owes more than $130 million to the global health agency, according to WHO. And Trump administration officials acknowledge that they haven’t finished working out some issues, such as lost access to data from other countries that could give America an early warning of a new pandemic.

The withdrawal will hurt the global response to new outbreaks and will hobble the ability of U.S. scientists and pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines and medicines against new threats, said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University.

The WHO is the United Nations’ specialized health agency and is mandated to coordinate the response to global health threats. It also provides technical assistance to poorer countries; helps distribute scarce vaccines, supplies and treatments; and sets guidelines for hundreds of health conditions, including mental health and cancer.

Nearly every country in the world is a member.

▶ Read more about the WHO

Former special counsel Jack Smith testified Thursday about his investigation of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, detailing how the defeated president “sought to prey” on his supporters and “looked for ways to stay in power,” culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

It was Smith’s first public hearing since he left the department last year, and the nearly five-hour session at the House Judiciary Committee delved into far-flung details — from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s blockbuster testimony before the Jan. 6 committee to the gag order slapped on Trump during the investigation over his efforts to intimidate witnesses.

“Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who caused Jan. 6, it was foreseeable to him, and that he sought to exploit the violence,” Smith testified.

Trump, during the hearing, was live-posting his rage against Smith — suggesting the former career prosecutor should himself be prosecuted. In the room sat militant Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, and a tense encounter erupted between one audience member and police who had defended the Capitol, reminding how Jan. 6 still divides the Congress, and the country.

▶ Read more about Smith’s testimony

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded to U.S. President Donald Trump comment that “Canada lives because of the United States” on Thursday by saying Canada thrives because of Canadian values.

Carney said Canada can show the world that the future doesn’t have to be autocratic after returning from Davos where he gave a speech that garnered widespread attention.

In Davos at the World Economic Forum, Carney condemned coercion by great powers on smaller countries without mentioning Trump’s name.

Upon returning home to Canada, Carney responded to Trump directly by referencing Trump’s remarks in Davos.

“Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump said. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

“Canada doesn’t live because of the United States. Canada thrives because we are Canadian,” Carney responded Thursday.

Carney said Canada and the U.S. have built a remarkable partnership in the areas of economy, security and rich cultural exchange, but said “we are masters in our home, this is our own country, it’s our future, the choice is up to us.”

Trump later revoked his invitation to Carney to join his Board of Peace.

▶ Read more about Carney and Trump

The House rejected a Democratic-backed resolution Thursday that would have prevented President Donald Trump from sending U.S. military forces to Venezuela after a tied vote on the legislation fell just short of the majority needed for passage.

The tied vote was the latest sign of Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s tenuous hold on the majority, as well as some of the growing pushback in the GOP-controlled Congress to Trump’s aggressions in the Western Hemisphere. A Senate vote on a similar resolution was also tied last week until Vice President JD Vance broke the deadlock.

To defeat the resolution Thursday, Republican leaders had to hold the vote open for more than 20 minutes while Republican Rep. Wesley Hunt, who had been out of Washington all week campaigning for a Senate seat in Texas, rushed back to Capitol Hill to cast the decisive vote.

The war powers resolution would have directed Trump to remove U.S. troops from Venezuela. The Trump administration told senators last week that there are no U.S. troops on the ground in the South American nation and committed to getting congressional approval before launching major military operations there.

▶ Read more about the resolution