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Joe Biden warns Benjamin Netanyahu that assault on Rafah would be ‘a mistake’

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Joe Biden warns Benjamin Netanyahu that assault on Rafah would be ‘a mistake’

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Joe Biden warned Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday that an assault on Rafah “would be a mistake”, as he asked Israel’s prime minister to send a delegation to Washington with alternative plans for the next stage of its offensive against Hamas in Gaza.

In his first call with the Israeli leader in a month, the US president expressed his sharpest opposition to Netanyahu’s plans to launch a ground invasion in Rafah, the last remaining population centre in southern Gaza unoccupied by Israeli forces.

While Biden had previously said he did not want Israel to enter Rafah without a plan to protect civilians, he told Netanyahu that he believed Israel could achieve its goals there “by other means”, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said.

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Netanyahu agreed to send intelligence and humanitarian officials to Washington “in the coming days”, Sullivan said, to “hear US concerns about Israel’s current Rafah planning and to lay out an alternative approach that would target key Hamas elements in Rafah and secure the Egypt-Gaza border without a major ground invasion”.

The US does not expect Israel would begin any invasion until those talks take place, Sullivan said. He rejected Netanyahu’s argument that “raising questions about Rafah is the same as raising questions about defeating Hamas”, saying: “Anytime I hear an argument that says if you don’t smash into Rafah you can’t defeat Hamas . . . that is a straw man.”

In the call, Biden said the US was concerned that there were more than 1mn refugees in Rafah with nowhere to go. The city is a primary entry point for humanitarian assistance and Egypt is deeply worried about Israel’s planned operation.

“A major ground operation there would be a mistake. It would lead to more innocent civilian deaths, worsen the already dire humanitarian crisis, deepen the anarchy in Gaza, and further isolate Israel internationally,” Sullivan said.

Netanyahu, in a short video statement released after the call, said he and Biden had spoken about “the latest developments in the war, including Israel’s commitment to achieving all the goals of the war: the elimination of Hamas, the release of all our hostages, and ensuring that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel — while providing the necessary humanitarian aid that helps achieve these goals”.

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Sullivan also appeared to confirm the death of Marwan Issa, Hamas’s number three military official in Gaza in an Israeli air strike in central Gaza two weekends ago.

Israeli officials have said they targeted Issa and he was likely to have been injured, but had so far held off from confirming the death of a military commander nicknamed “the shadow man”.

Ties between Netanyahu and Biden have grown increasingly strained in recent months. The US has demanded that Israel do more to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, formulate what US officials have called a “credible” plan for evacuating more than 1mn Palestinians sheltering in Rafah, and begin realistic discussions about the aftermath of the war.

Amid increasing criticism from Biden and other Democratic party leaders, Netanyahu has seemingly doubled down, vowing that not even Israel’s close allies would stop a Rafah offensive, which he has described as integral to the achievement of “total victory” over Hamas.

“There is international pressure to prevent us from entering Rafah and completing the work [of destroying Hamas]. As prime minister of Israel, I reject this pressure,” Netanyahu told Israeli troops last Thursday.

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Netanyahu has also rejected comments by Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer — subsequently praised by Biden — that the long-serving Israeli premier had “lost his way” and that new elections were required.

Speaking on Monday to the leadership of AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobby group, Netanyahu again insisted that the Israeli people were “united” behind his war strategy and rejected Schumer’s criticism that he was driven by a desire for “political survival”.

“They keep saying that local politics is interfering with [victory in the war]. They may be right. On which side of the pond?,” Netanyahu said.

Amid the US push for a ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza, an Israeli delegation led by David Barnea, head of the Mossad intelligence agency, arrived in Doha for follow-on talks with international mediators.

Sullivan on Monday said the talks, though challenging, were ongoing.

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“So far, this deal has been more elusive than we would have hoped, but we will keep pressing because we regard this as an urgent priority,” he said.

The US has been working with Qatar and Egypt on an agreement that would halt the fighting between Israel and Hamas and release more than 100 Israeli captives still held in Gaza. But the mediators have struggled for weeks to narrow the wide gaps between the warring parties.

Israel’s delegation was granted a wider remit by the Israeli cabinet to negotiate on the basis of Hamas’s latest response on a possible framework agreement that would see a six-week truce and the release of some 40 Israeli hostages as well as hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

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Community reacts to ICE shooting in Minnesota. And, RFK Jr. unveils new food pyramid

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Community reacts to ICE shooting in Minnesota. And, RFK Jr. unveils new food pyramid

Good morning. You’re reading the Up First newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox, and listen to the Up First podcast for all the news you need to start your day.

Today’s top stories

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis woman, yesterday. Multiple observers captured the shooting on video, and community members demanded accountability. Minnesota law enforcement officials and the FBI are investigating the fatal shooting, which the Trump administration says was an act of self-defense. Meanwhile, the mayor has accused the officer of reckless use of power and demanded that ICE get out of Minneapolis.

People demonstrate during a vigil at the site where a woman was shot and killed by an immigration officer earlier in the day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Jan. 7, 2026. An immigration officer in Minneapolis shot dead a woman on Wednesday, triggering outrage from local leaders even as President Trump claimed the officer acted in self-defense. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey deemed the government’s allegation that the woman was attacking federal agents “bullshit,” and called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers conducting a second day of mass raids to leave Minneapolis.

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  • 🎧 Caitlin Callenson recorded the shooting and says officers gave Good multiple conflicting instructions while she was in her vehicle. Callenson says Good was already unresponsive when officers pulled her from the car. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claims the officer was struck by the vehicle and acted in self-defense. In the video NPR reviewed, the officer doesn’t seem to be hit and was seen walking after he fired the shots, NPR’s Meg Anderson tells Up First. Anderson says it has been mostly peaceful in Minneapolis, but there is a lot of anger and tension because protesters want ICE out of the city.

U.S. forces yesterday seized a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the north Atlantic between Iceland and Britain after a two-week chase. The tanker was originally headed to Venezuela, but it changed course to avoid the U.S. ships. This action comes as the Trump administration begins releasing new information about its plans for Venezuela’s oil industry.

  • 🎧 It has been a dramatic week for U.S. operations in Venezuela, NPR’s Greg Myre says, prompting critics to ask if a real plan for the road ahead exists. Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded that the U.S. does have a strategy to stabilize Venezuela, and much of it seems to involve oil. Rubio said the U.S. would take control of up to 50 million barrels of oil from the country. Myre says the Trump administration appears to have a multipronged strategy that involves taking over the country’s oil, selling it on the world market and pressuring U.S. oil companies to enter Venezuela.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released new dietary guidelines for Americans yesterday that focus on promoting whole foods, proteins and healthy fats. The guidance, which he says aims to “revolutionize our food culture,” comes with a new food pyramid, which replaces the current MyPlate symbol.

  • 🎧 “I’m very disappointed in the new pyramid,” Christopher Gardner, a nutrition expert who was on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, tells NPR’s Allison Aubrey. Gardner says the new food structure, which features red meat and saturated fats at the top, contradicts decades of evidence and research. Poor eating habits and the standard American diet are widely considered to cause chronic disease. Aubrey says the new guidelines alone won’t change people’s eating habits, but they will be highly influential. This guidance will shape the offerings in school meals and on military bases, and determine what’s allowed in federal nutrition programs.

Special series

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Trump has tried to bury the truth of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. NPR built a visual archive of the attack on the Capitol, showing exactly what happened through the lenses of the people who were there. “Chapter 4: The investigation” shows how federal investigators found the rioters and built the largest criminal case in U.S. history.

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Political leaders, including Trump, called for rioters to face justice for their actions on Jan. 6. This request came because so few people were arrested during the attack. The extremists who led the riot remained free, and some threatened further violence. The government launched the largest federal investigation in American history, resulting in the arrest of over 1,500 individuals from all 50 states. The most serious cases were made by prosecutors against leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. For their roles in planning the attack against the U.S., some extremists were found guilty of seditious conspiracy. Take a look at the Jan. 6 prosecutions by the numbers, including the highest sentence received.

To learn more, explore NPR’s database of federal criminal cases from Jan. 6. You can also see more of NPR’s reporting on the topic.

Deep dive

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC.

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Trump takes 325 milligrams of daily aspirin, which is four times the recommended 81 milligrams of low-dose aspirin used for cardiovascular disease prevention. The president revealed this detail in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published last week. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that anyone over 60 not start a daily dose of aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease if they don’t already have an underlying problem. The group said it’s reasonable to stop preventive aspirin in people already taking it around age 75 years. Trump is 79. This is what you should know about aspirin and cardiac health:

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  • 💊 Doctors often prescribe the low dose of aspirin because there’s no benefit to taking a higher dose, according to a large study published in 2021.
  • 💊 Some people, including adults who have undergone heart bypass surgery and those who have had a heart attack, should take the advised dose of the drug for their entire life.
  • 💊 While safer than other blood thinners, the drug — even at low doses — raises the risk of bleeding in the stomach and brain. But these adverse events are unlikely to cause death.

3 things to know before you go

When an ant pupa has a deadly, incurable infection, it sends out a signal that tells worker ants to unpack it from its cocoon and disinfect it, a process that results in its death.

When an ant pupa has a deadly, incurable infection, it sends out a signal that tells worker ants to unpack it from its cocoon and disinfect it, a process that results in its death.

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  1. Young, terminally ill ants will send out an altruistic “kill me” signal to worker ants, according to a study in the journal Nature Communications. With this strategy, the sick ants sacrifice themselves for the good of their colony.
  2. In this week’s Far-Flung Postcards series, you can spot a real, lone California sequoia tree in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris. Napoleon III transformed the park from a former landfill into one of the French capital’s greenest escapes.
  3. The ACLU and several authors have sued Utah over its “sensitive materials” book law, which has now banned 22 books in K-12 schools. Among the books on the ban list are The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. (via KUER)

This newsletter was edited by Suzanne Nuyen.

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Video: Minnesota Governor Condemns ICE Shooting

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Video: Minnesota Governor Condemns ICE Shooting

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Minnesota Governor Condemns ICE Shooting

Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota slammed the fatal shooting of a woman by an immigration agent. President Trump said that the agents had acted in self-defense.

This morning, we learned that an ICE officer shot and killed someone in Minneapolis. We have been warning for weeks that the Trump administration’s dangerous, sensationalized operations are a threat to our public safety, that someone was going to get hurt. Just yesterday, I said exactly that. What we’re seeing is the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines and conflict. It’s governing by reality TV. And today, that recklessness cost someone their life.

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Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota slammed the fatal shooting of a woman by an immigration agent. President Trump said that the agents had acted in self-defense.

By Jiawei Wang

January 8, 2026

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U.S. to exit 66 international organizations in further retreat from global cooperation

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U.S. to exit 66 international organizations in further retreat from global cooperation

The symbol of the United Nations is displayed outside the Secretariat Building on Feb. 28, 2022, at United Nations Headquarters.

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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will withdraw from dozens of international organizations, including the U.N.’s population agency and the U.N. treaty that establishes international climate negotiations, as the U.S. further retreats from global cooperation.

President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order suspending U.S. support for 66 organizations, agencies, and commissions, following his administration’s review of participation in and funding for all international organizations, including those affiliated with the United Nations, according to a White House release.

Most of the targets are U.N.-related agencies, commissions and advisory panels that focus on climate, labor, migration and other issues the Trump administration has categorized as catering to diversity and “woke” initiatives. Other non-U.N. organizations on the list include the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance and Global Counterterrorism Forum.

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“The Trump Administration has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.

Trump’s decision to withdraw from organizations that foster cooperation among nations to address global challenges comes as his administration has launched military efforts or issued threats that have rattled allies and adversaries alike, including capturing autocratic Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and indicating an intention to take over Greenland.

U.S. builds on pattern of exiting global agencies

The administration previously suspended support from agencies like the World Health Organization, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees known as UNRWA, the U.N. Human Rights Council and the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO. It has taken a larger, a-la-carte approach to paying its dues to the world body, picking which operations and agencies it believes align with Trump’s agenda and those that no longer serve U.S. interests.

“I think what we’re seeing is the crystallization of the U.S. approach to multilateralism, which is ‘my way or the highway,’” said Daniel Forti, head of U.N. affairs at the International Crisis Group. “It’s a very clear vision of wanting international cooperation on Washington’s own terms.”

It has marked a major shift from how previous administrations — both Republican and Democratic — have dealt with the U.N., and it has forced the world body, already undergoing its own internal reckoning, to respond with a series of staffing and program cuts.

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Many independent nongovernmental agencies — some that work with the United Nations — have cited many project closures because of the U.S. administration’s decision last year to slash foreign assistance through the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

Despite the massive shift, the U.S. officials, including Trump himself, say they have seen the potential of the U.N. and want to instead focus taxpayer money on expanding American influence in many of the standard-setting U.N. initiatives where there is competition with China, like the International Telecommunications Union, the International Maritime Organization and the International Labor Organization.

The latest global organizations the U.S. is departing

The withdrawal from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, is the latest effort by Trump and his allies to distance the U.S. from international organizations focused on climate and addressing climate change.

UNFCC, the 1992 agreement between 198 countries to financially support climate change activities in developing countries, is the underlying treaty for the landmark Paris climate agreement. Trump — who calls climate change a hoax — withdrew from that agreement soon after reclaiming the White House.

Gina McCarthy, former White House National Climate Adviser, said being the only country in the world not part of the treaty is “shortsighted, embarrassing, and a foolish decision.”

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“This Administration is forfeiting our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies, and decisions that would have advanced our economy and protected us from costly disasters wreaking havoc on our country,” McCarthy, who co-chairs America Is All In, a coalition of climate-concerned U.S. states and cities, said in a statement.

Mainstream scientists say climate change is behind increasing instances of deadly and costly extreme weather, including flooding, droughts, wildfires, intense rainfall events and dangerous heat.

The U.S. withdrawal could hinder global efforts to curb greenhouse gases because it “gives other nations the excuse to delay their own actions and commitments,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists that tracks countries’ carbon dioxide emissions.

It will also be difficult to achieve meaningful progress on climate change without cooperation from the U.S., one of the world’s largest emitters and economies, experts said.

The U.N. Population Fund, the agency providing sexual and reproductive health worldwide, has long been a lightning rod for Republican opposition, and Trump cut funding for it during his first term. He and other GOP officials have accused the agency of participating in “coercive abortion practices” in countries like China.

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When President Biden took office in January 2021, he restored funding for the agency. A State Department review conducted the following year found no evidence to support GOP claims.

Other organizations and agencies that the U.S. will quit include the Carbon Free Energy Compact, the United Nations University, the International Cotton Advisory Committee, the International Tropical Timber Organization, the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation, the Pan-American Institute for Geography and History, the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies and the International Lead and Zinc Study Group.

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