The Chinese Communist Party has escalated its persecution of Christians by arresting more prominent church leaders and putting them in detention centers, The Daily Wire has learned. At least seven Christians affiliated with the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, a city in southwestern China, were arrested on Tuesday, according to the church. The arrests began in the early morning and continued until evening. Early Rain Covenant Church is a prominent evangelical Presbyterian church that has earned the ire of the Communist Party for being part of China’s underground church movement. The arrests of the Early Rain members come just a few months after the Chinese government rounded up prominent leaders at Zion Church, another well-known underground church. Those arrested included Li Yingqiang, an elder at the church whose home in Deyang was searched, and preacher Dai Zhichao. Dai was arrested at the church office after being told by authorities he was not allowed to leave his home, according to the church. “At around 11:00 a.m. on January 6, he was taken under control at the church office, then brought to his home where it was searched, after which he went out of contact. It has now been confirmed that he is at the Jinniu District Case-Handling Center,” a message from Early Rain said. Others who were taken by authorities included elder Yan Hong, preacher Wu Wuqing, the family of Ye Fenghua, and deacon Zeng Qingtao. A woman named Shu Qiong was also taken by police and charged with “suspected provocation and police disturbance,” according to a source familiar with the arrests. A photo obtained by The Daily Wire shows the police showing up at her home. One of those arrested was able to return home on Tuesday, according to the church. The church is currently locating lawyers for those arrested. At the same time, police targeted the Early Rain Academy, a school operated by the church. “The academy immediately organized teachers and students to evacuate and leave the site. Subsequently, the owner of the teaching site was summoned to the police station and pressured, and was informed that all items must be removed from the site by Friday,” the church said in a release. The CCP’s targeting of Early Rain stretches back to 2018 when it began arresting prominent leaders, including Pastor Wang Yi. Wang was convicted in 2019 of subverting the government and sentenced to nine years in prison. While still imprisoned, he was just awarded a Democracy Service Medal by the National Endowment for Democracy. Corey Jackson, who heads up the advocacy organization Luke Alliance, said the arrests were part of a broader pattern of targeting of unregistered churches. He said in recent months that more pastors were being brought into local police offices for “tea times” and told that they must register with the state or face harsh treatment. “One person reported that they had been told by the domestic security police that churches, ‘house churches,’ are going to face complete prohibition. Participants will face imprisonment, and there’s going to be less pattern of warning, fines, and leeway,” Jackson told The Daily Wire. Jackson said that the government really wants to exert more control over the churches, and make them register any online services they have before meeting. He also said the government doesn’t want parents educating kids in their faith if they are below the age of 18. Jackson added that he would like to see the Trump administration put some pressure on China over their repression of Christianity. “We need to apply pressure on China with human rights,” he said. “We must continue not to just be transactional in our approach with China, but to also recognize that China is the one of the worst abusers of human rights in the world.”

Officials in Denmark and Greenland have requested to meet with Secretary of State Marco Rubio as President Donald Trump has renewed his efforts to acquire Greenland. Greenland Foreign Minister Vivian Motzfeldt and Denmark Foreign Minister Lars Rasmussen said separately that they had requested a meeting with Rubio. The officials said that similar meetings had been requested last year, but never granted. “The strong request for a meeting is related to the U.S.’s claims about our country,” Meltzfeldt said, according to ABC News. “Unfortunately, our country’s request for a meeting for a long time has not been successful, although this has been repeatedly requested by our country.” Rasmussen said that the meeting would clear up “certain misunderstandings” related to Washington’s desire to acquire Greenland, according to France 24. Trump has renewed his case for U.S. control of Greenland after the United States military last week successfully arrested and extradited Venezuela strongman Nicolás Maduro from his compound in Caracas. U.S. forces took Maduro to New York where he is set to stand trial on drug trafficking charges. The White House issued a statement on Tuesday that said the administration is leaving open the option of “utilizing the U.S. military” as part of its acquisition strategy. “President Trump has made it well known that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority of the United States, and it’s vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region,” the White House said. “The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the commander in chief’s disposal.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Monday that threats to involve the military are part of a bargaining strategy. Rubio said that Trump wants to purchase Greenland from Denmark, not invade it, according to The New York Times. Denmark has repeatedly pushed back against U.S. claims to the territory. On Tuesday, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland joined Denmark in issuing a joint statement against U.S. acquisition of Greenland. Trump has insisted that Greenland is necessary for U.S. national security, especially to secure Arctic shipping lanes. Danish control of Greenland also cuts against the Monroe Doctrine against European interference in the Western hemisphere.

President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Venezuela’s interim authorities will transfer between 30 and 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil to the United States. The move comes just days after Trump said the U.S. would take control of Venezuela and its oil following the capture of former dictator Nicolás Maduro on Saturday. Trump described the oil as “high quality” and said it would be delivered immediately to U.S. ports on storage ships. “This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” Trump posted. “I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan, immediately.” The Venezuelan shipment is enough to supply the United States for roughly one and a half to two and a half days, based on America’s daily consumption of about 20 million barrels. Venezuela currently produces only 900,000 to 1.1 million barrels per day, according to Venezuelan media, marking a sharp drop from the roughly 3 million barrels a day it produced before socialist Hugo Chávez took power in the late 1990s. Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, who was sworn in on Monday, initially took a harsh approach to Trump capturing her predecessor, but has since become more conciliatory. On Sunday, Rodriguez called for “moving towards balanced and respectful international relations between the United States and Venezuela.” “We invite the U.S. government to collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation oriented towards shared development within the framework of international law to strengthen lasting community coexistence,” she added. “President Donald Trump, our peoples and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war.” Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez speaks during a press conference in Caracas on September 8, 2025. (Photo by FEDERICO PARRA/AFP via Getty Images) Rodríguez, 56, has been such a loyal and unflinching defender of Maduro’s socialist government that the former dictator once called her a “tiger.” She is the daughter of left‑wing guerrilla leader Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, who helped found the Liga Socialista party in the 1970s. An attorney by training, Rodríguez has held several of the most powerful posts in Venezuela’s government, including Minister of Petroleum, President of the Constituent Assembly, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Minister of Popular Power for Communication and Information, in addition to serving as vice president. In 2018, she was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the European Union for her role in Nicolás Maduro’s inner circle and for undermining democracy. She responded by blasting the measures as the product of “racist” and “warmongering” policies of the “old imperial world,” the Associated Press reported at the time. Rodriguez was named vice president in 2018 by Maduro, who described her as “a young woman, brave, seasoned, daughter of a martyr, revolutionary and tested in a thousand battles.” Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado, told Fox News that Rodríguez is as dangerous as Maduro. “Delcy Rodriguez, as you know, is one of the main architects of torture, persecution, corruption, narco trafficking,” Machado said. “She’s the main ally and liaison with Russia, China, Iran, certainly not an individual that could be trusted by international investors. And she’s really rejected, repudiated by the Venezuelan people.” Despite the gesture from leaders, plain-clothes gunmen tied to the pro-Maduro “Colectivos” paramilitary group were deployed to Venezuela’s streets on Tuesday where they stopped vehicles to search phones and belongings looking for supporters of the United States capturing Maduro. Police were also reportedly instructed to “search and capture of everyone involved in the promotion or support for the armed attack by the United States.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the company’s new AI supercomputer, Vera Rubin, designed to tackle one of the biggest challenges with Artificial Intelligence: the skyrocketing demand for computing power. As AI models grow in size and complexity, the need for powerful hardware has surged. According to Huang, the largest AI models are increasingly driving an unprecedented demand for GPUs and infrastructure. On average, Huang said, AI models are increasing in size by a factor of ten each year, emphasizing the need for systems that can keep pace with rapidly evolving workloads. Vera Rubin is Nvidia’s answer: a rack-scale supercomputer built from six completely new chips, each engineered to work together as one cohesive system. The platform is named in honor of Vera Rubin, the pioneering American astronomer who provided compelling evidence for dark matter in the late 1970s. To design the new supercomputer, Huang says Nvidia had to break one of its internal rules. “We have a rule inside our company and it’s a good rule. No new generation should have more than one or two chips changed.” Nvidia’s Vera Rubin kept none of the chips the same, coming out with six new chips. Huang said Nvidia had no choice but to break the rule to keep up with Moore’s Law. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, developed Moore’s Law, which theorized that transistor counts double every two years. Transistors are the processing tools for chips and originally were millimeters in size, but today, they are atomic-sized. Given shrinking the size of the now almost atomic transistors would be extremely challenging, Nvidia co-designed six chips to work together, achieving higher performance without significantly increasing transistor count. Huang says “each one of them [the chips] are revolutionary and the best of its kind.” Nvidia claims that Vera Rubin delivers twice the computational power of Blackwell, its previous-generation system, while using less energy. The combination of liquid cooling, optimized chip design, and high-speed interconnects contributes to this efficiency. Beyond raw performance, the system also introduces confidential computing and is fully encrypted. This allows companies to deploy AI models in shared or public environments while ensuring that their data and models remain secure and inaccessible to others. The completed system weighs nearly two tons and houses 1,152 GPUs, all cooled 100% by liquid, compared with Nvidia’s previous generation Blackwell system, which is 80% liquid cooled and 20% air-cooled. Liquid cooling is more efficient than air, as it absorbs heat more effectively, allowing the system to maintain peak performance with less energy. Vera Rubin is already in full production and expected to be available for purchase in the second half of 2026. Notable leaders in tech have started praising Nvidia’s latest invention. Elon Musk said the “NVIDIA Rubin will be a rocket engine for AI.” Mark Zuckerberg said the supercomputer would help create the next leap in artificial intelligence. “NVIDIA’s Rubin platform promises to deliver the step-change in performance and efficiency required to deploy the most advanced models to billions of people.”

Plain-clothes gunmen deployed by Venezuela’s leaders are walking the streets and stopping vehicles as they crack down on dissent and pro-American sentiment in the wake of the capture of dictator Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces. The paramilitary members, known as Colectivos, were out in full force on Tuesday as the pro-Maduro regime seeks to maintain control of the country following the surprise U.S. strikes over the weekend, The Guardian reported. Men armed with rifles set up checkpoints in the capital city of Caracas, where they stopped drivers to search their vehicles, phones, and personal belongings, looking for any evidence of support for the United States capturing Maduro, according to The Telegraph. Police, meanwhile, were instructed to “immediately begin the national search and capture of everyone involved in the promotion or support for the armed attack by the United States.” One Caracas resident, Mirelvis Escalona, told The Guardian that anyone who is suspected of supporting the United States could be arrested. The Colectivos are reportedly targeting neighborhoods known to be home to those who support the opposition to Venezuela’s current government. “There’s fear. There are armed civilians here,” said Escalona. “You never know what might happen, they might attack people.” On Monday, 14 journalists, mostly foreign correspondents, were detained by Venezuelan authorities in Caracas before all of them except one were later released. Two people in western Venezuela were arrested after they celebrated the capture of Maduro, NBC News reported. “The suspects were shouting slogans against the government, celebrating the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, offending PSUV militants in the neighborhood, and inciting violence, in addition to firing shots,” according to police. Pro-Maduro Venezuelans, meanwhile, marched on the streets of Caracas on Tuesday in support of their captured leader and his wife. The large-scale crackdown on anti-Maduro sentiment comes as President Donald Trump urges the Venezuelan government to cooperate with the United States. “If they don’t behave, we will do a second strike,” Trump said on Sunday. After Maduro’s capture, Trump said that the United States would assume control of Venezuela until a transition could safely take place. Venezuela is now led by interim President Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice president and also worked under Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez. Trump said that Rodríguez would “pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro” if she refuses to cooperate with America’s demands. Since taking over, Rodríguez has condemned the U.S. operation to capture Maduro and has claimed that Maduro remains the rightful leader of Venezuela. While the Trump administration says it’s prepared to apply pressure on Rodríguez, the pro-Maduro regime appears unlikely to give up power anytime soon. María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader and most recent Nobel Peace Prize winner, told Fox News that Rodríguez represents the same threat to Venezuelans as Maduro. “Delcy Rodriguez, as you know, is one of the main architects of torture, persecution, corruption, narco trafficking,” Machado said. “She’s the main ally and liaison with Russia, China, Iran, certainly not an individual that could be trusted by international investors. And she’s really rejected, repudiated by the Venezuelan people.”