New shocking details have emerged in the case of a suspected member of the notorious Venezuelan prison Tren de Aragua, who federal authorities have charged with attempting to run over U.S. immigration officers in Portland. One Border Patrol agent pulled a gun and fired a “defensive shot” at the vehicle, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The suspected gang member and his passenger, a suspected Tren de Aragua-tied prostitute, sped off. The Daily Wire obtained newly unsealed charges filed against the driver, Luis David Nico Moncada, who is now charged with aggravated assault of a federal officer with a deadly or dangerous weapon and depredation of federal property in excess of $1,000. Moncada, who crossed the border illegally during the Biden administration and later received a deportation order, was driving the alleged prostitute in a red pickup truck when he was pulled over by six Border Patrol agents. Four of the agents approached Moncada, who appeared “anxious and visibly moving around in the driver’s seat,” and asked him and the alleged prostitute to exit the vehicle. Instead, Moncada reversed his car and hit an unoccupied Border Patrol vehicle “with enough speed and force to cause significant damage,” according to the charging documents. He then put his car in drive, “and continued the forward/reverse maneuver multiple times, striking the Border Patrol vehicle multiple times.” One of the agents fired their gun at Moncada before he fled the scene. Another agent on scene told federal investigators he feared Moncada could strike the agents or another car, according to the charging documents. Photos included in the documents appear to show that the Border Patrol vehicle’s bumper was torn off, both headlights were destroyed, the front driver-side quarter panel was dented, and the driver side rear-passenger door and quarter panel were dented. Credit: The Department of Homeland Security Moncada called 911 after fleeing the scene. When responding authorities applied a tourniquet to Moncada, he repeatedly stated “f*ck ICE.” Both Moncada and the alleged prostitute, later identified as Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras, were hospitalized with gunshot wounds. In a later interview with the FBI, Moncada “admitted to intentionally ramming the Border Patrol vehicle in an attempt to flee, and he stated that he knew they were immigration enforcement vehicles,” according to the charging documents. Zambrano-Contreras also crossed the border illegally under the Biden administration and was required to check in with ICE after she was released, but never did, according to the charging documents. She was allegedly involved in a shooting on July 7 tied to a bad prostitution deal. Before the shooting, Zambrano-Contreras called Moncada “to pick her up” and then contacted “a friend … who always carried a gun.” The friend, who is identified as “Alex,” showed up at the scene with several other men who proceeded to break into an apartment where the alleged customer was holding the alleged prostitute’s earnings and belongings. Agents were looking to arrest Zambrano-Contreras when the shooting occurred on Thursday. Authorities had also tied the shell casings recovered that day to a shooting that took place three days later. That shooting involved a car purchase gone wrong involving Tren de Aragua members. The Portland shooting took place one day after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis. Before the shooting, the woman appeared to be blocking a road with her vehicle. Federal agents were then seen approaching her vehicle and ordering her to get out of the car, before she backed up and pulled her car forward. An agent who appeared to have been hit by the car fired a fatal shot at the woman. The Department of Homeland Security called the incident “an act of domestic terrorism.” “This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement who are facing 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats,” the agency said. The incident sparked mass protests across Minneapolis.

'Colectivos [are] searching vehicles for evidence of U.S. citizenship'

'there really has not been that much communication'

'Everything that is broken in Washington'

Iranians Burn Down Mosques

'I was forced to drive away to save our lives'

A female orangutan that was captured as a juvenile has been released back into the wild after four years of “jungle school.” Found chained to the rafters of a wooden cabin on the Indonesian side of the island of Borneo, Charlotte was destined for a miserable life in captivity. But the Borneo Orangutan Rescue Alliance […] The post Orphaned Orangutan Returns to Wild Home After 4-Years Rehab in ‘Jungle School’ – LOOK appeared first on Good News Network.

Books Memory The Most Surprising Book Trend Right Now: Memory-Sharing New works exploring crucial questions of identity, and the way memory can be politicized and repressed… By Charlie Jane Anders | Published on January 12, 2026 Photo: Bret Kavanaugh [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Bret Kavanaugh [via Unsplash] If you asked someone to name the main trends in genre book publishing from the past year or two, they’d probably mention romantasy, cozy fiction, horror and a few other things. But I’ve been blown away by a sleeper trend lately: novels about people storing their memories remotely, gaining access to someone else’s memories, or sharing a memory with another person. In general, memory seems to be on a lot of people’s minds lately. Just recently, I’ve loved a ton of books on this theme. The notion of copying, storing, and sharing memories isn’t exactly new—in fact, I played with it quite a bit in my novel The City in the Middle of the Night. (Yoko Ogawa’s influential The Memory Police also deals with the ways our memories are controlled and overseen.) But this new wave of novels is using the concept to explore deep questions about personal identity, as well as the ways that our memories can be politicized and policed by repressive regimes.  To find out more about this topic, I talked to four authors of recent books that deal with this concept in various fascinating ways. (I also reviewed some books on this theme a while back for The Washington Post.)  One of my favorite books of 2025 was The Antidote, the long-awaited new novel by Karen Russell. The Antidote is the sobriquet of a prairie witch in dustbowl-era Nebraska, who acts as a sort of bank vault for people to store their unpleasant memories—with the promise that you can retrieve the memory later when you need it. But after a catastrophic dust storm, the Antidote and other prairie witches find their vaults cleaned out, all the stored memories gone forever.  The Antidote turns into an examination of buried historical trauma, especially the attempted genocide of Native Americans—thanks in part to a New Deal photographer’s magical camera that takes pictures of the past and future. In writing The Antidote, Russell says, “I was interested in what happens when people are unable or unwilling to reckon with the past, in the exiling of memories from our waking consciousness and from our public histories, those things that many of us must continuously forget or suppress in order to go on living as we do, and how that ‘collapse of memory’ harms us individually and collectively.” Russell adds, “I do think that whatever else a memory might be, it’s never the fullness of what happened. It’s always a (re)creation, never static or inert.” And that “these secrets that can feel so private and so personal, can become, in aggregate, something like a mass denial. Who and what we exclude from our family stories and collective histories has tremendous consequences, for all of us.” Russell says that while she was researching the novel that became The Antidote, she learned about an astonishing act of curatorial violence. Everyone has seen the iconic Dust Bowl photographs taken by New Deal photographers like Dorothea Lange—but the architect of this program, Roy Stryker, used a hole-punch to destroy the photographic negatives he didn’t want to include, in what Russell calls “an act of artistic curation and in some cases political calculation.” Russell says there’s a “shadow archive of unpublished and hole-punched negatives,” suppressed for decades, which you can now view online at the Library of Congress. Russell kept returning to one particular image of “a student with a hole-punched ear,” and “that hole-punched negative came to feel like the heart of this novel.” Another book I loved in 2025, Mia Tsai’s The Memory Hunters, takes place in a world where some special people, like Key, can harvest memories from other people. Key can also unearth memories from people who lived long ago, using a complex process involving mushrooms. When Key finds an old forbidden memory that contradicts the official record and threatens the political order, she’s forced to hide it—but the memory is taking over her personality and she’s in danger of losing herself. Her bodyguard and lover, Vale, is forced to take drastic measures to save her. Tsai says she’s always been fascinated by the concept of memory. “Memory is magic!” she says. “How can something so crucial and something we stake our lives and personalities on be so easily tampered with?” Tsai points out that a lot of books that came out in the past year were probably acquired in 2023, and written in 2020-2022, if not earlier. And there’s one thing about the early 2020s that seems especially relevant to her.  Says Tsai: I think the wave of memory-related books has a lot to do with how we’ve been gaslit as a nation over how devastating Covid has been and continues to be (plus the global gaslighting over the genocides to which we’re daily witnesses). What we experienced and what we remember does not match up with what we’re being told. And invalidating a memory is so deeply personal. It’s hurtful and provocative to say, “No, that’s not how it went.” The gaslighting began before Covid, of course, and the first Trump administration was already bombarding us with lies and trying to erase the very existence (and accomplishments) of marginalized communities. All this, while “burying our ability to process beneath continual outrage,” says Tsai. “In a way, sharing memories to verify their realness became a way to bond with someone else, a way to confirm that what we experienced was real, unbelievable as it was.” Tsai sums it up perfectly: “Memory-recording lets us know we were there and it happened; memory-sharing proves we were alive and not alone.” Recently, Tsai visited some Civil War battlegrounds, and saw a monument to Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. Nearby, there was a sign entitled, “The War Over Memory,” which detailed “one of America’s first great delusions,” or one of our earliest propaganda campaigns, “the effects of which we’re still feeling 160 years later.” It’s not just that we’re being lied to about events that we personally witnessed, says author Seth Haddon—it’s that we have more ability to witness those events than at any other time in history, because we’re all connected. We can share the experiences of people around the world who are “enduring violence, displacement, [and] oppression.” And at the same time, mainstream and official narratives present a very different picture of reality. “This gap between lived (or viewed?) experience and official stories has made the question of memory feel newly urgent,” says Haddon. In Haddon’s great space-opera novella Volatile Memory, a trans scavenger named Wylla finds a mask that gives her enhanced abilities—but when she wears the mask, she also experiences the memories and consciousness of the dead person who wore it before, a woman named Sable. Haddon uses the sharing of Sable’s memories to ask some deep questions about how our memories make us who we are, but also how our embodiment shapes our experience of being alive. Haddon says that the notion of “preserving the self” is even more important when we’re under so much pressure to deny what we’re witnessing. The main way we can preserve the self is by holding on to memory, “even if it can’t be free from personal/contextual bias.” Our memories end up “feeling more intimate and trustworthy than the flood of information we receive from elsewhere, especially in a time when so many sources feel compromised.” We feel as though an individual person’s memories are “purer and more authentic” than the narrative shared by a lot of people, even if the notion of authenticity is inherently messy. Yiming Ma’s fascinating These Memories Do Not Belong to Us takes the theme of censorship and repression to a further extent, taking place in a future dominated by a new Qin Empire, in which everybody has a Mindbank that records their memories. Some past memories are contraband, either because they have subversive themes that the government disapproves of or because they contain historical events that the government wants to cover up. Ma’s novel in stories contains a narrative assortment of forbidden memories, which the main character has inherited after the death of his mother. Ma says that he was interested in resilience when he wrote These Memories, because it’s by having a shared narrative that we can “stay resilient and resist” during times of political turbulence. This shared narrative can come from writing that explores “both individual and collective memory.”  Ma also was inspired by the fact that researchers have continued to make a lot of new discoveries about how memories are made and stored. For example, scientists have new evidence that memories can be stored outside the brain, and that our memories are dynamic rather than static, meaning that we are constantly revising them every time we revisit them. And that long-term memories can form independently from short-term memories. Ma was also inspired by research that reveals that some people cannot form mental images, which shows “how differently we all experience our memories and dreams.” I was also struck by a moment in the recent novel Slow Gods by Claire North. An artificial intelligence explains that artificial minds store memories the same way humans do: by compressing them into narratives with most of the details stripped out, because the raw sensory data is too huge to store in the long term. I also found it fitting that the last book I read in 2025 was There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, in which monsters go around devouring people’s memories, and one particularly terrifying monster kills anyone who can remember that it exists.  What I’ve personally gotten from this recent flood of books (and what I tried to explore in The City in the Middle of the Night) is that even though we fixate on individuality—the notion that one person’s experience is totally unique—the more we can share our experiences, the more we can realize that we are one. That our fates, and our pasts, are bound together, and memory is always, on some level, collective as well as personal.  I also increasingly think that being able to experience another person’s memories is a higher form of empathy—and empathy is something we are all longing for right now, in the midst of so much performative cruelty. Not to mention community, which can only be formed by the feeling of shared heritage. (And heritage is in many ways just another word for memory.) Says Tsai, “I don’t feel this every day, but I certainly do now: What a glory it is to continue surviving and making memories with others.”[end-mark] This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown. Buy the Book The City in the Middle of the Night Charlie Jane Anders Buy Book The City in the Middle of the Night Charlie Jane Anders Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The post The Most Surprising Book Trend Right Now: Memory-Sharing appeared first on Reactor.

Hundreds more federal law enforcement officers are arriving in Minneapolis following the Immigration and Customs Enforcement-involved shooting in the city last week.   The new officers began arriving Sunday and will continue to arrive in Minneapolis Monday, according to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.   The new arrivals will “allow our ICE and our Border Patrol individuals that are working in Minneapolis to do so safely,” Noem said on Fox News Sunday, adding that immigration enforcement operations will “continue” in the city despite protests and opposition from elected Democrat leaders.   DHS is deploying hundreds more federal agents to Minneapolis, Minnesota, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Sunday. pic.twitter.com/1BWk8XxaSi— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) January 11, 2026 Anti-ICE protests have continued in Minneapolis since Wednesday, when an agent shot and killed a woman who appeared to obstruct immigration enforcement operations there. According to the homeland security department’s account, the woman, Renee Nicole Good, was blocking vehicle traffic and, when approached by officers, attempted to weaponize her vehicle against an ICE agent who in turn fired his weapon at the driver.    A video of the incident published on Friday revealed a new vantage point from the agent’s perspective. BREAKING: Alpha News has obtained cellphone footage showing perspective of federal agent at center of ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis pic.twitter.com/p2wks0zew0— Alpha News (@AlphaNews) January 9, 2026 The additional agents join the roughly 2,000 immigration officers who were already deployed to Minneapolis earlier this month.   Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, has long been vocal about his opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations in his city. Frey has asked immigration officers to leave the city, and state, following the ICE-involved shooting last week.   “Today is a good day for ICE to get out of Minnesota,” Frey wrote on X Sunday.   Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, also a Democrat, “have been very clear that they’re going to continue their rhetoric, they’re going to continue to put criminals and corrupt illegal aliens above the people that live in that city and in that state, Noem said. “They’ve said they’re not going to help us, so we’ll make sure that we protect our officers, but we also follow through on making sure these criminals are brought to justice.”   Last week, Walz floated the possibility of deploying the National Guard to protect Minnesotans, including from “rogue” federal agents. The FBI is conducting an inquiry into the shooting. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, on Friday asked the public for evidence on the incident after reporting that state investigators were frozen out of the federal investigation. Multiple videos of the incident have gone viral on social media, leading to speculation about the driver’s intent and criticism of the ICE agent’s decision to fire his weapon.   “Officers have to make decisions, you know, in split second time,” a retired ICE officer told The Daily Signal following the shooting.   “That officer had about a quarter second to decide to make that shot. He can’t see the wheels turning on the car. He’s looking straight on at the driver, not at the wheels,” the retired ICE officer continued.   “You don’t know … what he’s hearing at the time, how loud things were, …  it was icy on the ground, he may not have felt that he could move fast enough” to get out of the way of the vehicle,” the retired officer speculated.  “There are all these different things that come in, and he’s taking all those senses and situation into effect in less than a quarter second to make the decision to pull his firearm.”  The post Noem Sends More Fed Agents to Minneapolis Following Anti-ICE Protests appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FYI to Parents: Google Thinks All Your Children Are Belong to Them?