Waarnemend president van Venezuela Delcy Rodríguez heeft zondag aangegeven dat ze genoeg heeft van bevelen uit de Verenigde Staten. Daarmee verwees ze naar de druk die Washington op Venezuela uitoefent sinds de gevangenneming van Nicolás Maduro.

"Het is genoeg geweest met de orders uit Washington aan het adres van de Venezolaanse politiek. Laat ons Venezolaanse politici onze meningsverschillen en interne conflicten oplossen. Het is genoeg geweest met buitenlandse grootmachten", zei Rodríguez tijdens een speech voor oliearbeiders in de staat Anzoátegui.

Rodríguez werd op 5 januari benoemd tot interim-president, nadat de socialistische president Maduro tijdens een militaire operatie door de VS was opgepakt en meegenomen naar New York. Daarop kondigde Trump aan dat Washington tot nader order Venezuela zou "runnen".

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Early morning view along the main street of the Higashi Chaya district in Kanazawa, Japan.

The city of Kanazawa has three well-preserved historic chaya ("teahouse") districts, and Higashi Chayagai, or the Eastern Chaya district, is the largest. The chaya offered food, drink, and entertainment by geisha. The buildings here date from around 1820, when the chaya were relocated from the central part of the city to their current locations. Traditionally, the houses featured lattices on the exterior of the ground floor, and guestrooms above. Some of the chaya are today preserved as semi-museums, still offering tea and sweets and geisha performances, while many others are now cafes, restaurants, and shops.

The Higashi Chaya district has been designated as a Japanese cultural asset.

Sony A7C / ILCE-7C
Sony FE 24-105mm F4 G OSS
77mm; 10 sec; f/16; ISO 100

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Sixth seed marches into quarter-finals with 6-3, 6-4 victory while the defending champion must pay forfeit agreed on with her podcast co-host

While speaking on a podcast before her big match against Madison Keys, Jessica Pegula was discussing their battle last January in the Adelaide final. Keys’s performance, Pegula recalled, had prompted Pegula to accurately predict to their mutual friends that Keys would win the Australian Open two weeks later. It is normal for players to discuss future opponents, but they do not usually do so in conversation with each other. With a chuckle, Keys interjected: “Jess is like, ‘I hope I don’t see that level [tomorrow].’”

She did not. Keys’s reign at the Australian Open came to a difficult end in the fourth round as the defending champion and ninth seed was crushed under the weight of her hefty unforced error count and a spotless performance from Pegula, the sixth seed, who marched into the quarter-finals with a 6-3, 6-4 win. This was, in some ways, a historic match on Rod Laver Arena: the first grand slam singles match between two podcast co-hosts.

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• Los Angeles Rams 27–31 Seattle Seahawks

• Darnold and Stafford shine in high-class QB duel

• Patriots grind out AFC championship in snow

Sam Darnold threw for three touchdowns, the Seahawks’ “Dark Side” defense came up with a critical fourth-down stop, and Seattle advanced to the Super Bowl, beating the Los Angeles Rams 31-27 in an electrifying NFC championship game on Sunday.

“It’s amazing,” Darnold said. “To be able to do it with these guys in this locker room, though, with this coaching staff, that’s why it means the world to me.”

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Are the German people on board with the government’s massive militarisation programme? Kate Connolly reports

“Not so long ago, to be a German soldier dressed in German uniform was quite a difficult role to embody. I mean, you could be going down the street and you could be spat on, or you could have names called at you.

“I’ve recently seen people get into conversation with soldiers, which I hadn’t seen in the past, [and] more recently, somebody going up to a soldier and actually getting him into conversation about his role, and at the end of the conversation, thanking him.”

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This is the news we should be paying attention to. At least for the moment, everything else is a distraction

When we talk about our inability to pay attention, to concentrate, we often mean and blame our phones. It’s easy, it’s meant to be easy. One flick of our index finger transports us from disaster to disaster, from crisis to crisis, from maddening lie to maddening lie. Each new unauthorized attack and threatened invasion grabs the headlines, until something else takes its place, and meanwhile the government’s attempts to terrorize and silence the people of our country continue.

So let me break it down. There is one story: our country is on the brink of an authoritarian take-over. In Minneapolis an innocent poet and an ER nurse at a VA hospital were both killed in cold blood by federal agents. It is happening now. Toddlers are being sent to detention centers; videos of their gyms for kids recall the youth choruses that the Nazis so proudly showed off at the Terezin concentration camp. Intimidation and violence are being weaponized against the citizens of Minneapolis, some of whom are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being beaten, arrested and shackled, regardless of whether they are US citizens or asylum seekers or people from another country peacefully living and working here for decades.

Francine Prose is a former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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Two Democratic ex-leaders warn core American values are under assault – key US politics stories from Sunday 25 January at a glance

Democratic ex-presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have spoken out against the fatal shooting of a 37-year-old nurse in Minneapolis, the second person to be shot dead by federal immigration officers in the city this month.

In a statement released on Sunday, Obama and his wife, Michelle, described the killing of Alex Pretti as “a heartbreaking tragedy” and “a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault”.

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KDE's "Plasma Login Manager" is apparently dropping support for FreeBSD, the Unix-like operating system, reports the blog It's FOSS. They cite a recently-accepted merge request from a KDE engineer to drop the code supporting FreeBSD, since the login manager relies on systemd/logind:

systemd and logind look like hard dependencies of the login manager, which means the software is built to work exclusively with these components and cannot function without them... logind is a component of systemd that is responsible for user session management...
This doesn't mean that KDE has abandoned the operating system altogether. FreeBSD users can still run the KDE Plasma desktop environment and continue using SDDM, the current login manager that works just fine on such systems.

The article argues FreeBSD users "won't really care much for missing out on this as they have plenty of login manager options available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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