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Hello and welcome to NewsHour.

It's coming to live from the BBC World Service studios in central London.

I'm Tim Franks.

And we're devoting the programme to this head spinning start to 2026, not just because there are still so many unanswered questions out of the astonishing US raid into Venezuela.

That and President Trump announcing, oh, by the way, we will be running Venezuela now.

But also because Donald Trump is raising the prospect that this could be just the start of his ambitions

to remake at least some of the world in the service of U.S. interests.

Later in the program, we'll be asking a Republican congressman about some of that.

Let's start, though, with one of the three big moments out of today,

and that was the arraignment in court in New York of the man and his wife

whom U.S. Special Forces snatched when they swooped into Caracas early on Saturday morning,

the then-President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife Celia Flores.

They've been charged with weapons and drug offenses, and supporters and opponents of the former

president were waiting outside the court.

Also, outside the court was our correspondent, Ned Torfick.

She gave me a sense of what was happening inside the court, what the scene was, and how the defendants looked.

It was a very dramatic day in court, actually.

You had Nicholas Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, brought in in blue prison garb.

They sat and shook the hands of their lawyers.

They put on their headphones for translation.

And then the arraignment got on to a normal start with the judge reading out the charges against Nicholas Maduro.

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