1. LA JOLLA, San Diego — On Jan. 8 at approximately 6:30 p.m., the UC San Diego’s A.S. Council discussed possible future relief efforts to support students affected by the active fires in the Los Angeles area during its first weekly meeting of the quarter.
A.S. President Leslie Vallejo-Avila stated that the A.S. Senate is not currently focused on a relief campaign but rather is gauging what resources the student body will need as a consequence of the fires. Vallejo-Avila explained that the president’s office, along with the Associate Vice President of Transportation and Transformation Lupe Barrera, AVP of Local Affairs Mina Nguyen, and AVP of Food and Housing Shawn Jerry, will participate in LA wildfire relief support for undergraduate students.
2. LA JOLLA, San Diego — Vice-President of External Affairs Eduardo Tapia-Jr. was appointed as election manager during the meeting. The A.S. Council also announced that UCSD was the campus with the highest voter engagement across the 10 UC campuses. The meeting was livestreamed through the body’s Facebook page.
3. NEW YORK, United States — President-elect Donald J. Trump was formally sentenced in his hush-money case last Friday, Jan. 10. Judge Juan Merchan finalized the sentencing and subjected Trump to unconditional discharge, absolving him of any possibility of facing jail time. The sentencing will take place 10 days before the president-elect is scheduled to be inaugurated.
Trump will become the first person convicted of a felony to assume the U.S. presidency in the nation’s history. Trump spoke for six minutes in response to the proceeding. He virtually attended the New York City courtroom for his sentencing on Jan. 10.
“This has been a very terrible experience. I think it’s a tremendous setback for New York and the New York court system. I think it’s an embarrassment to New York,” he stated.
4. BEIRUT, Lebanon — Joseph Aoun was elected by Lebanon’s parliament as head of state on Jan. 9. He received 99 of the 128 votes from parliament during the legislature’s second round of voting for the position. Aoun, a former army chief, will be Lebanon’s first head of state since 2022.
Aoun is widely perceived as the preferred candidate of the United States, France, and Saudi Arabia. His primary opposition and Hezbollah-backed candidate, Suleiman Frangieh, withdrew from elections and expressed his support for Aoun on Jan. 8.
The newly-elected head of state plans to focus his work on ensuring the state’s exclusive right to carry arms, rebuild portions of Lebanon previously destroyed by Israeli forces, and to prevent future Israeli attacks on the state. His election comes after Hezbollah and Israel finalized a ceasefire on Nov. 27. Aoun participated in drafting the agreement.
5. OTTAWA, Canada — On Jan. 6, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of the Canadian Liberal Party announced his resignation. This announcement follows the opposition parties signaling that they will vote down the minority government led by Trudeau in a vote of no confidence, which would trigger new elections if successful.
Opinion polls currently show the Conservative Party, led by the leader of the opposition, Pierre Poilievre, set to take the majority, with the Liberal Party suffering major losses in their seat total in parliament.
6. CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela was sworn into a third term in office on Jan. 10. Maduro’s victory in the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election has been widely regarded as fraudulent by organizations such as the Carter Center. The Carter Center identified several factors that led to their decision, including the fact that the election “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity at any of its stages and violated numerous provisions of its own national laws.”
The United States has rejected Maduro’s victory, instead stating that Edmundo González, the main opposition candidate in the 2024 election, is the actual president-elect. Many Latin American leaders, including leftist politicians, spoke out against Maduro’s inauguration. “I am a person of the left, and from the political left, I say: The government of Nicolás Maduro is a dictatorship,” the leftist president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, said in a recent press conference.
