How to rewrite this theme call to drupal_render
Something like this...

$build = array(
  '#theme' =&gt; 'image_style',
  '#path' =&gt; $news_image['uri'],
  '#style_name' =&gt; 'thumbnail',
  '#alt' =&gt; $news_image['alt'],
  '#title' =&gt; $news_image['title'],
);

$rendered = drupal_render($build);


Where every named variable you would normally pass to the theme() function as the second parameter becomes a #-prefixed key in the render array.