The US navy has announced that the USS Gerald R Ford, regarded as the world’s newest and largest aircraft carrier, has entered the area of responsibility of the US Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.
The deployment of the ship and the strike group it leads – which includes dozens of aircraft and destroyer ships – had been announced nearly three weeks ago, and its arrival marks an escalation in the military buildup between the US and Venezuela.
The regime of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, meanwhile, announced what it called a “massive deployment” of land, sea, air, river and missile forces, as well as civilian militia, to counter the US naval presence off its coast.
The US carrier joins other warships, a nuclear-powered submarine and aircraft based in Puerto Rico, forming the largest US military presence in the region in decades – seen as the biggest since the invasion of Panama in 1989.
Donald Trump has sought to justify the massive military buildup as part of his “war on drugs”, targeting traffickers allegedly smuggling narcotics through Caribbean and Pacific waters. That campaign has included airstrikes on boats that have so far killed at least 76 people in South American waters since September.
Ethics officials at Fannie Mae were removed from their jobs as they investigated whether a top Trump ally improperly accessed mortgage documents of Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and other Democratic officials, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
Cleto Escobedo III, the bandleader for the "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in-house band Cleto and the Cletones, has died. He was 59.
The Supreme Court is staying out of the fight over funding food benefits for now as a deal in Congress to end the government shutdown appears likely to be approved.
Department of Justice officials said they’re launching civil rights and terrorism investigations into protests outside a Turning Point USA event on the University of California, Berkeley campus on Nov. 10, in another escalation by the Trump administration to combat what it views as left-leaning dissenters in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death.
More than 69,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war so far, Gaza health officials said Saturday, as both sides completed the latest exchange of bodies under the terms of the tenuous ceasefire.
Lithuania’s top diplomat, Kęstutis Budrys, delivered a stark message to Western allies from NATO’s eastern flank during his Monday visit to Washington: The era of self-deterrence is over.
When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2bn cloud-computing deal in 2021, their customer – the Israeli government – had an unusual demand: agree to use a secret code as part of The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world, was born out of Israel’s concerns that data it moves into the global corporations’ cloud platforms could end up in the hands of foreign law enforcement authorities.
