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The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and three accompanying warships have arrived in the Middle East, bringing a renewed potential that President Donald Trump could opt to order airstrikes on Iran over its crackdown on protesters. The carrier, along with three destroyers, "is currently deployed to the Middle East to promote regional security and stability," US Central Command said Monday on social media. The strike group was in the Indian Ocean, Central Command said, and not in the Arabian Sea, which borders Iran. It will bring thousands of additional service members to the region, which has not had a US aircraft carrier since the USS Gerald R Ford was ordered in October to sail to the Caribbean as part of a pressure campaign on then-Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Trump told reporters last week that the ships were sent to the region "just in case". "We have a massive fleet heading in that direction, and maybe we won't have to use it," he said. Trump earlier had threatened
Venezuela's leading prisoner rights organisation said Monday that dozens of prisoners were released over the weekend, as the United States continues to pressure the acting government to free hundreds of dissidents jailed during the administration of ousted leader Nicolas Maduro. Alfredo Romero, president of Foro Penal, said in a post on X that 266 "political prisoners" had been freed since January 8, when Venezuela's acting government promised to release a "significant number" of prisoners in what it described as an effort to promote national reconciliation. Maduro was captured by the United States in a raid on January 3, and was replaced by Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, a longtime ruling party insider, who is now the nation's acting president. According to human rights groups, prisoners released this weekend included an opposition activist, a human rights lawyer and a journalism student who was imprisoned in March after he published complaints about his hometown's sewage system,
The death toll from the Trump administration's strikes on alleged drug boats is up to 126 people, with the inclusion of those presumed dead after being lost at sea, the US military confirmed Monday. The figure includes 116 people who were killed immediately in at least 36 attacks carried out since early September in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, US Southern Command said. Ten others are believed dead because searchers did not locate them following a strike. Eight of the presumed dead had jumped off boats when American forces attacked a trio of vessels accused of trafficking drugs on December 30, the military said. The number was not released previously, though the military said when announcing those strikes that the US Coast Guard had searched for survivors. The two other people presumed dead were on boats that were attacked on October 27 and last Friday. President Donald Trump has said the US is in "armed conflict" with cartels in Latin America and has justified the
The fatal shooting of a Minneapolis protester by a federal immigration officer touched off a fierce national debate and prompted some fellow Republicans to question President Donald Trump's hard-line immigration crackdown, but the president on Sunday night continued to blame Democratic officials. After remaining relatively quiet on Sunday, the Republican president in two lengthy social media posts said that Democrats had encouraged people to obstruct law enforcement operations. He also called on officials in Minnesota to work with immigration officers and "turn over" people who were in the US illegally. "Tragically, two American Citizens have lost their lives as a result of this Democrat ensued chaos," Trump wrote on his Truth Social media network. Trump's refusal to back away from his pledge to carry out the largest deportation program in history and the surge of immigration officers to heavily Democratic cities came as more Republicans began calling for a deeper investigation and
President Donald Trump said the US used a secret weapon he called "The Discombobulator" to disable Venezuelan equipment when the US captured Nicolas Maduro. Trump also renewed his threat to conduct military strikes on land against drug cartels, including in Mexico. Trump made the comments in an interview Friday with the New York Post. The Republican president was commenting on reports that the US had a pulsed energy weapon and said, "The Discombobulator. I'm not allowed to talk about it." He said the weapon made Venezuelan equipment "not work." "They never got their rockets off. They had Russian and Chinese rockets, and they never got one off," Trump said in the interview. "We came in, they pressed buttons and nothing worked. They were all set for us." Trump had previously said when describing the raid on Maduro's compound that the US had turned off "almost all of the lights in Caracas," but he didn't detail how they accomplished that. The president also indicated the US will con
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has signalled that US President Donald Trump should apologise for his false assertion that troops from non-US NATO countries avoided the front line during the Afghanistan war, describing Trump's remarks as "insulting" and "appalling." Trump said that he wasn't sure NATO would be there to support the United States if and when requested, provoking outrage and distress across the United Kingdom on Friday, regardless of individuals' political persuasion. "We've never needed them, we have never really asked anything of them," Trump said of non-US troops in an interview with Fox News in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday. "You know, they'll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that, and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines." In October 2001, nearly a month after the September 11 attacks, the US led an international coalition in Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaida, which had used the country as its base, and the ...
Police arrested about 100 clergy demonstrating against immigration enforcement at Minnesota's largest airport Friday, and thousands gathered in downtown Minneapolis despite Arctic temperatures to protest the Trump administration's crackdown. The protests are part of a broader movement against President Donald Trump's increased immigration enforcement across the state, with labour unions, progressive organizations and clergy urging Minnesotans to stay away from work, school and even shops. Metropolitan Airports Commission spokesman Jeff Lea said the clergy were issued misdemeanour citations of trespassing and failure to comply with a peace officer and were then released. They were arrested outside the main terminal at the Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport because they went beyond the reach of their permit for demonstrating and disrupted airline operations, he said. Rev Mariah Furness Tollgaard of Hamline Church in St Paul said police ordered them to leave but she and others .
The cold, hard reality facing any US, NATO or European plans for Greenland is the ice. It chokes harbours, entombs minerals, and freezes shorelines into minefields of white and blue shards that threaten ships all year. And the only way to break through all that is, well, with icebreakers: enormous ships with burly engines, reinforced hulls, and heavy bows that can crush and cleave ice. But the United States has only three such vessels, one of which is so decrepit as to be barely usable. It has entered agreements to obtain 11 more, but can only source additional ships from adversaries - or allies it has recently rebuffed. The key technology in the Arctic ----------------------------------- Despite toning down his rhetoric, US President Donald Trump seems set on the US owning Greenland for security and economic reasons: to keep what he calls "the big, beautiful piece of ice" out of the hands of Moscow and Beijing, to secure a strategic Arctic location for US assets, and to extract t
Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the settlement in Ukraine with US President Donald Trump's envoys during marathon overnight talks, and the Kremlin insisted that the territorial issue needs to be resolved to reach a peace deal. The Kremlin meeting, which lasted past 3 a.m. Friday, came hours after Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sharply criticized his European allies Thursday for what he cast as their slow and fragmented response to Russia's nearly four-year full-scale invasion that he said has left Ukraine at the mercy of Putin amid an ongoing U.S. push for a peace settlement. Kremlin foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov, who participated in Putin's meeting with Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, said "it was reaffirmed that reaching a long-term settlement can't be expected without solving the territorial issue," a reference to Moscow's demand that Kyiv withdraws its troops from the areas in the east that Russia illegally annexed but never fully ...