boat

May 9 (UPI) — Multiple injuries were reported Saturday in what rescuers called a “mass casualty” event involving a possible boat explosion at a popular Miami sandbar.

First responders to the scene of a possible boat explosion at around 12:45 p.m. “found multiple patients with various injuries, some burned, some minor injuries,” Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Battalion Chief Juan Arias told reporters.

“All patients were treated and transported to local hospitals,” he said, adding that the incident was designated as a “level 2 mass casualty incident, which gives us the sufficient amount of units on scene to go ahead and deal with the number of patients that we had.”

Arias said the injuries were from burns and that some victims suffered “traumatic” injuries.

The U.S. Coast Guard and Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission personnel also responded to the scene at Haulover Sandbar, a favorite party cruise spot for tourists located in Biscayne Bay north of Bal Harbour, Fla.

Arias did not specify how many people were injured in the incident, but multiple media reports quoted rescuers as saying 11 people were taken to area hospitals.

Witnesses said the injuries were caused by an explosion aboard a boat which knocked several people overboard and left them with burns.

A marina worker told WTVJ-TV the explosion was caused by a gas leak that happened when the boat’s captain turned on the ignition. Another person who was aboard the boat told the broadcaster there were 14 people on the vessel before the explosion.

An investigation into the incident was continuing into Saturday night.

April 27 (UPI) — The U.S. military has killed another three men in its latest attack targeting suspected drug-trafficking boats in the eastern Pacific, U.S. Southern Command announced late Sunday.

It was the 54th strike in the Trump administration’s violent anti-drug smuggling campaign that has killed at least 185 people since early September, according to UPI’s tally of publicly released data. At least 57 boats have been destroyed in the attacks in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean.

SOUTHCOM has announced each strike on social media, accompanied by a short black-and-white aerial video of the attack, showing the boat erupting in flames.

As with the previous strikes, SOUTHCOM said in a statement that the boat it attacked Sunday “was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”

The Trump administration claims the vessels are operated by 10 drug cartels and gangs that President Donald Trump has designated as terrorist organizations since returning to office, but has yet to provide evidence.

Trump argues the use of deadly force is warranted as the United States is in “armed conflict” with those organizations, but his administration has come under mounting accusations of conducting extrajudicial killings.

The strikes have been repeatedly condemned and their legality questioned by Democrats and human rights organizations, who accuse the Trump administration of violating international and maritime law by using the military to conduct law enforcement drug operations.

Ben Saul, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, chastised the Trump administration last month for “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.”

The attacks are not permissible law enforcement action in self-defense, authorized under the law of the sea, in national self-defense or under international humanitarian law, he said.

On Thursday, 125 humanitarian, human rights, peacebuilding and other related organizations from around the world called on all states to “immediately cease or refrain from supporting U.S. extrajudicial killings.”

The letter warned that states could be held legally responsible for aiding or assisting the United States by sharing intelligence as well as providing access to military bases and logistical support with the U.S. military.

The groups argue that the consequences of these killings are being felt throughout the hemisphere.

“Families awaiting the return of their loved ones may never know what happened to them and have no access to recourse,” the organizations said in their open letter.

“Coastal communities have witnessed human remains washing up on shore and fear for their lives when they trade and fish, sowing psychological trauma and undermining livelihoods.”

April 20 (UPI) — The U.S. military announced late Sunday that it has killed three men in its latest strike targeting a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean.

Seventeen people have been killed in six strikes the U.S. Southern Command has carried out in little over a week, marking one of the deadliest publicly announced stretches of the Trump administration’s monthslong anti-drug smuggling operation.

As in previous strike announcements, SOUTHCOM released little information.

The attack occurred Sunday, targeting a boat operated by a designated terrorist organization in the Caribbean, SOUTHCOM said in a statement, without naming the organization or providing evidence.

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” it said.

A 12-second, black-and-white clip of the strike posted to SOUTHCOM’s social media shows a boat moving across the ocean before disappearing in a large fiery explosion.

Since the first strike on Sept. 2, the U.S. military has killed at least 180 people, according to UPI’s tally of publicly released data. Fifty-five boats have been destroyed in the more than 50 strikes.

President Donald Trump argues that the use of deadly military force is warranted as the United States is in “armed conflict” with the 10 drug cartels and gangs he has designated as terrorist organizations since returning to the White House in January 2025.

The operation comes as the Trump administration seeks to expand its influence in the Western Hemisphere, including by using its military to dismantle what Trump has called “narco-terrorist networks.”

The strikes have been repeatedly condemned and their legality questioned by Democrats, rights groups, critics and United Nations experts, who accuse the Trump administration of violating international and maritime law over the use of the military to conduct law enforcement drug operations.

Last month, Ben Saul, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, lambasted the Trump administration over “its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.”

“These serial extrajudicial killings gravely violate the right to life, which applies extraterritorially,” he said on March 13.

“The attacks were not in national self-defense, since the vessels were not engaged in any armed attack on the U.S. Drug trafficking is crime, not war.”

On Wednesday, the same day the U.S. military killed three people in a strike in the eastern Pacific, a group of Democrats, led by Rep. John Larson of Connecticut, filed six articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, with one of the articles accusing him of violating the law of armed conflict over the strikes.

Larson accused Hegseth of abusing his position by ordering “our armed forces to strike boats in the Caribbean,” he said in a statement.

COMIC Jack Whitehall kicked off his £250,000 wedding to model Roxy Horner yesterday by rowing a boat across a lake to her.

The 37-year-old’s romantic gesture moved some guests to tears — but his pals soon lightened the mood as they jokingly called out to him: “Shagger!”

The comment was believed to be a reference to his appearance on BBC ancestry programme Who Do You Think You Are? in 2019.

It saw Jack discover that his great-great-grandfather Richard, a travelling salesman, was a bed-hopping womaniser killed by syphilis.

The funnyman smiled on the show as he called him “a bit of a shagger”.

His wedding took place in the grounds of £12million stately home Euridge Manor, near Chippenham, Wilts.

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The Georgian-style property is owned by Kate Middleton’s former boss, Jigsaw tycoon John Robinson.

Jack and Roxy invited more than 100 guests, including the comedian’s fellow TV star father Michael and mother Hilary.

Jack and 34-year-old Roxy’s two-year-old daughter Elsie acted as a flower girl.

The comedian’s sister Molly appeared to be a bridesmaid while his brother Barnaby was his best man.

Speaking to The Sun earlier this year, Jack said of Barnaby: “I gave quite a savage speech at his wedding.

“There were a few low blows he wasn’t too appreciative of.

“He’s going to have his opportunity to get his revenge on the big day.

“I’m bracing myself for that.”

Celebrity guests were said to include TV pals James Corden and Jamie Redknapp, who Jack worked with on Sky’s A League of Their Own.

Guests were asked to turn off their phones during the ceremony and were put on a social media blackout.

Cars driving in and out of the venue had blacked-out windows and there were security guards at the gates and by the entrance to the stately home.

Brit Awards host Jack and Roxy started dating in 2020 after meeting on a trip to Australia.

They got engaged in 2024.

Cambridge won a fourth consecutive Men’s Boat Race as Oxford claimed their first victory in the women’s race since 2016.

The Cambridge men came in as strong favourites for the 171st event but Oxford did well to stay with them for much of the race in tricky and blustery conditions along the 4.3-mile course from Putney to Chiswick.

But the class of the Light Blues came through in the final third as they pulled clear to triumph by 11.02 seconds for a seventh win in eight years.

In the 80th edition of the women’s race, Oxford made a blistering start and Cambridge were unable to respond as the Dark Blues stayed strong to win by 9.4 seconds and celebrate their 31st overall success.

Washington, DC – In September, the United States began launching dozens of deadly military strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific.

Nearly half a year later, remarkably little is known about the strikes. The identities of the nearly 157 people killed have not been released. Any purported evidence against them has not been made public.

But a group of United Nations and international law experts are hoping to change that on Friday, when they testify at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The international hearing will be the first of its kind since the strikes began on September 2, and rights advocates hope it can help lead to accountability as individual legal cases related to the strikes proceed.

Steven Watt, a senior staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s human rights programme, said the goal of the hearing will be threefold.

“Our ask will be to conduct a fact-finding investigation into what’s going on,” Watt said.

The second aim, he continued, would be “to assert or to arrive at a conclusion that there is no armed conflict here”, in what would be a rebuke to US President Donald Trump’s previous claims.

Finally, Watt said, he hopes the proceedings will yield long-sought transparency from the Trump administration on “whether or not they have a legal justification for these boat strikes”.

“We don’t think there are any,” Watt added.

‘We don’t know the names’

The experts set to testify at Friday’s hearing said the IACHR has a unique mandate to uncover the truth behind the US strikes.

The commission, based in Guatemala City, Guatemala, is an independent investigative body within the Organization of American States, of which the US was a founding member in 1948.

While the Trump administration has claimed it has a right to carry out the deadly attacks as part of a wider military offensive against so-called “narco-terrorists”, rights groups have decried the campaign as a series of extrajudicial killings.

They argue that Trump’s deadly tactics deny those targeted of anything that approaches due process.

Legal experts have also dismissed Trump’s claims that suspects in drug-related crimes are equivalent to “unlawful combatants” in an “armed conflict”.

Few details have emerged from the air strikes. Several families have come forward, however, to informally identify the dead as their loved ones.

Victims are said to include 26-year-old Chad Joseph and 41-year-old Rishi Samaroo, who were sailing home to Trinidad and Tobago when they were killed in October, according to relatives.

A complaint filed against the US government said both men travelled often between the islands and Venezuela, where Joseph found work as a farmer and fisherman, and Samaroo laboured on a farm.

The family of Colombian national Alejandro Carranza, 42, have also said he was killed in September when the US military attacked his fishing boat off the country’s coast.

The US has yet to confirm the victims’ identities, and only two survivors have ever been rescued in the 45 reported strikes.

A clearer picture of what happened will be a significant step towards accountability, according to experts like Watt.

“[The IACHR] is uniquely positioned to identify who all these persons are,” Watt said. “We just know the numbers from the United States. We don’t know the names or the backgrounds of these people.”

The IACHR has launched a range of human rights investigations in recent decades, including probes into the 2014 mass kidnapping of 43 students in Iguala, Mexico, and a series of murders in Colombia from 1988 to 1991 dubbed the Massacre of Trujillo.

The commission has also examined US policies, including extrajudicial detentions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during its so-called “global war on terror”.

The IACHR has the power to seek resolutions to human rights complaints or refer them for litigation before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Just last week, the court ordered Peru to pay reparations to the family of a woman who died during a government-led forced sterilisation campaign in the 1990s.

The Carranza family has filed its own complaint to the IACHR, and the families of Joseph and Samaroo have also lodged a lawsuit against the US in a federal court in Massachusetts.

Angelo Guisado, a senior staff lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), said a fuller accounting of the US actions is needed to prevent future abuses. He is among the experts testifying on Friday.

“You can’t normalise assassinating fishermen off the coast of South America,” Guisado told Al Jazeera. “That’s just sadistic and an abomination to the rules-based order that we’ve created.”

“So we hope that the commission can do some investigation.”

A war against ‘narco-terrorists’?

One of Guisado’s goals for Friday’s hearing will be to unpack the Trump administration’s argument that the attacks are necessary from a national security standpoint.

Even before the US strikes began, the Trump administration began framing the Latin American drug trade as an existential threat to the US.

As part of that re-framing, the administration borrowed messaging from its “global war on terror”, taking the unorthodox approach of labelling several cartels “foreign terrorist organisations”.

Speaking last week at a meeting of Latin American leaders, White House security adviser Stephen Miller maintained there is no “criminal justice solution” to drug cartels.

Instead, he affirmed that the US would use “hard power, military power, lethal force, to protect and defend the American homeland”, even if that meant carrying out deadly operations throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Guisado, however, noted that the administration has admitted that the targeted boats were largely carrying cocaine, not the highly addictive fentanyl responsible for the majority of US drug overdoses.

He explained that the administration has done little to prove its claims that drug traffickers are part of a coordinated effort to destabilise the US.

Such hyperbolic language, Guisado added, could be used as a smokescreen to conceal illegal actions.

“When you invoke national security interest, it seems as if scrutiny and any legitimate analysis or condemnation gets pushed to one side in favour of an ersatz martial law,” Guisado said.

“The idea that you could just proclaim anyone a narcoterrorist and do whatever you want with them is just so repugnant to our system of fairness, justice and law.”

Watt, meanwhile, said he hopes the IACHR will draw a clear “line in the sand”, separating drug crimes from what is conventionally considered an armed conflict.

He also would like to see the IACHR clearly outline the US’s human rights obligations.

“But even if there was an armed conflict — of which there isn’t — the laws of war would prohibit the type of conduct that the United States is engaging in here,” Watt explained.

“It would be an extrajudicial killing. It would be a war crime.”

Transparency or accountability

Friday’s hearing will only be an initial step towards accountability, and critics question how effective the IACHR will ultimately be.

The US has regularly shrugged off human rights probes at international forums, and it is not party to entities like the International Criminal Court in The Hague, raising barriers to the pursuit of justice.

Despite being a member of the OAS, the US has also not ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, one of the organisation’s founding documents.

It is, therefore, unclear how binding any IACHR decisions could be, although Watt argued that it is “longstanding jurisprudence of the commission that the declaration imposes obligations on non-ratifying member states”.

Still, legal experts said Friday’s hearing may yield clarity on the Trump administration’s legal argument for the boat strikes.

The IACHR has said US government representatives are set to appear at the hearing.

To date, the US Department of Justice has not released the Office of Legal Counsel’s official reasoning for the boat strikes, considered the foundational legal document for the military actions.

A separate memorandum from that office addressed the US abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on January 3, which it framed as a drug enforcement action.

That memo touched on the boat strikes, but it only served to raise further questions about Trump’s rationale.

“This will be an opportunity for the United States to put its case before the commission,” Watt said.

“But of course, it depends on US cooperation,” he continued. “They’re going down there, but it’ll be interesting to see what they actually say”.