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United States President Donald Trump has unveiled a second deal with a major pharmaceutical company to offer lower-cost prescription drugs direct to American consumers.

This time, the agreement concerned AstraZeneca, a multinational based in the United Kingdom.

Trump hosted the company’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, in the Oval Office on Friday to publicly cement the deal, which he described as “another historic achievement in our quest to lower drug prices for all Americans”.

“Americans can expect discounts, and as I said, it could be, in many cases, way over a hundred percent,” Trump said.

As in previous press appearances, he pledged US consumers would see impossible discounts on popular medications.

Inhalers to treat asthma, for example, would be discounted by 654 percent, Trump said, calling the device a “drug that’s hot, very hot”. He also reiterated past claims that some medications could see “a thousand percent reduction”.

Trump has long pushed to reduce prescription drug costs to what he has billed as “most-favoured nations prices”.

That would bring prices down to the same level as in other developed countries, though Trump, with typical hyperbole, has said the policy would equate to “the  lowest price anywhere in the world”.

AstraZeneca is the second major pharmaceutical company after Pfizer to strike such a bargain. Last month, Pfizer announced a “voluntary agreement” to price its products “at parity with other key developed markets”.

Like AstraZeneca, it also agreed to participate in an online, direct-to-consumer marketplace the Trump administration plans to launch, called TrumpRx.

But in a news release on its website, Pfizer made clear that the agreement would help it dodge the high tariffs that Trump threatened against overseas pharmaceutical manufacturers.

“We now have the certainty and stability we need on two critical fronts, tariffs and pricing, that have suppressed the industry’s valuations to historic lows,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said.

At Friday’s Oval Office ceremony, officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr openly celebrated the power Trump had wielded through his tariff threats.

“ The president saw something that we didn’t see, which is we had leverage, and that came through Howard [Lutnick] and the tariffs,” Kennedy said, giving a nod to Trump’s commerce secretary. “We had extraordinary leverage to craft these deals.”

The deals with both AstraZeneca and Pfizer came after Trump threatened in September to impose a 100-percent tariff on pharmaceutical companies unless they started to build manufacturing plants in the US.

“There will, therefore, be no Tariff on these Pharmaceutical Products if construction has started,” Trump wrote on his platform, Truth Social.

Those tariffs were slated to come into effect on October 1. But Pfizer unveiled its deal with the Trump administration on September 30, and the tariffs were subsequently postponed.

In Friday’s Oval Office appearance, Soriot acknowledged that, like Pfizer, he had negotiated a delay for any tariffs against AstraZeneca. In exchange, he pledged to increase US investments to $50bn by 2030.

“I appreciate very much Secretary Lutnick granting us a three-year tariff exemption to localise the remainder of our products,” Soriot said. “Most of our products are locally manufactured, but we need to transfer the remaining part to this country.”

Just one day earlier, AstraZeneca had revealed it would construct a “multi-billion-dollar drug substance manufacturing centre” in Virginia, with a focus on chronic diseases, a top priority for the Trump administration.

Trump himself touted his tariff threat as the impetus for the recent string of drug deals. When asked by a reporter if he could have brought the pharmaceutical companies to the negotiating table any other way, Trump was blunt.

“ I would never have been able to bring him,” he replied, with a gesture to Soriot. “ Now, I’m not sure that Pascal would like to say, but behind the scenes, he did say tariffs were a big reason he came here.”

Since returning for a second term as president, the Republican leader has relied heavily on tariffs – and the threats of tariffs – as a cudgel to bring foreign governments and businesses in line with his administration’s priorities.

He has called the term “tariff” the “most beautiful word” in the dictionary and repeatedly labelled the dates he unveiled such import taxes as “Liberation Day”.

But earlier this year, it was unclear if his sabre-rattling would pay dividends. In May, for instance, Trump issued an executive action calling on his government to take “all necessary and appropriate action” to penalise countries whose policies he understood as driving up US drug costs.

He also called on Secretary Kennedy to lay the groundwork for “direct-to-consumer” purchasing programmes where pharmaceutical companies could sell their products at a discount.

Trump, however, lacked a legal mechanism to force participation in such a programme.

In July, he upped the pressure, sending letters to major pharmaceutical manufacturers. The letters warned the drug-makers to bring down prices, or else the government would “deploy every tool in our arsenal” to end the “abusive drug pricing practices”.

He also openly mused that month about hiking tariffs on imported medications.

“We’ll be announcing something very soon on pharmaceuticals,” Trump told a July cabinet meeting. “We’re going to give people about a year, a year and a half, to come in, and after that, they’re going to be tariffed if they have to bring the pharmaceuticals into the country, the drugs.”

“They’re going to be tariffed at a very, very high rate, like 200 percent,” he added.

The “most-favoured nation” pricing scheme is an idea that Trump tried but failed to initiate during his first term as president, from 2017 to 2021.

How that project might shape up in his second term remains to be seen. The TrumpRx website – which the president insists he did not name himself – has yet to offer any services.

Those are expected in 2026.

More than four years after the family of deceased Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs filed a wrongful death suit against the Angels, jury selection will begin Monday in Orange County Superior Court.

Skaggs’ widow Carli Skaggs and parents Debra Hetman and Darrell Skaggs stated in a court filing that they seek at least $210 million in lost earnings and damages. A lawyer for the Angels said in a pretrial hearing that the plaintiffs now seek a judgment of $1 billion, although the lead attorney representing the family said the number is an exaggeration.

The trial is expected to last several weeks. Pretrial discovery included more than 50 depositions and the witness list contains nearly 80 names.

Lawyers for the Skaggs family aim to establish that the Angels were responsible for the death of the 27-year-old left-handed pitcher on July 1, 2019, after he snorted crushed pills that contained fentanyl in a hotel room during a team road trip in Texas.

An autopsy concluded Skaggs accidentally died of asphyxia after aspirating his own vomit while under the influence of fentanyl, oxycodone and alcohol.

Angels communications director Eric Kay provided Skaggs with counterfeit oxycodone pills that turned out to be laced with fentanyl and is serving 22 years in federal prison for his role in the death. Skaggs’ lawyers will try to prove that other Angels employees knew Kay was providing opioids to Skaggs.

“The Angels owed Tyler Skaggs a duty to provide a safe place to work and play baseball,” the lawsuit said. “The Angels breached their duty when they allowed Kay, a drug addict, complete access to Tyler. The Angels also breached their duty when they allowed Kay to provide Tyler with dangerous illegal drugs. The Angels should have known Kay was dealing drugs to players. Tyler died as a result of the Angels’ breach of their duties.”

The Skaggs family planned to call numerous current and former Angels players as witnesses, including future Hall of Famers Mike Trout and Albert Pujols as well as pitcher Andrew Heaney — Skaggs’ best friend on the team — in an attempt to show that Skaggs was a fully functioning major league pitcher and not an addict.

Pretrial filings and hearings indicated that the Angels were attempting to show that Skaggs was a longtime drug user who acquired pills from sources other than Kay. Skaggs’ mother, Debbie Hetman, testified during Kay’s 2022 criminal trial that her son admitted he had an “issue” with oxycodone as far back as 2013.

Hetman said her son quit “cold turkey” but she testified the addiction remained enough of a concern that Skaggs wasn’t prescribed opioids after undergoing Tommy John surgery in August 2014.

Judge H. Shaina Colover dashed a key Angels defense strategy when she ruled that Kay’s criminal conviction could not be disputed during the civil trial. Angels attorney Todd Theodora contended that new evidence indicated Skaggs died of a “cardiac arrhythmia, second to the fact that Tyler had 10 to 15 drinks in him, coupled with the oxycodone, for which Angels baseball is not responsible.”

Theodora said that if the Angels could prove Kay was not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, neither Kay nor the team would be culpable in Skaggs’ death. Colover, however, ruled that Kay’s “conviction, based on applicable law and facts, was final.” Kay’s appeal was denied in federal court in November 2023.

Pretrial depositions of Angels players and support personnel provided a rare glimpse into the rowdy, often profane culture of a major league clubhouse.

Angels clubhouse attendants testified that Kay participated in stunts such as purposely taking an 85-mph fastball off his knee in the batting cage, having a pitcher throw a football at his face from short range, eating a bug and eating pimples off the back of Trout.

Tim Mead, the Angels longtime vice president of communication and Kay’s supervisor, acknowledged as much in his deposition, saying, “If you try to describe a clubhouse or a locker room in professional sports, or even college, and probably even the military in terms, and try to equate it to how we see — how this law firm is run or a corporation is run, you know, unfortunately, there’s not lot of comparison…. There’s a lot of fun, there’s a lot of release.”

And a lot of painkillers. Former Angels players Matt Harvey, C.J. Cron, Mike Morin and Cam Bedrosian testified at Kay’s trial that he distributed blue 30 milligram oxycodone pills to them at Angel Stadium. Skaggs, testimony revealed, was a particularly frequent customer.

Testimony established that Kay was also a longtime user of oxycodone and that the Angels knew it. In a filing, the Skaggs family showed evidence that Angels team physician Craig Milhouse prescribed Kay Hydrocodone 15 times from 2009 to 2012. The Skaggs family also plans to call Trout, who according to the deposition of former Angels clubhouse attendant Kris Constanti, offered to pay for Kay’s drug rehabilitation in 2018.

Skaggs was a top prospect coming out of Santa Monica High in 2009, and the Angels made him their first-round draft pick. He was traded to the Arizona Diamondbacks a year later and made his major league debut with them in 2012.

Traded back to the Angels in 2014, Skaggs made the starting rotation, where he remained when not battling injuries until his death. His numbers were rather ordinary, a 28-38 win-loss record with a 4.41 earned-run average in 96 career starts, but his lawyers pointed to his youth and the escalating salaries given to starting pitchers in asking for a jury award of at least $210 million and as much as $785 million.

Skaggs earned $9.2 million — including $3.7 million in 2019 — and would have become a free agent after the 2020 season. Effective starting pitchers at a similar age and comparable performance can command multi-year contracts of $100 million or more.

Skaggs’ death prompted MLB to begin testing for opioids and cocaine in 2020, but only players who do not cooperate with their treatment plans are subject to discipline. Marijuana was removed from the list of drugs of abuse and is treated the same as alcohol.

MLB emergency medical procedures now require that naloxone be stored in clubhouses, weight rooms, dugouts and umpire dressing rooms at all ballparks. Naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, is an antidote for opioid poisoning.

Oct. 2 (UPI) — President Donald Trump last month notified several congressional committees that the United States is in armed conflict with drug cartels that he has designated as terrorist organizations.

The notice to relevant congressional committees described drug cartels as “unlawful combatants” and comes after the military struck alleged drug-running vessels in the Caribbean Sea last month, including two from Venezuela, according to ABC News.

Those strikes killed 17 people aboard the targeted boats.

“The president directed the Department of War to conduct operations against them pursuant to the law of armed conflict,” the notice to congressional committees says, as reported by The Hill.

“The United States has now reached a critical point where we must use force in self-defense and defense of others against the ongoing attacks by these designated terrorist organizations,” the notice says.

Trump issued the notice following a Sept. 15 strike that killed three in a vessel operated by a “designated terrorist organization,” Fox News reported.

The military strikes are “in line with the law of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring deadly poison to our shores,” Anna Kelly, White House deputy press secretary, told Fox News.

“He is delivering on his promise to take on the cartels and eliminate these national security threats from murdering more Americans,” she added.

The notice to the congressional committees abides by federal law that requires presidential administrations to report attacks or hostilities that involve the U.S. military.

It also emphasizes the strikes are done in self-defense while “eliminating the threat posed by these designated terrorist organizations.”

The Trump administration views the drug cartels as engaging in an ongoing attack against the United States that involves arms, in addition to deadly drugs that kill tens of thousands of U.S. citizens every year.

The cartels are transnational in nature and engage in ongoing “attacks throughout the Western Hemisphere,” the notice says.

The military action against the alleged drug-running vessels has drawn criticism from congressional Democrats, who accuse the Trump administration of exceeding its constitutional authority.

Other critics say Venezuela has only a minor role in the trafficking of illicit drugs that reach the United States, and there has been no proof provided that the 17 people killed have been drug traffickers.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants and says the United States is now in a “non-international armed conflict,” according to a Trump administration memo obtained by the Associated Press on Thursday, following recent U.S. strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

Congress was notified about the designation by Pentagon officials on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The memo, startling in scope, signals a potential new moment not just in the Trump administration’s willingness to reach beyond the norms of presidential authority to wage war but in Trump’s stated “America First” agenda. It also raises stark questions about how far the White House intends to use its war powers and if Congress will exert its authority to approve — or ban — such military actions.

The move comes after the U.S. military last month carried out three deadly strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. At least two of those operations were carried out on vessels that originated from Venezuela.

Those strikes followed up a buildup of U.S. maritime forces in the Caribbean.

“Although friendly foreign nations have made significant efforts to combat these organizations, suffering significant losses of life, these groups are now transnational and conduct ongoing attacks throughout the Western Hemisphere as organized cartels,” according to the memo, which refers to cartel members as “unlawful combatants.” “Therefore, the President determined these cartels are non-state armed groups, designated them as terrorist organizations, and determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States.”

Pentagon officials could not provide a list of the designated terrorist organizations at the center of the conflict, a matter that was a major source of frustration for some of the lawmakers who were briefed, according to the person.

Lawmakers have been pressing Trump to go to Congress and seek war powers authority for such operations.

The White House and the Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment. Multiple defense officials reached Thursday appeared to be caught off guard by the determination and would not immediately comment or explain what the president’s action could mean for the Pentagon or military operations going forward.

What the Trump administration laid out at the closed-door classified briefing was perceived by several senators as pursuing a new legal framework that raised questions particularly regarding the role of Congress in authorizing any such action, the person familiar with the matter said.

As the Republican administration takes aim at vessels in the Caribbean, senators and lawmakers of both major political parties have raised stark objections. Some had previously called on Congress to exert its authority under the War Powers Act that would prohibit the administration’s strikes unless they were authorized by Congress.

The first military strike, carried out on Sept. 2 on what the Trump administration said was a drug-carrying speedboat, killed 11 people. Trump claimed the boat was operated by the Tren de Aragua gang, which was listed by the U.S. as a foreign terrorist organization earlier this year.

The Trump administration had previously justified the military action as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States.

But several senators, Democrats and some Republicans, as well as human rights groups questioned the legality of Trump’s action. They called it potential overreach of executive authority in part because the military was used for law enforcement purposes.

By claiming his campaign against drug cartels is an active armed conflict, Trump appears to be claiming extraordinary wartime powers to justify his action.

Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committees, said the drug cartels are “despicable and must be dealt with by law enforcement.”

“The Trump Administration has offered no credible legal justification, evidence, or intelligence for these strikes,” said Reed, a former Army officer who served in the 82nd Airborne Division.

The Trump administration has yet to explain how the military assessed the boats’ cargo and determined the passengers’ alleged gang affiliation before the strikes.

Madhani and Mascaro write for the Associated Press. AP writer Konstatin Toropin contributed reporting.

MILLIONS of Brits who pop pills for heartburn could be at greater risk of a deadly tummy bug, experts warn.

The drugs, called proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) and handed out by GPs and bought over the counter to tackle heartburn and indigestion.

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The latest NHS figures show more than 73 million prescriptions were dished out in England in 2022/23 alone, making them some of the most prescribed drugs in England.

The pills work by reducing the amount of acid in the stomach, easing the burning pain that comes with acid reflux.

And although generally considered safe PPIs, which include omeprazole, lansoprazole and pantoprazole, are not without risks.

Experts have long warned the drugs can increase the chances of Clostridioides difficile, otherwise known as C. diff, a nasty bug that causes severe diarrhoea and can sometimes be fatal.

Last year, the UK saw a spike in cases of the nasty bacteria.

From February 2024 to January 2025, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) received 19,239 reports of C. diff sufferers. The higest number of cases since 2011/12.

A new study, published in The Journal of Infection in May of this year, checked for the first time if taking higher doses of the pills makes the risk even worse.

Pharmacist Deborah Grayson, dubbed the “godmother of pharmacology” on TikTok, also sounded the alarm in a viral video.

She said: “It can be helpful to have omeprazole if you’ve got gastritis or erosion in your oesophagus, but if you’ve only got simple heartburn-related problems, longer term it can have greater impacts on the body.”

While reflux is uncomfortable, stomach acid is essential for digestion.

It activates pepsin, an enzyme that breaks down proteins in the gut, and helps soften food. 

It also protects against harmful microbes in food. 

“Reduced stomach acid can also compromise the gut’s natural defense barrier, increased susceptibility to infections such as C. diff, campylobacter and small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO),” Deborah added. 

“These can cause further gastrointestinal symptoms and, in some cases, serious complications.”

But researchers behind the new review said that while PPIs are linked to a higher risk of C. diff overall, there was no strong evidence that taking bigger doses raised the danger further.

The team from Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, carried out what’s called a “dose-response meta-analysis”, pooling results from previous trials and studies to see if higher amounts of the drug meant higher risk.

The study confirmed the pills are linked to a higher risk of C. diff, but found no clear proof that bigger doses make things worse.

The experts say it’s still a wake-up call to stop overprescribing and keep patients under review.

Patients should never suddenly stop taking PPIs without medical advice, as this can make acid reflux worse.

Anyone worried about their prescription should speak to their GP.

A DRUG kingpin arrested while partying at an Ibiza nightclub for a £20million drug ring he ran with his ex-girlfriend has been jailed.

The couple from Merseyside plotted to smuggle over 300 kilos of drugs in two lorries in the summer of 2022.

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Eddie Burton, 23, from Liverpool was jailed for 19 years at Canterbury Crown Court on Friday, September 26.

His glam ex-girlfriend, Sian Banks, 25, was sentenced to five years in February of this year.

Burton had been living in mainland Europe in 2022 when two lorries were intercepted at Dover Port containing heroin, cocaine and ketamine.

The first of those lorries was stopped by Border Force on July 3 and the second was intercepted the following month on August 12.

Overall, officers discovered a whopping 307 kilos with an estimated street value of £20million.

Burton’s fingerprints were found on both the drug packages as well as the modified fuel tank that was used to conceal them.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) launched a huge manhunt for Burton who was living between the Netherlands and Spain after he left the UK in 2021.

Burton was put in cuffs by Spanish police in August 2023 at the Pacha nightclub in Ibiza for unrelated drug dealing offences.

He had been using an alias to avoid being caught at the time but was extradited to Germany and charged with drug offences before he was returned to the UK in March last year.

Following that, Burton pleaded guilty to four counts of importing Class A and B drugs.

According to the MailOnline, Burton was involved in drugs from an early age and started dealing them at 10 years old.

Those who knew him said he was engaging in serious criminal activity while he was still at primary school and weren’t surprised by his life’s trajectory.

Whereas Banks had a love of luxury holidays and high-end goods with a fondness for men with money, according to those who knew her.

She was arrested in December 2023 before she pleaded guilty to seven charges including importing Class A drugs and money laundering earlier this year.

She had visited Burton in the Netherlands and Spain on a monthly basis between June 2022 and October 2023.

Her phone had also revealed that she had twice smuggled cocaine and ketamine into her luggage after visiting Burton in Amsterdam in August 2022.

Messages were also uncovered between the pair two days after the first lorry was intercepted.

They showed that Banks had flown to the Netherlands and helped prepare the first shipment of narcotics.

One of the messages to Burton revealed Banks was concerned her fingerprints were on the bags of ketamine.

He replied: “You’ve never been nicked or had ye prints took anyway so doesn’t matter.”

It was also discovered that banks had sold scam Covid-19 travel documents during the pandemic.

NCA Senior Investigating Officer John Turner said: “Burton, with Banks’ help, attempted to smuggle huge quantities of harmful drugs into the UK, believing he could operate with impunity overseas.

“Banks held a crucial role in the criminal enterprise, laundering the illicit profits and acting as the UK-based facilitator for the multi-million pound drug importations.

“The drugs, had they reached their final destination, would have had a destructive impact on our communities, fuelling violence and exploiting vulnerable people throughout the supply chain.”

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MEXICO CITY — To help justify a sweeping deportation campaign, an extraordinary U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and unprecedented strikes on boats allegedly trafficking drugs, President Trump has repeated a mantra: Tren de Aragua.

He insists that the street gang, which was founded about a decade ago in Venezuela, is attempting an “invasion” of the United States and threatens “the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere.” Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump described the group as “an enemy of all humanity” and an arm of Venezuela’s authoritarian government.

According to experts who study the gang and Trump’s own intelligence officials, none of that is true.

While Tren de Aragua has been linked to cases of human trafficking, extortion and kidnapping and has expanded its footprint as Venezuela’s diaspora has spread throughout the Americas, there is little evidence that it poses a threat to the U.S.

“Tren de Aragua does not have the capacity to invade any country, especially the most powerful nation on Earth,” said Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist who wrote a book about the gang. The group’s prowess, she said, had been vastly exaggerated by the Trump administration in order to rationalize the deportation of migrants, the militarization of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, and perhaps even an effort to drive Venezuela’s president from power.

“It is being instrumentalized to justify political actions,” she said of the gang. “In no way does it endanger the national security of the United States.”

Before last year, few Americans had heard of Tren de Aragua.

The group formed inside a prison in Venezuela’s Aragua state then spread as nearly 8 million Venezuelans fled poverty and political repression under the regime of Nicolás Maduro. Gang members were accused of sex trafficking, drug sales, homicides and other crimes in countries including Chile, Brazil and Colombia.

As large numbers of Venezuelan migrants began entering the United States after requesting political asylum at the southern border, authorities in a handful of states tied crimes to members of the gang.

It was Trump who put the group on the map.

While campaigning for reelection last year, he appeared at an event in Aurora, Colo., where law enforcement blamed members of Tren de Aragua for several crimes, including murder. Trump stood next to large posters featuring mugshots of Venezuelan immigrants.

“Occupied America. TDA Gang Members,” they read. Banners said: “Deport Illegals Now.”

Shortly after he took office, Trump declared an “invasion” by Tren de Aragua and invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used 18th century law that allows the president to deport immigrants during wartime. His administration flew 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they were housed in a notorious prison, even though few of the men had documented links to Tren de Aragua and most had no criminal records in the United States.

In recent months, Trump has again evoked the threat of Tren de Aragua to explain the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops and a small armada of ships and warplanes to the Caribbean.

In July, his administration declared that Tren de Aragua was a terrorist group led by Maduro. That same month, he ordered the Pentagon to use military force against Latin American cartels that his government has labeled terrorists.

Three times in recent weeks, U.S. troops have struck boats off the coast of Venezuela that it said carried Tren de Aragua members who were trafficking drugs.

The administration offered no proof of those claims. Fourteen people have been killed.

Trump has warned that more strikes are to come. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” he said in his address to the United Nations.

While he insists the strikes are aimed at disrupting the drug trade — claiming without evidence that each boat was carrying enough drugs to kill 25,000 Americans — analysts say there is little evidence that Tren de Aragua is engaged in high-level drug trafficking, and no evidence that it is involved in the movement of fentanyl, which is produced in Mexico by chemicals imported from China. The DEA estimates that just 8% of cocaine that is trafficked into the U.S. passes through Venezuelan territory.

That has fueled speculation about whether the real goal may be regime change.

“Everybody is wondering about Trump’s end game,” said Irene Mia, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank focused on global security.

She said that while there are officials within the White House who appear eager to work with Venezuela, others, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are open about their desire to topple Maduro and other leftist strongmen in the region.

“We’re not going to have a cartel operating or masquerading as a government operating in our own hemisphere,” Rubio told Fox News this month.

Top U.S. intelligence officials have said they don’t believe Maduro has links to Tren de Aragua.

A declassified memo produced by the Office of Director of National Intelligence found no evidence of widespread cooperation between his regime and the gang. It also said Tren de Aragua does not pose a threat to the U.S.: “The small size of TDA’s cells, its focus on low-skill criminal activities and its decentralized structure make it highly unlikely that TDA coordinates large volumes of human trafficking or migrant smuggling.”

Michael Paarlberg, a political scientist who studies Latin America at Virginia Commonwealth University, said he believes Trump is using the gang to achieve political goals — and distract from domestic controversies such as his decision to close the investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Tren de Aragua, he said, is much less powerful than other gangs in Latin America. “But it has been a convenient boogeyman for the Trump administration.”

US president says American forces struck the vessel in the Southern Command’s ‘area of responsibility’.

United States President Donald Trump says American forces have carried out another strike targeting a ship that he claimed was “trafficking illicit narcotics”, killing at least three men on board the vessel.

The announcement, late on Friday, marks the third time the US has claimed a deadly attack on an alleged drug smuggling vessel this month.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the “lethal kinetic strike” took place on his orders in the US Southern Command’s “area of responsibility” – a region that encompasses 31 countries in South and Central America and the Caribbean.

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking illicit narcotics, and was transiting along a known narcotrafficking passage en route to poison Americans,” Trump said.

“The strike killed 3 male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel, which was in international waters. No US Forces were harmed in this strike.”

The US has twice this month carried out strikes against alleged drug-smuggling vessels that had originated in Venezuela.

Sept. 18 (UPI) — Ecuador President Daniel Noboa announced Thursday plans to call a voter referendum to ask whether they want a constituent assembly. He said the country must “free itself from institutional captivity” and establish a new legal framework to confront organized crime.

In an official statement, he said Ecuadorians will set the rules for a “new Ecuador” and accused traditional political structures of blocking reforms needed to strengthen his security policy.

According to the presidential message, earlier questions submitted by the executive branch for a public vote “were rejected” by the Constitutional Court, a decision Noboa attributed to “political activism” without naming a specific institution or giving dates.

Noboa’s decision follows other recent measures, including the Sept. 1 replacement of the entire military leadership, which the Defense Ministry described as a new phase in the war against criminal gangs.

The Security Bloc has seized 135 tons of drugs in maritime operations so far this year, a record that already surpasses all seizures made in 2024. Between January and August, authorities confiscated 68.1 tons of cocaine at the ports of Guayaquil, Machala and Posorja, including 27.3 tons at Posorja, which accounted for 40% of the total.

Posorja, a fishing town in the southwest that is home to Ecuador’s most modern port, has become a symbol of the international fight against drug trafficking. Built to boost legal exports, it is now at the center of battles over cocaine routes.

Ecuador has also strengthened cooperation with the United States. The Trump administration pledged $13.7 million in security aid and $6 million in drones to bolster maritime surveillance, along with updates to the extradition treaty and intelligence sharing to combat criminal groups.

The government says this year’s seizures have caused losses of more than $9.3 billion for criminal networks.

“Our goal is to financially strangle drug trafficking and cut off every supply route,” Defense Minister Gian Carlo Loffredo said.

Sept. 17 (UPI) — The Trump administration has announced the unsealing of an indictment and a multimillion-dollar reward for information on the leader of a Sinaloa Cartel-linked gang, as it cracks down on the infamous narcotics trafficking organization.

Federal law enforcement accuses Juan Jose Ponce Felix, also known as El Ruso, of being the leader of Los Rusos, a Mexican gang controlling the Mexicali drug trafficking corridor and a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel.

“Ponce Felix’s organization directly manages the distribution of millions of dollars’ worth of narcotics, particularly cocaine, fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin, from Mexico to the U.S.,” the Drug Enforcement Administration said in a statement, adding with proceeds sent back to Mexico.

According to the State Department, Felix is not only the leader of Los Rusos, but its founder as the primary armed wing of La Mayiza, a powerful faction of the U.S.-designated Sinaloa Cartel.

La Mayiza was co-founded by Ismael Zambada Garcia, also known as El Mayo, who pleaded guilty in the United States in late August to being the leader of the criminal enterprise.

The DEA alleges that Ponce Felix, in 2012, before he became the leader of Los Rusos, worked with Zambada Garcia, leading a “fleet of cartel soldiers” in 2012, who conducted kidnappings, hostage takings, torture and murder.

He has been charged four times in two different California districts.

Along with the unsealing of the indictment, the State Department offered a reward of $5 million for information that leads to his arrest or conviction.

“For years, Ponce Felix has resorted to kidnapping, torture and murder to maintain his grip on power,” DEA Administrator Terrance Cole said in a statement.

“This reward underscores this administration’s whole-of-government approach and unwavering commitment to destroy the Sinaloa Cartel.”

The announcement comes weeks after the DEA led a four-day domestic operation from Aug. 25 to 29, targeting the Sinaloa Cartel, which resulted in 617 arrests and the seizure of drugs, 420 firearms and more than $11 million in U.S. currency.

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Monday that the U.S. military again targeted a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela, killing three aboard the vessel.

“The Strike occurred while these confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela were in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics (A DEADLY WEAPON POISONING AMERICANS!) headed to the U.S.,” Trump said in a Truth Social post announcing the strike. “These extremely violent drug trafficking cartels POSE A THREAT to U.S. National Security, Foreign Policy, and vital U.S. Interests.”

The strike that Trump says was carried out Monday came two weeks after another military strike on what the Trump administration says was a drug-carrying speedboat from Venezuela that killed 11.

The Trump administration justified the earlier strike as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States.

But several senators, Democrats and some Republicans, have indicated dissatisfaction with the administration’s rationale and questioned the legality of the action. They view it as a potential overreach of executive authority in part by using the military for law enforcement purposes.

The Trump administration has claimed self-defense as a legal justification for the first strike, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio arguing the drug cartels “pose an immediate threat” to the nation.

U.S. officials said the strike early this month targeted Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. And they indicated more military strikes on drug targets would be coming as the U.S. looks to “wage war” on cartels.

Trump did not specify whether Tren de Aragua was also the target of Monday’s strike.

The Venezuelan government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reported strike.

The Trump administration has railed specifically against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for the scourge of illegal drugs in U.S. communities.

Maduro during a press conference earlier on Monday lashed out at the U.S. government, accusing the Trump administration of using drug trafficking accusations as an excuse for a military operation whose intentions are “to intimidate and seek regime change” in the South American country.

Maduro also repudiated what he described as a weekend operation in which 18 Marines raided a Venezuelan fishing boat in the Caribbean.

“What were they looking for? Tuna? What were they looking for? A kilo of snapper? Who gave the order in Washington for a missile destroyer to send 18 armed Marines to raid a tuna fishing vessel?” he said. “They were looking for a military incident. If the tuna fishing boys had any kind of weapons and used weapons while in Venezuelan jurisdiction, it would have been the military incident that the warmongers, extremists who want a war in the Caribbean, are seeking.”

Speaking to Fox News earlier Monday, Rubio reiterated that the U.S. doesn’t see Maduro as the rightful leader of Venezuela but as head of a drug cartel.

“We’re not going to have a cartel, operating or masquerading as a government, operating in our own hemisphere,” Rubio said.

Following the first military strike on a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela, America’s chief diplomat said Trump was “going to use the U.S. military and all the elements of American power to target cartels who are targeting America.”

AP and others have reported that the boat had turned around and was heading back to shore when it was struck. But Rubio on Monday said he didn’t know if that’s accurate.

“What needs to start happening is some of these boats need to get blown up,” Rubio said. “We can’t live in a world where all of a sudden they do a U-turn and so we can’t touch them anymore.”

Madhani and Garcia Cano write for the Associated Press. AP writer Matthew Lee in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Actor Martin Sheen, who portrayed a president on television and is the father of admitted drug user Charlie Sheen, testified before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday to ask Congress for continued support of drug courts, an alternative criminal justice program.

A drug court is a special docket that addresses the cases of nonviolent drug offenders. Members participate in substance abuse treatment programs – usually for at least one year – and are subject to random drug testing. There are currently more than 2,500 drug courts across the country, treating more than 120,000 Americans.

Drug court advocates contend that the courts help reduce recidivism, reducing the number of people in prison and returning law-abiding, tax-paying citizens to society. Drug court participants reported 25% less criminal activity and had 16% fewer arrests than comparable offenders not enrolled in drug courts, according to a Justice Department study.

“It’s a deeply personal [issue],” Sheen told reporters after the congressional hearing, adding that “it’s no secret I’ve been through a 12-step program.”

Sheen quickly reminded lawmakers that he’s no expert on the subject.

“Celebrity, to a greater or lesser degree, is often confused for credibility. For instance, I am not a former president of the United States,” Sheen said in his opening remarks, a reference to his role as President Jed Bartlet on the Emmy award-winning television show “The West Wing.” Sheen is also well-known for his critically acclaimed role in “Apocalypse Now,” a 1979 film about the war in Vietnam.

Despite his amateur political status, Sheen noted that he helped create a drug court in Berkeley in 1996. Graduates from that drug court helped establish sober-living houses in the area. Since then, he’s been an advocate for drug courts because “it is an extension of my work with the peace and social justice community,” he said.

The hearing was called by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who chairs the Judiciary Committee’s crime and terrorism subcommittee.

Earlier Tuesday, Sheen joined fellow actor Matthew Perry and more than a dozen members of Congress to address hundreds of people in a rally in support of drug courts.

The advocates, holding up signs that said “Drug Courts $ave Lives,” pressed lawmakers to commit a minimum of $88.7 million in the 2012 budget toward drug courts, noting that the courts offer a significant return on investment. Every dollar spent on drug courts yields an average of $2 in savings for the criminal justice system.

Beyond the dollars and cents, drug courts have helped reclaim the lives of many who had succumbed to drug addiction.

“You have no idea how … far that money really does go,” one drug court graduate said at the rally.

Others charge that with a soaring national debt, drug courts should be funded by states.

“With out-of-control spending and surging public debt threatening our nation’s stability, increased federal funding of state and local courts should not be a priority,” David Muhlhausen, research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said before the subcommittee.

With the current growing tensions between Venezuela and the United States, it’s worth recalling a little-known aerial mission that the U.S. military launched to interdict narcotics coming out of Central and South America back in the 1990s. Most notably, the announcement earlier this week that 10 F-35s will deploy to Puerto Rico startled some, but it is actually far from unprecedented. In fact, something similar was happening for years, decades ago. This was Coronet Nighthawk, which employed U.S. Air Force fighters to patrol against suspected drug traffickers.

Starting with the current situation, the deployment of F-35s has been taken by some as evidence that the United States is planning to go to war directly with Venezuela. However, as we have previously pointed out, these stealth jets could also be used for a range of other relevant tasks. In particular, their advanced sensors make them ideal intelligence-gathering platforms. You can read more about that here.

We are still waiting to hear more about the F-35 deployment. Currently, it remains unclear where they will come from, when they arrive, and what they will do once they get there.

However, the deployment does have some parallels with Coronet Nighthawk, a counterdrug operation that began in the early 1990s and employed fighter aircraft to patrol the skies of Central America and the Caribbean and detect suspected drug-running aircraft. This was at a time of huge concern around drug trafficking and smuggling into the United States, which had begun to peak during the era of the Reagan administration in the mid-1980s.

The main facility for Coronet Nighthawk was Howard Air Force Base in Panama, although assets would eventually also be rotated into other airfields in the Caribbean and Central America.

This mission was initially undertaken by Air Combat Command before transitioning from the active-duty component to the Air National Guard. Fighters were on 24/7 alert to intercept possible drug-trafficking aircraft and to provide overwatch to dissuade such flights. On receiving coordinates of a suspect flight, fighters were expected to scramble within 15 minutes and would then go and investigate them.

F-15s and F-16s were involved, with an example of the former pictured at the top of this story. Dated 1993, the original caption describes it as an F-15 sent to identify an aircraft that was possibly hauling drugs as detected by the Southern Regional Operations Center.

A Washington Post article from 2000, detailing the 113th Wing’s activities in Curaçao provides an idea of how the mission worked:

“The fast, agile F-16s would quickly intercept the suspect planes in international airspace as they flew over open water. The aircraft would be identified and tracked along their route and then followed again after making suspected deliveries. Information on the planes’ actions and location would be passed on to law enforcement agencies and local civil authorities for possible arrests and seizures.”

It appears the U.S. Air Force fighters flew their missions unarmed, serving as the ‘eyes in the sky’ to locate suspect aircraft as well as to dissuade them from being in the airspace in the first instance.

However, intercepting ‘slow-movers’ was and remains a challenge for a jet fighter.

“The drug runners aren’t running at high noon,” Col. Mike Redman, the 113th Wing vice commander, told the Washington Post. “They’re doing it very early in the morning, and they’re flying low over the water.” Typically, the drug-runners would try and fly at low speed, just below the clouds.

The Coronet Nighthawk mission was wound up in 2001, due to the implementation of the Panama Canal Treaty, which handed the canal back to the Panamanian government at the end of December 1999, together with U.S. military bases in the country. (In 2002, the Coronet Nighthawk name would be resurrected for the deployment to Europe of Air Force F-117 stealth fighters).

Clearly, however, the mission had been successful in terms of its original remit.

As of the early 1990s, 75 percent of the drugs in the region were assessed to be transported by air, according to an official history from the 142nd Wing, one of the units that provided fighter jets. By the time the mission ended, the percentage of drugs transported in the region by air had been reduced to 25 percent, as the drug traffickers changed their approach accordingly.

According to one publicly available account, between September 1994 and the end of the decade, Coronet Nighthawk fighters were credited with ensuring the disruption or seizure of over 33,000 metric tons of cocaine.

“We didn’t go over there expecting to completely stop the flow of cocaine coming into the country,” Maj. Conal J. Brady III, a 199th Fighter Squadron F-15 pilot, said in one contemporary account. “But we did make a dent in it and made it a lot harder for the drug runners.”

As far as the 142nd Wing and its F-15s were concerned, they made six deployments to Panama for Coronet Nighthawk, first in 1992, twice in 1993, again in 1994, over the New Year 1995–96, and lastly in 1999. A typical deployment involved five F-15s and around 50 airmen, with personnel rotating every two weeks.

“It’s a real-world mission, but at least the weather’s nice and you’re working under the palm trees near white sand beaches,” Redman explained to the Washington Post.

It should be recalled that, during the same timeframe, an overseas F-16 assignment might otherwise take airmen to a desert base in the Middle East, to fly long-duration ‘no-fly’ zone missions over Iraq.

The current F-35 deployment is a fairly clear indication that the situation in the region is currently heating up.

Back in the 1990s, most of the narcotics traffic was underway in the air. The pulse-Doppler lookdown radars on the F-15s and F-16s were key to finding aerial targets, which were mainly active at night.

Now, most of the drugs in the region are moved on the surface of the water. Modern fighters have even more powerful radars paired with electro-optical systems that can detect and investigate targets on the surface and do so very quickly. With the U.S. military now also engaging suspected drug traffickers at sea, fighters would also be able to attack those targets themselves. The air threat from Venezuela is also not nonexistent. While the token fleet of aging F-16s is not a huge concern, Venezuela does have 21 more potent Su-30MK2V Flanker multirole fighters.

For the time being, at least, it seems that the favored option for counter-narcotics missions involves the MQ-9 Reaper drone, at least two of which have recently been noted in Puerto Rico. Although these are among a number of different aircraft now involved, MQ-9s can carry a variety of missiles as well as sensors for surveillance and can loiter for more than 24 hours over a target, making them an ideal platform for these missions. What they cannot do is respond anywhere near as rapidly as a fighter.

Meanwhile, although Coronet Nighthawk was just one of many military efforts by the U.S. government to try to stop the flow of drugs into the country from Central and South America, it appears to have been one of the more successful ones.

Contact the author: [email protected]

On the night TJ McGee overdosed from a mixture of drugs and alcohol in his freshman year at UC Berkeley, his friends found him passed out in the hallway by their shared dorm room.

The roommates tried to help, but when McGee stopped breathing, they called 911.

McGee survived and, racked with guilt over what happened that night, committed to confronting his substance-use problem. Then, in the days that followed, McGee received a surprise email from campus officials that ushered in a whole new wave of emotions.

The letter said the administration would be placing McGee on academic probation for violating Berkeley’s residential conduct rules against drug and alcohol possession, use and distribution — possibly jeopardizing his academic career.

“They made me feel as if I was a villain for the choices I made,” said McGee, 20, now a junior. “I felt shameful enough already.”

Today, McGee speaks regularly in support of California State Assembly Bill 602, which would prohibit public colleges and universities from punishing students if they call 911 during an overdose emergency, or if a peer does so on their behalf. It requires schools to offer rehabilitation options and requires students who seek emergency medical assistance to complete a treatment program.

“The bill would protect students just like me from even receiving a letter like that,” and ensures that they are given care instead, McGee said.

The bill recently passed in both houses of the state Legislature; it awaits Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature. A spokesperson for Newsom said he typically does not comment on pending legislation.

Despite a recent nationwide plunge in the number of deaths stemming from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and contaminated versions of those drugs, overdose remains the leading cause of death for Americans age 18 to 44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Though numbers could be revised as new data from California come in, the CDC provisionally estimates a 21% drop in overdose deaths in the state to 9,660 between March 2024 and March 2025, compared with 12,247 in the previous 12-month period. Opioid-related deaths, in particular from fentanyl, made up the bulk of California’s overdose fatalities in 2023, the most recent year for which statistics are available on the state’s opioid-prevention website.

In response, California started requiring campus health centers at most public colleges and universities to make the opioid overdose-reversing nasal spray Narcan available to students in campus residences.

McGee said that while he hadn’t taken any opioids the night of his overdose, he was administered Narcan while incapacitated.

Advocates for AB 602 say more needs to be done to increase the likelihood that college students will seek immediate help during a drug-related emergency.

It’s important for lawmakers and college officials to realize how much fear is involved when an overdose occurs — not just with the person who is overdosing but among peers who seek to help but don’t want to get a friend in trouble, said UC Berkeley student Saanvi Arora. She is the founder and executive director of Youth Power Project, a nonprofit that helps young people who’ve had adverse health experiences use their personal stories to promote policy reforms.

“California has dramatically increased investments in school-based mental health and crisis-intervention resources and access, for example to fentanyl testing strips on college campuses and access to Narcan,” Arora said. “But one big gap that we see … is that there’s still a really low utilization rate among young people and students.”

Fear of academic probation, suspension or expulsion leads some students with substance-use problems to avoid reaching out to residential advisors, instructors or school administrators for help, leaving them feeling so isolated that they see few other options besides turning to the police as a last resort or doing nothing at all, Arora said.

Youth Power Project authored a bill to combat these problems; Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco), its chief sponsor, introduced it to the state Legislature this past spring. “During an overdose any hesitation can be deadly,” the lawmaker said in a statement. “AB 602 makes it clear that calling 911 will never cost you your academic future.”

Campus discipline and legal prosecution can be counterproductive if the goal is to prevent overdose deaths, said Evan Schreiber, a licensed clinical social worker and director of substance abuse disorder services at APLA Health, an L.A.-based nonprofit that offers mental-health and substance-use services and backs the bill.

“By removing the fear of consequences, you’re going to encourage more people to get help,” Schreiber said.

Schreiber and Arora said AB 602 extends to places of higher learning some of the protections guaranteed to Californians outside of campuses under the “911 Good Samaritan Law,” which went into effect in 2013 to increase the reporting of fentanyl poisoning and prevent opioid deaths.

That law protects people from arrest and prosecution if they seek medical aid during an overdose-related emergency, as well as individuals who step in to help by calling 911. It doesn’t, however, cover disciplinary actions imposed by colleges and universities.

One difference between the 911 Good Samaritan Law and the version of AB 602 that passed both houses of the Legislature is that the latter does not cover students who call on behalf of an overdosing peer and who are themselves found to have violated campus alcohol and drug policies, said Nate Allbee, a spokesperson for Haney. Allbee noted that Haney hopes to add this protection in the future.

Even though AB 602 doesn’t include all of the protections that supporters wanted, the rule solves what Arora identified as a major problem: UCs, Cal State campuses and community colleges in California are governed by a patchwork of policies and conduct codes regarding substance use that differ from campus to campus, making it difficult for students to know where they stand when they are in crisis.

McGee said he wished he’d learned more about the support services that were available to him at Berkeley before his overdose. But he was already struggling emotionally and living on his own when he entered college in fall 2023.

McGee described growing up in an environment in which substance use was common. He never felt that he could turn to anyone close to him to work through feelings of loneliness and bouts of depression. It was easier to block it all out by partying.

McGee started using harder drugs, missing classes and spending whole days in bed while coming down from his benders. He wouldn’t eat. Friends would ask what’s wrong, but he’d stare at the wall and ignore them. His grade-point average plummeted to 2.3.

Some of the friends who helped McGee on the night of his overdose grew distant for a time, too dismayed over the turmoil he was causing himself and those around him.

McGee knew he needed to keep trying to salvage his academic career and earn back the trust of his peers. All he could think was: “I need to fix my grades. I need to fix myself.”

One day during his recovery, McGee sat his friends down, apologized and explained what he was going through.

Then in his sophomore year, McGee happened to be lobbying lawmakers in Sacramento over campus funding cuts when he overheard a separate group of students from Youth Power Project talking about a bill they authored that would become AB 602.

It was like eavesdropping on a dark chapter in his own life. McGee agreed to present the bill to Haney and share his experience at meetings with legislators and in hearings.

McGee’s disciplinary probation on campus lasts until the end of 2025, but working on the overdose bill has given him a new sense of purpose. A psychology major, McGee eventually took on public policy as a minor.

“I feel like I became a part of this bill and it became such a large source of hope for me,” McGee said. “It would be amazing to see this support and care implemented nationally. This is not just a California issue.”

With this administration, it’s another day, another unwinnable fight. All with a real war coming over the horizon.

President Trump campaigned on ending the “forever wars,” but he’s since launched two new ones: a shooting war on drugs in the Caribbean and a symbolic war on crime in America’s cities. Neither will ever end and both will tie our military down, just as the most potent threat America’s ever known is rising and readying to fight.

Let’s start with the real war. China is America’s only real competitor, an adversary far more powerful than the Soviet Union ever was. President Xi Jinping has directed his military to be able to take Taiwan by 2027, and they’re nearly set. U.S. Admiral Sam Paparo, America’s military commander in the Pacific, testified in the spring that this activity against Taiwan grew 300% in 2024. These aggressive actions, he said, are “not just exercises; they are rehearsals,” adding that “we must be ready today.” China’s recent military parade put a missile-shaped exclamation on Paparo’s point.

But America’s not preparing for real war right now. And because the world knows that America’s not preparing, America’s not deterring.

Instead we’re sending the Navy to blow up a drug dealer and deploying the National Guard to walk around Los Angeles, Washington and maybe Chicago. These distractions degrade military readiness at a time when we need all the ready we can get.

Last week, the Trump administration killed 11 people when it struck a four-engine speedboat in the southern Caribbean. The president said it was transporting drugs from Venezuela to the U.S. There’s much to consider: whether the strike was legally justified, or possibly illegal murder; or whether the administration should have notified and gotten authorization from Congress.

Setting those aside for the moment, let’s focus on whether a war on drugs in the Caribbean is a prudent use of military assets. The Pentagon sent to the region three guided-missile destroyers (around 1,000 sailors), an Amphibious Readiness Group (4,500 sailors) and a Marine Expeditionary Unit (2,200 Marines), along with surveillance planes, special forces assets, and a submarine. All to destroy a single speedboat? One that may or may not have been carrying a few kilograms of cocaine, or may have been carrying people on a human smuggling run.

Last year, just doing its job, American law enforcement seized 63 metric tons of cocaine. At that rate, the same day as the strike, we could assume that American law enforcement seized about 172 kilograms of cocaine alone, all without an additional armada.

There’s a reason we don’t use blowtorches for brain surgery and knives with soup bowls. They don’t work. Neither will sending thousands and thousands of sailors and Marines — at enormous cost in taxpayer money and troop training — to fight a second war on drugs, one boat at a time.

Consider the American military’s most recent history with drug interdiction. We wanted drug production to go down in Afghanistan, but it tripled in our two decades there. Or take it from Nixon: Wars on drugs don’t end well. Because they simply don’t end.

Neither will the new symbolic war on crime in U.S. cities. Again, costly, when one considers we already have a tool in the box for crime. The National Guard and Marine deployment to Los Angeles cost America $120 million for approximately 5,000 troops over 60 days (some 300 remain today). Washington, as a federal city, has taken on approximately half those used in California, which brings the total bill closer to $200 million for these unnecessary additional measures.

But what’s worse, far worse, is what the soldiers are doing. CNN recently reported that one soldier’s mission in Washington is to walk around Chinatown from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. every day. Another from Mississippi said she’d been routinely cursed at. Yet another guardsman from Louisiana admitted confusion about what the military was even there to do.

The president has said he wants Chicago to be next (“Chipocalypse Now”). The city’s mayor and the governor of Illinois have stood against such a move. It appears the people of Chicago are considering even stronger opposition. This summer a research center at the University of Chicago found that 60% did not approve of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. It also found that 28% would “attend a protest against the Trump administration’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants, even if it became violent.”

With Chicago’s 2.5 million people, even if the survey counted too many tough talkers — if only 10% of the citizens there were willing to physically contest a deployment that was part of an immigration enforcement roundup — that’s hundreds and hundreds of thousands against handfuls of troops. Not one American soldier ever signed up to police Chicago.

Back in Washington on Friday, President Trump signed an executive order changing the Department of Defense’s title to the “Department of War” in large part because he believes it will get the country back to fighting “to win.” But when you start a new war on drugs and a new war on crime, when you send the ax instead of the scalpel — you’ll never win. You’re just signing America up for two more forever wars, two more unwinnable fights.

And the only one playing to win is Beijing.

ML Cavanaugh is the author of the forthcoming book “Best Scar Wins: How You Can Be More Than You Were Before.” @MLCavanaugh

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Coast Guard detects and detains scores of drug-running vessels in the Caribbean every year in its role as the world’s drug police on the high seas.

Now, that anti-narcotics mission may look vastly different after a U.S. military strike on a vessel off Venezuela. Trump administration officials asserted last week that gang members were smuggling drugs bound for America.

The Trump administration has indicated more military strikes on drug targets could be coming, saying it is seeking to “wage war” on Latin American cartels it accuses of flooding the U.S. with cocaine, fentanyl and other drugs. It is facing mounting questions, however, about the legality of the strike and any such escalation, which upends decades of procedures for interdicting suspected drug vessels.

“This really throws a wrench in the huge investment the U.S. has been making for decades building up a robust legal infrastructure to arrest and prosecute suspected drug smugglers,” said Kendra McSweeney, an Ohio State University geographer who has spent years investigating the legal infrastructure of U.S. drug interdictions at sea.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserted while visiting Latin America last week that drug cartels “pose an immediate threat to the United States” and that President Trump “has a right, under exigent circumstances, to eliminate imminent threats to the United States.”

A U.S. official familiar with the reasoning also cited self-defense as legal justification for the strike that the administration says killed 11 members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, which has been dubbed a foreign terrorist organization. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.

The administration used a similar argument months prior to justify an intense bombing camping against Houthi rebels in Yemen. However, behind the scenes, the justification for strikes against the cartels appears to be far more complex.

The New York Times reported last month that Trump signed a directive to the Pentagon to start using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels. That reporting was related to the Venezuela strike, according to a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.

Touting the strike, but no details on how it happened

Vice President JD Vance celebrated the strike over the weekend, suggesting that the use of force is necessary to protect American families from deadly drugs.

“Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” Vance said on X.

Several Democrats and even some fellow Republicans criticized Vance’s comments. Congressional leaders also have pressed for more information on why the administration took the military action.

The Pentagon has been silent about any details on the strike. Military officials have not divulged what service carried it out, what weapons were used or how it was determined that the vessel was operated by Tren de Aragua or carrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week that “foreign terrorist organizations have been designated, we have those authorities, and it’s about keeping the American people safe. There’s no reason for me to give the public or adversaries any more information than that.”

Pentagon officials did not respond to direct questions about the legal justification for the strike and whether the military considered itself at war with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government.

Hegseth traveled Monday to Puerto Rico, where troops deployed for a training exercise and where the U.S. is sending 10 F-35 fighter jets for operations against drug cartels.

‘There’s no authority for this whatsoever’

Claire Finkelstein, a professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania, said “extrajudicial killing” would be a better term to describe the strike. She sees it as an outgrowth of the two-decade blurring of the lines between law enforcement and armed conflict.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. started designating members of foreign terrorist organizations, such as al-Qaida and the Taliban, as unlawful combatants, making them vulnerable to U.S. attacks even when not directly engaged in warfare.

Trump has designated several Latin American cartels, including Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations. But that in itself does not make a U.S. strike against suspected members of the group legal, Finkelstein said. Congress has not authorized the use of force against Venezuela nor are there any U.N. resolutions that would justify the U.S. actions.

“There’s no authority for this whatsoever under international law,” she said. “It was not an act of self-defense. It was not in the middle of a war. There was no imminent threat to the United States.”

A pair of armed Venezuelan planes flew by a U.S. warship in the Caribbean days after the strike, and Trump warned Friday that any future flights would be met with gunfire.

The strike “quite arguably is an act of war against Venezuela and they would potentially be justified in responding with the use of force,” Finkelstein said. “Could you imagine what would happen if their navy was 12 miles off the coast of the U.S.?“

Turning to the seas during the drug war

The search and seizures by sea are a routine feature of America’s first “forever war” — the drug war, which President Richard Nixon declared in 1971.

In 1986, at the height of Pablo Escobar’s Medellin drug cartel, Congress passed the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, which defines drug smuggling in international waters as a crime against the United States and gives the U.S. unique arrest powers.

Usually, authorities stop and board boats, arrest the crew and seize any contraband. The efforts are led by the U.S. Coast Guard with support from the Pentagon, State Department, Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI as well as allies from the U.K., France, Netherlands and across Latin America.

Now, warning operations like the strike “will happen again,” Rubio said Trump “wants to wage war on these groups because they’ve been waging war on us for 30 years and no one has responded.”

Under the maritime drug enforcement law, 127 new prosecutions were brought in the first nine months of the current fiscal year, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which collects Justice Department data. That compares to 131 for all of 2024.

Since each case involves multiple defendants, the actual number of foreigners detained at sea is likely much higher.

The Coast Guard announced last month what it called its largest drug haul on record from multiple interdictions over two months. Some of those seizures were carried out by a Coast Guard law enforcement detachment aboard a Dutch naval vessel in the Caribbean.

“While no one is sympathetic to the plight of drug dealers, the reason we do this through a judicial process, in partnership with other nations, is so we can collect evidence that allows us to build bigger cases and go after the cartel bosses,” said James Story, who served as ambassador to Venezuela during the first Trump administration.

Story, who ran the State Department’s anti-narcotics bureau in Colombia and Latin America earlier in his career, said 20 nations have liaisons at a multiagency task force based in the Naval Air Station in Key West, Florida, where high seas boardings are coordinated.

“Anything that could potentially jeopardize those relationships would make us less effective in the long run,” he said.

Toropin and Goodman write for the Associated Press. Goodman reported from Miami.

SACRAMENTO — A Riverside County lawmaker accused of driving drunk after a car crash, but cleared by a blood test, took the first step Monday toward suing the Sacramento Police Department, saying officers had tarnished her reputation.

After Sen. Sabrina Cervantes (D-Riverside) was broadsided by an SUV near the Capitol in May, Sacramento police interviewed the 37-year-old lawmaker for hours at a Kaiser Permanente hospital before citing her on suspicion of driving under the influence. Prosecutors declined to file charges after the toxicology results of a blood test revealed no “measurable amount of alcohol or drugs.”

In an 11-page filing Monday, Cervantes alleged that officers had retaliated against her over a bill that would sharply curtail how police can store data gathered by automated license plate readers, a proposal opposed by more than a dozen law enforcement agencies.

The filing also alleges that the police treated Cervantes, who is gay and Latina, differently than the white woman driver who ran a stop sign and broadsided her car.

“This is not only about what happened to me — it’s about accountability,” Cervantes said in a prepared statement. “No Californian should be falsely arrested, defamed, or retaliated against because of who they are or what they stand for.”

Cervantes, a first-year state senator, has said since the crash that she did nothing wrong. She represents the 31st Senate District, which covers portions of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and chairs the Senate elections committee.

Cervantes’ lawyer, James Quadra, said the Sacramento police had tried to “destroy the reputation of an exemplary member of the state Senate,” and that the department’s “egregious misconduct” includes false arrest, intentional infliction of emotional distress and defamation.

A representative for the Sacramento Police Department declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

After news broke of the crash, the Sacramento Police Department told reporters that they had “observed objective signs of intoxication” after speaking to Cervantes at the hospital. She said in her filing that the police had asked her to conduct a test gauging her eyes’ reaction to stimulus, a “less accurate and subjective test” than the blood test she requested.

The toxicology screen had “completely exonerated” Cervantes, the filing said, but the police department had already “released false information to the press claiming that Senator Cervantes had driven while under the influence of drugs.”

The filing alleges that one police officer turned off his body camera for about five minutes while answering a call on his cell phone. The filing also said that the department failed to produce body camera footage from a sergeant who also came to the hospital.

WASHINGTON — The F-35 is the most advanced fighter jet on the planet, capable of waging electronic warfare, of dropping nuclear weapons, of evading the surveillance and missile defenses of America’s most fearsome enemies at supersonic speeds.

Ten of them are being deployed by a newly branded War Department to Puerto Rico to combat drug traffickers in dinghies.

It is the latest example of the Trump administration using disproportionate military force to supplement, or substitute for, traditional law enforcement operations — first at home on the streets of U.S. cities and now overseas, where the president has labeled multiple drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and has vowed a “tough” response.

On Tuesday, that response began with an inaugural “kinetic strike” targeting a small vessel in the Caribbean allegedly carrying narcotics and 11 members of Tren de Aragua, one of the Venezuelan gangs President Trump has designated a terrorist group. Legally designating a gang or cartel as a terrorist entity ostensibly gives the president greater legal cover to conduct lethal strikes on targets.

The operation follows Trump’s deployment of U.S. forces to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., for operations with dubious justifications, as well as threats of similar actions in San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans, moves that a federal judge said last week amount to Trump “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”

Trump has referred to both problems — urban crime and drug trafficking — as interlinked and out of control. But U.S. service members have no training in local law or drug enforcement. And experts question a strategy that has been tried before, both by the United States and regional governments, of launching a war against drugs only to drive leaders in the trade to militarize themselves.

U.S. drug policy “has always been semi-militarized,” said Jeremy Adelman, director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University. Trump’s latest actions simply make more explicit the erasure of a line “that separates law enforcement from warfare.”

“One side effect of all this is that other countries are watching,” Adelman said. “By turning law enforcement over to the military — as the White House is also doing domestically — what’s to stop other countries from doing the same in international waters?

“Fishermen in the South China Sea should be worried,” he added.

The Trump administration has not provided further details on the 11 people killed in the boat strike. But officials said the departure of a drug vessel from Venezuela makes Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dictatorial president labeled by the White House as a top drug kingpin, indirectly responsible.

“Let there be no doubt, Nicolás Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker in the United States, and he’s a fugitive of American justice,” Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of State and national security advisor, said on a tour of the region Thursday, citing a grand jury indictment in the Southern District of New York.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a news conference Wednesday in Mexico City.

(Hector Vivas / Getty Images)

The president’s war on drug cartels will continue, Rubio said, adding that regional governments “will help us find these people and blow them up.”

Maduro has warned the strike indicates that Washington seeks regime change in Caracas. The Venezuelan military flew two aircraft near a U.S. vessel in international waters Thursday night, prompting an angry response from Pentagon officials and Trump to direct his Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to “do what you want to do” in response.

“Despite how dangerous this performance could be, because of its political consequences, it can’t be taken seriously as a drug policy,” said Lina Britto, an expert on Latin America and the Caribbean at Northwestern University with a focus on the history of the drug trade. “It lacks rigorousness in the analysis of how drug trafficking operates in the hemisphere.”

Most drugs entering the U.S. homeland from South America arrive in shipping containers, submarines and more efficient modes of transportation than speedboats — and primarily come through the Pacific, not the Caribbean, Britto said.

Trump has flirted with military strikes on drug cartels since the start of his second term, working with Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, to coordinate drone strikes over Mexican territory for surveillance of cartel activity.

But Sheinbaum has ruled out the use of force against cartels, or the deployment of U.S. forces within Mexico to combat them, warning that U.S. military action would violate Mexican sovereignty and upend collaboration between the two close-knit trade and security partners.

In comparison, Venezuela offers Trump a cleaner opportunity to test the use of force against drug cartels, with diplomatic ties between the two governments at a nadir. But a war with Maduro over drugs could create unexpected problems for the Trump administration, setting off a rare military conflict in a placid region and fueling further instability in a country that, over the last decade, already set off the world’s largest refugee crisis.

Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Trump’s use of foreign terrorist designations changes the rules of engagement in ways that allow for action “where law enforcement solutions failed in the past.”

“What we are witnessing is a paradigm shift in real time,” Berg said. “Many of Latin America’s most significant criminal organizations are now designated foreign terrorist organizations. The administration is demonstrating that this is not only rhetorical.”

But Paul Gootenberg, a professor at Stony Brook University and author of “Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug,” characterized Trump’s military operation as a “simplistic” approach to complex social problems.

“This is more a performative attack on the Venezuelan regime than a serious attempt at drug policy,” Gootenberg said.

“Militarized drug policy is nothing new — it was tried and intensified in various ways from the mid-1980s through 2000s, oftentimes under U.S. Southern Command,” he added. “The whole range and levels of ‘war on drugs’ was a long, unmitigated policy failure, according to the vast, vast majority of drug experts.”

Times staff writer Ana Ceballos contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. is purchasing enough doses of a new twice-a-year HIV prevention shot to share with up to 2 million people in poor countries by 2028, the State Department announced Thursday.

Gilead Sciences had already announced it would sell that supply of the protective drug lenacapvir at no profit for use in low- and middle-income countries that are hard-hit by HIV. The question was who would buy and distribute it after the Trump administration slashed foreign aid earlier this year — forcing closures of health clinics and disrupting HIV testing and care in many countries.

Under Thursday’s move, the U.S. will purchase the doses under the PEPFAR program and work with governments in hard-hit countries on how to distribute them. The priority will be to protect pregnant or breastfeeding women, said Jeremy Lewin, a State Department senior official.

Lewin said the program will be a collaboration with the Global Fund, another international program that funds HIV treatment and prevention efforts, but wouldn’t disclose how much the U.S. was investing.

“We’re hoping, with the Global Fund, to help 2 million people get on the medication over the next three years but could potentially see more,” he said.

There are more than 30,000 new HIV infections in the U.S. every year and 1.2 million people are living with the virus. Worldwide there are 1.3 million new infections annually and nearly 40 million people living with the virus.

Many experts say lenacapavir is the most powerful option yet for what’s called PrEP — using preventive medicines to guard against sexually transmitted HIV. Unlike daily pills that people may forget, each lenacapavir shot offers protection for six months. In two groundbreaking studies with people at high risk, it nearly eliminated new infections.

The drug already has been approved for use in the U.S. and Europe.

In March, the head of the U.N. AIDS agency urged the Trump administration and Gilead to make the preventive shots available worldwide for millions.

Gilead has signed agreements with generic drugmakers to produce low-cost versions of the shot for poor countries, mostly in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. The doses provided at-cost for up to 2 million people in those countries were intended to be a stopgap until the generics are available.

Neergaard writes for the Associated Press.

United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that military attacks on alleged drug traffickers will “happen again”, brushing aside concerns over the legality of such attacks and the sovereignty of Latin American nations.

Speaking during a news conference in Mexico City on Wednesday, Rubio pledged continued security coordination with countries like Mexico, but suggested the US would not hesitate to take extreme measures on its own.

His remarks, in part, were a response to President Donald Trump’s announcement that the US had blown up a vessel in the Caribbean Sea a day earlier.

Trump and Rubio identified the small boat as a drug-smuggling vessel coming from Venezuela, though no details were provided. All 11 people on board reportedly died.

Rubio framed the air strike as part of a shifting strategy in the US’s ongoing “war on drugs”.

“The United States has long — for many, many years — established intelligence that allowed us to interdict and stop drug boats. And we did that. And it doesn’t work. Interdiction doesn’t work,” Rubio said.

“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them.”

Rubio then explained that the attack was authorised personally by Trump. It had been in the south Caribbean Sea at the time of the attack, and Rubio said it was headed for the US.

“Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up. And it will happen again,” Rubio said. “Maybe it’s happening right now. I don’t know.”

Rubio’s visit to Mexico City comes as the Trump administration seeks close cooperation with Mexico, but its aggressive foreign policy has spurred concerns abroad.

Latin American nations have struggled to balance the need for working relations with the US and Trump’s increasingly brazen threats.

Experts say that attacks like Tuesday’s boat bombing are likely illegal under international law, which limits military actions on vessels sailing through international waters.

Still, Rubio defended the action as necessary for protecting the wellbeing of the US.

“If you’re on a boat full of cocaine or fentanyl, whatever, headed to the United States, you’re an immediate threat to the United States,” said Rubio.

US military strikes against armed groups around the world have often depended on the idea that such groups, often tied to armed or fighting groups that represent an immediate risk to US national security. That argument has not previously been used as a pretext for military strikes on drug trafficking, deemed a criminal issue.

But Trump’s second inauguration has marked a shift in that approach.

Since taking office in January, Trump has pushed for emergency powers on the premise that Latin American gangs and other criminal groups constitute an “invasion” on US soil.

He has also designated many such groups as “foreign terrorist organisations”.

In August, reports emerged that Trump had signed an order authorising military strikes against cartels and other drug-smuggling operations, fuelling fears that the US would carry out military strikes in Latin America despite concerns about sovereignty.

Such concerns have been particularly prominent in Mexico, the US’s immediate neighbour to the south.

To mark Rubio’s visit, Mexico and the US issued a joint statement emphasising “respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity”.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has also repeatedly sought to dispel worries that the Trump administration may take unilateral action on Mexican soil. Trump, meanwhile, has not ruled out such a possibility.

Al Jazeera correspondent John Holman explained that Rubio’s visit was aimed at “smoothing the feathers” and lowering tensions in Mexico.

“There was a lot of fulsome praise. But the elephant in the room here really is that President Trump has been saying repeatedly that, if Mexico wants it, then the US is very happy to send its military down into the country to fight drug cartels,” Holman explained.

“That really wasn’t touched on in this meeting apart from the Mexican foreign minister repeatedly saying that, ‘Yes, we’re going to work with the United States’ — in a very diplomatic way, saying everyone in their own jurisdiction.”

Nevertheless, Rubio and other US officials have emphasised that the US would continue to collaborate on security and drug enforcement with Mexico, which the US has pushed to take a more aggressive stance.

“We’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on the TV show Fox and Friends.

Not all countries in the region are apprehensive as the US takes on an increasingly militarised approach to criminal groups.

“I, along with most of the country, am happy that the US naval deployment is having success in their mission,” Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said in a statement on Tuesday.

“The pain and suffering the cartels have inflicted on our nation is immense. I have no sympathy for traffickers; the US military should kill them all violently.”