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Conservative pundit Walter Curt argued that President Donald Trump should invade Venezuela after the country's president, Nicolás Maduro, sang John Lennon's "Imagine" as a call for peace."I believe that an attack on a drug cartel stronghold on the ground in Venezuela is imminent," Real America's Voice host Jake Novak told Curt on Monday before playing a clip of Maduro singing a line from "Imagine.""Let it be known across the world, though, that a sure way to provoke military action is to sing John Lennon's 'Imagine,' which I think is actually necessary," Curt argued. "The moment I saw this, but whenever this first came out, I said, all right, double the bounty, send the Marines.""I think there's a major play we're making down there for the entire region by going out of Venezuela," he noted. "Everyone seems to forget that Venezuela also has, you know, the world's largest oil reserves.""But, you know, any time you're singing John Lennon's 'Imagine,' I think you should immediately be invaded by the Marines, paratroopers. Send 'em all."

MP for Hampstead and Highgate in London denies allegations and condemns ‘flawed and farcical’ trialWhat led to Bangladesh trial of Tulip Siddiq in her absence?A court in Bangladesh has sentenced the British MP Tulip Siddiq to two years in jail after a judge ruled she was complicit in corrupt land deals with her aunt, the country’s deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina.In a ruling on Monday, a judge found Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate, guilty of misusing her “special influence” as a British politician to coerce Hasina into giving valuable pieces of land to her mother, brother and sister. Continue reading...

Shocking as this moment is, none of us should pretend we weren’t warned. When Donald Trump installed Pete Hegseth — a television provocateur whose public record is soaked in belligerence, booze, and culture-war performance — as America’s Defense Secretary, the world could see exactly where it was headed.Still, nothing prepared us for the Washington Post revelation that Hegseth personally ordered U.S. forces to “kill everybody” on a small wooden boat off the coast of Trinidad on Sept. 2.You’d expect rogue militias or failed-state paramilitaries to speak that way. You don’t expect it from the man running the Pentagon.What the Post reports is almost too grotesque to absorb.After the first U.S. missile ripped the boat apart and set it burning, commanders watched on a live drone feed as two survivors clung desperately to the charred wreckage.They were unarmed. They were wounded. They were no threat to anyone. They were simply alive; inconveniently alive for a man who had allegedly already given the order that there be no survivors.And so, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the strike, the Special Operations commander overseeing the operation ordered a second missile. It hit the water and blew those two men apart.History tells us to watch out for nations that lose their moral compass in real time.It starts when the powerful stop seeing human beings as human. It accelerates when the government itself denies any obligation to justify its killings.And when leaders begin lying to Congress and the public to cover what they’ve done, you’re no longer looking at isolated abuses. You’re staring straight into the machinery of authoritarianism.Instead of telling Congress that the second strike was designed to finish off wounded survivors, Pentagon officials claimed it was to “remove a navigation hazard.”That isn’t just spin: it’s an attempt to rewrite reality.The Post quotes Todd Huntley, a former Special Operations military lawyer now at Georgetown Law, saying exactly what any first-year law student would immediately recognize: because the U.S. is not legally “at war” with drug traffickers, killing the people on that boat “amounts to murder.”Even if a war did exist, Huntley notes, the order to kill wounded, unarmed survivors “would in essence be an order to show no quarter,” which is defined under the Geneva Conventions as a war crime.This isn’t an obscure legal debate. This is basic civilization. Armed states do not execute helpless people in the water.And yet this is now U.S. policy. The boat strike on Sept. 2 was not a one-off. It was the beginning of a campaign.The Post reports that since that first attack, Trump and Hegseth have ordered more than 20 similar missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 80 people.The administration insists the victims were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But in classified briefings to Congress, Pentagon officials have not provided even one single verified name of a trafficker or gang leader they’ve killed. Lawmakers from both parties say they’ve been shown nothing beyond grainy videos of small boats being destroyed from the air.If these men had truly been high-value cartel operatives, Trump would be parading names and photos across every rally stage in America. The silence tells its own story.Experts warn that many of the dead may not have been traffickers at all. They may have been border-crossing migrants, subsistence fishermen, or small-scale smugglers whose crimes did not remotely justify summary execution.International human rights groups are already calling these killings extrajudicial and illegal. Some foreign governments are asking whether the United States has effectively created a free-fire zone over parts of the Caribbean, and several have limited intelligence sharing with us for fear of being complicit in prosecutable war crimes and crimes against humanity.This, too, has been part of the authoritarian playbook since ancient times.Pick a foreign or criminal “other,” paint them as subhuman monsters, and then declare that the normal laws of war, morality, and basic decency no longer apply.For years, right-wing media has been hyping Tren de Aragua as a kind of supercharged successor to MS-13, just as Trump once used MS-13 as a bludgeon to justify abuses at home.The fact that the administration has produced no evidence for its claims isn’t a bug: it’s the point. When the government fabricates an omnipresent threat, it gives itself permission to kill whoever it wants.This may also explain the ferocity with which Hegseth and Trump went after Democratic lawmakers when they reminded U.S. service members that they are duty-bound to disobey illegal orders.Those officers weren’t being dramatic: they were issuing a warning grounded in fresh blood. And Hegseth’s and Trump’s panicked rage — calling for the death penalty for six members of Congress, including a decorated war hero and a CIA officer — now makes perfect sense: he knows perfectly well what he’s already ordered.The strike on Sept. 2 is not just a policy failure; it’s a moral collapse. If the Post’s reporting is accurate — and multiple congressional offices say it is consistent with what whistleblowers have told them — then the United States has engaged in the deliberate killing of wounded, unarmed men floating in the sea.That is the kind of conduct that topples governments, triggers war-crimes investigations, and leaves scars on nations for generations.Nobody elected Trump or Hegseth to serve as judge, jury, and executioner for impoverished people in wooden boats. Nobody gave them the authority to murder suspects without trial. And nobody gave them the right to lie to Congress about it.Congress must not let this pass. These allegations demand immediate public hearings, subpoena power, and full investigative authority.If Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody,” he must be removed and prosecuted.If U.S. commanders falsified reports to mislead Congress and the public, they must be held accountable.And if Trump approved or encouraged these actions, then impeachment and criminal referral are not optional: they’re required to defend the rule of law.America doesn’t have many chances left to prove to the world, and to ourselves, that we still believe in the value of human life and the restraints of democratic power. This is one of them.

This blog is now closed.Full report: Sri Lanka and Indonesia deploy militaries as Asia floods death toll passes 1,100How cyclones and monsoon rains combined to devastate parts of Asia – visual guideCyclone Ditwah, which unleashed catastrophic flooding and landslides across Sri Lanka, has brought heavy rain to India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu.The storm, now about 30 miles off the coast of the city of Chennai, the state capital, has weakened into a “deep depression”, according to weather officials, who expect it to weaken even further across the day. Continue reading...

President Donald Trump’s saber-rattling about potential military action in Venezuela is indeed about drugs, but not cocaine. It is about a far more dangerous drug that former President George W. Bush admitted (in his 2006 State of the Union address) the US is addicted to.Oil.Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world — 300 billion barrels — even larger than reserves in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Trump and his oil industry friends may imagine that by deposing President Nicolás Maduro and installing a friendly government there, the US would have unlimited access to this huge oil reserve, which is five times larger than the proven reserves in the US. Never mind the fact that for any hope of future climate stability, most of this oil needs to stay right where it is: in the ground.We’ve seen this tragic play before. The Bush administration justified its disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq with the pretext that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which, as it turned out, it didn’t. As US Central Command commander General John Abizaid admitted about the Iraq War at the time: “Of course it’s about oil, it’s very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that.” The invasion killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, and destabilized the broader Middle East region for years.And now here we go again. A similar pretext — this time “drug interdiction” — is being used to justify a potential US invasion and regime change in Venezuela. But this is not about stopping the flow of dangerous drugs, it is about actually increasing the flow of the dangerous drug some pushers want to keep us all hooked on.Oil. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro recently stated on the US-Venezuela threat: “Oil is at the heart of the matter.”Instead of admitting their addiction, the damage it causes, and committing to recovery, hardcore junkies are always desperate for more supply. It seems Mr. Trump and his oil industry friends are the most dangerous narco-traffickers we need to worry about.Richard Steiner was a marine professor with the University of Alaska from 1980 to 2010, stationed in the Arctic and Prince William Sound. He advises on oil and environment through Oasis Earth.

This commentary was originally published by Big Pivots. The Sand Creek Massacre comes to mind in reading about U.S. Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), a decorated combat veteran who declared that members of the U.S. military must refuse illegal orders.“No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution,” said Crow and five other members of Congress, all of them veterans of our armed forces or intelligence services, in a video posted last week.President Donald Trump went ballistic, branding them as traitors. “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!” said a social media post that Trump shared. He later backtracked, saying he didn’t actually call for their deaths. Not sure what hanging short of death looks like. Crow and other legislators did report death threats.Denver7 talked with a former U.S. Army officer, Joseph Jordan. His law firm specializes in defending service members under investigation. He cited the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which says service members must obey orders, unless they are “patently illegal,” such as one that “directs the commission of a crime.”But the code says those who disobey orders risk facing a court martial. A military judge decides if an order was lawful.Writing in the New York Times, David French, an attorney who served in Iraq, as did Crow, parsed details of the relevant federal law. Shooting a prisoner is unambiguously illegal, said French. Bombing a home that is thought to contain insurgents is not.Looming large is the legality of Trump’s orders to kill those on boats in the Caribbean who may — or may not — be carrying narcotics. Trump, said French, “has put the military in an impossible situation. He’s making its most senior leaders complicit in his unlawful acts, and he’s burdening the consciences of soldiers who serve under his command.”Captain refuses to killAt Sand Creek, on Nov. 29, 1864, Captain Silas Soule and Lieutenant Joseph Cramer refused to allow their men to participate in killing about 200 Cheyenne and Arapahoe natives, most of them women and children.The Great Plains in 1864 were contested territory. Colorado had become a U.S. territory in 1861, but the Cheyenne and other tribes who had migrated over the previous 150 years to build lives around the plentiful buffalo herds were not consulted. Friction was growing. Murders had occurred.Desperate to figure out a co-existence, a delegation of Arapahoe and Cheyenne leaders had traveled to Denver that September. Colorado’s territorial governor, John Evans, was present but remained largely silent. The natives left, believing they had been assured safety if they remained in place in southeastern Colorado. About 350 of them and various other individuals were camped along the dry creek bed that November.Colonel John Chivington had other ideas. He was a hero from an 1864 Civil War battle in New Mexico. He had been at the peace negotiations that September. But perhaps hoping to embellish his reputation and win a seat in Congress, Chivington set out from Denver for Fort Lyons, near today’s Las Animas. There, he detained anybody who he thought would interfere with his plans.Marching overnight, Chivington and his men arrived at the Sand Creek encampment at dawn. The natives had hoisted the American flag amid their teepees, but it did them no good. A triumphant Chivington and his men returned to Denver hoisting scalps. They were welcomed as heroes.Some saw them otherwise. Soule and Cramer, horrified by what they had seen, wrote impassioned letters to their commanding officer, Major Edward Wynkoop. The Army held hearings several months later. Soule did not live long enough to be fully vindicated. He was assassinated in Denver the next April. Both Soule and Evans are buried at Riverside Cemetery, north of downtown Denver.Among many accomplishments, Evans helped found both Northwestern University in Illinois and the University of Denver. In 2014, both universities commissioned reports examining the culpability of Evans in the massacre. The Northwestern report was slightly more restrained, but both found Evans bore responsibility for helping create the circumstances. More than any other political official in Colorado Territory, said the DU report, Evans “created the conditions in which the massacre was highly likely.”Soule’s grave is marked by a simple white tombstone along with other veterans. The grave of Evans is large and imposing. Last Memorial Day, I found flowers, a flag and a testimonial at the grave of Silas Soule. Others had visited, too. As for the tombstone of Evans, I saw nothing. He had remained silent in 1864, when leadership was needed.Allen Best is a Colorado-based journalist who publishes an e-magazine called Big Pivots. Reach him at [email protected].

Newsmax host T.W. Shannon exploded at his guest Saturday after they rebuked his condemnation of those criticizing the Trump administration’s potentially illegal military orders, calling his guest’s remarks "outrageous."“We're seeing the left now comparing our troops to Nazis!” Shannon proclaimed, pointing to remarks from Glenn Kirschner, an attorney and former U.S. Army prosecutor. Appearing recently on MS NOW, Kirschner spoke in support of the Democratic lawmakers who urged service members to defy unlawful orders.“If you're committing offenses, and your defense is going to be 'I was just following orders,' you know, that didn't work out so well at Nuremberg,” Kirschner said, referring to the military tribunals held after World War II to prosecute high-ranking Nazi officials.Following the clip, Shannon tried to get a consensus among his two guests – Joe Conason, editor-in-chief at National Memo, and Jeffrey Lord, columnist for The American Spectator – but failed to convince both of them.“Now Joe, surely we're at a point where we can all agree that comparing United States service members to Nazis is over and beyond the pale?” Shannon asked.“I don't think that's what he did, he clearly didn't do that if you listen to the clip,” Conason said. “The point is that if you follow illegal orders, you're imitating some of the worst figures in history, and we have a record with [President] Donald Trump of issuing illegal orders.”Conason went on to argue that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth – who’s carried out a number of strikes in the Caribbean at the direction of Trump targeting suspected drug traffickers, strikes that have been called illegal “extrajudicial killings” – had already violated the law with his remarks condemning the Democratic lawmakers – specifically Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) – who urged service members to defy illegal orders.“What's funny is that Hegseth clearly has no idea of what the legality of anything is!” Conason said. “He, by basically publicly convicting Mark Kelly in his remarks, violated the Uniform Code of Military Conduct himself!”Shannon went on to call Conason’s remarks “outrageous,” and encouraged his other guest to rebuke them. Lord was happy to oblige, declaring there to be “nothing illegal” about the Trump administration’s strikes on suspected drug traffickers at sea.Conason wasn’t done yet, however, and tore into Hegseth and the Trump administration for what he called their “real touch of evil.”“The question is how do you stop illegal drug smuggling? Do you murder people in advance of any showing that they were doing anything like that, or would you arrest them on the high seas as we've done in the past?” Conason said. “Or, do you just blow up boats and kill the survivors? I mean, that was the real touch of evil here. Apparently, Secretary Hegseth was informed that there were survivors of a strike and then told somebody to 'kill them all.'

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly delivered an order in the first attack on a suspected drug boat that lawmakers have blasted as excessive and "blatantly illegal."President Donald Trump's Pentagon chief ordered a missile attack on the boat Sept. 2 off the Trinidad coast, but intelligence analysts and military leaders watching drone footage of the strike realized after the smoke cleared there were two survivors clinging to the wreckage – and the Washington Post reported that Hegseth gave another verbal directive.“The order was to kill everybody,” said a source with direct knowledge of the situation.The Special Operations commander overseeing the attack ordered another strike at Hegseth's instruction, and the two men were blown apart in the water – which a former military lawyer said "amounts to murder."An order to strike the defenseless men "would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Todd Huntley, who advised Special Operations forces during U.S. counterterrorism campaign is now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.The elite SEAL Team 6 led the attack, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the matter, and the operations commander, Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, told others on the secure conference call that the survivors were legitimate targets because they might have been able to call other traffickers to come get them and their cargo.The Pentagon has since struck at least 22 more boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing another 71 alleged drug smugglers.Later the same day, Trump released a redacted 29-second video of the Sept. 2 attack, which didn't show the follow-up strike, but one person who saw the live feed said people would be horrified if the entire video was made public.Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, reported to the White House that the “double-tap,” or follow-on strike, was intended to sink the boat and remove a possible hazard to other ships, and not to kill survivors, and a similar explanation was given to lawmakers in closed-door briefings.“The idea that wreckage from one small boat in a vast ocean is a hazard to marine traffic is patently absurd, and killing survivors is blatantly illegal,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), a Marine Corps veteran and Trump critic who was briefed on the strikes with other members of the House Armed Services Committee. “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder.”