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Death of commander of Popular Forces is blow to Israel’s efforts to confront Hamas through proxy groupsThe leader of an Israeli-backed militia in Gaza has been killed, dealing a major blow to Israel’s efforts to build up its own Palestinian proxies to confront Hamas.Yasser abu Shabab, a Bedouin tribal leader based in the Israeli-held zone of the devastated territory, is thought to have died from wounds sustained in a violent clash with powerful and well-armed local families, according to local media and sources in Gaza. Continue reading...

Delhi visit gives Russian leader a chance to reduce Moscow’s isolation but both countries need each other to negotiate Trump’s US and a powerful ChinaWhen Vladimir Putin last set foot in India almost exactly four years ago, the world order looked materially different. At that visit – lasting just five hours due to the Covid pandemic – Putin and the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, discussed economic and military cooperation and reaffirmed their special relationship.Three months later, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine would turn him into a global pariah, isolating the Kremlin from the world and restricting Putin’s international travel. Continue reading...

WASHINGTON — Democratic veterans on Capitol Hill say there’s a dangerous throughline to Pete Hegseth’s dueling scandals, over the use of an unsecured messaging app and boat bombings in the Caribbean and Pacific: The Pentagon chief is endangering US troops.A new report from the Pentagon inspector general finds Hegseth — a former Army officer who was a Fox News weekend host before he entered government — put troops in danger this spring when he shared Yemen war plans on the commercial messaging app Signal."He shared information he shouldn't have in a way that he shouldn't have, and the consequences are that our military could be compromised and the safety of our men and women in uniform could be compromised,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) told Raw Story. “That's what we know.”“Is that the kind of person that we want to be the Secretary of Defense?" Houlahan — an Air Force veteran and member of both the House Intelligence and Armed Services Committees — said. "No one should be using Signal in that way. Nobody should be communicating that information at all. It's just not nobody, it's the Secretary of Defense."Details from the inspector general report on Hegseth’s use of commercial messaging app Signal — including how the then national security adviser, Mike Waltz, came to add Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat ahead of strikes in Yemen — are damning to many in Congress.But that issue pales in comparison to allegations Hegseth signed off on unlawful military strikes in the Caribbean. To veterans in Congress, it’s unconscionable that Secretary of Defense Hegseth and President Donald Trump, the commander-in-chief, are seemingly letting their underlings take the blame for the military strikes. “It is incredibly offensive. And it sends a message to the troops that this President, this SecDef, is willing to throw you under the bus,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) — an Army veteran who lost her legs in Iraq — told Raw Story. “One of the first things you learn as an Army officer, which, you know, [Hegseth] supposedly was, is that you can always delegate authority, but you never delegate responsibility. The responsibility rests with him.”Hegseth doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. ‘No leader worth their salt’On Monday, the Defense Secretary took to social media to seemingly shift the blame.“Lets make one thing crystal clear: Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100 percent support,” Hegseth wrote on X. “I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on this September 2 mission and all others since.”That was the mission when, the Washington Post first reported, an order was given to carry out a second strike on a boat in the Caribbean, the first having left survivors clinging to wreckage. The Post said Hegseth ordered the second strike, which most analysts say would constitute a war crime. He denies it. To Duckworth and many other veterans on Capitol Hill, Hegseth passing the buck is scandalous. “I've always known that he's not qualified for the job,” Duckworth said. “I worry about the service members being put into jeopardy by this, right? We’re violating international laws of armed conflict, we are putting service members in legal jeopardy.“My focus right now is what are we doing to our service members? We're putting them in real jeopardy, both legally and also personally. I mean, you know, if we're going to do this in international waters, what's to keep some other country from saying, ‘Hey, we're going to do this to the US’?”Other senior members of the Armed Services Committees agreed. "No leader worth their salt pushes responsibility off on a subordinate,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) told Raw Story. “And if Hegseth gave a ‘kill everybody’ order — and we have to determine whether, in fact, that's true — that's a clear violation of law, whether or not he gave it before the second strike. A kill everybody order just in and of itself is a violation of the laws of war.”Kaine says Hegseth has a bad habit of passing the buck. "The opening salvo of ‘It's all a lie’ and ‘It's journalists who are spinning a fake narrative’ to now, ‘Well, yeah, it's true but you know, it was Adm. Bradley's call, not mine’ — I mean, you know, no,” Kaine said. ‘Legal risk’Kaine and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) are renewing their calls for Congress to pass an AUMF — or Authorization for Use of Military Force — before the Pentagon carries out more air strikes off the coast of Venezuela. "We're seeing realized a lot of the fears members had that this unauthorized campaign would result in blowback to the country, to our troops," Schiff told Raw Story. "One of the concerns I've had all along has been that we risk putting service members in physical danger, but we also risk putting them at legal risk and that's exactly what's happened."Hegseth’s Democratic critics say it's the same with “Signalgate.” "Secretary Hegseth has been a liability to the administration from the moment he was confirmed,” Houlahan of Pennsylvania said. “At what point does the President recognize that and ask for his resignation?"

Prohibited from working, people sent to the island by Australia say they are struggling to survive because food is so expensiveFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAsylum seekers sent to Nauru by Australia say they are going hungry on the island, prohibited from working to support themselves and given insufficient money to buy enough food.Others say they fear the Nauru government will deport them to their home countries, from where they say they have fled persecution and violence. Continue reading...

Much improved response systems are struggling to cope with ever more powerful and destructive stormsDeath toll from Indonesia floods passes 700 as 1 million evacuatedFamilies stranded on their rooftops. Homes buried by fast-flowing mud. Jagged brown craters scarring lush green hillsides.The scenes are the result of a series of cyclones and storms in a heavy monsoon season that have struck Asia with torrential rains, gutting essential infrastructure and reshaping landscapes. The violent weather has killed at least 1,200 people in the past week and forced a million to flee without knowing whether their homes will still be standing when they go back. Continue reading...

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."

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.

By Evan Ellis, Latin America Research Professor, US Army War College. As an analyst who has worked on security issues for over 30 years, I've been monitoring the US military build-up in the Caribbean for months.The US administration now has the potential to take decisive military action in Venezuela.Washington has described Nicolás Maduro as the leader of a terrorist group and deemed his regime illegitimate.The US has named its mission in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean "Operation Southern Spear" and briefed President Donald Trump on military options.The arrival of the USS Gerald R. Ford gives the US Joint Task Force established in the region the option to launch a high volume of attacks against land targets, should Trump give the order. According to media reports, there are now 15,000 troops in the region, including marines on ships and some 5,000 personnel at bases in Puerto Rico.This massive deployment has, arguably, sought to convince Maduro's loyalists that US action is now an option on the table.The message is clear: if a military solution is pursued, the US is highly likely to be successful.This quantity of US military hardware in the region has not been seen since "Operation Uphold Democracy" in Haiti in 1994, when American-led forces helped end the military regime that had overthrown the democratically elected government.The most modern aircraft carrier in the US Navy is the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier. Its ability to rapidly launch and recover the 75 modern fighter aircraft on board would allow it to generate a significant number of strikes against Venezuelan targets. This would serve as a complement to the substantial numbers of missiles and other weapons on the other ships in the region.It joins an Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group. This group includes a helicopter dock ship and two landing platform vessels capable of transporting the 2,200 marines of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and their vehicles and equipment onto land, should they be needed.If such an event occurs, they would be transported by V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft, helicopters and rapid air cushioned landing craft with the capacity to carry marines and heavier equipment over the beach to their objectives.In addition, the US has six destroyers and two cruisers with hundreds of missiles for both land attack and air defence and an AC-130 gunship capable of delivering high volumes of missiles against land targets.The special operations force's support ship, the "Ocean Trader", is also in the region and there is at least one attack submarine under the water's surface.Then on nearby US territory in Puerto Rico, the US has at least 10 F-35s, the most advanced fighter jet in the world. Flight tracking shows on Nov. 21 at least four additional aircraft were flown into the region from the US.These capabilities are further complemented by rapidly deployable assets from nearby bases in the continental US, from which the US has already flown sorties with B-52 and B-1 bombers.At least one MQ-9 Reaper attack and surveillance drone has also been deployed in the region.The imbalance of military firepower cannot be overstated. The small number of man-portable Igla-S anti-aircraft weapons that Maduro can rely on could take out a handful of US helicopters. But it is likely that few are in workable condition and even those may not be in the hands of people who know how to use them.Venezuela has around 63,000 soldiers, 23,000 troops in the National Guard and 15,000 marines. There are also unknown thousands in the militia. A submarine, two frigates, two corvettes and several missile and patrol boats are patrolling the coast. But they are massively dwarfed by the number, power and reach of what the US has stationed there.How it could unfoldAny move by Venezuelans to oust Maduro themselves could be supported by limited US operations on land targets, including military leaders and facilities supporting what the US alleges are drug operations.Should a home-grown attempt be unsuccessful, a large-scale, decisive US operation to capture or eliminate the regime's leadership, is one option.One way this could be done could involve a massive barrage of missiles and strikes by stealth aircraft, supported by electronic warfare, special operations missions, and clandestine operations from inside the country. The aim would be to take down the regime’s air defence systems, command nodes, fighter aircraft and other threats.Whether the United States would follow up such an operation with "boots on the ground" is not certain.But if Washington has the will, the US certainly has the military might needed to remove the US-designated terrorist group "Cartel de los Soles," including its alleged head, Maduro, which it claims is a threat to US interests.