Top World News

Sep 17, 2025 - World

Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs says Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have signed a defense pact pledging that any attack on either nation would be considered an attack on both

Sep 17, 2025 - World

At least 11 of the 14 immigrants deported by the U.S. to Ghana are still being held there, according to the deportees and their lawyers

Sep 17, 2025 - World

President Donald Trump pledged to reduce the high cost of drugs, but he likely didn't mean the cost of cocaine. A Wall Street Journal report on Wednesday revealed that Trump's mass deportation operations have removed important agents from those in U.S. Customs and Border Protection stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border. The report spoke with 59-year-old Nemesio “Mencho” Oseguera, a new drug king in Mexico, stashed away in closely guarded mountains in the heart of the Sierra Madre. For decades, he has worked to build the Jalisco New Generation Cartel while other cartels are warring with each other. Oseguera has caught a "break from the Trump administration," as described by the Journal. While Trump's agents are focused on deporting migrants, fewer federal agents are dealing with "drug-traffic interdiction.""In Arizona, two Customs and Border Protection checkpoints along a main fentanyl-smuggling corridor from Mexico have been left unstaffed," the report revealed. "Officers stationed there were sent to process detained migrants. A senior administration official said the U.S. border is more secure than it has ever been."Meanwhile, Colombia is making "record amounts of cocaine," said the report. The availability is now dropping prices. "Cocaine prices have fallen by nearly half to around $60 to $75 a gram compared with five years ago," the Journal reported, citing Drug Checking Los Angeles researcher Morgan Godvin.“The price of pure cocaine has plummeted,” Godvin noted.The top fentanyl traffickers in Mexico are the Sinaloans, who were caught by Trump's crackdown. However, their absence has allowed an "open field for Jalisco."While the U.S. is trying to catch Oseguera, with a $15 million bounty, the report said he rarely leaves the mountain and his guards are armed with "heat-seeking, shoulder-fired rocket launchers capable of piercing a tank," among other things, the report said. Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was extradited to the U.S. in January 2016, and his sons inherited the operation. While they were moving a variety of drugs like cocaine and heroin, they switched largely to fentanyl, the report said. It noted that it's easier to produce and smuggle. In December, Oseguera sat down with Sinaloa's faction led by the Guzmán sons, noting he was willing to supply them with weapons, cash, and fighters if they could use the cartel's smuggling routes and tunnels into the U.S., the report said, citing those familiar with the meeting. They also divided up the drug trafficking. The Guzmán sons would handle fentanyl, and the Oseguera would focus on cocaine and meth. Read the extensive report here.

Sep 17, 2025 - World

Ukraine expects to have a $3.5 billion fund by next month to buy weapons from the U.S. and sustain its fight against Russia's invasion

Sep 17, 2025 - World

On Sept. 2, the Trump administration shared footage purporting to show a US strike on a Venezuelan fishing boat. Even if we take the incident entirely at face value (and there are a lot of reasons to question the video itself) — the US Navy attacked a fishing boat off Venezuela, killing 11 people. On Monday, another strike was allegedly conducted on a boat, killing three people. The way the media has handled these strikes is an indictment of the state of American neoliberal reporting in a neofascist age.Why hasn’t the mainstream media pressed the administration on these strikes being illegal and dangerous (and unpopular)? Why has no one in Washington considered the implications of calling a fishing boat carrying civilians a legitimate military target? Why isn’t the media calling the Venezuelan boat strike an abhorrent war crime at every turn?It’s simple: they don’t care about defending the truth or holding the powerful accountable. They have no principles to stand on besides profit and access.Within hours of these strikes breaking, major outlets were repeating the Trump administration’s line that this was a strike on a “drug boat.” According to this framing, the attacks were justified, necessary, and part of a broader war on drug trafficking. Virtually none of these outlets even entertained the obvious legal and ethical questions. Instead, they served as stenographers for the administration. This is not what an objective (not neutral) press in an advanced democracy does.This is reminiscent of the Iraq War era, when corporate media parroted the Bush administration’s ludicrous arguments, paving the way for invasion and occupation that would kill at least 200,000, maim millions, and destroy American democracy further.Legal experts across the spectrum have already stood up to say the killings were illegal. Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s conservative Antonin Scalia Law School, called the strike “unjust and illegal.” Jeremy Wildeman, an adjunct professor of international Affairs at Carleton University and fellow at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre in Ottawa, described it as “part of the dangerous and ongoing erosion of due process and the very basic principles of how we interact with each other in domestic and foreign affairs, regulated by accepted norms, rules, and laws, that the Trump administration has been pointedly hostile toward following and specifically undermining.”Wildeman added that “this is definitely about regime change and domination.” Even the Atlantic Council hedged, acknowledging that the legality was at best murky and in some cases advancing arguments to justify it. Meanwhile, US Vice President JD Vance bluntly stated that he does not care if the strikes are war crimes at all.The available evidence does suggest this was an outright criminal massacre. The first boat was, we now know thanks to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), turning back to shore, not threatening US forces when it was fired upon. Those killed would be civilians. Even if they were transporting drugs, drug couriers are not lawful combatants. They are criminals under domestic law, not combatants in an armed conflict.Due process was ignored. There was no trial, no arrest, no attempt at interdiction — just summary execution. And the strikes occurred in Venezuelan territorial waters, not in an international conflict zone. If another country did this, say Russia bombing a fishing boat in the Baltic, or China attacking smugglers near Taiwan, the Western media would have declared it a war crime the same day. Add this to the list of Western double standards in the international arena — we are seeing the destruction of the “liberal order” in real time.These strikes are not a one-off. They fit into decades of US policy toward Venezuela, including economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and repeated regime change attempts. For 25 years, Washington has tried to topple the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro through economic sabotage, coups, and support for far-right opposition. The humanitarian toll of those sanctions has been devastating. They have themselves emboldened repression by the Maduro government, which has used America as a scapegoat, with reason, for all its faults.Now, with this attack, we see a dangerous escalation from economic to military means. If the precedent is set that the US can strike targets inside Venezuela (this was in Venezuela’s national waters) with impunity, it opens the door to a broader military campaign. That is exactly what think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies have been preparing for. One CSIS report, now deleted, explicitly laid out “options for regime change” in Venezuela, against the “Maduro narco-terrorist regime.”So why is the media so unwilling to call this what it is? Major outlets fear losing access to government sources if they challenge the official narrative. They also simply don’t want to admit that America is committing crimes, and may not be the moral actors in every major geopolitical event, as they were taught throughout their lives. Going back to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent 101, corporate interests are also important, with companies like Exxon and Chevron having billions at stake in Venezuela’s oil fields (and a US-backed government running things in Caracas). US military action that destabilizes or topples Maduro could directly benefit those firms.Many of the analysts quoted in media coverage are from think tanks funded by the defense industry or oil companies. They have an interest in exaggerating Venezuela’s threat and downplaying US abuses, to make the US intervention seem justified and good. And reporters too often repackage leaks from US intelligence agencies as fact, without independently verifying. A lot of the “analysis” on the strikes in mainstream news has been from the intelligence agencies, who have a direct incentive to lie and manipulate information in favor of regime change.Even respected outlets have contributed to this dynamic. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have both amplified the claim that Venezuela is a “narco-terrorist state.” That claim has been debunked by organizations like InSight Crime and the International Crisis Group, which show that while drugs transit Venezuela, it is hardly unique; Colombia and Mexico play a much larger role in global cocaine markets, yet they remain US allies.Meanwhile, outlets like the Christian Science Monitor are pushing a narrative that “more Latin Americans welcome US intervention,” based on flimsy and cherry-picked anecdotes that, once again, helps the Trump administration lay the groundwork for more meddling and war. Would the Marines be greeted as liberators in Caracas? The hope is to expand the “War on Drugs” into the “War on Terror,” giving the US military more tools to intervene in Latin America, and then bringing repression to the home front (also called the Imperial Boomerang theory). In reality, the region is increasingly turning away from Washington’s militaristic and blusterous approach, seeking alternative frameworks to the failed War on Drugs.Joseph Bouchard is a journalist and researcher from Québec covering security and democracy in Latin America. His articles have appeared in Responsible Statecraft, Reason, The Diplomat, Le Devoir, and RealClearPolitics, among others. He is a PhD student in Politics at the University of Virginia and a SSHRC doctoral fellow on Latin American Politics.