Category World News

Republicans in the United States Senate have voted down legislation that would have required US President Donald Trump to obtain congressional approval for any military attacks on Venezuela.

Two Republicans had crossed the political aisle and joined Democrats to vote in favour of the legislation on Thursday, but their support was not enough to secure passage, and the bill failed to pass by 51 to 49 votes.

“We should not be going to war without a vote of Congress,” Democratic Senator Tim Kaine said during a speech.

The vote comes amid a US military build-up off South America and a series of military strikes targeting vessels in international waters off Venezuela and Colombia that have killed at least 65 people.

The US has alleged, without presenting evidence, that the boats it bombed were transporting drugs, but Latin American leaders, some members of Congress, international law experts and family members of the deceased have described the US attacks as extrajudicial killings, claiming most of those killed were fishermen.

Fears are now growing that Trump will use the military deployment in the region – which includes thousands of US troops, a nuclear submarine and a group of warships accompanying the USS Gerald R Ford, the US Navy’s most sophisticated aircraft carrier – to launch an attack on Venezuela in a bid to oust President Nicolas Maduro.

Washington has accused Maduro of drug trafficking, and Trump has hinted at carrying out attacks on Venezuelan soil.

Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, referencing Trump’s military posturing towards Venezuela, said on Thursday: “It’s really an open secret that this is much more about potential regime change.”

“If that’s where the administration is headed, if that’s what we’re risking – involvement in a war – then Congress needs to be heard on this,” he said.

Earlier on Thursday, a pair of US B-52 bombers flew over the Caribbean Sea along the coast of Venezuela, flight tracking data showed.

Data from tracking website Flightradar24 showed the two bombers flying parallel to the Venezuelan coast, then circling northeast of Caracas before heading back along the coast and turning north and flying further out to sea.

The presence of the US bombers off Venezuela was at least the fourth time that US military aircraft have flown near the country’s borders since mid-October, with B-52s having done so on one previous occasion, and B-1B bombers on two other occasions.

Little public support in US for attack on Venezuela

A recent poll found that only 18 percent of people in the US support even limited use of military force to overthrow Maduro’s government.

Research by YouGov also found that 74 percent of people in the US believe that the president should not be able to carry out military strikes abroad without congressional approval, in line with the requirements of the US Constitution.

Republican lawmakers, however, have embraced the recent strikes on vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific, adopting the Trump administration’s framing of its efforts to cut off the flow of narcotics to the US.

Questions of the legality of such attacks, either under US or international law, do not appear to be of great concern to many Republicans.

“President Trump has taken decisive action to protect thousands of Americans from lethal narcotics,” Senator Jim Risch, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in remarks declaring his support for the strikes.

While only two Republicans – Senators Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski – defected to join Democrats in supporting the legislation to limit Trump’s ability to wage war unilaterally on Thursday, some conservatives have expressed frustration with a possible war on Venezuela.

Trump had campaigned for president on the promise of withdrawing the US from foreign military entanglements.

A jury in the state of Virginia in the United States has awarded $10m to a former teacher who was shot by a six-year-old student.

The jury on Thursday sided with former teacher Abby Zwerner’s claim, made in a civil lawsuit, that an ex-administrator at the school had ignored repeated warnings that the six-year-old child had a gun in class.

Zwerner, 28, was shot in January 2023 as she sat at a reading table in her first-grade classroom and spent nearly two weeks in the hospital, required six surgeries and still does not have the full use of her left hand.

The bullet fired by the six-year-old narrowly missed her heart and remains in her chest.

Zwerner, who did not address reporters outside the court after the decision was announced, had sought $40m in damages against Ebony Parker, a former assistant principal at Richneck Elementary School in the city of Newport News, Virginia.

One of her lawyers, Diane Toscano, said the verdict sent a message that what happened at the school “was wrong and is not going to be tolerated, that safety has to be the first concern at school”.

Zwerner’s lawyers had claimed that Parker, the assistant principal at the time, had failed to act in the hours before the shooting after several school staff members told her that the student had a gun in his backpack.

“Who would think a six-year-old would bring a gun to school and shoot their teacher?” Toscano had asked the jury earlier.

“It’s Dr Parker’s job to believe that is possible. It’s her job to investigate it and get to the very bottom of it.”

Parker did not testify in the lawsuit.

The mother of the student who shot Zwerner was sentenced to four years in prison after being convicted of child neglect and firearms charges.

No charges were brought against the child, who told authorities he got his mother’s handgun by climbing onto a drawer to reach the top of a dresser, where the firearm was in his mother’s purse.

Newtown Action Alliance, an advocacy organisation that supports reforms aimed at addressing gun violence, said that the case points to the need for greater regulations over the storage of firearms in homes with children.

“Abby Zwerner was shot by her 6-year-old student using a gun from home,” the group said in a social media post, adding that “76 percent of school shooters get their guns from their homes or relatives”.

Abby Zwerner was shot by her 6-year-old student using a gun from home.

76% of school shooters get their guns from their homes or relatives.

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Zwerner no longer works for the school district and has said she has no plans to teach again. She has since become a licensed cosmetologist.

While accidents involving young children accessing unsecured firearms in their homes are common in the US, school shootings perpetrated by those under 10 years old are rare.

Here is how things stand on Friday, November 7:

Fighting

• Ukraine attacked Russia with at least 75 drones on Thursday, sparking a fire in an industrial area in the southern city of Volgograd, which killed at least one person and halted dozens of flights across the country, Russian officials said.
• Russian oil firm Lukoil’s refinery in Volgograd has also halted operations after it was struck by Ukrainian drones, the Reuters news agency reports, citing three sources familiar with the matter.
• The sources said Lukoil’s primary processing unit, CDU-5, with a daily capacity of 9,100 metric tonnes, or 66,700 barrels per day – a fifth of the plant’s total capability – and another with a capacity of 11,000 tonnes per day were damaged during the attack.
• Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces have advanced in the battered Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk and were fighting house-to-house battles in a bid to eject Ukrainian troops.
• Russia said it captured 64 buildings in Pokrovsk over the past 24 hours and repelled Ukrainian attacks from Hryshyne to the west.
• Moscow says taking Pokrovsk would give it a platform to drive north towards the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the Donetsk region, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
• South Africa’s government said it received distress calls from 17 citizens who had joined mercenary forces in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The men are between the ages of 20 and 39 years and are trapped in Ukraine’s war-torn Donbas region. It is unclear who they were fighting for.

Military aid

• Ukraine is engaged in “positive” talks on the purchase of Tomahawk missiles and other long-range weaponry with the United States, Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington, Olha Stefanishyna, told Bloomberg News.
• Swedish Defence Minister Pal Jonson said Sweden and Ukraine have signed a letter of intent that includes establishing a joint hub in Ukraine “where Swedish personnel will be working on defence innovation”.
• Ukraine has also asked Sweden to start training Ukrainian pilots on Swedish Gripen fighter jets as soon as possible, Kyiv’s Defence Minister Denys Shmyhal said.

Sanctions

• Swiss commodity trader Gunvor said it has withdrawn its proposal to buy the foreign assets of sanctioned Russian energy company Lukoil after the US Treasury called the firm Russia’s “puppet” and signalled Washington’s opposition to the deal.
• The US Treasury said in a post on X that President Donald Trump “has been clear that the war must end immediately. As long as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin continues the senseless killings, the Kremlin’s puppet, Gunvor, will never get a license to operate and profit”.
• Lukoil has started diverting Caspian oil flows from the Azeri capital of Baku to the Russian port of Makhachkala in response to Western sanctions, Reuters reports, citing two industry sources. One of the sources said a tanker, Lady Leila, under the Russian flag, arrived late on Thursday at Makhachkala with a cargo of 5,000 metric tonnes of crude oil from Lukoil’s Korchagin oilfield in the Caspian Sea.

Regional security

• Flights have resumed at Sweden’s second-largest airport, Gothenburg-Landvetter, after a drone incident prompted a sabotage investigation and halted air traffic. It was the latest in a series of incidents European officials have said are part of hybrid warfare being waged by Russia on European countries.
• Belgian Defence Minister Theo Francken said his country will work to improve surveillance of its airspace following repeated sightings of drones over its airports and military bases in recent months.
• NATO countries have been on high alert in recent weeks after drone sightings and other air incursions, including at airports in Copenhagen, Munich and in the Baltic region. Some 20 Russian drones also entered Polish airspace in September. Moscow has denied any connection with the incidents.
• Poland will roll out a new military training programme this month as part of a broader plan to train about 400,000 people in 2026, the Defence Ministry said. Galvanised by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland now spends more of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defence than any other NATO member.

Russian affairs

• The Russian government has agreed to phase in a planned lowering of its value-added tax thresholds for small businesses from 2026 rather than impose it in one go, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said after a backlash from business owners over the measure intended to fund Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
• Two lawmakers from Germany’s biggest opposition party, the far-right Alternative for Germany, will travel to Russia next week for a BRICS summit. The party is under fire from opponents over its ties to the Kremlin and accusations – strongly denied – that it could be passing on sensitive military information.

War crimes

• A Ukrainian court has sentenced a Russian soldier to life in prison after finding him guilty of killing a Ukrainian prisoner of war, the first time Kyiv has jailed a suspect on such charges.
• The court in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia found Dmitry Kurashov guilty of shooting dead Vitalii Hodniuk, a Ukrainian soldier who had surrendered in January 2024 when his dugout was captured by Russian forces.

America’s longest government shutdown is becoming more painful by the day.

At least 40 million Americans are struggling to get food, more than a million federal workers haven’t been paid, health insurance premiums are rising, and flights are getting disrupted.

Congress has been locked in a standoff over a bill to fund government services, with Democrats demanding tax credits that will make health insurance cheaper for millions of Americans and an end to federal agency cuts.

Democrats won decisive victories in state and local elections this week. President Donald Trump is blaming the shutdown for this setback to the Republican Party.

So, will he now be willing to negotiate? Can the two sides agree to a comprise?

Presenter: Bernard Smith

Guests:

Mark Pfeifle – Republican strategist

Jeremy Mayer – Professor of political science at George Mason University

The United Nations Security Council has voted to remove sanctions on Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa and his Interior Minister Anas Khattab following a resolution championed by the United States.

In a largely symbolic move, the UNSC delisted the Syrian government officials from the ISIL (ISIS) and al-Qaeda sanctions list, in a resolution approved by 14 council members on Thursday. China abstained.

The formal lifting of sanctions on al-Sharaa is largely symbolic, as they were waived every time he needed to travel outside of Syria in his role as the country’s leader. An assets freeze and arms embargo will also be lifted.

Al-Sharaa led opposition fighters who overthrew President Bashar al-Assad’s government in December. His group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), began an offensive on November 27, 2024, reaching Damascus in only 12 days, resulting in the end of the al-Assad family’s 53-year reign.

The collapse of the al-Assad family’s rule has been described as a historic moment – nearly 14 years after Syrians rose in peaceful protests against a government that met them with violence that quickly spiralled into a bloody civil war.

HTS had been on the UNSC’s ISIL and al-Qaeda sanctions list since May 2014.

Since coming to power, al-Sharaa has called on the US to formally lift sanctions on his country, saying the sanctions imposed on the previous Syrian leadership were no longer justified.

US President Donald Trump met the Syrian president in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in May and ordered most sanctions lifted. However, the most stringent sanctions were imposed by Congress under the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act in 2019 and will require a congressional vote to remove them permanently.

In a bipartisan statement, the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee welcomed the UN action Thursday and said it was now Congress’s turn to act to “bring the Syrian economy into the 21st century”.

We “are actively working with the administration and our colleagues in Congress to repeal Caesar sanctions”, Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen said in a statement ahead of the vote. “It’s time to prioritize reconstruction, stability, and a path forward rather than isolation that only deepens hardship for Syrians.”

Al-Sharaa plans to meet with Trump in Washington next week, the first visit by a Syrian president to Washington since the country gained independence in 1946.