A United States military build-up and strikes on boats near Venezuela.
President Donald Trump says he’s targeting drug gangs – without presenting evidence.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro says he’ll stand up to Washington, with his country now on high alert.
So, what’s next?
Presenter: Nick Clark
Guests:
Elias Ferrer – Founder of Orinoco Research, a consulting company in Caracas
Paola Bautista de Aleman – Politician, member of the Venezuelan opposition in exile
United States President Donald Trump called for the jailing of Democratic officials in Illinois resisting his mass deportation campaign, a day after armed troops from Texas arrived in the state to bolster the operation.
Chicago, the largest city in Illinois and third-largest in the country, has become the latest flashpoint in the Trump administration’s drive to deport millions of immigrants, which has prompted allegations of rights abuses and myriad lawsuits.
list of 3 itemsend of list
The operation is being led by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose masked agents have surged into several Democratic-led cities to conduct raids, stoking outrage among many residents and protests outside federal facilities.
“Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also!” Trump posted Wednesday on his Truth Social platform.
Local officials argue that city and state law enforcement are sufficient to handle the protests, but Trump claims the military is needed to keep federal agents safe, heightening concerns among his critics of growing authoritarianism.
After National Guard deployments in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, 200 troops arrived in Illinois on Tuesday.
An immigration enforcement building outside Chicago has also been the site of clashes between federal agents and protesters.
“The federal government has not communicated with us in any way about their troop movements,” Pritzker told reporters in Chicago. “I can’t believe I have to say ‘troop movements’ in an American city, but that is what we’re talking about here.”
A judge will have a role in determining how many boots are on the streets: There’s a court hearing Thursday on a request by Illinois and Chicago to declare the National Guard deployment illegal.
Trump’s attacks on Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, both Democrats, follow similar extraordinary public calls by the president for his political opponents to face legal charges.
They come on the same day that former FBI director James Comey was arraigned on charges of lying to Congress – an indictment which came just days after Trump urged his attorney general to take action against him and others.
Pritzker, seen as a potential Democratic candidate in the 2028 presidential election, has become one of Trump’s most fiery critics.
He pledged Wednesday to “not back down,” listing a litany of grievances against Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“Making people feel they need to carry citizenship papers. Invading our state with military troops. Sending in war helicopters in the middle of the night,” he wrote on X.
“What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?” he asked. “We must all stand up and speak out.”
By “war helicopters”, Pritzker was referring to a major raid last week in which Black Hawk helicopters descended on a Chicago housing complex.
Dozens of people were arrested in the surprise operation, according to the Trump administration, but US media reported that American citizens were detained for hours.
Mayor Johnson has since announced “ICE-free zones” where city-owned property will be declared off-limits to federal authorities.
Johnson accused Republicans of wanting “a rematch of the Civil War”.
Trump’s immigration crackdown is aimed at fulfilling a key election pledge to rid the country of what he called waves of foreign “criminals”.
Trump has nonetheless faced some legal setbacks, including a federal judge in Oregon blocking his bid to deploy troops in Portland, saying his descriptions of an emergency there were false and that the US is a “nation of Constitutional law, not martial law”.
Washington, DC – Two years into the war on Gaza, legal scholars have emphasised the importance of labelling the mass atrocities Israel is committing against Palestinians as a genocide due to the legal and political implications of the determination.
Additionally, experts stressed that it is the most accurate description of the Israeli campaign, and even some of Israel’s staunchest supporters acknowledged that the country has committed war crimes in Gaza.
list of 3 itemsend of list
But experts said Israel’s brutal assault is more than individual violations of the laws of war; it represents a push to destroy the Palestinians and must be described as what it is – a genocide.
Former United Nations official Craig Mokhaiber said genocide involves the violation of core rights that apply without exception; it also invokes an international responsibility to stop it.
“The obligations apply to all states,” Mokhaiber told Al Jazeera. “All states in the world are obliged to use whatever means they have in order to put an end to the genocide and to punish the perpetrators of the genocide and to prevent the genocide in the first instance.”
He noted that the formal name of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention is the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Adopted by 153 countries – including the United States, all Western powers and Israel – the convention is the ultimate international law on genocide.
“The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish,” it reads.
Susan Akram, director of Boston University’s International Human Rights Clinic, said describing the assault on Gaza as a genocide is “critical”.
“Genocide is the most serious of international crimes, and because of that, the Genocide Convention requires all states parties to prevent and punish it, so the recognition that it is genocide automatically triggers obligations on state parties,” Akram told Al Jazeera.
The convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
Genocidal acts include killing and injuring members of the targeted group, prevention of births and imposing “conditions of life calculated to bring about” the physical destruction of the group.
Any one of the acts listed in the convention can amount to carrying out a genocide. It does not need to be all of them.
In the case of Gaza, UN investigators and rights groups have found Israel to be carrying out several of the acts listed in the convention.
“The Israeli authorities intended to kill as many Palestinians as possible through its military operations in Gaza since 7 October 2023 and knew that the means and methods of warfare employed would cause mass deaths of Palestinians, including children,” a UN commission of inquiry said in a report last month.
The UN investigators also pointed to a long list of Israeli officials and military commanders calling for collective punishment and mass violence against Palestinians as proof of genocidal intent.
The findings added to the growing consensus by rights groups and international legal scholars that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, UN experts and the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) have all accused Israel of genocidal acts in Gaza.
So has the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, which is named after Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who is credited with coining the term genocide after the Holocaust.
Israel has turned most of Gaza into rubble, killing more than 67,000 people and injuring nearly 170,000 more.
Repeated forced displacement orders by the Israeli military have rendered nearly all of the territory’s population homeless, and a strict blockade on humanitarian aid has sparked a famine in the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military has also been targeting medical facilities across Gaza while blocking fuel and medical supplies needed for the operation of hospitals in the enclave.
But Israel rejects accusations of genocide, often dismissing them as anti-Semitic, claiming that it is carrying out a self-defence campaign against Hamas.
Israel is facing genocide accusations, brought by South Africa, at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but the top UN tribunal could take months, if not years, to make a final determination in the case.
Still, the ICJ has issued three sets of provisional measures, including ordering Israel to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza.
In an interim ruling in January 2024, the ICJ found that it is “plausible” that Israel is violating the Genocide Convention.
Two months later, the court ordered Israel to enable the “unhindered provision” of aid to Gaza as deadly hunger was starting to spread in the enclave due to the Israeli blockade. Israel has not followed the order.
In May of that year, the ICJ issued another directive ordering Israel to halt its offensive against the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where most of the territory’s population was sheltering at that time. Israel continued with the operation.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory said in its September report that the first ICJ ruling put “all states on notice”.
“As such, the duty to prevent genocide was triggered due to the actual or constructive knowledge of the immediate plausibility that genocide was being or was about to be committed,” the report said.
Boston University’s Akram agreed.
“It’s not at all a mystery what states are required to do. They have to take all means within their powers to punish – and most importantly stop – an ongoing genocide,” she told Al Jazeera.
“So why this has not triggered a global sanctions regime is really a failure of the international system.”
The International Criminal Court (ICC) may prosecute Israeli officials on genocide charges.
The ICC last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes in Gaza, including using starvation as a weapon of war. But the tribunal has not pursued genocide charges in the conflict.
With a US veto looming over any UN Security Council resolution critical of Israel, the enforcement of genocide prevention – outside international courts – largely falls to individual states.
Some international coalitions, including The Hague Group, have been pushing for concrete measures to hold Israel accountable for its abuses in Gaza.
Despite the shift in public opinion and the growing recognition of a Palestinian state, Israel has maintained strong trade and diplomatic ties with most of its Western allies.
Backed by the financial and diplomatic might of the US, Israel has been enjoying what rights advocates describe as impunity for its genocidal campaign in Gaza.
In the US, a group of Palestinians and Palestinian Americans sued the administration of then-President Joe Biden in the early months of the war for failure to prevent genocide.
The plaintiffs sought an order to halt US assistance to Israel.
Last year, Judge Jeffrey White dismissed the case, arguing that federal courts do not have jurisdiction over foreign policy.
Still, White found that the evidence presented in the case indicated “the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people and therefore plausibly falls within the international prohibition against genocide”.
“It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza, but it [is] also this Court’s obligation to remain within the metes and bounds of its jurisdictional scope,” he wrote.
Ernesto Verdeja, an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, said that while legal avenues to stop the genocide in Gaza are important, the solution is ultimately a political one.
“It’s a solution that requires real, sustained and broad-based political pressure, and that includes not only political leaders and states but also civil society movements to get the Israeli state to stop carrying out this absolutely appalling set of attacks on Gazan civilians,” Verdeja told Al Jazeera.
He added that the war on Gaza should be called a genocide for the sake of accuracy, underscoring that denial of the genocide in Gaza often pivots to justifying the mass atrocities Israel is committing in the enclave.
“The bad-faith version of the argument essentially says, ‘Well, it’s not really genocide; therefore, it’s justified,’” Verdeja told Al Jazeera.
He warned against focusing on legal technicalities, court rulings and definitions, rather than pushing to stop the horrors unfolding in Gaza.
New York City has filed a lawsuit accusing Facebook, Google, Snapchat, TikTok and other online platforms of fuelling a mental health crisis among children by addicting them to social media.
The 327-page complaint filed on Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan seeks damages from Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms, Google and YouTube owner Alphabet, Snapchat owner Snap and TikTok owner ByteDance. It accused the defendants of gross negligence and causing a public nuisance.
list of 4 itemsend of list
The city joined other governments, school districts and individuals pursuing about 2,050 similar lawsuits in nationwide litigation in the Oakland, California, federal court.
New York City is among the largest plaintiffs with a population of 8.48 million, including about 1.8 million under age 18. Its school and healthcare systems are also plaintiffs.
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said allegations concerning YouTube are “simply not true”, in part because it is a streaming service and not a social network where people catch up with friends.
The other defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for New York City’s law department said the city withdrew from litigation announced by Mayor Eric Adams in February 2024 and pending in California state courts so it could join the federal litigation.
According to Wednesday’s complaint, the defendants designed their platforms to “exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of youth” and drive compulsive use in pursuit of profit.
The complaint said 77.3 percent of New York City high school students admitted to spending three or more hours a day on “screen time” including TV, computers and smartphones, contributing to lost sleep and chronic school absences.
New York City’s health commissioner declared social media a public health hazard in January 2024, and the city, including its schools, has had to spend more taxpayer dollars to address the resulting youth mental health crisis, the complaint said.
The city also blamed social media for an increase in “subway surfing”, or riding atop or off the sides of moving trains. At least 16 subway surfers have died since 2023, including two girls aged 12 and 13 this month, police data show.
Footage shows rescue dogs and workers combing through debris after a building collapse in central Madrid killed four people, including three construction workers and an architect. The six-story building was being converted into a hotel. Several people were also injured.
Saudi Arabia have fought back to earn a 3-2 win over Indonesia in Group B of Asia’s World Cup qualifiers as Feras Al-Brikan’s double boosted their hopes of securing a place at next year’s finals in North America.
Kevin Diks put Indonesia ahead from the spot in the 11th minute on Wednesday, but Saleh Abu Al-Shamat levelled six minutes later before Al-Brikan scored either side of half-time to secure the points despite a second Diks penalty two minutes from time.
list of 4 itemsend of list
Saudi Arabia next face Iraq in Jeddah on Tuesday and know that a win over Graham Arnold’s side will guarantee their place in December’s draw for the finals in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Indonesia and Iraq will face one another on Saturday.
The Indonesians went in front when Hassan Al-Tambakhti stuck out an arm as Dean James swung in his free kick from the right and Diks stepped up to clinically place his spot kick beyond Nawaf Al-Aqidi.
The lead was short-lived as Al-Shamat steered his right-footed strike from the edge of the area beyond Maarten Paes’s dive to his left.
With nine minutes left in the half, the home side went in front. Yakob Sayuri’s needless pull on Al-Brikan’s shirt saw referee Ahmad Al-Ali called to the pitch-side monitor, and the Kuwaiti awarded a penalty that Al-Brikan slammed home.
Al-Brikan put the result beyond doubt in the 62nd minute with a clinical close-range finish.
Paes threw himself to his right to keep out Musab Al-Juwayr’s low drive only for Al-Brikan to pounce on the rebound and send the ball back under the body of the Indonesia goalkeeper.
Diks struck again from the penalty spot after Nawaf Bu Washl hit the ball with his arm as he went down in his own area in a tussle with Ole Romeny while Mohammed Kanno’s injury-time red card made for a nervous finish for Herve Renard’s side.
Oman kept hosts Qatar at bay to earn a 0-0 draw in the countries’ opening clash in Group A of the fourth round of Asia’s World Cup preliminaries earlier on Wednesday, denting both nations’ hopes of automatic qualification for the 2026 finals.
Qatar captain Akram Afif went closest to claiming the points for Julen Lopetegui’s side at Doha’s Jassim bin Hamad Stadium when he wastefully steered his shot wide 49 minutes into a tense game of few chances.
The Carlos Queiroz-coached Omanis, who are looking to qualify for the World Cup for the first time, will face the United Arab Emirates on Saturday in the next game in the three-team group. Qatar will take on the Emiratis on Tuesday.
The winners of the group will qualify directly for the finals while the team finishing second advances to a playoff with the runner-up from Group B, which is being played in Saudi Arabia.
Qatar dominated the opening exchanges but struggled to turn that superiority into opportunities. Only midfielder Boualem Khoukhi threatened the Oman goal with a strike from distance in the 13th minute that flew wide of the target.
The Omanis were largely kept on the back foot although Issam Al-Sabhi did fashion an opening in the 27th minute that goalkeeper Mahmud Abunada gathered, and Amjad Al-Harthi steered a header over the bar late in the half.
Afif should have put the hosts ahead soon after the interval when the Omanis gifted him possession in their own half, but the Asian Player of the Year uncharacteristically side-footed his shot the wrong side of the post.