U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks on January 21, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“There is no military solution to the overdose crisis, but there is a political solution to a president with authoritarian ambitions,” said one peace advocate. “Congress must act now to end unauthorized military action.”
As rights groups and Democratic lawmakers condemned the Trump administration’s bombing of a boat it claims—without evidence—was carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made clear on Thursday that targeting vessels linked to drug smuggling in Latin America, and possibly elsewhere, will be part of the White House’s ongoing policy.
At a news conference in Quito, Ecuador, Rubio suggested Latin American governments have a choice: Work with the Trump administration to crack down on drug trafficking or see the US kill more citizens suspected of trying to smuggle illegal substances.
“For cooperative governments, there’s no need because those governments are going to help us,” said Rubio. “They’re going to help us find these people and blow them up, if that’s what it takes.”
Some governments in the region have avoided criticizing this week’s bombing of a boat off the coast of Venezuela, which the US has said killed 11 people it had identified at “narco-terorrists” connected to Tren de Aragua, and which was conducted under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force.
The White House has not provided evidence of the suspected drug smuggling or that the victims were connected to the gang. US intelligence agencies have also called into question President Donald Trump’s claims that Tren de Aragua is a high-level gang that terrorist organization working with the Venezuelan government.
Ecuador’s government said Thursday it intends to revise its extradition agreement with the US, and President Daniel Noboa praised the US for its efforts to “actually eliminate any terrorist threat.” On the same day, Rubio announced $20 million in new security assistance for Ecuador.
“Under Trump, if the president declares you a terrorist, the U.S. military will apparently execute you on his behalf, no questions asked.”
The White House has also turned its attention to two Ecuadorian gangs, Los Lobos and Los Choneros, with Rubio announcing they have been designated as terrorist groups. The designation gives the Trump administration “all sorts of options,” Rubio claimed, for cracking down on the gangs’ activities, including potentially killing those suspected of being leaders or traffickers for the groups.
“This time, we’re not just going to hunt for drug dealers in the little fast boats and say, ‘Let’s try to arrest them,'” Rubio said. “No, the president has said he wants to wage war on these groups because they’ve been waging war on us for 30 years and no one has responded.”
As Rubio spoke in Quito, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at Fort Benning in Georgia on Thursday that while Trump said he ordered the strike on the boat in the Caribbean this week, low-ranking military officers will soon be empowered to make final decisions on such attacks—strikes which international law experts have decried as nothing less than extrajudicial murder.
“The understanding is that those authorities are better made, those decisions are better made, by men and women in the professional arms,” Hegseth said.
Despite the administration’s use of the military to attack the boat near Venezuela this week and Rubio’s rhetoric about being at “war” with groups involved in the drug trade, human rights advocates and other Latin American leaders have stressed in recent days that drug trafficking is a crime that must be confronted by law enforcement—not an entity that the US can defeat through military action.
“We have been capturing civilians transporting drugs for decades without killing them. Those who transport drugs are not the big drug traffickers, but the very poor young people of the Caribbean and the Pacific,” said Colombian President Gustavo Petro.
Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America toldThe Washington Post that “you don’t just simply blow boats out of the water. You follow law enforcement procedures.”
Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of Win Without War, said that with this week’s deadly attack—and plans to conduct more strikes—Trump has brought former President George W. Bush’s “dream to full fruition.”
“Under Trump, if the president declares you a terrorist, the U.S. military will apparently execute you on his behalf, no questions asked,” said Haghdoosti. “That should deeply alarm us all, especially at a time when the president thinks nothing of labeling anyone from a USAID worker to a college student as a terrorist.”
The killing of 11 suspected Venezuelan gang members, added Haghdoosti, will make “no difference whatsoever in the lives of people struggling with their own or a loved one’s addiction,” particularly as the Republican Party’s budget cuts have “ravaged” funding for substance use disorder treatment and overdose prevention.
“There is no military solution to the overdose crisis, but there is a political solution to a president with authoritarian ambitions,” said Haghdoosti. “Congress must act now to end unauthorized military action in the Caribbean, investigate these apparently lawless killings, and restore the proven health and harm reduction programs that people struggling with the scourge of fentanyl desperately need.”
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Palestinians gather at an aid distribution point set up by the privately-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), near the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on June 25, 2025. [Eyad BABA / AFP /Getty Images]
A group of senior Democratic senators in the US has issued a scathing letter calling on the Trump administration to immediately halt funding to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a controversial private organisation accused of complicity in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians near its aid distribution sites.
Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Peter Welch, joined by 19 others, urged the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought to cut financial support to GHF and redirect funds to established humanitarian mechanisms. “We urge you to immediately cease all US funding for GHF and resume support for the existing UN-led aid coordination mechanisms,” the senators wrote.
The letter, shared with The Guardian and published on Van Hollen’s website, sharply criticises the administration’s handling of the GHF programme, alleging that funding was approved despite serious internal warnings from USAID officials. The agency flagged “operational and reputational risks and lack of oversight,” noting that the group’s risk management plan failed to provide assurances that aid would reach civilians in need.
GHF began distributing aid in Gaza in late May after the Israeli government approved limited entry of food and supplies through only four militarised sites in the south. The system replaced a UN-led aid network that previously operated over 400 distribution points across the Strip. The shift is believed to have been designed to displace Palestinians and fragment the aid ecosystem in favour of Israeli-coordinated alternatives with the final aim of ethnically cleansing Gaza.
Since GHF began operations, thousands of Palestinians have been killed while attempting to access food near its sites, according to UN data. Witnesses report civilians being fired on by Israeli tanks, drones and soldiers. “Any operation that channels desperate civilians into militarised zones is inherently unsafe. It is killing people,” warned UN Secretary-General António Guterres in late June.
The senators’ letter raises serious concerns that GHF is not a neutral humanitarian actor. The organisation is reported to work in close coordination with the Israeli military and uses American private military contractors, including Safe Reach Solutions and UG Solutions, to secure its aid convoys. These contractors have been documented using live ammunition and stun grenades during aid distributions.
GHF’s first executive director, Jake Wood, resigned prior to its operational launch, stating the plan could not be implemented without abandoning fundamental humanitarian principles. The senators noted that GHF’s system, by forcing Palestinians to travel long distances to receive food, risks facilitating forced displacement.
Despite the mounting evidence of war crimes, the State Department proceeded with a $30 million grant to GHF in June. This was done under a “priority directive” from the White House, bypassing standard audits, Congressional consultation and legally mandated vetting procedures meant to prevent aid from reaching designated terrorist organisations. The grant was also exempted from third-party monitoring.
Further controversy surrounds GHF’s reported involvement in a proposal dubbed the “Gaza Riviera,” a 38-page development plan for large-scale camps, which critics argue would legitimise Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign by resettling Palestinians outside of Gaza.
The senators also demanded full transparency from the administration of President Donald Trump, calling for the release of GHF’s funding documents, award contracts, and any export licences for military services. They questioned whether US nationals employed by GHF-linked contractors had engaged in hostilities in Gaza, and if the administration had licensed the export of firearms to these firms.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, U.S. President Donald Trump, and French President Emmanuel Macron. DeSmog collage. Credit: Faces of the World / Flickr (Macron), Steffen Prößdorf (Merz), Gage Skidmore / Flickr (Trump)
European leaders are bending to the demands of U.S. climate science deniers.
“The CSDDD is the greatest threat to America’s sovereignty since the fall of the Soviet Union,” the Heartland Institute, a pro-Trump U.S. think tank, tweeted on 31 March.
The Heartland Institute is one of the world’s leading climate science denial groups. It has helped to draft Donald Trump’s anti-climate policies, which have seen the president pledge to “drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels and once again pull the U.S. out of the flagship 2015 Paris Agreement.
Over recent months – along with a host of other Trump allies – the Heartland Institute has set its sights on a new target: the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).
This vague acronym belies the potentially transformative impact of the new law. In its original form, the CSDDD sought to require large companies – and those in “high risk” sectors – trading in the EU to address human rights and environmental issues in their own operations and in their supply chains. High turnover companies would also have been forced to adopt a plan to align with the Paris Agreement, including setting emissions reduction targets.
The Heartland Institute and its anti-climate, anti-regulation peers are vocal opponents of the law – and launched an aggressive campaign to water it down, or even to see it scrapped entirely.
These groups, which are all part of the ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) ecosystem, view the CSDDD as symbolic of the way in which “woke” governments are attempting to force citizens and global corporations to conform to a pro-diversity, pro-environment agenda.
Following Trump’s election in November, these MAGA groups wasted no time in formulating their plans to oppose this perceived agenda.
They focused in particular on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which attempt to create workplaces free from bias – and environmental, social and governance (ESG) schemes, which try to ensure that organisations are guided by responsible and sustainable practices, not just profit.
In December, barely a month after Trump’s victory, the Heritage Foundation – the group that wrote the key ‘Project 2025’ blueprint for the president’s second term – published a report entitled: “ESG, DEI, and What to Do About Them”.
In the report, the Heritage Foundation described ESG and DEI as “pernicious”, and called the CSDDD “a serious problem”.
Two months later, the State Financial Officers Foundation – an influential network of Republican finance officials – wrote an open letter calling on the new administration to “investigate” the CSDDD, claiming that the EU’s directives are based on “unscientific assumptions about the nature of climate change impacts” and “will force companies to incriminate themselves”.
This quickly filtered through to Trump’s Cabinet. On 12 February, Howard Lutnick, the president’s pick for commerce secretary, told a Senate committee that the CSDDD threatened to place “significant burdens” on U.S. companies, and that the Trump administration was exploring the use of “commercial tools” to mount a counter-attack against the EU’s environmental regulations.
Soon this rhetoric made its way to the White House. In March, as part of the worldwide tariffs implemented by the Trump administration, the president called the EU “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the world”.
But the EU hasn’t stood firm in the face of Trump’s war of words.
The EU has already announced that it will be scaling back the CSDDD and delaying its implementation. The number of companies within scope has been reduced by 80 percent. The firms in question will only be required to file due diligence reports every five years, and won’t be required to investigate the ESG operations of their indirect business partners. The implementation of the law has also been postponed until 2028.
But Trump’s MAGA hardliners are still not satisfied. In April, the Heartland Institute released an open letter signed by 31 other groups, calling for Congress and the Trump administration to “take immediate steps to counter the CSDDD’s implementation”, including “if necessary, imposing retaliatory trade policies that punish EU nations for eroding America’s sovereignty, freedoms, and prosperity.”
This backlash is now influencing European leaders. In late May, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called for the CSDDD to be scrapped entirely. They claim it must be abandoned in order to defend the “competitiveness” of European corporations, with Macron stating that Europe must “synchronise with the U.S. and the rest of the world.”
This judgement signifies the appeasement of anti-climate pressure groups that are ideologically opposed to clean energy and climate science.
The Heartland Institute has denied that humans are driving climate change, which it has called a “delusion”, while the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document urged Trump to “dismantle the administrative state”, reverse policies on climate action, slash restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrap state investment in renewable energy, and gut the Environmental Protection Agency.
If the EU waters down its climate policies in response to Trump’s pressure, it will have helped to send Project 2025 global.
The ‘Climate Cartel’
It’s unclear whether these MAGA groups – and the Trump administration – will ease up on the EU if the CSDDD is ditched entirely. They may simply use it as evidence that European lawmakers will buckle under enough pressure.
Indeed, MAGA’s opposition to the CSDDD is part of a multi-pronged campaign that seeks to dismantle global climate initiatives pioneered by both governments and corporations.
Much of the original groundwork for this campaign was undertaken by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and its chair Jim Jordan, a leading Trump supporter.
Last year, Jordan’s committee produced reports – and demanded evidence from major corporations – on a supposed “climate cartel” of “left-wing activists and major financial institutions”.
The committee alleged that some of the world’s biggest asset managers – that have questionable climate commitments – are conspiring to force American companies to decarbonise against their wishes.
As part of its “investigation”, the committee demanded information from more than 130 U.S.-based companies, retirement and pension programmes, as well as 60 U.S.-based asset managers.
In November, 11 Republican-led states sued BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street – three of the world’s biggest asset managers – over their ESG policies. In West Virginia and Oklahoma, nearly two dozen banks have been barred from public contracts for trying to divest from fossil fuels.
These actions, along with the anti-climate rhetoric of Donald Trump, have had a chilling effect. In February last year, BlackRock, State Street, and JP Morgan Asset Management withdrew from Climate Action 100+, an investor-led initiative that works to ensure the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters take action on climate change.
Fast forward a year, and a growing list of major U.S. corporations are either cancelling or delaying their sustainability reports – designed to show how they are meeting their climate commitments.
And a new story from the investigative outlet CORRECTIV today reports that German insurance giants and investment firms are withdrawing from climate agreements, while companies are quietly shelving their sustainability policies, amid the anti-ESG backlash orchestrated by Trump and his acolytes.
As one sustainability expert at a financial firm told CORRECTIV: “We have to be careful not to harm the cause by sticking our necks out and becoming a target in the U.S.”
This article was produced with support from the European Media and Information Fund, managed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The sole responsibility for any content supported by the European Media and Information Fund lies with the author(s) and it may not necessarily reflect the positions of the EMIF and the Fund Partners, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European University Institute.
Memorials for some of the more than 100 people killed in July 2025’s catastrophic flash flooding in central Texas, which was intensified by climate change. Credit: source/credit info: World Central Kitchen (CC BY 4.0)
A 435-page review found the authors used standard climate denier tropes to produce a report riddled with errors.
A group of more than 85 climate experts today released a scathing review of the Trump administration’s “Climate Working Group” report on climate change science, condemning it as “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.”
The reviewers include MacArthur “Genius” Fellows, a half-dozen members of the National Academy of Sciences, Royal Society fellows, and fellows from other prominent scientific organizations including the American Meteorological Society, which issued its own separate statement criticizing the Climate Working Group report.
They found that the federal report “exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics” in order “to downplay the risks of record-breaking heat, intense rainfall, worsening wildfires, rising sea levels, and widespread health harms – all well-established by decades of peer-reviewed science.”
The Trump administration’s report was authored by five longtime climate deniers — Steve Koonin, John Christy, Ross McKitrick, Judith Curry, and Roy Spencer —as part of its effort to gut federal powers to regulate climate-heating pollution from cars, power plants, and other major sources. The Department of Energy (DOE) released it on July 29.
On the same day the Trump report was released, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency’s proposal to rescind the foundation of those regulations: its scientific “endangerment finding” affirming that carbon pollution threatens human health and welfare by creating dangerous planetary warming.
Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler organized the volunteer effort to review the report, which is being submitted to the Department of Energy during the public comment period that closes on September 2. The public comment period on the EPA’s proposal is open through September 22.
Announcing the release of the review this morning on his personal blog, Dessler termed the Trump report “a show trial for climate science.
“Like any good Soviet trial, the outcome of this exercise by the Dept. of Energy is already known: climate science will be judged too uncertain to justify the endangerment finding,” Dessler said. “Once you understand that, everything about the DOE report makes total sense. You understand why the five contrarian authors were selected: The only way to get this report was to pick these authors. If any other writing team had been chosen, the report would have been 180° different.”
The Trump report’s authors have previously defended their work, telling the journal Nature that they are “committed to a transparent and fact-based dialogue on climate science and know from long experience that scientific criticism and rebuttal are essential to that process.”
In response to a request for comment, Curry referred reporters to her blog, where she described the Dessler review as “comprehensive” and a “laudable effort,” noting that it “was prepared in 30 days (sort of weakens the argument that the DOE report was written too quickly, ha ha).”
The Energy Department’s public comment period on the report was set for 30 days, rather than a more typical 60 days. The agency has not announced an extension.
After “skimming” the review, Curry said, she “didn’t spot anything in this report that would lead to changing any of the conclusions in the DOE Report.”
The four other members of the Climate Working Group, as well as the Energy Department, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“A Wonderful Example of Junk Science”
The Trump report “is a travesty for U.S. scientific integrity,” said Ryan Katz-Rosene of the University of Ottawa, an expert on climate and sustainability policies and politics, in a statement. “It reads like a list of common climate skeptic tropes — long ago rebutted by the scientific community — being rehashed by a group of disgruntled scientists.”
The 435-page expert review found that the Trump climate report exhibited a pattern of questionable reasoning, as well as dozens of factual and structural flaws — such as relying on “verifiably flawed and unrepresentative [scientific] literature.”
It was also riddled with typos, scrambled citations, unsupported claims about climate science, and references to research or data that the reviewers could not find, along with at least one manufactured quote.
These sorts of errors have become associated with AI slop, though the reviewers didn’t speculate whether the report’s five authors — who the expert reviewers described in a statement as a “tiny team of hand-picked contrarians” — used AI to write their report.
“I always like to find a silver lining,” climate scientist Andy Miller, a 33-year EPA veteran, said in a statement. “In this case the silver lining is that this document is a wonderful example of junk science that can be used as an example for years to come.”
Koonin, Curry, and their co-authors used several climate disinformation tactics in their report. Here are just a few.
Omitting Evidence
The review found many instances where the Trump report left out vital details — sometimes entire fields of study — that would undercut the administration’s case for deregulation.
“The only mention of the oceans throughout the entire report is in the context of ocean acidification, coral reefs, and sea level rise,” the review noted. “The glaring omission of the myriad impacts of climate change on the ocean — marine heat waves, changing species distributions, changes in ocean circulation, increased harmful algal blooms, coastal erosion, and economic impacts on commercially valuable fisheries to name a few — is a significant problem with the report.”
The report also has a bad case of “selection bias,” by elevating minor issues or weak science over well-established and strong science, or issues vital to climate action.
In one instance, the Trump team heavily downplayed the scientific research at the heart of the Paris Agreement’s nitty-gritty methodologies for measuring carbon emissions, and put a more marginal approach at the center instead.
“For a report claiming to be a ‘Critical Review’ of greenhouse gas impacts to entirely ignore the primary scientific framework for international and national climate policy is an inexplicable and scientifically unjustifiable omission,” the review concluded.
In sections where Trump’s climate team claimed that there were no long-term extreme weather trends associated with climate change — such as more frequent and destructive floods and hurricanes — the review found that they left out key findings that contradicted their conclusion, cherry-picked studies, quoted research out of context, and used outdated materials instead of the best available science.
The five authors used similar tactics to slant sections on tornadoes and wildfires.
Zombie Arguments
The Trump administration report raises questions about climate change that have been asked and answered — repeatedly. Rehashing these long-settled scientific debates created an opportunity for the report’s authors to deny the fundamental cause of the climate crisis: burning fossil fuels.
“Those sorts of back-from-the-dead arguments [create] a ‘zombie argument’ that is inconsistent with the state of the best available science,” the expert review concluded.
One such resurrected claim pointed to record-breaking high temperatures in the 1930s to dismiss climate change as a factor in recent heat waves. However, many of these records have fallen since 2000. “[I]n our calculation, the most recent few years have had as many record-breaking high temperatures as the 1930s,” the review notes. “In fact, the year with the most record-breaking hot days is 2023.”
The federal report sometimes griped about the absence of their claims from recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change surveys of the best-available science, without acknowledging that climate scientists have moved on from those questions for good reasons.
“So much literature has been produced to refute the claims of the [Climate Working Group] report authors, and over so long a time period,” the review pointed out, “that these claims are no longer part of the active scientific debate.”
Echo Chambers
The Trump administration’s five authors relied heavily on citations to their own climate-related research and analyses, the review found.
Overall, 11 percent of the report’s citations were self-citations, according to the review — roughly two to four times more than the self-citations in the climate science overview released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2021.
In a couple of chapters, the self-citations numbered more than one out of every four.
This echo chamber of self-citations pushes out other, peer-reviewed and published science on the same topics, “of which there is plenty,” according to the expert review.
Word Games
The expert review found that conclusions reached by the Trump team sometimes relied on incorrect uses of scientific terms in ways that favored climate denial.
In one example, reviewers explained that the term ocean acidification “is not used in a way to indicate that the ocean is becoming an acid,” but “the more commonly used term for the phenomena of ocean carbonate chemistry changes because it provides a straightforward terminology to describing the declining pH of the ocean.”
Elsewhere, the Trump team uses the term “greening” in a misleading way that “implies ‘greening’ is an expansion of vegetation into areas that were previously non-vegetated,“ the review found. This is a key mistake because the report “thus incorrectly interprets the literature on ‘greening’ throughout this section.”
The Endangerment Finding, Endangered
Opponents of greenhouse gas cuts have worked for decades to block or overturn the federal government’s power to regulate them.
The legal basis for this authority is the EPA endangerment finding that — despite being credited to the Obama-Biden administration by Trump officials — dates back to George W. Bush’s second term as president.
In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in lawsuit brought by Massachusetts and several other states, that CO2, methane, and four other greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act. In the ruling the court also found that under the Clean Air Act, the EPA had a duty under to analyze whether they endanger public health or welfare and — if so — to regulate sources of carbon pollution.
In response to this decision, the EPA produced its endangerment finding. Rather than regulate carbon pollution, however, the Bush White House suppressed the document.
In 2009 the Obama White House released the finding, and began establishing rules under the Clean Air Act to cap and cut carbon pollution from motor vehicles as well as power plants and other industrial sources.
Since then, as DeSmog has previously reported, a powerful anti-climate coalition of politicians, oil companies, trade groups, and right-wing networks has been trying to overturn the endangerment finding, culminating in Project 2025 — the extreme-right blueprint for transforming the federal government.
Project 2025’s chapter on the EPA, which mentions “updating” the 2009 endangerment finding, was written in part by Aaron Szabo, now a high-level Trump appointee to the agency.
The director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, was one of the main architects of Project 2025, and has publicly supported rescinding the endangerment finding.
Some members of the Trump climate working group were also part of his first administration. Steve Koonin, a physicist, advised the government on climate change during Trump’s first term, and atmospheric scientist John Christy was on the EPA’s Science Advisory Board.
Another Trump report co-author, climatologist Judith Curry, was a paid witness for the state of Montana during a 2023 trial on whether the state’s promotion of fossil fuels violated its constitution. The 16 young Montana residents who sued the state won that case.
UPDATE Sept. 2, 2025: This story has been updated to include a statement from Judith Curry, and to correct the end date of the public comment period for the EPA’s proposal to rescind the endangerment finding.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
This image was posted on social media by President Donald Trump and shows a boat that was allegedly transporting cocaine off the coast of Venezuela when it was destroyed by US forces on September 2, 2025. (Photo: President Donald Trump/Truth Social)
“Drug trafficking is a crime, not an act of war,” noted one critic. “Traffickers must be arrested, not summarily executed.”
Legal and human rights experts said that Tuesday’s deadly US attack on a boat the Trump administration claimed was transporting cocaine off the coast of Venezuela violated international law.
“Drug trafficking is a crime, not an act of war,” former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth said on social media following the strike, which US President Donald Trumpsaid killed 11 people. “Traffickers must be arrested, not summarily executed, which US forces just illegally did.”
“Trump admits he ordered a summary execution—the crime of murder,” Roth added. “Drug traffickers are not combatants who can be shot on sight. They are criminal suspects who must be arrested and prosecuted.”
Declassified video showing the U.S. committing a war crime when it fired on a civilian vessel near Venezuela.Being suspected of carrying drugs does not carry a death sentence and certainly not without due process.
Michael Becker, an associate professor of international law at Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland, told the BBC Wednesday that the Trump administration’s designation of the Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua and other drug trafficking groups as terrorist organizations “stretches the meaning of the term beyond its breaking point.”
“The fact that US officials describe the individuals killed by the US strike as narcoterrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets,” Becker said. “The US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela or the Tren de Aragua criminal organization.”
“Not only does the strike appear to have violated the prohibition on the use of force, it also runs afoul of the right to life under international human rights law,” Becker added.
Luke Moffett, a professor of international law at Queens University Belfast in Northern Ireland, told the BBC that while “force can be used to stop a boat,” this should generally be accomplished using “nonlethal measures.”
Such action, said Moffett, must be “reasonable and necessary in self-defense where there is immediate threat of serious injury or loss of life to enforcement officials,” and the US attack was likely “unlawful under the law of the sea.”
“It reflects the worst of US militarism—secretive, unilateral, and contemptuous of due process, human rights, and the rule of law.”
The peace group CodePink said Wednesday that “even if Washington’s claims are accurate, drug trafficking does not justify a death sentence delivered by missile.”
“International law is clear: The use of force is only lawful in self-defense or with explicit UN Security Council authorization,” the group continued. “This strike had neither. It reflects the worst of US militarism—secretive, unilateral, and contemptuous of due process, human rights, and the rule of law.”
“Under US law, it’s equally indefensible,” CodePink argued. “The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to authorize war. Unilateral action may only be used in emergencies or self-defense, and this strike meets neither.”
CodePink continued:
With the US Southern Command assets already deployed in the region, why blow up a vessel instead of capturing and interrogating the crew? If the goal were really to uncover evidence of [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro’s alleged involvement, this reckless approach raises only two possibilities: Either the narrative is fabricated and Washington used it as a pretext for a deadly show of force or it’s real, and the US chose extrajudicial killing over law, evidence, and humanity.
CodePink called on Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) “to lead the fight in Congress to stop this escalation,” urging him to “introduce legislation to block unauthorized military force, hold hearings to expose the dangers of border militarization, insist on transparency of all relevant directives, and rally Congress to cut off funding for these reckless operations.”
Tuesday’s attack came amid Trump’s deployment of an armada of naval warships off the coast of Venezuela, whose socialist government has long endured US threats of regime change—and sometimes more.
Infused with the notion that it has the right to meddle anywhere in the hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine, the US has attacked, invaded, occupied, and otherwise intervened in Latin American and Caribbean nations well over 100 times since the dubious declaration was issued by President James Monroe in 1823.
Since the late 19th century, oil-rich Venezuela has seen US interventions including involvement in border disputes, help with military coups, support for dictators, and attempts to subvert the Bolivarian Revolution—including by officially recognizing opposition figures claiming to be the legitimate presidents of the country.
Critics of US imperialism highlighted Washington’s hypocritical policies and practices toward Venezuela.
Former Philippine President Duterte is in custody in The Hague, having been charged by the International Criminal Court for ordering the summary execution of alleged drug traffickers. Trump just ordered the summary execution of 11 alleged drug traffickers. https://t.co/T4tjhVNNeh
“Venezuela produces no cocaine, but US warships patrol its coastline under the banner of a ‘drug war,'” New Hampshire Peace Action organizing director Michael “Lefty” Morrill wrote Wednesday.
Meanwhile, neighboring Colombia and nearby Peru—the world’s two leading cocaine producers—get no such treatment. Nor does Ecuador, which has emerged as one of the world’s leading trafficking hubs.
Morrill also briefly explored bits of the long US history of supporting narcotraffickers when strategically expedient, noting that former Panamanian President Manuel Noriega “was first a CIA asset, then branded a narco-dictator and dragged to a US prison.”
“The Taliban was once a strategic partner in Afghanistan’s opium trade, before being cast as the world’s largest trafficker,” he added. “‘Drugs’ are not simply powders; they are pretexts, shaped to fit the contours of empire.”
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
![Palestinians gather at an aid distribution point set up by the privately-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), near the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on June 25, 2025. [Eyad BABA / AFP /Getty Images]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/GettyImages-2221372445.jpg?fit=920%2C613&ssl=1)
