Kill Em All; Peace Pieces
US and World News Dec. 2- 5
Kill Em All
The Pentagon announced on Thursday that another US strike against small boats killed four people in the eastern Pacific. At least 22 such strikes have killed 86 people so far.
President Trump announced on Tuesday that land strikes against Venezuela will begin “very soon.”
On Wednesday, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro confirmed he spoke with Trump ten days prior and called the meeting “cordial” and a potential path for diplomacy.
Trump appeared to sleep through a meeting on Venezuela strategy with senior cabinet members, likely the last of the year.
Secretary of ‘War’ Pete Hegseth denied ordering the follow-up strike on Sept. 2 that killed two would-be survivors and blamed it on Joint Special Operations Commander Admiral Mitch Bradley. Hegseth couched the blame in apparent praise for Bradley’s “combat decisions.” Trump has now said that he wouldn’t have ordered the strike and that he believes Hegseth’s denial.
Congress is now investigating Hegseth for the incident, a bipartisan group led by Senators Schumer, Kaine, Schiff, Paul has introduced a war powers resolution to block Trump’s planned invasion without congressional authorization.
Admiral Bradley appeared before the Senate on Thursday behind closed doors and denied that Hegseth gave an explicit order to kill everyone on board. The Hill is now reporting that Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of US Southern Command set to retire early on Dec. 12th, was actually forced out by Hegseth after he voiced concern over the “murky” legal basis for the strikes.
Shooting at shipwreck survivors is the paradigmatic case of war crimes.
Trump said that “I would not have done this. The first strike was very lethal...”
But Trump now says that any country trafficking drugs into the US can be attacked militarily.
“We’ve only just begun striking narco-boats– and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” Trump said.
At the same time, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former President of Honduras who was convicted of trafficking more than 400 tons of cocaine to the United States. Hernandez was sentenced to 45 years in prison in 2024, for crimes that included weapons charges and accepting a $1 billion bribe from Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman for his first presidential campaign in exchange for protecting trafficking routes. Trump called the case against him a “Biden setup.”
Fentanyl doesn’t come from Venezuela, and cocaine comes primarily from the Andean countries of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Most of the sea-based drug trafficking to the US arrives through the eastern Pacific rather than the Caribbean, where most of the US strikes have taken place.
The US Coast Guard reported that 27% of maritime interdictions of suspected drug traffickers yielded no evidence of drug trafficking during 2024.
The family of one Colombian man slain in the attacks has accused Trump of murder, as have human rights groups like Amnesty International.
Congressman Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) has now announced articles of impeachment against Hegseth for murder and conspiracy to murder, as well as for “reckless and unlawful mishandling of classified information.”
The UK has stopped sharing related intelligence with the US following the strikes.
Megyn Kelly, for her part, said this:
“So, I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I want Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”
Maduro has said that he is willing to step down during the next 18 months and reportedly offered to leave the country in exchange for a guarantee of $200 million for himself and amnesty for his administration officials, which Trump rejected.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, with 303 billion barrels, mostly around the Orinoco River in the north of the country. The denser form of crude oil there and low investment in infrastructure have limited the country’s actual oil output.
Reports
The Pentagon’s Inspector General released the report on Hegseth’s earlier signal chat scandal, finding that he endangered American servicemembers by accidentally leaking Yemen strike plans to a journalist on the messaging app. Hegseth refused to hand over his phone to the IG or appear for an interview.
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A leaked FBI report detailed Kash Patel’s demands for a swat team jacket and patches before he would leave a plane in Utah after the Charlie Kirk assassination. This comes in addition to the steady stream of reports that Patel has used government planes for golf outings, hunting trips, and dates with his girlfriend, a 28-year old country singer in Nashville. Patel also redirected a SWAT team from its emergency readiness and response role to instead perform as personal security for his girlfriend. The new report also claims that Patel polygraphed members of the FBI to determine whether any of them were disloyal to him.
The report alleges that the FBI is in “complete disarray” under Patel’s ‘leadership’.
ICE Escalation and Resistance
“Only reverse migration can fully cure this situation,” Trump wrote after Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal shot two members of the West Virginia National Guard in Washington, D.C., killing one, Sarah Beckstrom and critically wounding a second, Andrew Wolfe.
On Friday, DATE, the DHS official account posted: “The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear: Remigration Now.”
It soon came out that Lakanwal had been recruited as a fifteen-year old into a CIA zero unit to kill his fellow countrymen in night raids.
“They were in the heaviest fighting- it was almost every day.” Mick Mulroy, a retired Marine and CIA officer said of the so-called ‘zero unit’ into which he (Lakanwal) was recruited as a 15 year old.
Lakanwal had arrived in the US in 2021 and received asylum in 2024.
He has been charged with premeditated murder among other counts and pleaded not guilty to all charges from his hospital bed, where he has remained since the shooting. Lakanwal had been shot by a National Guard member.
Wolfe has awoken from a medically-induced coma but remains in critical condition.
Trump blamed the shooting on Joe Biden and Afghan culture generally and promised to further vet all Afghan immigrants to the US as well as Somalis.
Trump instructed US Citizenship and Immigration Services to freeze all immigration processing for migrants from the 19 countries on Trump’s previous travel ban.
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Citizens in New York City blocked an ICE raid on the busy Canal Street in lower Manhattan on Saturday, Nov. 29th, blocking the officers in a parking garage and ending the raid before it began.
Students and school staff at a North Carolina school, including the principal, linked arms and surrounded their school, refusing entry to immigration enforcement.
ICE are currently beginning to surge in the Minnesota twin cities area and have already arrived in New Orleans.
Suits
The Nonprofit Campaign for Accountability filed a 17-page report documenting Lindsey Halligan’s violations of DOJ ethics policies, professional ethics guidelines and federal law. Halligan is currently serving as the Trump-appointed acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan does not use “acting” or “interim” in her title despite never being confirmed by the Senate and US District Judge Cameron Currie ruling last month that her appointment by Pam Bondi was illegal.
Since Halligan was the only prosecutor to move forward with the cases against Letitia James and James Comey, Currie ordered those cases dismissed. On Monday, a three-judge panel from the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled that Bondi’s attempts to keep Alina Habba in the acting role as US Attorney for New Jersey were illegal for bypassing the confirmation process.
The New York Times is suing the Pentagon over its new policy restricting reporters to government approved information, calling it “exactly the type of speech and press-restrictive scheme that the Supreme Court and the D.C Circuit have recognized violates the First Amendment.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the White House website now has a section dedicated to “Media Offenders.”
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The House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed Jack Smith for an interview about his prosecutions of Donald Trump during his first presidential term. Smith is the former special counsel for the Justice Department. He is scheduled to appear for a closed-door interview on Dec. 17th and required to produce relevant records. Smith’s lawyers said that he had offered six weeks ago to appear before the Republican-led committee for an open-door session.
Costco is suing Trump for a “full refund” of revenue lost due to (changing) tariffs. Costco is now the largest of dozens of companies to file such a suit.
Peace Pieces
Israel has opened the southern Rafah border crossing into Egypt, but only in one direction, rather than the two-way crossing agreed upon in the recent ceasefire deal. Egypt has consistently insisted that the crossing be opened in both directions to prevent the permanent displacement of Palestinians. Israel claims that people can now leave Gaza “voluntarily.”
At least 366 people have been killed in Gaza since the most recent ceasefire announcement. Seven people, including five members of a single family, were killed in a strike in the Al-Mawasi Evacuation Zone, an Israeli-declared ‘safe zone’ on Thursday.
People in Khan Younis took a break from the daily funerals to celebrate the joint wedding of 54 couples in deliberate defiance of the ongoing genocide.
Israel struck in Lebanon
On Thursday, Israel struck sites in southern Lebanon that it claimed are Hezbollah weapons storage facilities in civilian areas of four cities. The strikes came a day after civilian representatives from the two countries met for talks with UN peacekeepers for the first time in decades. The two countries have had a ceasefire since November 2024.
The US has asked Lebanon to return an unexploded US-made bomb dropped on Beirut by Israel to avoid the technology falling into the hands of its adversaries. The small-diameter GBU-39 bomb made by Boeing is relatively inexpensive and unique for its guidance capability despite the lack of an engine. Instead, it uses wings that allow it to glide for up to 68 miles. The strikes killed five including Hezbollah commander Haytham Ali Tabtabai and wounded at least 28 others in Beirut suburbs.
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DRC, Rwanda
The leaders of Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda have signed a peace deal, as fighting continues. The two sides’ leaders agreed in principle to a US-brokered deal in June, but have not implemented it. Trump described the deal this way:
“Some people may be surprised. I think they’ve spent a lot of time killing each other and now they’re going to spend a lot of time hugging, holding hands and taking advantage of the United States of America economically, like every other country does.”
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Sudan
The UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk warned on Thursday of “a new wave of atrocities” in Sudan, particularly in the central Kordofan region, and called for “all states with influence over the parties to take immediate action to halt the fighting, and stop the arms flows that are fuelling the conflict”.
The conflict has already displaced more than 14 million people, making it the largest refugee crisis on earth, and has killed at least 40,000. The US renewed its push for peace talks after Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia urged Trump to do so, but attempted talks have not paused the fighting for months. Saudi Arabia and Egypt support the army generally, while the UAE is funding the Rapid Support Forces, although it denies this. Trump’s envoy to Sudan is Massad Boulos, father-in-law of his daughter Tiffany. Norway is currently preparing to host ceasefire negotiations, and the Trump administration is expected to impose more severe sanctions on the warring parties.
Ukraine “Peace Plan”
Three real estate moguls- Donald Trump, his envoy/golf buddy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner–continue waffling back and forth between brief attempts at tough talk on Russia and almost complete capitulation. The most recent 20-point deal included demands that Ukraine relinquish the eastern Donbass region (largely Russian-speaking) and promises that Ukraine will never join NATO.
Trump has now renamed the US Institute of Peace the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, replacing the United States with himself.
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Nuggets
Around 20,000 rounds of ammunition belonging to the German military, the Bundeswehr, were stolen from an unattended civilian truck.
A government official and three others killed in a shooting in northwest Pakistan.
Trump is now promising to withhold SNAP food assistance payments from most blue states beginning next week if they withhold information on recipients, like their names and immigration status.
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“I knew that if nobody went to help them, they would die… I don’t know where my strength came from.”
Charles Norman Shay, a Native American from the Penobscot Nation of Maine who earned a silver star for repeatedly saving drowning soldiers at Omaha Beach on D-Day has died at the age of 101. Shay was a 19-year old Army medic on D-Day and remained in service through the Korean War, where he earned a bronze star. He was turned away from the voting booth in 1945 while in full uniform.
He later became an advocate for Native veterans and eventually moved to Normandy in 2017, to continue his work educating people about the Native American contributions in World War II and throughout US history.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/us/politics/charles-norman-shay-dead.html