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Brazilian senator Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, on Thursday urged the United States to bomb boats in Rio de Janeiro to fight drug trafficking, as it has done in the Caribbean and Pacific.Washington has deployed stealth warplanes and Navy ships in the Caribbean as part of what it calls counter-narcotics efforts, destroying nine vessels and killing at least 37 people, according to US figures. President Donald Trump’s government alleges the boats were involved in drug trafficking, although it has not shared evidence to back that assertion and some family members of those killed say they were innocent fishermen.Flavio Bolsonaro said he was “envious” in a post on the X social media platform responding to one by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, featuring a video of the moment a boat sailing at sea is hit by a missile and set ablaze.”I heard there are boats like this here in Rio de Janeiro, in Guanabara Bay, flooding Brazil with drugs. Wouldn’t you like to spend a few months here helping us fight these terrorist organizations?”Trump last week said he had authorized covert CIA action against Venezuela and was considering strikes against alleged drug cartels on land.The US actions — which killed at least one Colombian — have also enraged that country’s leftist President Gustavo Petro and shattered ties between Washington and Bogota.Petro said Trump was “carrying out extrajudicial executions” that “violate international law” by striking alleged drug-trafficking boats. Washington has not released evidence to support its assertion that the targets of its strikes are drug smugglers, and experts say the summary killings are illegal even if they hit confirmed narcotics traffickers.The Bolsonaro family has close ties to Trump.The former president was sentenced last month to 27 years in prison over a botched coup attempt in what Trump said was a “witch hunt” against his ally.Another son of the former president, Eduardo, lobbied hard for Washington to impose punitive tariffs on Brazil and sanctions against top officials.However, tensions between Brasilia and Washington have thawed in recent weeks with a potential meeting on the cards between Trump and leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at a summit starting this weekend in Malaysia.

Trinidadian Rishi Samaroo’s relatives are adamant: he was a fisherman, not a drug trafficker as the United States claimed after it destroyed his boat in Caribbean waters.Samaroo, 41, was one of six people killed in the attack announced last week by US President Donald Trump himself.Rehabilitated after a criminal youth, “Rishi was a loving, kind, caring, sharing person… He would do anything for anybody that asked him,” his sister Sunita Korasingh told AFP Thursday after his funeral in a suburb of Port of Spain, the capital of the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago. The United States has deployed a military fleet in the Caribbean in what it has called an anti-drug operation but Venezuela says it really aims to unseat President Nicolas Maduro.The Pentagon has announced nine attacks on alleged drug boats in recent weeks in the Caribbean and now the Pacific, claiming close to 40 lives. The victims’ governments and families say most were civilians — many of them fishermen. The US has made public no evidence to back up its claims of drug trafficking involving the vessels.In a question addressed to Trump, 38-year-old Korasingh said: “If he was 100 percent (sure) that this boat… had drugs in it, why didn’t he stop this vessel and search it and all the rest of vessels instead of blowing up people… like dogs?” If drugs are found on these boats, she continued, “you could lock them up… within the law… but you can’t just be going around blowing up” boats.- “We all make mistakes” About 30 people gathered Wednesday night for Samaroo’s wake in a tent in a poor neighborhood.Neighbors say shootings are frequent in the area, host to several drug gangs and a significant community of Venezuelan migrants. Few people wanted to speak to AFP. A scholar known as a pandit led the Hindu ceremony, one of the most practiced religions in Trinidad and Tobago. Korasingh made a banner featuring Samaroo with angel wings standing on clouds with a blue sky in the background and the words: “Gone but never forgotten.”His family said he had served a 15-year sentence for homicide committed as a teenager, then moved to Venezuela. “As human beings, we make mistakes at a young age… We learn from our mistakes and grow,” said Korasingh of her brother’s criminal past.When he got out, he became a fisherman and a goat farmer and sold cheese.Drugs? Never. “He never even smoked a cigarette in his whole life,” she insisted. “He never even drank a beer in his life.”His family says Samaroo was on his way home from Venezuela when he was killed.- Last call -Attendees at the wake played cards, drank alcohol and coffee, and talked about Samaroo. Another sister, Sallycar Korasingh, said she received a video call from him minutes before he set out by boat on that fateful night of October 12.”We spoke and he showed me he was going on the boat. This was just before midnight… I took a picture of him,” the 31-year-old told AFP.She said did not know what Samaroo’s relationship was with 26-year-old Chad Joseph, also killed in the strike.According to Trinidadian press, Joseph had been accused of drug trafficking in the past but never convicted. But his family and neighbors insisted to AFP last week Joseph had no links to drug trafficking, and was also a fisherman and farmer.Samaroo had three children in Venezuela with three different women, according to family members.Trinidadian police are investigating the strike.

US President Donald Trump’s administration sounded the alarm Thursday over potential turmoil at airports as the government shutdown threatens to drag into November, warning of ruined holiday plans for millions of Americans. With the standoff in Congress over health care spending now in its fourth week, Trump’s Republicans and the opposition Democrats are facing increasing pressure to end a crisis that has crippled public services.More than 60,000 air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers are working without pay, and the White House warned that increasing absenteeism could mean chaos at check-in lines.  Trump’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters the shutdown was already causing “severe impacts” at airports nationwide.”If the Democrats continue to keep the government closed, we fear there will be significant flight delays, disruptions and cancelations in major airports across the country this holiday season,” she said.Airport workers calling in sick rather than working without pay — leading to significant delays — was a major factor in Trump bringing an end to the 2019 shutdown, the longest in history at 35 days.In Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson told a news conference that airport staffing shortages were now the reason for more than 50 percent of delays, a huge increase on the normal statistic of five percent.Some 19,000 flights were held up from Saturday to Monday, he said, warning that this rate was “only going to increase,” with airport workers taking on second jobs as Uber drivers or delivering food.”The longer the shutdown goes on, and as fewer air traffic controllers show up to work, the safety of the American people is thrown further into jeopardy,” he said.- Politically toxic -Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, appearing alongside Johnson, said staff in control towers were voicing deepening anger over the shutdown, which has led to an estimated 1.4 million federal workers going without pay.”I want them coming to their facilities and controlling the airspace, but they’re having to make decisions about how they spend their time, to make sure they put food on their table, feed their kids and support their family members,” he said.With no end to the shutdown in sight, the gridlock is beginning to take a personal toll on lawmakers, who fly out of Washington most weekends to return to their home districts. During an earnings call with analysts on Thursday American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, five miles from the capital, had suffered “operating delays and issues with air traffic control.”After weeks of failed daily votes on a House-passed resolution to reopen the government, the Senate also rejected a bill Thursday to guarantee pay for troops and some federal employees who have been working for nothing. Republicans had hoped that a blockade on troop pay would be seen by some Democrats as politically toxic and might be a catalyst to finally break the party’s united stance on the shutdown. All but three Democrats voted against the bill, however, arguing that it would have given Trump too much sway over who gets paid and who doesn’t, while offering no help for 750,000 workers placed on enforced leave without pay. Democrats say the only path to reopening the government is a Trump-led negotiation over their demands to extend subsidies that make health insurance affordable for millions of Americans — the key sticking point in the standoff.But Trump has insisted he won’t negotiate with Democrats until the shutdown is over.

US President Donald Trump said Thursday he was postponing a “surge” of federal forces into San Francisco, after repeatedly musing about sending troops into a city Republicans routinely paint as a crime-ridden hellhole.Trump said he had been readying to order action at the weekend but had been persuaded to step back after speaking to “friends of mine who live in the area” and to Mayor Daniel Lurie.Lurie “asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around. I told him I think he is making a mistake, because we can do it much faster, and remove the criminals that the Law does not permit him to remove,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.”Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”Lurie, a Democrat who this week warned that masked immigration agents were using tactics designed to create a backlash, said Thursday he had told Trump San Francisco was on the up, and had been assured the federal government was stepping back.”The president told me clearly that he was calling off any plans for a federal deployment in San Francisco,” Lurie said.”Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem reaffirmed that direction in our conversation this morning.”San Francisco serves as a shorthand in Republican circles for everything that is wrong with American cities.The tech hub features regularly on right-wing cable news as a place of spiraling criminality and consequence-free drug use among a rampaging population of homeless people.The reality is more nuanced: unlike a lot of American cities whose down-at-heel districts might be easily avoided, many of San Francisco’s problems are concentrated in an area next to the business district and near places popular with tourists.While this makes the behavior more visible, statistics reveal the city’s crime rates are plunging.Figures from the San Francisco Police Department and the California Department of Justice show the number of murders is at a seven-decade low, while robberies are down to levels not seen in 40 years.Along with an aggressive campaign to arrest and deport migrants using masked agents, Trump has angered Democratic Party-controlled cities like Los Angeles and Washington by sending in National Guard troops.His supporters say this is necessary to stem rising crime and should spread to other cities, but opponents say it is an authoritarian move intended to inflame tensions.

Apple lost a UK lawsuit Thursday which accuses the US tech giant of abusing the dominant position of its App Store, with claimants seeking more than £1.5 billion ($2 billion) in damages.The Competition Appeal Tribunal found that Apple had shut out competition in the app distribution market and charged app developers “excessive and unfair” commissions. Apple said it “strongly disagrees” with the ruling and intended to appeal.This is the second setback in two days for Apple.On Wednesday, the UK’s competition watchdog said it had “strategic market status” in smartphones and tablets alongside Google, due to the two firms’ dominant positions.The Competition and Markets Authority said Apple and Google would face tougher regulation of services on their mobile platforms, which it said risked “limiting innovation and competition”.The new measures are similar to a tech competition law from the European Union, the Digital Markets Act, which carries the potential for hefty financial penalties — and could force the tech giants to open up their platforms. The app store case was brought by King’s College London academic Rachael Kent and the law firm Hausfeld & Co on behalf of millions of UK iPhone and iPad users.Under UK law, in this type of class action all potentially affected persons are included in the procedure by default, and may benefit from possible compensation, unless they voluntarily opt out.- YouTube and Candy Crush -At the hearings, which opened in January, claimants argued that Apple users were overcharged by the company “due to its ban on rival app store platforms.”A 30-percent surcharge that the company “imposes” on apps purchased through Apple’s App Store leads to consumers “paying more”, they said.At the heart of the claimants’ case was that Apple used the App Store to exclude competitors, forcing users to use its system and boosting profits in the process.Apple’s “restrictions cannot sensibly be justified as being necessary or proportionate to deliver the benefits which Apple puts forward as flowing from its objective of an integrated and centralised system,” the Tribunal found.It ruled that in cases where Apple overcharged app developers and passed on the extra costs to consumers, users were entitled to a refund with interest.Law firm Hausfeld hailed the judgement as a “great outcome for UK consumers and businesses”.It “highlights the importance of the collective actions regime for UK consumers and businesses,” the firm said in a statement, adding that the refund could apply to popular apps like Candy Crush and YouTube.Apple, which had denounced the trial as “baseless”, maintained that its App Store “faces vigorous competition from many other platforms” and insisted that 85% of apps on the App Store were free.Regulators around the world have increased scrutiny and investigations of Apple’s practices in recent years, particularly regarding its app store.The American giant is facing another £785 million lawsuit in the United Kingdom over the fees charged to developers. In April, Apple was also fined €500 million (£436 million) in the EU for preventing developers from steering customers outside its App Store to access cheaper deals, in violation of the bloc’s rules. Apple has appealed the fine.

A record-breaking marine heat wave in 2023 left two ecologically vital coral species “functionally extinct” in Florida’s Coral Reef, a study said Thursday, highlighting the growing dangers a warming climate poses for the world’s oceans.Elkhorn and staghorn corals, which take their names from the antler shapes they resemble and belong to the Acropora family, are fast-growing “reef builder” species that long dominated waters off Florida and in the Caribbean.Both species — but particularly elkhorn — created complex branch-like structures akin to the dense canopy of a forest, providing crucial habitats for fish and acting as natural barriers against strong waves and coastal erosion.The pair have been declining since the 1970s from threats including climate change, disease and unsustainable fishing, which combined to leave them critically endangered. But the 2023 heat wave — which persisted for almost three months and brought record-high ocean temperatures off Florida — proved a death knell for the two species in the Florida Coral Reef, the world’s third-largest barrier reef. “The numbers of these species that are left on the reef today are now so low that they’re no longer able to perform their functional role in the ecosystem,” Ross Cunning, a research biologist at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and co–first author of the paper that was published in Science, told AFP.”This is something that demonstrates the level of climate pressures on our natural world and something we all need to take extremely seriously,” he added.Research to determine how many remain in the Caribbean is underway, but the picture appears bleak there, too.- Restoration efforts -Coral are made up of tiny individual animals called polyps, which maintain a symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae that live within their tissues. When the algae are stressed by heat or pollution, however, they leave, causing the coral to “bleach” and become vulnerable to disease and death.Recovery is sometimes possible. But the new research, which involved diver surveys to track more than 52,000 colonies of staghorn and elkhorn coral across 391 sites, unfortunately confirmed scientists’ worst fears: the two species were nearly totally wiped out, with mortality ranging 98-100 percent in the Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas off the state’s south coast.They fared better off southeast Florida, on the northern extent of the reef tract, where mortality rates were around 38 percent thanks to slightly cooler conditions. In a blow to conservation efforts the losses impacted both wild and restored Acropora, grown in nurseries then planted onto the reef as part of restoration projects that have been in place since the 2000s. It’s not yet well understood what made the elkhorn and staghorn coral more sensitive to heat than other coral species that did not experience the same catastrophic losses. Scientists have been safeguarding many of Florida’s remaining Acropora in aquariums and nurseries, and have since added survivors of the 2023 heat wave. The idea is to study the genes that helped them withstand heat, and possibly introduce new genetic diversity from populations outside of Florida that might boost resilience. “Restoration is more critical than ever to preventing a complete extinction,” said Cunning. “But we know that the way that we perform restoration fundamentally needs to change — we can’t continue just planting out as much coral as possible.”Ultimately, efforts to help coral adapt must go hand-in-hand with action to curb climate change and save the reefs — which support a quarter of all ocean life, provide food and income for hundreds of millions of people, protect shorelines from waves and floods and are even responsible for beloved sandy white beaches.”Coral reefs may be some of the first ecosystems on our planet to be feeling impacts at this level from extreme heat waves due to climate change,” said Cunning. “But what does that mean for the next ecosystem?”

US President Donald Trump has pardoned the convicted Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, the White House said Thursday, accusing Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden of launching an unnecessary “war” against the industry. Binance was created in 2017, and swiftly became the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, turning Zhao into a billionaire.Following an investigation into the firm’s operations, Zhao pleaded guilty to violating US anti-money-laundering laws in late 2023, and served a four-month prison sentence for it in 2024.Zhao’s pardon wipes his criminal record, and could help pave the way for Binance to return to the United States, around two years after it agreed to suspend its American operations in a deal to resolve the Department of Justice’s criminal investigation.  “In their desire to punish the cryptocurrency industry, the Biden Administration pursued Mr. Zhao despite no allegations of fraud or identifiable victims,” the White House said in a statement shared with AFP.The White House said the Biden administration’s decision to prosecute Zhao and to seek a three-year prison sentence for him had “severely damaged the United States’ reputation as a global leader in technology and innovation,” adding that the “war on crypto” was now over. Binance has spent almost a year pursuing a pardon for Zhao, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, noting that Binance has been a “key supporter” of the Trump family’s crypto venture World Liberty Financial. Despite stepping down as chief executive in 2023, Zhao remains the majority shareholder of Binance.The Trump family’s various crypto businesses have netted them a pre-tax profit of around a billion dollars, according to a recent Financial Times investigation.Trump’s pardon of Zhao follows a string of other similarly controversial moves such as his decision to issue a blanket pardon for people convicted of violence in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump has also commuted — or reduced — the sentence of the disgraced former Republican lawmaker George Santos, who was convicted of committing wire fraud and identity theft. 

NBA head coach Chauncey Billups of the Portland Trail Blazers and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier were arrested on Thursday for alleged involvement in illegal gambling, US officials said.Billups, a former Detroit Pistons star and a member of the National Basketball Association Hall of Fame, was arrested in connection with rigged illegal poker games tied to Mafia crime families, FBI Director Kash Patel said.Rozier and a former NBA player and assistant coach, Damon Jones, were among six people arrested in a sports betting case, Patel said at a press conference in New York.US Attorney Joseph Nocella said the 49-year-old Billups was one of more than 30 people indicted for alleged involvement in a “nationwide scheme to rig illegal poker games” that used “high-tech cheating technology.”Rozier and Jones allegedly “participated in one of the most brazen sports corruption schemes since online sports betting became widely legalized in the United States,” Nocella said.He described it as “an insider sports betting conspiracy that exploited confidential information about National Basketball Association athletes and teams.”The defendants were involved in illegal betting on the performance of players on the Charlotte Hornets, the Portland Trail Blazers, the Los Angeles Lakers and Toronto Raptors, Nocella said.He said the NBA has cooperated with the investigation which led to the indictments unsealed on Thursday.New York police commissioner Jessica Tisch cited an example of a March 23, 2023 game in which Rozier was then playing for the Hornets. Rozier let co-conspirators “know that he planned to leave the game early with a supposed injury,” Tisch said.”Using that information, members of the group placed more than $200,000 in wagers” on his expected performance in the game, she said. “Rozier exited the game after just nine minutes, and those bets paid out, generating tens of thousands of dollars in profit.”As for the rigged poker games allegedly involving Billups, the organizers used “custom shuffling machines that could read cards, barcoded decks and hidden cameras built into tables and light fixtures,” Tisch said.”Victims believed that they were sitting at a fair table,” she said. “Instead, they were cheated out of millions.”- NBA player banned for life -Billups retired from the NBA as a player in 2014 and has been the head coach of the Trail Blazers since 2021. He was on the bench for the team’s first game of the season on Wednesday, a loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves.Rozier, 31, was the 16th overall pick by the Boston Celtics in the 2015 draft. He has averaged 13.9 points per game playing for three teams over his 11-year NBA career.Rozier is suffering from a hamstring injury and did not play in the Heat’s opening game of the NBA season on Wednesday.Rozier’s lawyer, James Trusty, said in a statement that prosecutors “appear to be taking the word of spectacularly incredible sources rather than relying on actual evidence of wrongdoing.””Terry was cleared by the NBA and these prosecutors revived that non-case,” Trusty said. “Terry is not a gambler, but he is not afraid of a fight, and he looks forward to winning this fight.”Nocella, the US attorney, said the indictment in the sports gambling case was linked to the arrest last year of a former NBA player, Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors, who was banned from the league for life for his role in a betting scandal.Porter was accused of placing bets linked to his performance on the court. He has pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and is awaiting sentencing.NBA players are forbidden from wagering on NBA games under league rules.Billups’s arrest comes three months after that of former NBA All-Star Gilbert Arenas, who was arrested in July on charges of running illegal high-stakes poker games at his Los Angeles mansion.Arenas has pleaded not guilty.

Republicans sounded the alarm Thursday over potential turmoil at US airports as the government shutdown threatens to drag into November, warning of ruined holiday plans for millions of Americans. With the standoff in its fourth week, President Donald Trump’s Republicans and the opposition Democrats are facing increasing pressure to end a stalemate that has crippled public services.More than 60,000 air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers are working without pay, and the Trump administration joined Republicans in Congress to warn that increasing absenteeism could mean chaos at check-in lines.  “We are rounding into a holiday season, as we all know, and we’re in the middle of the height of the football season. This is peak travel time for the US,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told a news conference.”Hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to travel to football games this weekend, for example, and if the current trajectory continues, many Americans could miss watching their favorite teams and reconnecting with friends and family.”Airport workers calling in sick rather than working without pay — leading to significant delays — was a major factor in Trump bringing an end to the 2019 shutdown, the longest in history at 35 days.In normal times, five percent of flight delays are the result of staffing shortages but that has increased to more than 50 percent, Johnson said.He told reporters that 19,000 flights were delayed from Saturday to Monday and that this rate was “only going to increase” as the shutdown continues.Johnson said airport workers were finishing long shifts and then taking on second jobs as Uber drivers or delivering food.”The longer the shutdown goes on, and as fewer air traffic controllers show up to work, the safety the American people is thrown further into jeopardy,” he warned.- Politically toxic -Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he had spoken to staff in control towers who were voicing deepening anger over the shutdown — a standoff over health care funding that has led to 1.4 million federal workers going without pay.”I want them coming to their facilities and controlling the airspace, but they’re having to make decisions about how they spend their time, to make sure they put food on their table, feed their kids and support their family members,” he said.After weeks of failed daily votes on a House-passed resolution to reopen the government, Senate Republicans scheduled a vote Thursday to guarantee pay for troops and some federal employees who have been working for nothing. Republicans hope that a blockade on troop pay may be seen by some Democrats as politically-toxic and may be a catalyst to finally break the party’s united stance on the shutdown. But Democrats indicated they intend to reject the bill, arguing that it gives Trump too much sway over who gets paid and who doesn’t, while offering no help for 750,000 workers placed on enforced leave without pay. A trio of shutdown bills — one on troop pay, another to pay airport security workers and air traffic controllers and a third to preserve an under-threat food aid program — could be brought to the Senate floor next week.Democrats say the only path to reopening the government is a Trump-led negotiation over their demands to extend subsidies that make health insurance affordable for millions of Americans — the key sticking point in the standoff.Republican Senate leader John Thune has offered Democrats a vote on preserving the expiring benefits and Trump has insisted he won’t negotiate with Democrats until the shutdown is over.The president is leaving Washington on Friday for a multi-day trip to Asia, his second foreign sojourn since the shutdown began.

Outgoing New York mayor Eric Adams endorsed former state governor Andrew Cuomo in the November mayoral election, The New York Times reported Thursday.Adams, who has been mired by corruption allegations linked to his term in office, dropped out of the race on September 28 but did not initially endorse a rival.Cuomo, a former governor of New York, is trailing the race’s frontrunner, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, while the Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa is a distant third. The election is on November 4.”I think that it is imperative to really wake up the Black and brown communities that have suffered from gentrification on how important this race is,” Adams told The Times in an interview.”I’m going to walk with the governor in those neighborhoods and get them engaged.”Adams has had a rocky relationship with Cuomo previously, calling the former governor a “snake and a liar” for reportedly pressuring him to quit the race.It is unclear what impact Adams’s endorsement will have on the race.In the last citywide poll before Adams dropped out, commissioned by Fox News and carried out between September 18 and 22, Adams was polling 7 percent.Mamdani leads Cuomo by 11 percentage points in the latest citywide poll, conducted by Patriot Polling between October 18 and 19, with the Democratic Party candidate at 43 percent. Sliwa was at 19 percent.