On January 3, 2026, the world watched in shock as American bombers, warships, and helicopters executed a lightning strike on Caracas, disabled Venezuelan air defenses, and whisked President Nicolás Maduro and his wife away to the United States. The Manhattan U.S. Attorney said Maduro would face a four‑count indictment, including a narco‑terrorism conspiracy and gun crimes under Title 18; President Donald Trump boasted at a press conference that U.S. troops would “run” Venezuela until a friendly government could be installed and that American oil companies would “fix” the country with profits...

In the closing days of 2025, the White House turned an opioid crisis into a national security drama. Standing in the Oval Office during a Mexican Border Defense Medal ceremony on December 15, President Donald Trump declared that he would sign an executive order to classify fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction,” calling the announcement “historic.” Treating a synthetic painkiller like a nuclear bomb says more about Washington’s mindset than about the drug. Though drug overdose deaths declined in 2024, 80,391 people still died and 54,743 of those deaths were from opioids. Those numbers...

Former U.S. Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney died on November 3, 2025 at age 84; his family said he had suffered from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease. Best known for steering national security policy after the 9/11 attacks, he became the dominant force behind a Global War on Terror that unleashed torture, preemptive war, and mass surveillance. Amnesty International has described him as one of the principal architects of a program that amounted to torture, while the Brown University Costs of War project attributes more than 900,000 deaths and trillions of dollars in spending to...