#Customs and #Border Protection officer fires gun in dispute with driver at JFK airport.

NEW YORK — An on-duty Customs and Border Protection #officer fired his #gun several times during a confrontation with another motorist Tuesday on an access road for New York’s Kennedy Airport, police said.

The CBP officer told authorities that he pulled his weapon after the other driver attacked him over a minor traffic crash, Port Authority police said.

It wasn’t clear if the shots hit anything. The other driver fled the scene after the shooting, according to the CBP officer, who was unhurt.

The two-vehicle crash happened shortly before 5 a.m. near the airport’s main car rental facilities on the tangle of roads and ramps that lead to the airport’s terminals, administration buildings and cargo areas.

JFK’s roadways are currently undergoing a major construction overhaul and navigating the thicket of detours and traffic changes has been a source of frustration and confusion for many drivers.

The Port Authority didn’t say if the officer was driving an official vehicle. His name has not been released.

The investigation led to traffic delays in the area during the morning commute, but those issues lessened as the morning progressed.

Trinidad and Tobago will open Caribbean nation’s airports to U.S. military as #Venezuela tensions grow.

The announcement comes after the U.S. military recently installed a radar system at the airport in Tobago. The Caribbean country’s government has said the radar is being used to fight local crime, and that the small nation wouldn’t be used as a launchpad to attack any other country.

The U.S. would use the airports for activity that would be “logistical in nature, facilitating supply replenishment and routine personnel rotations,” Trinidad and Tobago’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. It did not provide further details.

Trinidad’s prime minister previously has praised ongoing U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.

Only 7 miles (11 kilometres) separate Venezuela from the twin-island Caribbean nation at their closest point. It has two main airports: Piarco International Airport in Trinidad and ANR Robinson International Airport in Tobago.

Hours after the announcement, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez said her country was immediately cancelling any contract, deal or negotiation to supply natural gas to Trinidad and Tobago.

She claimed that the government of Trinidad and Tobago participated in the recent U.S. seizure of an oil tanker off the country’s coast, calling it an “act of piracy.”

She also accused Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar of having a “hostile agenda” against Venezuela, noting that the U.S. military installed an airport radar in Tobago.

“This official has turned the territory of Trinidad and Tobago into a U.S. aircraft carrier to attack Venezuela, in an unequivocal act of vassalage,” Rodríguez said.

Persad-Bissessar told The Associated Press that she wasn’t bothered by the statement, describing it as “simply false propaganda.”

“They should direct their complaints to President Trump, as it is the U.S. military that has seized the sanctioned oil tanker. In the meantime, we continue to have peaceful relations with the Venezuelan people,” Persad-Bissessar said.

The prime minister asserted that her nation has “never depended” on Venezuela for natural gas supplies: “We have adequate reserves within our territory.”

Trinidad and Venezuela had previously reached a deal over the development of a gas field in Venezuelan waters, near the maritime border separating the two countries.

In December 2023, Venezuela granted a licence for oil giant Shell and Trinidad and Tobago to produce gas from the field. In October, the U.S. government granted Trinidad and Tobago permission to negotiate the gas deal without facing U.S sanctions placed on Venezuela.

Amery Browne, an opposition senator and Trinidad and Tobago’s former foreign minister, accused the Trinidadian government on Monday of being deceptive in its announcement.

Browne said that Trinidad and Tobago has become “complicit facilitators of extrajudicial killings, cross-border tension and belligerence.”

“There is nothing routine about this. It has nothing to do with the usual cooperation and friendly collaborations that we have enjoyed with the USA and all of our neighbors for decades,” he said.

LOS ANGELES -- Federal authorities said Monday that they foiled a plot to bomb multiple U.S. companies on New Year’s Eve in Southern California, announcing the arrests of members of an extremist anti-capitalist and anti-government group.

The four suspects were arrested Friday as they were testing explosives in the desert east of Los Angeles, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said during a news conference.

Officials showed reporters surveillance aerial footage of the four suspects moving a large black object in the desert to a table shortly before their arrests.

In the criminal complaint, the four suspects named are Audrey Illeene Carroll, 30; Zachary Aaron Page, 32; Dante Gaffield, 24; and Tina Lai, 41. They are all from the Los Angeles area, Essayli said.

Officials did not describe a motive but said they are members of an offshoot of a pro-Palestinian group dubbed the Turtle Island Liberation Front. Each faces charges including conspiracy and possession of a destructive device, court documents show.

It wasn’t immediately clear if they had attorneys and The Associated Press was unable to reach family members.

Essayli said Carroll last month created a detailed plan to bomb five or more locations across Southern California on New Year’s Eve and were trying to hit multiple companies. He declined to name the companies but described them as “Amazon-type” logistical centers.

“Carroll’s bomb plot was explicit,” Essayli said. “It included step-by-step instructions to build IEDs... and listed multiple targets across Orange County and Los Angeles.”

Two of the group’s members also had discussed plans for future attacks including targeting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and vehicles with pipe bombs in 2026, according to the criminal complaint.

“Carroll stated that some of those plans would quote `take some of them out and scare the rest,”' Essayli said.

The plans were discussed both at an in-person meeting with members in Los Angeles and through an encrypted messaging app, Essayli said.

Evidence photos included in the court documents show a desert campsite with what investigators said were bomb-making materials strewn across plastic folding tables.

The suspects “all brought bomb-making components to the campsite, including various sizes of PVC pipes, suspected potassium nitrate, charcoal, charcoal powder, sulfur powder, and material to be used as fuses, among others,” the complaint states.

Last week they were putting their plan to the test in the desert before federal authorities moved in, Essayli said.

“They had everything they needed to make an operational bomb at that location,” he said.

The four were scheduled to appear in court in Los Angeles Monday afternoon, Essayli said.

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By Julie Watson And Christopher Weber

Watson reported from San Diego.

Western and Arab diplomats tour Lebanon-Israel border to observe Hezbollah disarmament efforts.


The delegation that included the ambassadors of the United States and Saudi Arabia was accompanied by Gen. Rodolph Haikal, commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces, as well as top officers in the border region.

The Lebanese government has said that by the end of the year, the army should have cleared all the border area south of the Litani river from #Hezbollah’s armed presence.

Hezbollah’s leader Naim Kassem had said that the group will end its military presence south of the Litani river but vowed again over the weekend that they will keep their weapons in other parts of Lebanon.

Parts of the zone south of the Litani River and north of the border with Israel were formerly a Hezbollah stronghold, off limits to the Lebanese national army and UN peacekeepers deployed in the area.

During the tour, the diplomats and military attaches were taken to an army post that overlooks one of five hills inside Lebanon that were captured by Israeli troops last year.

“The main goal of the military is to guarantee stability,” an army statement quoted Haikal as telling the diplomats. Haikal added that the tour aims to show that the Lebanese army is committed to the ceasefire agreement that ended the Israel-Hezbollah war last year.

There were no comments from the diplomats.

The latest Israel-Hezbollah war began Oct. 8, 2023, a day after Hamas attacked southern Israel, after Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas. Israel launched a widespread bombardment of Lebanon in September last year that severely weakened Hezbollah, followed by a ground invasion.

The war ended in November 2024 with a ceasefire brokered by the U.S.

Israel has carried out almost daily airstrikes since then, mainly targeting Hezbollah members but also killing 127 civilians, according to the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

On Sunday, the Israeli military said it killed three Hezbollah members in strikes on southern Lebanon.

Over the past weeks, the U.S. has increased pressure on Lebanon to work harder on disarming Hezbollah and canceled a planned trip to Washington last month by Haikal.

U.S. officials were angered in November by a Lebanese army statement that blamed Israel for destabilizing Lebanon and blocking the Lebanese military deployment in south Lebanon.

A senior Lebanese army official told The Associated Press Monday that Haikal will fly to France this week where he will attend a meeting with U.S., French and Saudi officials to discuss ways of assisting the army in its mission. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.

The Lebanese army has been severely affected by the economic meltdown that broke out in Lebanon in October 2019.

Bassem Mroue, The Associated Press

Nigeria’s richest man Aliko Dangote escalated his fight with regulators on Sunday, accusing them of enabling cheap fuel imports that threaten local refineries.

The yen strengthened on Monday ahead of a likely Japanese rate rise in a week that is packed with central bank decisions and key U.S. data that could help shape the Federal Reserve's near-term policy outlook.

#BEIRUT — A man who carried out an attack in Syria that killed three U.S. citizens had joined Syria’s internal security forces as a base security guard two months earlier and was recently reassigned amid suspicions that he might be affiliated with the Islamic State group, a Syrian official told The Associated Press Sunday.

The attack Saturday in the Syrian desert near the historic city of Palmyra killed two U.S. service members and one American civilian and wounded three others. It also wounded three members of the Syrian security forces who clashed with the gunman, interior ministry spokesperson Nour al-Din al-Baba said.

Al-Baba said that Syria’s new authorities had faced shortages in security personnel and had to recruit rapidly after the unexpected success of a rebel offensive last year that intended to capture the northern city of Aleppo but ended up overthrowing the government of former President Bashar Assad.

“We were shocked that in 11 days we took all of Syria and that put a huge responsibility in front of us from the security and administration sides,” he said.

The attacker was among 5,000 members who recently joined a new division in the internal security forces formed in the desert region known as the Badiya, one of the places where remnants of the Islamic State extremist group have remained active.
Attacker had raised suspicions

Al-Baba said the internal security forces’ leadership had recently become suspicious that there was an infiltrator leaking information to IS and began evaluating all members in the Badiya area.

A delicate partnership

The incident comes at a delicate time as the U.S. military is expanding its cooperation with Syrian security forces.

The U.S. has had forces on the ground in Syria for over a decade, with a stated mission of fighting IS, with about 900 troops present there today.

Before Assad’s ouster, Washington had no diplomatic relations with Damascus and the U.S. military did not work directly with the Syrian army. Its main partner at the time was the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the country’s northeast.

That has changed over the past year. Ties have warmed between the administrations of U.S. President Donald Trump and Syrian interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, the former leader of an Islamist insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham that used to be listed by Washington as a terrorist organization.

In November, al-Sharaa became the first Syrian president to visit Washington since the country’s independence in 1946. During his visit, Syria announced its entry into the global coalition against the Islamic State, joining 89 other countries that have committed to combating the group.

U.S. officials have vowed retaliation against IS for the attack but have not publicly commented on the fact that the shooter was a member of the Syrian security forces.

Critics of the new Syrian authorities have pointed to Saturday’s attack as evidence that the security forces are deeply infiltrated by IS and are an unreliable partner.

Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, an advocacy group that seeks to build closer relations between Washington and Damascus, said that is unfair.

Despite both having Islamist roots, HTS and IS were enemies and often clashed over the past decade.

Among former members of HTS and allied groups, Moustafa, said, “It’s a fact that even those who carry the most fundamentalist of beliefs, the most conservative within the fighters, have a vehement hatred of ISIS.”

“The coalition between the United States and Syria is the most important partnership in the global fight against ISIS because only Syria has the expertise and experience to deal with this,” he said.

Later Sunday, Syria’s state-run news agency SANA reported that four members of the internal security forces were killed and a fifth was wounded after gunmen opened fire on them in the city of Maarat al-Numan in Idlib province.

It was not immediately clear who the gunmen were or whether the attack was linked to the Saturday’s shooting.

Abby Sewell, The Associated Press

Both countries confirmed that large-scale fighting, which was set off by a skirmish on Dec. 7 that wounded two Thai soldiers, continued Sunday. The two sides are battling over longstanding competing claims to patches of frontier land, some of which contain centuries-old temple ruins.

More than two dozen people on both sides of the border have officially been reported killed in the past week’s fighting, while more than half a million have been displaced.

Reporters from The Associated Press arrived at the scene of Sunday’s rocket impact in Sisaket province’s Kantharalak District about 10 minutes after it hit. They witnessed the body of a man totally wrapped in bandages being put on a stretcher that was taken to an ambulance.

A house a couple of hundred meters (yards) away was in flames, with village volunteers attempting to put out the fire with buckets of water. A piece of shrapnel believed to be from the same rocket was embedded nearby in the road.

The victim, identified as Don Patchapan, was killed in the heart of a residential area near a school, according to a Thai Army statement. Thai Government spokesperson Siripong Angkasakulkiat condemned Cambodia for deliberately firing into civilian areas, saying that such an action was “cruel and inhumane.”

Thailand earlier reported civilian deaths during the renewed conflict, but most of them already had underlying health issues and died during an evacuation.

Cambodia has deployed truck-mounted BM-21 rocket launchers with a range of 30-40 kilometres (19-25 miles). Each can fire up to 40 rockets at a time but cannot be precisely targeted. They have landed largely in areas from where most people have already been evacuated.

Thai authorities say Cambodia has launched thousands of the rockets on virtually a daily basis. Thailand, meanwhile, has been carrying out airstrikes with its fighter planes, with Cambodia saying the bombing continued on Sunday. Both sides have employed drones for surveillance and delivering bombs.

Residents in another village in Kantharalak said several houses there were damaged by a rocket attack Saturday. Kanbancha Charoensri, who was in the village during the attack, said several rockets landed nearby and injured a few people.

“Houses that were hit directly were totally destroyed,” he said. “The ground was shaking so much. It was so scary.”

The Thai military has acknowledged 16 of its troops have died during the fighting, and estimated Sunday that there have been at least 221 fatalities among Cambodian soldiers. Cambodia denounced the Thai count of its dead as disinformation but has not yet acknowledged any military casualties. It has said at least 11 civilians have been killed and more than six dozen wounded.

Cambodia Prime Minister Hun Manet delivered a morale-boosting message to his countrymen on Sunday, writing on social media that he is proud to see this nation’s strength “in this situation where our country is facing difficulties due to aggression from neighboring countries.”

The new fighting derailed a ceasefire promoted by U.S. President Donald Trump that ended five days of earlier combat in July. It had been brokered by Malaysia and pushed through by pressure from Trump, who threatened to withhold trade privileges unless Thailand and Cambodia agreed. It was formalized in more detail in October at a regional meeting in Malaysia that Trump attended.

Trump announced this past Friday that the two countries had agreed at his urging to renew the ceasefire, but Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul denied making any commitment and Cambodia announced it was continuing to fight in what it said is self-defense.

A Thai Navy warship in the Gulf of Thailand joined the fighting on Saturday morning, trading fire with guns based in Cambodia’s southwestern province of Koh Kong. Each side blamed the other for initiating the exchange on a new front.

——

Tian Macleod Ji And Jintamas Saksornchai, The Associated Press

Jintamas reported from Surin, Thailand. Sopheng Cheang contributed from Preah Netr Preah, Cambodia.

Children in DR Congo recount gang rape, sexual slavery by #M23 rebels. A child is raped there every 30 minutes, the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF said earlier this year.

Germany says foils Islamist plot to attack Christmas market. German authorities said Saturday they had arrested five men on suspicion of involvement in an Islamist plot to plough a vehicle into people at a Christmas market.

Officials have been on high alert during the festive season, after a deadly car-ramming attack at a market in the city of Magdeburg last Christmas shocked the nation.

Police and prosecutors said they had detained an Egyptian, three Moroccans and a Syrian on Friday over the plan to carry out the attack in southern Bavaria state.

Investigators suspect “an Islamist motive” for the plot, according to the statement.

The Egyptian, aged 56, was an imam at a mosque in the Dingolfing-Landau district, German newspaper Bild reported.

According to authorities, he had called for an attack to be carried out on a Christmas market in the area “using a vehicle in order to kill or injure as many people as possible”.

The Moroccans -- aged 30, 28 and 22 -- allegedly then agreed to carry out the attack while the Syrian, 37, encouraged them.

All the suspects were brought before a magistrate on Saturday after their arrest and are in custody.

Joachim Herrmann, state interior minister in Bavaria, told Bild the “excellent cooperation between our security services” had helped to prevent “a potentially Islamist-motivated attack”.

Authorities did not say where the suspects were arrested.

It was also not clear when the attack was supposed to take place, how detailed the plans were, and which market was to be targeted.
Rising security costs

Last year’s attack in Magdeburg, which saw a car barrel through a crowded market, killed six people and wounded more than 300.

A Saudi doctor -- who is a critic of Islam and an adherent of far-right views and radical conspiracy theories -- went on trial last month accused of carrying out the rampage.

Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen, a 51-year-old psychiatrist, has admitted ploughing a rented SUV through the market.

In 2016 an Islamist drove a truck into a crowd at a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people.

The rampages have fuelled a heated debate about the security of the festive installations, which are hosted by nearly every town and consist of stalls with merchants selling gifts, hot mulled wine, sausages and sweets.

Some cities have cancelled the beloved winter tradition because of the mounting costs and complexity of ensuring security.

Magdeburg’s Christmas market went ahead this year but only received approval shortly before opening.