#LONDON, November 2. The United States upgrading a long-abandoned base Puerto Rico obviously preparing for potential military operations in Venezuela, Reuters said, citing satellite photos.

According to the agency, construction works at the former Roosevelt Roads naval base in Puerto Rico which was closed more than 20 years ago, began on September 17 when operations to clear and repave taxiways leading to the runway began. Apart from that, the United States is expanding civilian airport infrastructure in Puerto Rico and on the island of Saint Croix, the US Virgin Islands. These territories are located some 500 miles (around 800 kilometers) off Venezuela.

Washington accused Caracas of not doing enough to combat drug smuggling. Under this pretext, the US deployed large forces to the Caribbean. The Miami Herald reported earlier, citing sources, that "the Trump administration has made the decision to attack military installations inside Venezuela and the strikes could come at any moment." Meanwhile, speaking to reporters, US President Donald Trump denied that he had made a decision to deliver strikes on Venezuela.

Fire and explosion at store in northwestern Mexico leave at least 23 dead and a dozen injured.

The fire occurred Saturday in downtown Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora state, Sonora Gov. Alfonso Durazo said in a video posted on social media.

Six people remained hospitalized on Sunday morning, according to Sonora’s prosecutor’s office. Sonora Attorney General Gustavo Salas Chávez said preliminary investigations showed the deaths were caused by inhalation of toxic gases.

Images circulating on social media show a massive fire engulfing the Waldo’s store. One video showed a burned man collapsing onto the asphalt a few meters (yards) from the store entrance.

Prosecutors said they believe the fire originated in a transformer but the exact cause is under investigation.

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum sent her “deepest condolences” to the families and loved ones of the victims.

She said she was in touch with the state governor to provide support and instructed Interior Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez to send a team to assist victims’ families and the injured.

The store Waldo’s also lamented the deaths on social media and said it was collaborating with authorities.

#Chinese calligraphy album fetches more than $1 million at auction

#Agriculture and auto sectors top priorities for government support amid U.S. tariffs: Nanos.

Canadians believe the agriculture and auto sectors should be the federal government’s top priorities when it comes to supporting industries impacted by U.S. tariffs, according to a new Nanos Research survey conducted for CTV News.

The survey asked participants to rank which industries the government should be spending the most money to help by identifying their top two priorities.

“One interesting thing, and this is from a political perspective, is that there’s not really one thing that cuts right across the country,” said Nik Nanos, founder and chief data scientist at Nanos Research.

The agriculture sector was picked by respondents as the top priority, with 29 per cent ranking it first and another 19 per cent ranking it second. The auto industry was not far behind, with 24 per cent putting it first and 18 per cent putting it second.

The softwood lumber sector came in third on the list, with 15 per cent ranking it first and 31 per cent putting it second. The aluminum industry was fourth on the priority list, with 15 per cent of respondents putting it first and 25 per cent ranking it second.

His administration would measure “success not only by the battles we win,” Trump said in his inaugural address, “but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

But nine months into his second go-round in the White House, Trump is beating a curious path to executing his “peace through strength” foreign policy agenda, a phrase he borrowed from a fellow Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who saw building a strong military and economy as the bedrock to Soviet deterrence.

Trump’s take on Reagan doctrine includes sharper threats, bombings and no shortage of bravado.

It’s too soon to tell how history will judge Trump’s version, but the Gipper had his doubters, too.

“There are a lot of people who would have given Reagan a not-passing grade around 1983 or so,” said University of Tennessee scholar Andrew Busch, noting the year that Reagan ordered the U.S. invasion of a Caribbean island, Grenada. “By 1989, when he left office, they would say, ‘Wow, that guy was like the biggest peacemaker in the 20th century in some ways.’”
Peace done Trump-style

Trump’s unique approach to Reaganesque diplomacy was on full display during his trip to Asia this past week.

As he made his way to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, Trump announced via social media that he was cancelling trade talks with Canada and imposing another 10% tariff on imports of Canadian goods. He expressed outrage over a television ad — paid for by the Canadian province of Ontario — that used a spliced audio of Reagan criticizing tariffs and aired during the World Series.

Read more: Carney says he told Ontario premier not to run anti-tariff ad, apologized to Trump

Then as Trump met with leaders in Malaysia and South Korea, the U.S. Navy carried out more lethal strikes on suspected drug boats in the Pacific.

His administration moved to shift the USS Ford and thousands of additional sailors from the Mediterranean toward the Caribbean Sea waters near Venezuela, continuing the biggest U.S. troop buildup in Latin America in more than 50 years.

Trump wasn’t done.

Minutes before a critical meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday, Trump took to social media to suggest he was preparing to discard a decades-old U.S. prohibition on testing the nation’s nuclear weapons.

Later, as he made his way back to Washington, Trump was coy on whether he really meant to say he was ordering the resumption of explosive testing of nuclear weapons — something only North Korea has undertaken this century -- or calling for the testing of U.S. systems that could deliver a nuclear weapon, which is far more routine.

He remains opaque about whether he intends to resume underground nuclear detonation tests.

“You’ll find out very soon,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, as he headed to Florida for a weekend stay.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is not shedding light on what kind of testing the administration planned to undertake. But he is reiterating Trump’s Reagan-borrowed mantra.

“America will ensure that we have the strongest, most capable nuclear arsenal, so that we maintain peace through strength,” Hegseth said Friday. “That’s what this is. In every meeting, that’s what we talk about: Peace through strength.”
A classic top-to-bottom operation

While the loose talk about nuclear testing was certainly unsettling to some, reaction appeared to be relatively measured. Trump, after all, has made many pronouncements only to later make pronounced shifts in positions.

For example, in a matter of weeks recently, he went from maintaining Ukraine must cede land to Russia to proclaiming that he believed Kyiv could win back all of the land lost in the war to declaring “fighting should stop at the lines they are at now.”

Administration officials are loath to question Trump’s tactics but acknowledge that some may appear to be contradictory, particularly with what seem to be spur-of-the-moment reversals in his public statements.

Rather than regard these abrupt changes in course as defects, administration officials privately argue that they give the U.S. more influence and make adversaries and potential adversaries — not to mention allies and partners — more wary to cross Trump.

But policy consistency has long been regarded as key in national security and international relations, not least because it provides a concrete basis for international understandings and actions that other countries consider when making their own decisions.

“This is a product of a lack of process,” said Ian Kelly, a retired career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Georgia in Trump’s first term. “It’s a classic top-to-bottom operation and there doesn’t seem to be any consultation with other stakeholders, especially with Congress, but also long-standing allies.”
Steering clear of the endless war pitfall

Trump has managed to grasp tightly onto the “peacemaker” title even as his administration has carried out an activist foreign policy in the early going of his second term.

Trump claims as a shining achievement his decision to order strikes in June on three critical Iranian nuclear facilities that he says “obliterated” the Iranian program. The bombing caused significant damage in an operation in which no American troops were harmed.

While Trump insists the program was destroyed, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said this week that renewed movement has been detected recently at Iran’s nuclear sites.

Before those strikes, some of Trump’s die-hard backers, including Steve Bannon, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and commentators Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, expressed consternation as Trump mulled military action. They pointed to Trump’s own wariness over decades of war fomented in previous administrations.

Trump’s strikes in the Caribbean appear to be landing huge blows to Venezuelan drug smugglers and unsettling the government of President Nicolás Maduro. At the moment, that seems to be coming with “very little political cost” for Trump, said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.

But Logan argues that Trump should be careful as he ponders the path ahead in Venezuela and steer clear of the pitfalls of the “endless wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan that left an indelible mark on the American psyche. This one would be in his own backyard.

“This administration seems to favor these short, sharp strokes and then say they have resolved the problem altogether,” Logan said. “I’m afraid what will happen is that we will discover that none of these problems have actually been put to bed.”

Scientists try to prove link between Amazon gold mining and disabilities in babies. Rivers that have been the lifeblood of their people now carry mercury from illegal gold mining, threatening the health of their unborn children.

“Breast milk is no longer reliable,” said Alessandra Korap, a leader of the Munduruku people.

At Sai Cinza, a Munduruku community surrounded by illegal mines, the family of three-year-old Rany Ketlen struggles to understand why she has never been able to raise her head and suffers from muscle spasms.

Scientists may soon have an answer. Rany is one of at least 36 people in the area, mostly children, with neurological disorders not explained by genetic tests, according to preliminary data from a groundbreaking study into the impacts of mercury contamination.

While scientists have warned of the risks that mercury could pose to Indigenous children in the Amazon, none have established a causal link to disabilities in their communities, as this study may soon do.
Eat the fish poisoned by mercury or go hungry

Rany’s father, Rosielton Saw, has worked as a miner near their village for years, following in the footsteps of his father, Rosenildo.

Sitting at the family’s one-bedroom wooden home, the older man said he knew the mercury they used was dangerous.

But mining about 30 grams of gold per week provides just “enough to support ourselves,” Rosenildo Saw said.

The family regularly eats surubim, a carnivorous fish that accumulates mercury in the river biome. Rany Ketlen, who has severe swallowing problems, drinks the fish broth.

In recent years, government health officials have reported dozens of other patients in the wider region suffering from similar disorders. But a lack of testing and access to medical care has made it difficult to compile a full picture of the problem or establish the exact causes.

Now researchers are collecting data on neurological problems known to be associated with mercury poisoning, ranging from acute brain malformation to memory issues, in a multi-year study concluding by the end of 2026.

The scientists involved in the latest unpublished research, backed by Brazil’s leading public health institute, said a top suspect is the mercury seeping into waterways after miners use it to bind tiny specks of gold extracted from riverbanks – a largely lawless trade spurred on by record-high prices for the precious metal.

The mercury has contaminated river fish that are a staple for Indigenous communities and accumulated in women’s placentas, breast milk and offspring at alarmingly high levels, often two or three times the hazardous threshold for pregnant mothers.

Chief Zildomar Munduruku, who is also a nurse, said he cannot tell his people to stop eating fish, despite guidance from health officials.

“If we obey their rules, we will go hungry,” he said.
Even if mining stops, mercury will linger

Far downstream from Sai Cinza, diplomats and world leaders gather next month in the Amazon for the United Nations climate summit, known as COP30. Brazilian organizers have called it the “Forest COP,” focusing global attention on threats to tropical rainforests and their inhabitants, such as illegal mining across the region.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has driven thousands of miners out of Indigenous lands since he returned to office in 2023. But the mercury left behind cannot be broken down as it cycles through air, water, and soil, fueling a lasting health crisis.

Brazil’s government has stepped up monitoring of mercury levels in the Munduruku Indigenous Territory, trained public health officials to identify early signs of mercury poisoning and invested in clean water sources for remote communities, the Health Ministry said in a statement.

Even if “gold mining in the Amazon came to a complete stop, the mercury that was deposited ... would remain for many more decades,” said Paulo Basta, a researcher at public health institute Fiocruz, who has studied mercury contamination of Indigenous people for more than three decades.

Papers, interviews and fresh data reviewed by Reuters suggest the humanitarian crisis unleashed by illegal mining will have permanent consequences for current and future generations of Indigenous communities in the Amazon.

A 2021 study by Basta and his colleagues found 10 of 15 mothers tested in three Munduruku villages had elevated mercury levels. An earlier study found 12 of 13 people in a Yanomami village where mining was rampant had dangerous mercury levels in their bloodstream. Nearly all the 546 registered cases that were in the government’s databases by March 2025 were collected by Basta and his team.

“That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Basta said. The Munduruku, Yanomami, and Kayapó territories have populations of tens of thousands of people who could potentially be contaminated by mercury.
Proving causation is not easy

In the study now underway, Basta’s team aims to provide a crucial missing link in the puzzle: proof that mercury is causing disabilities. For that, they are following 176 pregnant women to test babies during their first years of life.

At Sai Cinza, where Rany Ketlen and her family live, the researchers’ preliminary data showed that, on average, mothers in the study had mercury levels five times higher than the Brazilian Health Ministry considers safe and their babies had three times that level. Rany Ketlen’s sister, one-year-old Raylene, is one of them, though she has not yet shown any symptoms.

“This mercury disease, if you don’t look for it, you won’t find it,” said Cleidiane Carvalho, a nurse who set out years ago to connect researchers with the sick Indigenous children she came across. Without their studies, she worried, the crisis “will be silenced, neglected forever.”

But proving a causal link to mercury contamination has been a challenge.

Fiocruz researchers found that Indigenous communities often lack basic health services and are vulnerable to various infectious diseases, all potential causes of neurological problems. Marriage among close cousins, which can cause genetic disorders, is also more common in small Indigenous communities.

It is likely that mercury is among the causes of the conditions of the 36 patients who did not have an inherited genetic disorder, but that does not rule out other factors, said Fernando Kok, a geneticist at the University of Sao Paulo who is working on the Fiocruz study.

Exams that find mercury in people’s bodies are like snapshots of a patient’s recent diet, so they alone cannot prove a prior contamination as a cause of neurological problems.

“It’s a perfect crime, because it leaves no signature,” Kok said.

Reporting by Ricardo Brito, Manuela Andreoni and Adriano Machado; editing by Brad Haynes and Claudia Parsons, Reuters

White #House restricts reporters’ access to part of press office, Journalists are now barred if they do not have prior approval to access the area known as Upper Press -- which is where Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s office is located and is near the Oval Office.

Reporters have until now been able to freely visit the area, often wandering up to try to speak to Leavitt or senior press officers to seek information or confirm stories.

Media are still allowed to access the area known as “Lower Press,” next to the famed White House briefing room, where more junior press officers have their desks, the memo said.

The policy comes amid wider restrictions on journalists by the Trump administration, including new rules at the Pentagon that major outlets including AFP refused to sign earlier this month.

The change at the White House was announced by the National Security Council in a memorandum titled “protecting sensitive material from unauthorized disclosure in Upper Press.”

“This memorandum directs the prohibition of press passholders from accessing... ‘Upper Press,’ which is situated adjacent to the Oval Office, without an appointment,” said the memo, addressed to Leavitt and White house Communications Director Steven Cheung.

“This policy will ensure adherence to best practices pertaining to access to sensitive material.”

It said the change was necessary because White House press officers were now routinely dealing with sensitive materials following “recent structural changes to the National Security Council.”

Trump has gutted the once powerful NSC, putting it under the control of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, after former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was reassigned in May following a scandal over the use of the Signal app to plan strikes on Yemen.

Trump’s administration has made a major shake-up to access rules for journalists since his return to power in January.

Many mainstream outlets have seen their access to areas like the Oval Office and Air Force One reduced, while right-wing, Trump-friendly outlets have been given more prominence.

The White House also banned the Associated Press news agency from key areas where Trump speaks after it refused to recognize his order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

#UN human rights chief: U.S. military strikes on alleged drug boats ‘unacceptable’.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk called for an investigation into the strikes, in what appeared to mark the first such condemnation of its kind from a United Nations organization.

Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for Turk’s office, relayed his message on Friday at a regular UN briefing: “These attacks and their mounting human cost are unacceptable. The U.S. must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats.”

She said Turk believed “airstrikes by the United States of America on boats in the Caribbean and in the Pacific violate international human rights law.”

President Donald Trump has justified the attacks on the boats as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States, but the campaign against drug cartels has been divisive among countries in the region.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday announced the latest U.S. military strike in the campaign, against a boat he said was carrying drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean. All four people aboard were killed. It was the 14th strike since the campaign began in early September, while the death toll has grown to at least 61.

Shamdasani noted the U.S. explanations of the efforts as an anti-drug and counter-terrorism campaign, but said countries have long agreed that the fight against illicit drug trafficking is a law-enforcement matter governed by “careful limits” placed on the use of lethal force.

Intentional use of lethal force is allowed only as a last resort against someone representing “an imminent threat to life,” she said. “Otherwise, it would amount to a violation of the right of life and constitute extrajudicial killings.”

The strikes are taking place “outside the context” of armed conflict or active hostilities, Shamdasani said.

The Associated Press

Young T. rex or a new dinosaur? New bones add to the debate. At first, researchers had only a tyrannosaur skull to go by, making it hard to tell if it belonged to a child or adult. Another skull and skeleton nicknamed Jane added to the debate, but didn’t settle the controversy.

Now a research team said there’s new evidence that resolves the case. The latest clue comes from a complete skeleton — first uncovered in 2006 in Montana — that scientists say identifies the mystery reptile as its own species and not a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex.

The discovery “rewrites decades of research on Earth’s most famous predator,” said study co-author Lindsay Zanno with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University.

Growth rings within the bones found in Montana’s Hell Creek Formation told scientists the new dinosaur was an adult about half the size of a fully-fledged T. rex. From growth comparisons to other reptiles like crocodiles, they also found that the major differences between the creature’s skull and an adult T. rex’s — changes in bone structure, nerve patterns and sinuses — were unlikely to form from simply going through puberty.

Signs pointed to a dinosaur that’s a distant T. rex cousin known as Nanotyrannus lancensis, the researchers reported in a study published Thursday in the journal Nature.

There’s now “more support and evidence than there ever has been” that this T. rex relative could exist, said Holly Woodward, a fossil bone expert from Oklahoma State University who had no role in the new study. But she’s not yet convinced that the other mystery skeletons like Jane are something new.

Other independent scientists also said the debate isn’t over. The new skeleton is indeed an adult, but it could be a sister species to T. rex and not a distant relative, said vertebrate paleontologist Thomas Carr of Carthage College.

There are similarities between the shape of T. rex’s skull and the mystery specimens that keep him from switching camps.

“I don’t think this study settles everything,” he said.

Resolving this case of mistaken identity is important to understanding how T. rex grew up, said study co-author James Napoli with Stony Brook University. Another big question is whether T. rex was the main predator prowling toward the end of the age of dinosaurs 67 million years ago — or whether a tinier, but still mighty predator also roamed.

The new skeleton is dubbed “Dueling Dinosaurs” because it was found intertwined with the bones of a Triceratops, and is currently on display at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

___

Adithi Ramakrishnan, The Associated Press

#Putin claims Russian troops have surrounded two Ukrainian cities but #Ukraine says that’s not true.


KYIV, Ukraine — Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed Wednesday that Russian troops have surrounded Ukrainian forces in two key eastern cities of Ukraine and offered to negotiate a deal for their surrender. Ukrainian military officials vigorously denied the claim.

Putin, speaking at a meeting with wounded soldiers at a Moscow military hospital, suggested that the Russian military was ready to open safe corridors for Ukrainian and Western journalists to “let them see with their own eyes what’s going on.”

He claimed Ukrainian troops are encircled in Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian stronghold in the eastern Donetsk region, and in Kupiansk, an important rail junction in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

Russia has recently been pushing its significant advantage in troops and weapons at key points along the around 1,000-kilometre (600-mile) front line, almost four years after it invaded its neighbor.

But the Ukrainian armed forces said claims of Kupiansk being surrounded are “fabrications and fantasies” while the spokesman for Ukraine’s eastern forces, Hryhorii Shapoval, told The Associated Press that the situation in Pokrovsk is “hard but under control.”

The Ukrainian Army’s 7th Rapid Reaction Corps, which is defending Pokrovsk, said Russia had deployed some 11,000 troops in a bid to encircle the city. Some Russian units had managed to infiltrate Pokrovsk, it acknowledged in a social media post.

Russian officials have in the past made claims about capturing Ukrainian strongholds that have turned out not to be true. Independent verification of the claims was not possible.

Putin’s comments coincided with his diplomatic efforts to persuade the United States, which is seeking a peace deal to end the war, that supporting Ukraine is pointless because it can’t hold out against Russian military superiority. He has also stressed what he says is Russia’s improving nuclear capability as he refuses to budge from his war aims.

Putin on Wednesday indicated that Russia is open for a deal for the Ukrainian troops in the two cities to surrender. A media visit to the areas would allow reporters to see “the condition the encircled Ukrainian troops are there so that Ukraine’s political leadership could make the relevant decisions regarding the fate of their citizens,” he said.

Small groups of Russian soldiers are engaging in house-to-house battles in both Kupiansk and Pokrovsk, Ukrainian officials and Russian war bloggers have said, while artillery and drones target roads. The Ukrainian military is increasingly relying on drones to supply troops.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said late Tuesday that Russian forces had advanced in the Pokrovsk area but “almost certainly do not currently control any positions within the city of Pokrovsk itself.”

It added that the advances “are unlikely to cause an immediate collapse of the Ukrainian pocket in the Pokrovsk direction.”

Asked about the situation in Kupiansk, the spokesman of Ukraine’s Joint Forces Task Force, Viktor Trehubov, said Putin’s claim does not match the reality on the ground. “To put it simply, there is no encirclement,” Trehubov told The AP.

Russian forces have been trying for more than a year to take Pokrovsk, which Ukraine stopped using as a logistical hub in the region as Russia piled on the pressure at the end of last year. The city, which was home to around 60,000 people before the war, is largely in ruins.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has kept up its long-range drone and missile attacks on Russian rear areas in an effort to disrupt logistics by striking oil refineries and manufacturing plants.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said that air defences downed 100 Ukrainian drones over five regions overnight, with 13 airports, including three in the Moscow region, briefly suspending flights because of the attack.

Russia, in the meantime, continued its campaign against Ukraine’s power grid and civilian infrastructure in at least six regions. At least 13 people, including a nine-year-old, were injured, officials said.

The #Ukrainian air force said #Russia fired 126 strike and decoy drones overnight.