Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America. Please take a moment to click the ❤️ and restack this post. The oligarchs’ platforms are trying to keep stories like the ones below from hitting your feeds, and this helps us break through.
The Pentagon’s own analysts concluded that the Caribbean boat bombing campaign failed to reduce the supply of cocaine in the United States. Trump knew a year ago that his top tech ally was the target of a Chinese spy operation and chose not to act. A Honduran mother in Texas says she miscarried days after ICE agents allegedly struck her during her husband’s arrest. And Lauren Boebert has officially lost her seat in Congress.
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Pete Hegseth Blew Up All Those Boats in the Caribbean for Nothing
Every administration has lost the war on drugs, but this is the first one to lose it with Hellfire missiles.
The Trump administration’s campaign of bombing suspected drug boats in the Caribbean had no effect on the supply or price of cocaine in the United States, a DEA assessment reviewed by The Washington Post found. Instead, the strikes prompted traffickers to switch to larger vessels that follow coastlines.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly ordered his forces to “kill everybody” on a boat off the coast of Trinidad on September 2, and then told Fox News on September 3 he watched it live. Hegseth dubbed it “fake news” when The Washington Post reported that a second strike was ordered to kill survivors clinging to wreckage, but the White House confirmed it the next day.
Trump said in April that the strikes had stopped 98.2 percent of drugs entering the country by sea. More cocaine was seized at U.S. borders in the ten months after the strikes began than in the ten months before, according to Customs and Border Protection’s own data.
The operation has killed 221 people in 67 strikes since last September, and the administration has provided no evidence that any of the boats were carrying drugs. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell still insisted the operation was imposing “systemic friction” on criminal networks.
Trump Knew Top Tech Ally Was Targeted by Chinese Spy and Did Nothing
The chip ban was supposed to keep Nvidia’s technology out of China, not get its CEO a date.
Trump was told over a year ago that Jensen Huang, the CEO of chipmaker Nvidia and one of Trump’s closest advisers on artificial intelligence, was the target of a Chinese espionage operation, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. Trump did not act on the information and on Sunday told reporters he had no regrets about the decision.
Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman, became close with Jensen Huang when she was running a data center company that U.S. investigators suspected of diverting restricted Nvidia chips to China, according to The New York Times and the Financial Times. Intelligence agencies concluded she had been recruited by a leading Beijing spy agency.
In a memo to Nvidia staff Sunday, Huang acknowledged he had been “unfaithful” to his wife, but did not address the other allegations. Nvidia’s board announced an independent probe, and three Republican-led House committees called for Huang to appear for a closed-door national security briefing.
Trump called Huang an “honorable guy” who should remain as CEO. He said he still planned to bring Huang to Shenzhen next week for a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Honduran Mother Miscarries After ICE Agents Allegedly Strike Her
The party that says life begins at conception has nothing to say about this one.
A Honduran mother in Austin says she miscarried days after ICE agents arrested her husband outside the family’s home on October 7. Díaz-Carrasco, who was seven months pregnant, told Noticias Telemundo that agents pushed her and struck her arms while she was visibly pregnant.
Díaz-Carrasco was hospitalized after the arrest and told that her baby had died from an excess of stress. The couple had planned to name their son Lix Andree.
Her husband, Lix Alberto Díaz-Carrasco, had been the family’s main breadwinner, supporting Díaz-Carrasco and their five other children. While grieving and trying to get help from Honduran authorities to pay for the funeral, Díaz-Carrasco has had to take care of the household in his absence.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed the arrest but did not comment on the circumstances surrounding Díaz-Carrasco’s pregnancy loss. Lix Alberto filed a habeas corpus petition on October 15 challenging his detention, and the case was still active as of November 7.
Lauren Boebert Loses Reelection After Moving to Colorado’s Reddest District
Switching districts worked about as well as switching seats in that theater.
Lauren Boebert has officially been unseated in Congress after Democrat Eileen Laubacher, a retired two-star Navy rear admiral, beat her in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District. It was considered the most Republican-leaning House seat in the state.
Boebert first won her seat in Congress in 2020, knocking off a fifth-term Republican incumbent in a primary. She changed districts in 2024 after nearly losing her 2022 race to Democrat Adam Frisch by just 546 votes, hoping a safer seat would protect her career.
Trump endorsed Boebert days before the election, praising her as a “MAGA Warrior” on Truth Social. He had also called her “dumb” and “weak-minded” earlier this year after she campaigned alongside one of his most vocal Republican critics, Kentucky’s Thomas Massie.
In 2023, Boebert was caught groping her date at a performance of the musical Beetlejuice in Denver, where she was also vaping before security escorted her out. She referred to Rep. Ilhan Omar as a suicide bomber at a campaign event, called LGBTQ civil rights legislation “supremacy of gays,” and was alleged by her staff to have been involved in planning the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
New York Tells Sheriffs to End ICE Contracts by November 25. Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James sent a guidance letter to every sheriff and county executive in New York warning that civil immigration detention contracts will be void and unenforceable as of November 25 under the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act. The law prohibits local governments, police departments and jails from making agreements with ICE to rent bed space for federal immigration detainees. On November 4, a federal judge in Albany denied a request from 15 sheriffs to block the ban, finding they lacked standing as agents of the state to challenge state law.
New York City Announces $25 Million Plan to Shelter Homeless During the Winter. This winter, the Mamdani administration will bring in 800 new beds, warming buses and additional nurses across New York City to keep people who sleep on the streets out of the extreme cold. The city announced $25 million in new funding for its Code Blue plan, which kicks in when temperatures drop below 32 degrees. Last winter, during a brutal stretch of freezing temperatures, more than two dozen people died in their homes or outdoors. Street canvassers will now contact every homeless person they come across instead of only targeting those on a list of at-risk individuals.
Houston Mayor Signs Executive Order Limiting Police Cooperation with ICE. Houston Mayor John Whitmire signed an executive order Friday directing police to contact ICE only for jailable offenses, a move he had resisted for months while Governor Greg Abbott threatened to pull roughly $110 million in state grants from cities that limited ICE cooperation. Abbott lost his re-election bid to Democrat Gina Hinojosa last Tuesday, and Whitmire issued the order just days later. The order also comes after Mexican homebuilder Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot by an ICE agent during a traffic stop in July, and another ICE officer was indicted in October for allegedly ramming his car into a pedestrian.
Electric Vehicles Now Displace Five Times More Oil Globally Than Five Years Ago. Battery electric vehicles are now displacing 1.2 million barrels of oil per day, up from 215,000 in 2021, a new analysis from Transport & Environment finds. Now, electric vehicles make up 25 percent of all new car sales worldwide, compared to 6.6 percent five years ago. The cars on the road today are avoiding over 200 million tons of CO2 emissions per year, and countries that have almost entirely adopted EVs have insulated themselves from future oil price shocks. At current rates of adoption, electric cars will displace 5.8 million barrels per day by 2034, T&E projects.
