In Sudan, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces said Thursday they’ve agreed to a U.S.-backed ceasefire proposal to end more than two years of a devastating war with the Sudanese military. The truce was brokered by a U.S.-led group of mediators known as the Quad, made up of negotiators from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Hundreds of thousands of civilians facing famine remain trapped in the city of El Fasher in Sudan’s North Darfur region after it was seized by the RSF. Sudan’s war has triggered what the U.N. describes as the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with millions of people displaced.

Mujahid Bahr al-Din: “We hope that things would go back to what they used to be and for people to go back to their lands. War is not good. I swear to God, people were destroyed. Youth were lost, and families were lost. We don’t have anything to say. We just want the country to be fixed. We wish the country would be fixed for people to return to their lands and to live in peace and security.”

In Gaza, Israel’s military is continuing to target the southern city of Khan Younis with airstrikes and artillery fire despite the U.S.-brokered truce that took effect nearly a month ago. On Thursday, a civil society group in Gaza appealed for international assistance in finding the bodies of more than 10,000 Palestinians still buried under the rubble of buildings destroyed during Israel’s two-year assault. In its appeal, the National Committee for Missing Persons called Gaza “the world’s largest mass grave.”

In Lebanon, at least one person was killed and nine others injured after Israel launched a series of airstrikes Thursday. Both Lebanon’s government and Hezbollah condemned the attacks as another flagrant violation of the ceasefire deal agreed to one year ago.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday the U.S. military struck another boat in the Caribbean, claiming without evidence it had killed three narcotraffickers on board. The latest killings bring the reported toll from U.S. attacks in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific to 70 people aboard 18 boats. Hegseth’s announcement came as Republican senators narrowly blocked a war powers resolution seeking to bar President Trump from taking military action against Venezuela without congressional authorization. Senator Chris Van Hollen spoke ahead of Thursday evening’s vote.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen: “Quit engaging in illegal actions in the Caribbean and international waters, blowing up boats and people in an extrajudicial fashion. And when it comes to Venezuela, stop making these threats and amassing military assets off the shore and claiming you somehow have the authority to do that. The Constitution invests the authority to go to war with the United States Congress.”

On Thursday, the former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, told the BBC the U.S. attacks on civilian vessels would be treated as crimes against humanity under international law. We’ll have more on the attacks later in the broadcast with Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive.

The U.S. federal government shutdown has entered its 38th day. On Thursday, Senate Democrats huddled behind closed doors to discuss ways to end the stalemate, as Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune prepared a Friday vote on a package of spending bills that once again omits Democrats’ key demand: an extension of federal health insurance tax credits set to expire on December 31. Without an extension, the average enrollee will see premium costs more than double. Millions would lose coverage entirely.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to immediately and fully fund SNAP food assistance benefits, after it refused to draw down contingency funds to pay for the program that helps one out of every eight people in the U.S. afford groceries. The administration promptly appealed the ruling. In response, Washington Senator Patty Murray wrote, “I have never seen an American president so desperate to force children and seniors to go hungry. … This is as ugly and cruel as it gets.”

Millions of U.S. air travelers face travel chaos after the Trump administration began canceling flights at 40 of the nation’s busiest airports. Airlines have already canceled thousands of flights, and that number is expected to grow if the government shutdown continues into next week. This comes amid a shortage of air traffic controllers who’ve been forced to work long hours without pay throughout the shutdown.

The death toll from Wednesday’s crash of a UPS cargo plane in Louisville, Kentucky, has risen to 13. The National Transportation Safety Board says it has recovered the plane’s cockpit voice and data recorder and is investigating the plane’s maintenance history. NTSB employees are considered essential workers and have been required to work without pay throughout the shutdown.

Elon Musk is poised to become the first trillionaire in world history. On Thursday, shareholders at the electric vehicle maker Tesla approved a pay package worth nearly $1 trillion if Musk meets certain corporate goals over the next decade. He’s already the world’s richest person with a net worth of around $500 billion.

A federal judge in Chicago has banned federal agents from using tear gas, pepper spray and other riot weapons amid Trump’s immigration crackdown in the city. The latest ruling by Judge Sara Ellis extends temporary restrictions issued last month in which she ordered federal agents to use body cameras and report on excessive use of force during raids in the Chicago area. There have been mounting reports of immigration agents pointing guns at civilians during the operations, as well as attacking protesters and journalists. Ellis blasted Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino for admitting that he lied about being hit with a rock during a raid in Chicago’s Little Village before deploying tear gas on a crowd of people. Judge Ellis wrote, “The government would have people believe instead that the Chicagoland area is in a vise hold of violence, ransacked by rioters and attacked by agitators. That simply is untrue, and the government’s own evidence in this case belies that assertion.”

In Washington, D.C., a jury on Thursday acquitted a man who was charged for throwing a sandwich at a federal agent in protest of President Trump’s crackdown on the capital. Sean Dunn was found not guilty of one count of misdemeanor assault. A grand jury previously rejected a felony charge against Dunn, whose image throwing a submarine-style sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent in August became a symbol of resistance.

LGBTQ+ advocates have vowed to continue fighting after the conservative-majority Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to temporarily enforce a discriminatory passport policy against transgender, nonbinary and intersex people. The policy requires U.S. passports to match a person’s sex designation found on their original birth certificate. The measure seeks to end a Biden-era practice of issuing passports with a gender-neutral marker — an X — and for applicants to select a marker that matches their gender identity. In response, the ACLU said, “Forcing transgender people to carry passports that out them against their will increases the risk that they will face harassment and violence and adds to the considerable barriers they already face in securing freedom, safety, and acceptance.” We’ll have more on this story after headlines.

In Vietnam, at least five people were killed after Typhoon Kalmaegi battered coastal regions with torrential rain and gushing winds. The storm made landfall in central Vietnam Thursday, destroying homes, uprooting trees and causing widespread power outages for an estimated 1.2 million people. The typhoon left a trail of destruction in the Philippines, where the death toll rose to nearly 200 people on Friday. The typhoon has weakened to a tropical storm as it moved toward Cambodia and Laos.

On Thursday, the U.N. World Meteorological Organization warned 2025 is on track to rank among the three warmest years on record, coming after last year set a record as the hottest year ever observed.

The Texas-based oil giant Exxon financed right-wing think tanks to help spread climate change denial across Latin America. That’s according to newly revealed documents published by The Guardian and DeSmog which uncovered a widespread campaign by Exxon to finance the U.S.-based Atlas Network, a coalition made up of more than 500 so-called free market think tanks and its partners worldwide, in order to spread lies about the role of fossil fuels in causing the climate crisis.

World leaders on Thursday delivered opening remarks in Belém, Brazil, which is preparing to host the COP30 U.N. climate summit starting next week. This is Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva: “The window of opportunity we have to act is closing rapidly. Climate change is a result of the same dynamics that over the centuries have fractured our society between rich and poor and divided it between developed and developing countries.”

The Trump administration is not sending a U.S. delegation to the upcoming climate talks. Democracy Now! will be broadcasting from COP30 in Belém.

California Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday she will not seek reelection when her term ends in early 2027. Pelosi has represented San Francisco in Congress for nearly four decades. In 2007, she was elected as the first female speaker of the House, where she exerted powerful control over House Democrats as they took up major legislation, including the Affordable Care Act under President Obama. She served a second term as House speaker from 2019 to 2023.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani traveled to Puerto Rico Thursday for the annual Somos conference, which focuses on issues important to Puerto Rican communities. Mamdani proposed raising revenue for his ambitious affordability agenda by raising the personal income tax on New Yorkers who make $1 million or more by 2% and raising the state’s top corporate tax to match that of New Jersey. Governor Hochul has rejected broad tax increases on New Yorkers. Meanwhile, Republican New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a key ally of President Trump, has announced she’ll seek her party’s nomination to challenge Hochul in the 2026 gubernatorial election.

The trailblazing human rights attorney Peter Weiss has died at the age of 99. Weiss served on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights for nearly five decades, where he worked to end South African apartheid and the Vietnam War, fought for nuclear disarmament and sought justice for victims of the U.S.-backed Contras in 1980s Nicaragua. He pioneered using the 1789 Alien Tort Statute in human rights cases. He also represented the family of U.S. journalist and human rights activist Charles Horman in a case against Henry Kissinger and others, after Horman was disappeared and killed in Chile soon after the U.S.-backed 1973 coup. He spoke to Democracy Now! about the case in 2013.

Peter Weiss: “Our case was dismissed because we couldn’t conduct discovery. When you bring any kind of case, civil or criminal, you have to look for the evidence and produce the evidence to the judge or the jury. And everything that we wanted, we were told, was classified and would not be made available to us. So, eventually, the case had to be dismissed.”

Peter Weiss died just five weeks shy of what would have been his 100th birthday.