Hi there,

While general admission tickets are currently sold out, you can still get VIP tickets for our 30th Anniversary Celebration on Monday, February 23rd at the Riverside Church in NYC. We will be joined by legendary activist and scholar Angela Davis, singer, songwriter, artist, activist Michael Stipe, jazz icon Wynton Marsalis, award winning journalist Naomi Klein, Nobel Peace Laureate Maria Ressa and more very special guests. Get your VIP tickets before they sell out!

If you can't make it to the event, show your support of our fearless, independent journalism with a donation. Please donate in honor of our 30th anniversary today, so we can keep shining a spotlight on the grassroots movements fighting for democracy and challenging abuses of power around the world. Every dollar makes a difference. Thank you so much!

Democracy Now!
Amy Goodman

Non-commercial news needs your support.

We rely on contributions from you, our viewers and listeners to do our work. If you visit us daily or weekly or even just once a month, now is a great time to make your monthly contribution.

Please do your part today.

Donate

U.S. Military Strikes Boat in the Caribbean, Killing Three People

HeadlineFeb 16, 2026
Image Credit: X/@Southcom

A U.S. military strike killed three people and blew up a boat in the Caribbean on Friday, according to the U.S. Southern Command. The U.S. military said the boat was allegedly following “drug trafficking routes,” without providing any evidence. Since September, the Pentagon has conducted 39 strikes against boats allegedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 133 people. On Sunday, the Pentagon announced that U.S. forces raided a sanctioned oil tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the vessel in the Caribbean in an effort to target oil shipped from Venezuela. The Trump administration has been seizing tankers in order to take control of Venezuela’s oil.

It comes as The Wall Street Journal reports that the Pentagon used Anthropic’s artificial intelligence tool Claude in its operation to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The Pentagon was able to use Claude through Anthropic’s partnership with the data company Palantir. A spokesperson for Anthropic told The Wall Street Journal that the company is “committed to using frontier AI in support of U.S. national security.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top