The US military action in Venezuela breaches international law and the UK should make clear it is unacceptable, the chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has said. Dame Emily Thornberry is the most senior Labour MP so far to criticise Donald Trump's strikes on the country over the weekend, which saw President Nicolas Maduro and his wife captured. The UK government has so far refused to say whether the move was illegal, insisting it is for the Americans to lay out the legal basis for the action. But the US president's actions have been criticised by some Labour MPs, as well as the leaders of the Lib Dems, Greens and the SNP. Dame Emily told BBC Radio 4's Westminster Hour the strikes were not a legal action and she cannot think of anything that could be a proper justification.

Mogadishu, Somalia – Ending the United States' "forever wars" was a major slogan of Donald Trump's 2024 election campaign, during which he and many of his supporters spoke out against American resources and lives being put to waste in conflicts across the globe. But on February 1, a mere 10 days after being inaugurated for a second time, President Trump announced that the US had carried out air strikes targeting senior leadership of ISIL (ISIS) in Somalia. "These killers, who we found hiding in caves, threatened the United States," his post on X read. This marked Trump's first military action overseas, but it wouldn't be his last. In the time since, the US has provided weapons and support to Israel in its wars in Gaza and across the Middle East; it has launched strikes on Yemen; and even attacked Iran's nuclear facilities.

CAIRO – Al-Qaida's chief bomb maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, who was behind the 2009 Christmas Day plot to down an airliner over Detroit and other foiled aviation-related terror attacks, was killed in a U.S. drone strike, Yemeni officials and a tribal leader said Friday. The killing of al-Asiri deals a heavy blow to the group's capabilities in striking western targets and piles pressure on the group that already lost some of its top cadres over the past years in similar drone strikes. A Yemeni security official said that al-Asiri is dead; a tribal leader and an al-Qaida-linked source also said that he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in the eastern Yemeni governorate of Marib. The tribal leader said that al-Asiri was struck, along with two or four of his associates, as he stood beside his car. He added that al-Asiri's wife, who hails from the well-known al-Awaleq tribe in the southern governorate of Shabwa, was briefly held months ago by the UAE-backed forces and later released. Al-Qaida itself has remained silent about its top bomb maker.

ISLAMABAD – A Taliban official says a suspected U.S. drone strike the previous day killed a top commander of the militant Haqqani network -- the man who in 2014 accompanied U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl when he was handed over to U.S. authorities. The Taliban official identified the man as Qari Abdullah, saying he died in the "area of Khost." Pakistani intelligence officials had earlier said a suspected U.S. strike hit in Pakistan's lawless tribal region bordering Afghanistan's Khost, a Haqqani stronghold, killing two militants. The Taliban official wouldn't confirm it was the same strike.

Al-Zawahri is believed to be based in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, but many of the group's senior figures are believed to have moved to Syria, taking advantage of the country's civil war to establish a presence -- though many of them have subsequently been killed in U.S. drone strikes the past year. An al-Qaida-linked group, Fatah al-Sham, is one of the strongest forces among the rebels fighting to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Al Qaeda has returned to its longtime base of operations in southern Afghanistan and is plotting new attacks against the West, fifteen years after being overrun by U.S.-led NATO forces following the 9/11 attacks, according to a published report. Britain's Daily Telegraph, citing Afghan security officials, reported Monday that Al Qaeda cells have moved back into southern Afghanistan following the withdrawal of most U.S. and allied troops in 2014. The report claimed that most of the cells are operating around the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban. The Telegraph reports that security officials believe that Al Qaeda's return to Afghanistan is the latest move to re-establish its strength after the killing of Usama bin Laden by Navy SEALs in 2011 and the rise of ISIS, a former Al Qaeda splinter group. The report comes days after a U.S. drone strike killed Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Akhtar Mansour.