Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Rylan Barton.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is defending the decision to strike an alleged drugboat in the Caribbean Sea for a second time,

saying the fog of war influenced the call and he did not see that there were survivors in the water.

Heg Seth said he didn't make the call for the subsequent boat strikes pinning it on

Admiral Frank Bradley. I watched that first strike lot. As you can imagine at the Department

of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn't stick around for the hour and two hours,

whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs. So I moved on to my next meeting.

A couple of hours later,

I learned that that commander had made the, which he had the complete authority to do.

And by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and

eliminate the threat. Lawmakers have opened investigations into precisely what Hexeth ordered

in his capacity as the Pentagon chief.

The Trump administration says the strikes are part of a counter-drug campaign that have left

more than 80 dead in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.

The former president of Honduras has been released from a U.S. prison.

He'd been convicted of a drug trafficking but was pardoned by President Trump. NPR's Ader-Peralta

reports this comes as Honduras tries to untangle a presidential election.

Juan Orlando Hernandez was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison last year for trafficking

some 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. At the time, the Justice Department said

he abused his power to help one of the most

powerful drug trafficking conspiracies in the world. Now, after President Trump issued a pardon,

he was released from a prison in West Virginia. Onduras is currently in the middle of a tense

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