Good evening. I'm Jeff Bennett. I'm the Navaz is away. On the news hour tonight, the U.S. escalates regional tensions with another deadly strike on an alleged drug boat off the coast of Venezuela.

Experts warn of the dangers of political interference in economic data after the president fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And Congress remains divided as the government shutdown continues, leaving many critical workers unpaid and needing to resort to food banks to survive.

There's just tremendous anxiety across our community at this stage.

Welcome to the News Hour.

The Trump administration launched a major military and diplomatic escalation in its new war on drugs today,

sending an aircraft carrier to Latin America and sanctioning Colombia's president.

Today's announcements come as the U.S. has increasingly targeted political leaders it opposes across the region,

and as the military has launched an unprecedented number

of deadly strikes in the Caribbean, here's Nick Schiffran with more.

Today in the Caribbean, another boat incinerated by a U.S. missile, the 10th U.S. strike since early

September on what the administration calls drug boats, including three strikes this week alone.

Hours later, a major military expansion.

The Pentagon announced the deployment of the Gerald Ford Carrier Strike Group, with more than

6,000 service members to, quote, disrupt narcotics trafficking and degrade and dismantle

transnational criminal organizations.

The cartels are the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere.

Yesterday, President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegeseth compared their efforts

against drug cartels to the global war on terror against groups including al-Qaeda and ISIS.

If you reframe how you understand the world in our own hemisphere, that's exactly what these

foreign terrorist organizations are.

And so we will track them, we will map them, we will network them, and we will hunt them

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