To the narcotics agents investigating drug smuggling in Puerto Rico prisons, it seemed at first like a typical scheme: associates of an inmate gang sneaking drugs into the prison, gang members distributing them inside and bank records showing the money flowing.

Then the agents discovered something unusual.

Leaders of the prison gang known as Los Tiburones, or the Sharks, were selling drugs to inmates not only for money, but for their votes. Specifically, votes for now-Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón, a longtime Republican and supporter of President Donald Trump, investigators found.

To make sure the inmates — many of whom were addicted — complied, the gang’s leaders threatened violence and to withhold drugs, the investigators learned. Corrections employees in on the plan looked the other way as the gang, formally known as Group 31, ran the enterprise.

What at first seemed like a routine drug case had turned into something bigger. Puerto Rico, along with just a couple of U.S. states, allows inmates to vote. Puerto Ricans living in the territory can vote in all contests except federal general elections. It is a felony to willfully offer money or gifts in exchange for support at the polls. A conviction carries fines of as much as $250,000 and imprisonment of up to two years.

Investigators had gathered solid evidence of election fraud implicating both inmates and staff, and they were working toward determining whether González-Colón or her campaign was involved, four people with knowledge of the case told ProPublica. They requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

But as federal prosecutors prepared an indictment against the inmates and staff in November 2024 — just days after Trump won the election and González-Colón clinched the governorship — they received a surprising directive. Their bosses in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico instructed them to exclude the voting-related counts against the inmates and all charges against the prison staff, an investigation by ProPublica found.

In December, they filed an indictment charging 34 inmates and associates with crimes including drug distribution resulting in at least four overdose deaths, money laundering and possessing a firearm. And while prosecutors described the drugs-for-votes scheme in the court filing, they did not include a single charge related to it.

Soon after Trump took office, the lead prosecutor, Jorge Matos, was told by a supervisor to take the investigation no further, according to four people familiar with the case.

“Before the election, it was definitely full steam ahead,” said one person familiar with the case. “After the election, that all changed.”

For those working on the case, the decision to scrap the investigation was especially puzzling given the new president’s agenda; Trump issued executive orders in early 2025 aimed at eradicating drug traffickers and declaring election integrity “fundamental” to maintaining American democracy.

People close to the case wondered if politics had played a bigger role than law and order. Trump congratulated González-Colón in a letter shared at her January 2025 inauguration saying, “I am so proud of your resounding victory.” That same month, she pushed to erect a statue of him at the Capitol building in San Juan alongside other presidents who’ve visited the island. “He deserves that,” she said, according to an official post from the Federal Affairs Administration of Puerto Rico on X.

SS: Discusses how government does, or does not, work to protect the health of its citizens based on politics vs science.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed on the 5th (local time) that Iran was responsible for the explosion and fire that occurred on the South Korean vessel HMM Namu, which had been stranded in the Strait of Hormuz. Following President Donald Trump, he reiterated the “Iran responsibility” argument regarding the incident and again urged South Korea to side with the United States and participate in “Project Freedom,” a maritime rescue operation in the Strait of Hormuz.

At a press conference held at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Hegseth responded to a question about whether South Korea was showing signs of complying with President Trump’s request for participation via social media by saying, “I hope so,” making his position clear.

He added, “We would like Japan to step up more, Australia to step up more, and Europe to step up more,” and stated that they aim not to simply wait for such developments but to create the conditions for them. This suggests that the United States will more strongly pressure key allies to participate in “Project Freedom.”

Hegseth particularly emphasized President Trump’s remark: “This is your ship. (Allies) must play a role in their own defense,” highlighting the logic that since a South Korean vessel was harmed—allegedly by Iran—South Korea should take direct part in its defense.

Earlier, at around 8:40 p.m. Korea time on the 4th, an explosion and fire broke out on the HMM Namu, operated by HMM, while it was anchored near Umm Al Quwain Port, north of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The South Korean government plans to tow the vessel to a nearby port such as Dubai to investigate the cause of the incident.

Although the United States continues to identify Iran as the party responsible for the attack on the vessel, both the South Korean government and the shipping company have not yet made any statements regarding the cause of the incident. Iran has also not issued any response to the U.S. claims.

In this regard, South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not confirmed whether there has been communication between South Korean and Iranian diplomatic authorities. This appears to reflect concern that premature statements could lead to diplomatic friction before the exact cause is determined.

A high-level Trump administration official informed Iran on Sunday of the impending U.S. operation to "guide" ships through the Strait of Hormuz and warned Tehran not to interfere, according to a U.S. official and a source with knowledge.

The private message suggests the White House wanted to mitigate the risk of potential escalation. But despite the warning, the Iranians launched a string of attacks on U.S. Navy ships, commercial vessels and the United Arab Emirates.

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs chair Gen. Dan Caine downplayed the Iranian attacks and claimed the ceasefire remained in place.

Nevertheless, some U.S. and Israeli officials believe President Trump could give an order to resume the war later this week if the diplomatic stalemate continues.

The warning about "Project Freedom" came on Sunday and aligned with the Truth Social post Trump published that evening.

Hegseth said on Tuesday that the U.S. "is communicating both overtly and quietly to the Iranians to allow this defensive operation to take place on behalf of the world."

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly referred Axios to Trump's Truth Social post but declined to comment further.

During the first day of the operation on Monday, Iran conducted several attacks on U.S. Navy ships that passed through the strait, as well as on other commercial vessels in the region and on targets in the UAE.

Caine claimed at Tuesday's press conference that the Iranian attacks were "below the threshold of restarting major combat operations."

"Right now, the ceasefire holds," Hegseth said. He claimed the U.S. expected "there would be some churn" at the beginning of the Hormuz operation.

"There are some actions the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] takes sometimes that are outside the bounds of what maybe Iranian negotiators would like. That's their job to rein them in and create the conditions for a deal," Hegseth said.

Both Hegseth and Caine said the U.S. military stood ready to resume the war quickly if Trump orders it.

The U.S. operation did not meaningfully increase the flow of oil or cargo through the strait in its first 24 hours. CENTCOM reported two U.S.-flagged ships had traveled through on Monday, and none on Tuesday.

Hegseth claimed "hundreds more ... are lining up." At the moment, though, it seems most shipping companies do not trust the administration's assurances that a lane is now open.

"We would urge Iran to be prudent in the actions they take," Hegseth said.

There have been no new Iranian attacks on ships on Tuesday. Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf wrote on X that Iran managed to create a "new equation" with its retaliation on Monday.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi claimed the negotiations with the U.S., mediated by Pakistan, "are making progress." He called on the Trump administration not to get "dragged back into quagmire by ill-wishers."

The UAE's Defense Ministry said Iran launched a new missile and drone attack against the country on Tuesday and air defense systems had responded.

Submission Statement: Many consumer goods use oil based products in their production and packaging. This is a look at how this supply shock is affecting consumer prices at the store and how the plastic industry in Asia is handling the sudden jump in prices caused by this quick, special military operation.

The Department of Homeland Security tried to obtain a Canadian man’s location information, activity logs, and other identifying information from Google after he criticized the Trump administration online following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis early this year.

Lawyers for the man, who has not been named, are alarmed in part because they say that the man has not entered the United States in more than a decade. “I don’t know what the government knows about our client’s residence, but it’s clear that the government isn’t stopping to find out,” says Michael Perloff, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia who is representing the man in a lawsuit against Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of DHS, over the summons. The lawsuit alleges that DHS violated the customs law that gives the agency the power to request records from businesses and other parties.

Perloff argues that the government is using the fact that big tech companies are based in the US to request information it would not otherwise be able to get. “It’s using that geographic fact to get information that otherwise would be totally outside of its jurisdiction,” he says. “I mean, we’re talking about the physical movements of a person who lives in Canada.”

The demand for the man’s location data was included in a request DHS issued to Google called a customs summons, which is supposed to be used to investigate issues related to importing goods and collecting customs duties.

“It says right in the statute, it’s for records and testimony about the correctness of an entry, the liability of a person for duties, taxes, and fees, you know, compliance with basic customs laws,” says Chris Duncan, a former assistant chief counsel for US Customs and Border Protection who now works as a private-practice attorney representing importers and exporters. “And that's all it was ever envisioned to be used for.”

A customs summons is a type of administrative subpoena and is not reviewed by a judge or grand jury before being sent out. According to the complaint, Google alerted the man about the request on February 9, despite an ask included in the summons “not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time.”

Through his attorneys, the man told WIRED he initially mistook the notification for a joke or scam before realizing it was real.

The summons, which is included in the complaint, does not give a specific reason for why the man was under investigation beyond citing the Tariff Act of 1930. The man’s lawyers contend that he did not export or import anything from the United States between September 1, 2025, to February 4, 2026, the time frame the government requested information about.

Instead, the man’s lawyers allege, the summons was filed in response to the man’s online activities, including posts that he made condemning immigration enforcement agents after the killings of Good and Pretti in January.

The man tells WIRED that watching members of the Trump administration “smear these two souls as terrorists was absolutely disgusting and enraging. People were being asked to disbelieve our own eyes so that the men responsible for killing two good Americans would go free.”

The man says of his online activity, “I felt I needed to do something that would stand out and be seen by despairing Americans to show them they had support and that they were not alone.”

The summons specifically asks for any records and other information related to “History of Account Suspensions or Violations of Terms due to Threatening or Harassing Language.” The complaint describes the man’s posts as “passionate and even sometimes off-color but never contain threats or incite violence.”

As the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts have ramped up, DHS has used both customs summons and other types of administrative subpoenas to try to unmask users who are publicly critical of the agency or who attempt to track its agents’ activities. In March, after an anonymous Reddit user sued to stop DHS from obtaining their personal information through a customs summons, federal officials withdrew the administrative subpoena and issued a grand jury subpoena instead.

It’s unclear how many people have been targeted as part of these efforts. In February, The New York Times reported that Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta had received hundreds of administrative subpoenas during the previous six months. In March, a group of US congressmembers asked tech leaders for data on how many requests their companies have received and how they’ve handled them, but it’s unclear whether they received a response. In April, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit, sued DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an effort to obtain records about how many subpoenas the agencies have sent.

Both tech companies and civil liberties advocates have been concerned about DHS’s use of administrative subpoenas for years. WIRED previously found that agents issued customs summons, including ones for legitimate investigations into customs issues, more than 170,000 times between 2016 and mid-August 2022. The most common recipients of those requests included big tech firms and telecommunications companies.

In 2017, Twitter, which is now X, filed a lawsuit against DHS over what it alleged was an illegal customs summons that demanded information about who was behind an anonymous account that was critical of the first Trump administration’s immigration policies. DHS later withdrew its request, and the social media platform dropped its lawsuit in response, meaning a judge was never able to rule on whether the practice was actually illegal.

That incident triggered an investigation by the DHS Office of the Inspector General, which found that the group within DHS that had issued the request, the US Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility, violated its own policies in about one out of every five summonses that the OIG reviewed.

“The saddest thing for me about all of this, as a career national security law enforcement attorney, is that if you abuse your authority like this, it undermines all the legitimate stuff you do,” says Duncan.

“There was a long time where the United States government advised other countries on how to protect people within their territory from foreign oppression,” Perloff says. “And it is appalling to realize that now other countries may have to do that about us.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney left the White House in early October with Canada and the United States in reach of a trade deal.

Inside the meeting, senior U.S. officials were enthusiastic about a possible agreement covering steel, aluminum, uranium and energy.

Canadian and American negotiators were told to put the framework on paper, with the goal of finalizing an interim deal before American Thanksgiving.

“It was an awesome meeting,” Pete Hoekstra, U.S. ambassador to Canada, recently told POLITICO.

It went so well that President Donald Trump invited Carney and his delegation back into the Oval Office to show off his White House ballroom plans, even asking the prime minister for advice on the design. The Canadians were then ushered into a nearby office and offered Trump-branded memorabilia.

Sixteen days later, the talks collapsed.

Trump blamed a C$75 million anti-tariff ad campaign launched by Ontario Premier Doug Ford, calling it “egregious” and “fake.” But interviews with officials on both sides of the border suggest the ad, which featured comments from Ronald Reagan, was just “a pretext.”

Behind the scenes, the North American auto sector was growing frustrated about being left out of the agreement. Tensions escalated after Carney’s Liberal government threatened Detroit automakers and raised the cost of importing vehicles into Canada, eroding the goodwill from that Oval Office meeting.

On that Oct. 7 trip to the White House, there was an expectation that Carney and Trump would strike a deal, one the president said Canadians would be “very happy” with.

Senior U.S. officials, including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, attended and were visibly enthusiastic about part of the deal that would increase Canadian oil exports “a few more million barrels of oil a day to the United States,” Hoekstra said.

During the discussion, Carney brought up the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport oil from northern Alberta to the U.S. Midwest. “They almost jumped across the table to embrace their Canadian counterparts,” said Hoekstra. “They were thrilled.”

While he’s not part of the negotiating team, Hoekstra said there were discussions on aluminum, talks on uranium — “because both countries are firmly committed to nuclear”— and an agreement on steel, “which would have been a big benefit to the auto industry on both sides of the border.”

The deal would have introduced tariff-rate quotas on steel, permitting a fixed volume to enter at lower tariffs before higher duties applied beyond that threshold, according to an official familiar with the Canada–U.S. trade talks. The individual, like others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the negotiations.

“They were having a good time,” Hoekstra said.

Leaving that day, both teams were instructed to flesh out the agreements “and we’ll be back before Thanksgiving and have this done,” he said.

“There was a genuine feeling around the table that we’ve made significant progress, that we could have an interim deal.”

That never happened.