Norwegian police have seized a Russian-crewed ship on suspicion of being involved in causing “serious damage” to a fiber cable in the Baltic Sea between Latvia and Sweden.

Troms Police in northern Norway located the Silver Dania ship on Thursday evening, following a request from Latvian authorities, and it was brought into the port of Tromso Friday morning, according to a police statement.

“There is suspicion that the ship has been involved in serious damage to a fiber cable in the Baltic Sea between Latvia and Sweden. The police are conducting an operation on the ship to search, conduct interviews, and secure evidence,” the statement said.

The Silver Dania is Norwegian-registered and Norwegian-owned, police said, but the crew on board is Russian.

The ship was sailing between St. Petersburg and Murmansk in Russia, police said.

He added that authorities had not yet found any links connecting the ship with the damaged cable, and the crew has been allowed to prepare the Silver Dania to set sail Friday night.

The incident marks the second ship to be seized on suspicion of carrying out sabotage in the last week, after the Swedish Public Prosecutor’s Office confirmed Sunday it had boarded a ship following suspected damage to the communications cable running between Sweden and Latvia.

Latvia said the damage was likely caused by external forces.

This event was the latest in a string of incidents since late 2022, with damage being caused to Europe’s infrastructure running along the bottom of the Baltic Sea — pipes carrying natural gas and cables transporting electricity and data.

Such incidents have become more frequent over the past couple of years, raising suspicions they are the result of sabotage and triggering a flurry of investigations by European officials — with some openly pointing fingers at Moscow.

Russia has denied allegations of involvement in underwater cable sabotage. The Russian Embassy in London last week said NATO was building up naval and air forces under the “fictitious pretext of the ‘Russian threat.’”

After more than 80 years hidden beneath the waves off Rio de Janeiro, the location of a Brazilian troop transport ship torpedoed and sunk by Nazi Germany was definitively confirmed by Brazil’s navy this week.

The wreck of the Vital de Oliveira was initially discovered in 2011 by a pair of brothers, Jose Luíz and Everaldo Popermeyer Meriguete. As recently as July, the Brazilian navy had told Brazil’s O Globo newspaper that it could not confirm whether the hulk lying 45 kilometers (28 miles) from the coast was indeed the ship in question.

As part of a scientific expedition to obtain the exact location of the wreck, the navy officially confirmed the brothers’ 14-year-old discovery on January 16 using sonar imaging.

The Vital de Oliveira was a civilian ship, built in 1910 and outfitted as an auxiliary naval craft when Brazil entered World War II on the side of the Allies. It was transporting supplies, sailors and soldiers along the Brazilian coast when a German U-boat struck its stern with a torpedo just before midnight on June 19, 1944.

Brazil was the only South American country to send troops overseas in World War II. Throughout the Battle of the Atlantic, German U-boats patrolled Brazil’s coast, sinking some 34 vessels and killing 1,081 people, according to naval historian Roberto Sander, who wrote that the sinking of the Vital de Olivera was the navy’s “most major loss” during the war. Of the 270 souls aboard, he wrote, 99 perished.

“More than 60 years after these events,” Sander wrote in 2007, “the vast majority of Brazilian ships remain untouched at the bottom of the ocean.”

Their locations would only be confirmed, Sander inferred, via the use of “probes.”

The navy said in its press statement that the wreck was found “using multi-beam and side-scanning sonar.”

Both methods, which deploy fan-like arrays of sound waves to scan the seafloor, are frequently used together in underwater archaeology to create detailed visualizations of ocean wrecks, according to NOAA.

In the side-scanning sonar image released alongside the navy’s press statement, one can clearly see the outline of the Vital de Oliveira.

Coincidentally, the research vessel that confirmed the wreck’s location is also called the “Vital de Oliveira.”

President Donald Trump has called for an expansive, next-generation missile defense shield for the mainland United States, something modeled on Israel’s formidable defenses, typified by its signature Iron Dome system.

A defensive dome for the US – a country hundreds of times the size of Israel – would require massive scale, as well as space-based interceptors, and almost certainly be decades away.

Yet on the piece of US soil perhaps most vulnerable to missile attacks – the Pacific island of Guam – work is well underway on the kind of multi-layered missile defense that could point the way.

However, experts say even that faces steep challenges.

“There are no fast or panacea solutions, and we are making the decisions late in the game even though visionary military and political leaders saw this coming in the 1990s,” said Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

Guam’s early success

The US territory of Guam, a 210-square-mile island in the Pacific Ocean, is home to just under 175,000 people. It also hosts Andersen Air Force Base – a key deployment base for US Air Force bombers such as the B-1 and B-52 and sometimes the stealthy B-2 – and is homeport to US nuclear attack submarines that could be vital in any defense of Taiwan.

The island is less than 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) from China (PRC) and 2,100 miles from North Korea. Mockups of it have shown up in China’s military propaganda videos, and North Korea has made threats against it.

But the US military has not stood still, advancing its ability to defend against regional threats.

Just last December, the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) conducted the first successful intercept of a ballistic missile target from the island using the Aegis Guam System, which fired a land-based interceptor of the type that US Navy ships have used to destroy ballistic missile targets in testing.

“Current forces are capable of defending Guam against today’s North Korean ballistic missile threats. However, the regional threat to Guam, including those from PRC, continues to rapidly evolve,” the MDA’s director for operations, Michelle Atkinson, said in 2023.

In the December test, a US Air Force C-17 plane released a medium-range ballistic missile target off Guam’s coast. After the target was tracked by powerful radar, an interceptor was fired from a Vertical Launch System on the island, taking it out outside Earth’s atmosphere, according to releases by MDA and Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of the Aegis system on Guam.

It was a “a critical milestone in the defense of Guam and the region,” said US Navy Rear Adm. Greg Huffman, commander, Joint Task Force-Micronesia.

But the intercept test went beyond the land-based Aegis system, with other military elements testing systems that would form key parts of the multi-layered concept Trump would like to see.

That’s something akin to what Israel fields, a four-tiered system often lumped under the “Iron Dome” moniker, after its best-known and lowest layer. While the Iron Dome combats incoming rockets and artillery weapons, David’s Sling protects against short- and medium-range threats, and the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 systems stop ballistic missiles.

In a nod to a similarly layered defensive structure, US Indo-Pacific Command said it used December’s intercept to test tracking capabilities of the US Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system based on Guam.

THAAD is designed to stop incoming missiles in their terminal, or descent, phase of flight, while Aegis makes its intercept in the mid-course phase, outside Earth’s atmosphere, before the missiles dive on their target.

The US military also employs Patriot missile batteries, designed to make much lower-altitude intercepts, as the final phase of Guam’s defense. Both the THAAD and Patriot systems have been successfully used in combat.

All three – Aegis, THAAD and Patriot – will eventually form what is called the Enhanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense System (EIAMD) on Guam, which the MDA says will provide “360-degree coverage, and layered defense against regional ballistic, maneuvering ballistic, hypersonic glide, and cruise missile threats.”

That system would also rely on input from US satellites and space-based sensors, according to the MDA, inching it closer to Trump’s missile defense vision.

Difficult challenges

But the timeline for full Guam missile defense – expected to take at least a decade to put together – is indicative of the challenges in constructing any system to fight ballistic and hypersonic glide missiles. That’s not helped by constant technological advances in missile technology, which often evolves more quickly than ways to defend against it.

And Trump’s concept of a next-generation missile defense for the continental US goes well beyond what is still years away on Guam, an island about 10 times the size of Manhattan.

In his executive order, Trump said he would “direct (the US) military to begin construction of the great Iron Dome missile defense shield, which will be made all in the USA,” as the US faces a “catastrophic threat” from ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles.

His ambitious executive order called for an acceleration in “the development and deployment of Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor Layers, proliferated space-based interceptors, a Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, capabilities to defeat salvoes prior to launch, non-kinetic missile defense capabilities, and underlayer and terminal-phase intercept capabilities.”

Trump’s order does not give any estimate of the costs of such a system, but several hundreds of billions of dollars would probably be a conservative estimate.

“The costs of reliably defending an area the size of the United States against a wide variety of threats at multiple different intercept points would be astronomical,” said Matt Korda, associate director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

And as far as money goes, the advantage goes to the attacker.

“Offense is cheaper than defense every single time,” Korda said.

Even if US technology can develop and deploy all that Trump is asking for, impregnable missile defense could still prove impossible.

Though it is touted by many as the world’s best missile defense, attacks by Iran last year showed that the Iron Done is far from unbeatable, with projectiles fired by Tehran and Houthi rebels landing in Israel.

Iran achieved that by firing large numbers of weapons at Israel. While many of the around 180 missiles launched were intercepted, some got through. Missile defense experts have long pointed out that’s one way to beat any missile defense system.

Schuster, a former US Navy captain who worked on the Aegis missile defense system in its early days, said missile defenses can be “saturated,” pointing out that the incoming ballistic missile knows where it’s going, but the interceptors have to be directed to their target.

“You can only guide so many (interceptors) at any one time while the ballistic missile has an internal guidance system,” Schuster said.

The problem for defenders becomes more difficult once warheads with “maneuverable reentry vehicles” – which can change directions after they reenter the atmosphere and approach targets from different directions – are added. Both China and Russia have such capabilities.

“A target coming directly at you is the easiest to intercept. The greater the lateral displacement from that, the more challenging the intercept equation,” Schuster said.

Adversaries can compound that problem by firing decoy missiles, which distract from more important targets – which if they involve nuclear warheads, could do catastrophic damage.

The long road ahead

Of course, all that comes into play once a system is actually deployed.

And, according to Schuster, the biggest stumbling block for Trump’s shield plan could be a US production and procurement system that has been neglected – despite the early successes demonstrated on Guam.

“Our production rates are criminally low in my opinion,” he said. “We have been asleep at the switch … for over a decade.”

And it’s not just a manufacturing infrastructure problem, it’s also the limited knowledge and skills to produce them, Schuster said.

“We are going to have to invest in both plant, which we do well, and people, which we don’t do well.”

More than 700 people have been killed and 2,800 injured in just five days since fighting escalated in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) between January 26-30, UN Secretary-General spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters Friday.

“The WHO (World Health Organization) and its partners conducted an assessment with the government between the 26th and yesterday and report that 700 people have been killed and 2,800 people injured,” Dujarric said, noting that these totals are expected to rise.

“Humanitarian organizations in Goma continue to assess the impact of the crisis including the widespread looting of warehouses and the offices of aid organizations,” he added.

On Wednesday DRC President Felix Tshisekedi vowed “a vigorous and coordinated response” against the rebel alliance that has besieged swathes of the nation’s mineral-rich east and forced hundreds of local troops to surrender.

Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix told reporters Friday that “the situation remains tense” in Goma with “occasional shooting” but “overall calm is gradually restored.”

He also warned that the rebel groups are about 60 kilometers north of another major city, Bakavu, and “seem to be moving quite fast.”

Experts have repeatedly warned that the chaos of the conflict would leave civilians in Goma with shortages of basic necessities and at the risk of the spread of disease.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) found on Friday that access to safe drinking water in Goma has been cut off, “forcing people to use untreated water from Lake Kivu with all the risk that entails,” Dujarric said.

He added, “Without urgent action OCHA cautions the risk of water born disease outbreaks will just continue to increase.”

Nigerian Afro-pop sensation Yemi Alade has history with the Grammys. She’s featured on a Grammy-nominated album by Beyoncé and a Grammy-winning one by Beninese-French star Angelique Kidjo; but despite her popularity in Africa and her multilingual songs, Alade has yet to win a solo Grammy.

On February 2, that could change, with her song “Tomorrow” nominated in the Best African Music Performance category.

“Tomorrow” features on Alade’s sixth studio album “Rebel Queen,” which the Recording Academy said “solidifies her reputation as “Mama Africa” — the title of a previous Alade album and a term associated with iconic South African singer Miriam Makeba.

Alade first found fame with her 2014 single “Johnny,” which in 2019 made her the first Nigerian female artist to hit 100 million views on YouTube. She has also recorded the song in Portuguese, Swahili, and French.

She was inspired to record the French version by hearing her francophone African fans singing it word for word at her shows and thought that would show them her appreciation. As she began to tour Europe, she recalls the song became one of the pillars of her career.

“My own superwoman”

Alade was born in Abia State, southeastern Nigeria, to a Yoruba father and an Igbo mother, and historically, “intertribal relationships were frowned on,” she explained. As a teen growing up in Lagos, she and her friends were also immersed in African American culture listening to rap music and making mix tapes. That context played a key role in Alade’s development as an artist and intentionality became paramount, from her lyrics to her album titles.

“King of Queens,” “Woman of Steel,” “Mama Africa,” “Empress”, and “Rebel Queen” all speak of her struggles as a female artist in the industry, women’s empowerment and the unification of Africans across the world.

“I needed to be my own superwoman. I think that spirit became what you see today,” she said.

Rebel Queen mixes genres like R&B and pop with dancehall, highlife, and amapiano, with Alade singing in English, French, Igbo, Yoruba, and Swahili. It is the climax of a decade-long musical career that has taken her on a rich cultural journey.

“My love for Africa just genuinely grows,” she said. “I do not do this with an agenda. When I travel, I see the different cultures, I easily accept it, appreciate it, from the food to the language to the way of life. In every country I go to there’s something that’s culturally appealing.”

Staying independent

Alade has become known as a champion of African culture and for her international collaborations. She featured in Beyoncé’s 2020 musical film and visual album “Black is King,” and on her song “Don’t Be Jealous” from the album “The Lion King: The Gift.”

New album “Rebel Queen” features Ziggy Marley on the song “Peace and Love” and Kidjo on “African Woman.” The latter, Alade says, was one of the most challenging and fulfilling songs to make because she got to know one of her heroes even better, describing Kidjo as “my musical mother.”

Despite her growing success, Alade has chosen to remain independent, working with the same management team for over a decade in the music industry and recording with Effyzzie Music Group, rather than a major label.

“Other labels have made offers and we haven’t accepted, not because they’re not good enough. (But) if your goals are not in alignment with the goals that I’ve set for myself for over 10 years, then we should not be in the same boat. If you have a team of two people, trust me, that’s all you need,” she added.

“You have to make a decision. Do you want to have the party of [Chancellor] Olaf Scholz and all those eunuchs? Or are you on our side, with Elon Musk and Donald Trump? Which side has more sex appeal?”

Minutes later, Musk made a surprise video appearance beamed into the conference center. There was plenty of love in the room for Trump and his new administration from senior party officials.

The AfD has been riding high in the polls and could finish second in elections later this month.

Some of the rhetoric from Halle begs the question: is the AfD infatuated with Trump? And if so, why? The traffic has largely been one way – Musk aside, the new US president himself hasn’t spoken about the election or the party, which appears determined to forge an alliance.

And perhaps for good reason. Both the US and Germany have similar issues of mass migration and economic headwinds. And both parties have laid the blame for those issues at the feet of the governing class of ‘liberal’ parties, in their words.

Tino Chrupalla, the AfD co-leader, who attended the Capital One rally in Washington on inauguration day, also spoke in glowing terms about the US president.

Addressing the crowd before Weidel, he said, “You could feel the optimism and hope in the president. The American people felt liberated.” Chrupalla added: “He (Trump) implemented his election promises… That’s what I call politics for the people.”

Matthais Quent is a researcher and author on extremism, in particular the AfD and Germany’s far right. He says the attention from Musk is unchartered territory for the party, and they are harnessing it to their benefit.

Not every observer would agree with the assessment of Trump’s administration, but certainly, there is considerable overlap both in policy and in strategy.

“It’s nationalism, it’s populism, it’s anti-immigration, it’s disruption,” Quent says.

Across Europe there has been a wave of far-right parties coming to power on largely populist platforms. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, is a longtime Trump supporter and welcomed his return to office.

Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, who also survived an assassination attempt last year, has openly said his policies align closely with those of Trump.

As for the Musk-AfD alliance, Quent thinks they are flattered by his interest and are seizing an opportunity.

“The AfD has never had such open support by a whole government, or by a guy next to the government. They had support form very rich people in Europe and from Germany, but it was hidden and not public… he helps them to be seen as a normal political party which is the narrative of all far-right populist movements in the world,” Quent said.

At the campaign event in Halle, Musk repeated a common trope of his in this election, saying the AfD is Germany’s “best hope” before adding, “it’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”

Musk also caused controversy this week as commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz camp complex were held.

The billionaire said there’s “too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

Musk’s remarks mirrored the AfD’s long-held position that Germany should stop atoning for crimes committed by the Nazis in the past.

The comments irked Scholz, who called Musk’s words “disgusting.”

However, Quent questions how much Musk’s involvement is translating to support in the polls. He believes the AfD’s rise may be more accurately attributed to the weakness of the government and how social debates are focusing on the hot-button AfD issues, such as immigration.

Currently polling at roughly 21% would make the AfD the second largest political force in Germany and the first far-right party in that position since the Nazi era.

But the reality is they are likely to be frozen out of government. There has long been an agreement between Germany’s larger parties to refuse forming a government or passing laws with AfD assistance – it’s known as the “firewall.”

However, debates on tighter immigration legislation held this week in the Bundestag and, particularly a vote on Friday called the “influx limitation act” have been spearheaded by the favorite for chancellor, Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

The moves show the kind of impact the AfD are having on the campaign and major parties. Merz lost the vote on Friday, handing what people see as a victory for the AfD and a dent to his own campaign.

Regardless of how German voters may see the involvement from the US, Quent says, “in general, [the AfD leadership] are in favor of Trump, and they feel and they have a momentum right now.”

Carolina Aló was 17 years old the night her father, Edgardo, saw her for the last time. In their final conversation, he pleaded with Carolina to leave her boyfriend because of the way he treated her.

Almost 30 years later, Edgardo remembers the following night as if it were today.

By the time he arrived, his daughter was already dead. She had been stabbed 113 times by her boyfriend Fabián Tablado a week before her 18th birthday.

That cold Monday in 1996 was the beginning of a long fight by Edgardo to get justice for his daughter – one that would span decades and culminate in his testimony playing a pivotal role in a wider campaign to revise Argentina’s penal code to recognize femicide as an aggravating factor in homicide cases.

That campaign – led by women’s movements and human rights organizations – finally succeeded when Argentina’s government changed the code in 2012, but now, more than a decade on, many campaigners like Edgardo are wondering if their fight was in vain.

On January 24, Argentina’s Minister of Justice Mariano Cúneo Libarona warned on X that the government of President Javier Milei would seek to eliminate femicide from the penal code on the grounds it was a distortion of the concept of equality.

“This administration defends equality before the law, as enshrined in our national Constitution. No life is worth more than another,” he wrote.

Critics say the move is just the latest by the right-wing Milei government to clamp down on women’s rights. It comes after the president spoke out against the concept of femicide and what he called “radical feminism” at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“We have even got to the point of normalizing the fact that in many supposedly civilized countries, if you kill a woman, it is called femicide. And this carries more serious punishment than if you kill a man simply based on the sex of the victim – legally making a woman’s life be worth more than that of a man,” Milei told the forum.

But campaigners warn that such reform misunderstands the nature of femicide and will put Argentine women in greater danger.

“The violent death of women for reasons of gender is often perpetrated by people in their inner circle, generally current or former partners, or even by strangers, but in a context that includes contempt for the victim, humiliation and sexual assault,” explained Natalia Gherardi, a lawyer specializing in gender and co-director of the network of health and legal professionals RedAas.

“In general, men are more likely to be victims of murder, but the difference is that women are more likely to be murdered by people in their circle of trust. If one does not understand that the form, the way, the place, the perpetrator of this extreme violence is different, there is no way to have adequate policies to protect these women,” said Gherardi.

According to the Ombudsman’s Office of the Nation, from January 1 to November 15, 2024, there were 252 femicides in Argentina. Two thirds of the victims were murdered at home, while 84% were killed by someone with whom they had a previous relationship.

‘I had to go out and fight’

At the time of Carolina’s killing in the 1990s, sentences for men who killed women in the context of gender violence ranged between eight and 25 years in prison – and these could be reduced by mitigating factors such as good conduct in prison.

For Edgardo, the 24-year sentence handed to his daughter’s killer was too lenient; in his view, it failed to reflect the full horror of her killing. The more than 100 stab wounds inflicted on his daughter were made with at least three different knives. Yet her death was classified at the time as “simple homicide,” according to the sentence.

Experts on femicide say it is exactly these sort of details that single it out as distinct from other homicides, that may or may not involve a woman.

As Mariela Belski, executive director of Amnesty International Argentina, puts it: “A femicide is always a homicide, that is, the death of a person at the hands of another. However, the murder of a woman is not necessarily a femicide. For it to be considered a femicide, there must be a particular violence, a specific context. Femicides are rooted in a system that reinforces discrimination against women’s lives. At the same time, they reproduce stereotypes of masculinity associated with physical strength and the power to control women.”

In Edgardo’s case, he was shaken too by the knowledge his daughter’s murderer was asking to be released early and his fears of what might happen to other women. (Indeed, while in prison Tablado was found guilty of threatening another one of his partners, and had an extra two years and six months added to his sentence).

So Edgardo set about knocking on doors, spending years meeting lawyers, jurists and presidents, joining a wider movement by campaigners to change the law.

“I had to go out and fight because the law did not protect me. The judges did not protect me,” Edgardo recalls.

Living in fear

After years of pushing, Edgardo and his fellow campaigners were rewarded with a bittersweet victory in 2012, when the change to the penal code recognized femicide and upped the maximum sentence to life imprisonment.

Now, more than a decade later, under the Milei government, that hard-fought victory is coming under threat.

One of the first signs came in August 2024, when Milei’s government weakened a support program that provides subsidies to victims of gender-based violence so that they do not have to stay in the place where they are being abused – which for many, is in their family home.

The government’s move reduced the length of support from six to three months and introduced a requirement that applicants produce a police report confirming their situation. But critics point out that many victims of domestic violence feel too scared to go to the police in the first place.

As Belski, of Amnesty International, put it: “It is extremely worrying that the specificity of this type of crime and the obligations of the Argentine state to prevent, punish and eradicate violence against women, which have constitutional roots, are not understood.”

Meanwhile, 28 years and eight months later, Fabián Tablado is now free, having served his sentences.

The courts have assigned him an electronic ankle bracelet and a restraining order to protect his ex-partner and Edgardo Aló – an order he has in the past violated.

Edgardo says he lives with an anti-panic button in his pocket.

For him, life was put on hold in 1996. Every Christmas, he says, he keeps a glass on the family table for his beloved daughter.

Six Americans who had been detained in Venezuela are heading home to the US, President Donald Trump announced Friday, after his envoy met with the country’s President Nicolás Maduro.

US officials have not yet given details of the six detainees released, but Trump’s envoy for special missions Richard Grenell posted a picture on X of himself with the men aboard a plane.

“I’ve just been informed that we are bringing six hostages home from Venezuela,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Thank you to Ric Grenell and my entire staff. Great job!”

Grenell’s picture shows four of the released Americans wearing light blue outfits commonly worn by people held in the Venezuelan prison system.

“We are wheels up and headed home with these six American citizens. They just spoke to President Trump, and they couldn’t stop thanking him,” Grenell wrote in his post.

Maduro’s claim to a third term has been contested by the country’s opposition, which has published thousands of voting tallies that suggested their candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, won the election in July last year. They were backed by independent observers such as the Carter Center and the Colombian Electoral Mission.

Like the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada, the US does not recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s legitimate leader. It has placed a raft of sanctions or visa restrictions on Maduro-aligned officials. Washington has no diplomatic presence in Venezuela.

In September the US seized Maduro’s airplane.

Friday’s prisoner release came after a meeting between Grenell and Maduro, which had been expected to cover the deportation of Venezuelan nationals from the US. Trump has prioritized his campaign promise of mass deportations but Maduro has refused to take Venezuelan nationals back – and the US has generally been unable to send Venezuelans back because of frosty relations.

Gonzalez, who the US recognizes as Venezuela’s president-elect and who attended Trump’s inauguration, has warned the White House against cutting a deal with Maduro on deportation flights.

As Grenell headed to the meeting on Friday, Trump was asked if his envoy being photographed with Maduro would lend legitimacy to the Venezuelan leader.

The US President told reporters he wanted to “do something with Venezuela,” but noted that he was “a big opponent of Venezuela and Maduro.”

“They’ve treated us not so good, but they’ve treated, more importantly, the Venezuelan people, very badly,” he said.

Maduro said in an annual speech to the judiciary late on Friday evening that the meeting with Grenell had yielded some initial deals and he looked forward to “new deals for the good of the two countries and the region,” according to Reuters.

“President Donald Trump, we have made a first step, hopefully it can continue,” Maduro said.

Maduro and Grenell also discussed issues of migration and sanctions, according to a Venezuelan government statement on Friday.

Under Maduro – in office since 2013 – oil-rich Venezuela has fallen into a deep economic and political crisis, gripped by hyperinflation. Millions of people have fled the country in fear and desperation.

The State Department advises Americans against traveling to Venezuela, warning that “there is a high risk of wrongful detention of U.S. nationals.”

Nine Americans were brought home from Venezuela by the Biden administration in 2022 after five years of detention in the country.

In December 2023, the US secured the release of six wrongfully detained Americans and four other Americans held in Venezuela.