Hurricane Erin emerged as the first hurricane of the 2025 Atlantic season over the weekend, rapidly intensifying on Saturday (Aug. 16) to become a Category 5, the strongest type of hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. Erin then weakened and strengthened again and, at the time of writing, is a Category 4 with sustained wind speeds of about 130 mph (215 km/h).
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Excerpt:The United States has deployed three Aegis guided-missile destroyers to the coast of Venezuela, amid President Trump’s push to pressure Latin American drug cartels.
The USS Gravely, the USS Jason Dunham, and the USS Sampson are set to arrive shortly, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to comment and spoke Tuesday on the condition of anonymity to the Associated Press. They confirmed that U.S. military assets are being sent to the region for counter-narcotics operations and that the destroyers would be deployed “over the course of several months.”
The move comes as President Trump pushes to use the U.S. military against the cartels he blames for flooding American communities with fentanyl and fueling violence in American cities – both through illegal immigration, cross-border drug trafficking, as well as other long-established smuggling networks across land and sea – that Washington has previously failed to completely counter.