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CARACAS, Venezuela — Nicolás Maduro, who rose from unionized bus driver to Venezuelan president and oversaw his country’s democratic undoing and economic collapse, was captured Saturday during an attack by U.S. forces on his capital.

U.S. President Donald Trump, in an early morning social media post, announced Maduro’s capture. Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, later announced that the whereabouts of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, remained unknown. Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, said Maduro and Flores, would face charges after an indictment in New York.

Maduro’s fall was the culmination of months of stepped-up U.S. pressure on various fronts.

He had spent the last months of his presidency fueling speculation over the intentions of the U.S. government to attack and invade Venezuela with the goal of ending the self-proclaimed socialist revolution that his late mentor and predecessor, Hugo Chávez, ushered in 1999. Maduro, like Chávez, cast the United States as Venezuela’s biggest threat, railing against Democratic and Republic administrations for any efforts to restore democratic norms.

Maduro’s political career began 40 years ago. In 1986, he traveled to Cuba to receive a year of ideological instruction, his only formal education after high school. Upon his return, he worked as a bus driver for the Caracas subway system, where he quickly became a union leader. Venezuela’s intelligence agencies in the 1990s identified him as a leftist radical with close ties to the Cuban government.

Maduro eventually left his driver job and joined the political movement that Chávez organized after receiving a presidential pardon in 1994 for leading a failed and bloody military coup years earlier. After Chávez took office, the former youth baseball player rose through the ranks of the ruling party, spending his first six years as a lawmaker before becoming president of the National Assembly. He then served six years as foreign minister and a couple months as vice president.

Appointed the political heir to Chávez

Chávez used his last address to the nation before his death in 2013 to anoint Maduro as his successor, asking his supporters to vote for the then-foreign affairs minister should he die. The choice stunned supporters and detractors alike. But Chávez’s enormous electoral capital delivered Maduro a razor-thin victory that year, giving him his first six-year term, though he would never enjoy the devotion that voters professed for Chávez.

Maduro married Flores, his partner of nearly two decades, in July 2013, shortly after he became president. He called her the “first combatant,” instead of first lady, and considered her a crucial adviser.

Maduro’s entire presidency was marked by a complex social, political and economic crisis that pushed millions into poverty, drove more than 7.7 million Venezuelans to migrate and put thousands of real or perceived government opponents in prison, where many were tortured, some at his direction. Maduro complemented the repressive apparatus by purging institutions of anyone who dared dissent.

Venezuela’s crisis took hold during Maduro’s first year in office. The political opposition, including the now-Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, called for street protests in Caracas and other cities. The demonstrations evidenced Maduro’s iron fist as security forces pushed back protests, which ended with 43 deaths and dozens of arrests.

Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela would go on to lose control of the National Assembly for the first time in 16 years in the 2015 election. Maduro moved to neutralize the opposition-controlled legislature by establishing a pro-government Constituent Assembly in 2017, leading to months of protests violently suppressed by security forces and the military.

More than 100 people were killed and thousands were injured in the demonstrations. Hundreds were arrested, causing the International Criminal Court to open an investigation against Maduro and members of his government for crimes against humanity. The investigation was still ongoing in 2025.

In 2018, Maduro survived an assassination attempt when drones rigged with explosives detonated near him as he delivered a speech during a nationally televised military parade.

Bedeviled by economic problems

Maduro was unable to stop the economic free fall. Inflation and severe shortages of food and medicines affected Venezuelans nationwide. Entire families starved and began migrating on foot to neighboring countries. Those who remained lined up for hours to buy rice, beans and other basics. Some fought on the streets over flour.

Ruling party loyalists moved the December 2018 presidential election to May and blocked opposition parties from the ballot. Some opposition politicians were imprisoned; others fled into exile. Maduro ran virtually unopposed and was declared winner, but dozens of countries did not recognize him.

Months after the election, he drew the fury after social media videos showed him feasting on a steak prepared by a celebrity chef at a restaurant in Turkey while millions in his country were going hungry.

Under Maduro’s watch, Venezuela’s economy shrank 71% between 2012 and 2020, while inflation topped 130,000%. Its oil production, the beating heart of the country, dropped to less than 400,000 barrels a day, a figure once unthinkable.

The first Trump administration imposed economic sanctions against Maduro, his allies, and state-owned companies to try to force a government change. The measures included freezing all Venezuelan government assets in the U.S. and prohibiting American citizens and international partners from doing business with Venezuelan government entities, including the state-owned oil company.

Out of options, Maduro began implementing a series of economic measures in 2021 that eventually ended Venezuela’s hyperinflation cycle. He paired the economic changes with concessions to the U.S.-backed political opposition with which it restarted negotiations for what many had hoped would be a free and democratic presidential election in 2024.

Maduro used the negotiations to gain concessions from the U.S. government, including the pardon and prison release of one of his closest allies and the sanctions license that allowed oil giant Chevron to restart pumping and exporting Venezuelan oil. The license became his government’s financial lifeline.

Losing support in many places

Negotiations led by Norwegian diplomats did not solve key political differences between the ruling party and the opposition.

In 2023, the government banned Machado, Maduro’s strongest opponent, from running for office. In early 2024, it intensified its repressive efforts, detaining opposition leaders and human rights defenders. The government also forced key members of Machado’s campaign to seek asylum at a diplomatic compound in Caracas, where they remained for more than a year to avoid arrest.

Hours after polls closed in the 2024 election, the National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner. But unlike previous elections, it did not provide detailed vote counts. The opposition, however, collected and published tally sheets from more than 80% of electronic voting machines used in the election. The records showed Edmundo González defeated Maduro by a more than 2-to-1 margin.

Protests erupted. Some demonstrators toppled statues of Chávez. The government again responded with full force and detained more than 2,000 people World leaders rejected the official results, but the National Assembly sworn in Maduro for a third term in January 2025.

Trump’s return to the White House that same month proved to be a sobering moment for Maduro. Trump quickly pushed Maduro to accept regular deportation flights for the first time in years. By the summer, Trump had built up a military force in the Caribbean that put Venezuela’s government on high alert and started taking steps to address what it called narco-terrorism.

For Maduro, that was the beginning of the end.

NAGASAKI, Japan — Hundreds of prisoners of war from Allied countries were held at brutal Japanese camps in Nagasaki when the United States dropped an atomic bomb 80 years ago.

Their presence during the Aug. 9, 1945, bombing is little known, and family and researchers have been collecting and publishing testimonies to tell the stories of these often unrecognized victims.

In September, dozens of relatives of Dutch POWs and descendants of Japanese bombing survivors came together to commemorate both those who were abused at the camps and the tens of thousands of Japanese who were killed that day. The dead included at least eight captives at one of the Nagasaki camps.

Descendants and survivors reckon with a painful past

Andre Schram, who represented the Dutch families at the Nagasaki memorial, unveiled in 2015, is the son of a sailor who was among nearly 1,500 POWs held at the Fukuoka No. 2 Branch Camp for three years and forced to work at the Kawanami shipyard.

Many of the prisoners were Dutch service members captured by the Japanese in Indonesia, transported to Nagasaki on so-called “hell ships,” kept at two major camps — No. 2 and No. 14 — and used as slave labor.

About 150,000 Allied prisoners were held in dozens of camps across Asia during the war, including 36,000 sent to Japan to make up for labor shortage as Japanese men were drafted and deployed to battlefields across Asia, according to the POW Research Network Japan.

There were also prisoners from the United States, Britain, and Australia in Nagasaki. None died from the atomic blast at the No. 2 Camp, but more than 70 earlier died of malnutrition, overwork, and illness.

Andre Schram’s father, Johan Willem Schram, returned to the Netherlands four months after the war ended, but only near the end of his life did he tell his son about being treated like a slave. Japanese officials have apologized multiple times for wartime atrocities, “but Johan, like many other victims, had doubts about their sincerity,” his son said.

“He felt Japan and the Netherlands treated him and other prisoners of war with disrespect. He never wanted anything to do with Japan again,” Andre Schram wrote in Johan’s Story, a booklet about the Netherlands’ colonial rule of the Dutch East Indies, the war with Japan and the aftermath, based on his research after his father died in 1993.

Peter Klok said his father, Leendert Klok, also a Dutch POW at the camp, told him that Japanese civilians at the shipyard were friendly and helped him find parts to repair his watch. Military police later beat him for seeking help.

Klok called the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki awful, but said Japan must reflect on its atrocities.

A blinding flash, violent explosions, then the end of the war

When the U.S. B-29 dropped the “Fat Man” plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, prisoners at the No. 2 Camp, about 6.2 miles from ground zero, saw a huge orange fireball, purple smoke, and a triple-layer mushroom cloud, British captive Tom Humphrey wrote in his diary, part of which is quoted on the Royal Air Force website.

Windows at the camp were shattered, doors were blasted off, and the clinic ceiling collapsed, he wrote.

The other camp, Fukuoka No. 14, was much closer to the blast. The brick buildings were destroyed, killing eight and injuring dozens.

A former Dutch captive, Rene Schafer recalled that he and his fellow prisoners were digging a new shelter when Japanese soldiers warned of U.S. aircraft approaching. They jumped into a bunker, but his roommate suffered severe burns and died nine days later.

Australian survivor Peter McGrath-Kerr was reading when everyone bolted to shelters. A fellow Australian captive dug him out from the debris, but he was unconscious for five days with broken ribs, cuts and bruises and radiation burns on his hand.

Researchers examine a largely neglected history

In the days that followed the atomic bombing, prisoners from the Fukuoka No. 2 Camp provided rice and other assistance to their comrades from the No. 14 Camp.

Schram’s father and fellow POWs at the No. 2 Camp were officially notified of Japan’s surrender on Aug. 18, and a U.S. B-29 delivered its first food drop for the Allied POWs on Aug. 26.

On Sept. 13, the prison camp survivors left Nagasaki, heading for the Philippines on a U.S. carrier.

The ceremony in Nagasaki at a granite monument with three inscribed panels was the result of efforts by the families of Dutch POWs, who returned home with painful memories, and the descendants of atomic bombing survivors, said Kazuhiro Ihara, whose father lived through the bombing and was devoted to reconciliation with the POWs.

In Hiroshima, Japanese survivor Shigeaki Mori’s decadeslong independent research led to U.S. confirmation of the deaths of 12 captured American service members in the Aug. 6 atomic bombing.

Former President Barack Obama, who became the first U.S. leader to visit Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park in 2016, mentioned in his speech “a dozen Americans held prisoner” as part of the victims. He recognized Mori for seeking out the Americans’ families, believing their loss was equal to his own, and later gave him a hug.

A 1957 Japanese law allowed medical support for certified atomic bombing survivors and has since gradually expanded its scope. The number of certificate holders is now 99,000, down from a peak of 372,000 in 1980.

The Health and Welfare ministry says about 4,000 certificate holders were living outside Japan, many of them South Koreans and Japanese in the United States, Brazil and other countries.

According to the POW Research Network, at least 11 former POWs who were in Nagasaki — seven Dutch, three Australian and one British — received survivors’ certificates.

“The issue has been swept under the rug,” POW Research Network co-founder Taeko Sasamoto said.

The research requires the time-consuming examination of historical documents that haven’t attracted much academic interest, Sasamoto said. “It’s an important issue that has long been neglected.”

MEXICO CITY — A strong earthquake rattled southern and central Mexico on Friday, interrupting President Claudia Sheinbaum‘s first press briefing of the new year as seismic alarms sounded and leaving at least two people dead.

The earthquake had a magnitude of 6.5 and its epicenter was near the town of San Marcos in the southern state of Guerrero near the Pacific coast resort of Acapulco, according to Mexico‘s national seismological agency. There were more than 500 aftershocks.

The state’s civil defense agency reported various landslides around Acapulco and on other highways in the state.

Guerrero Gov. Evelyn Salgado said that a 50-year-old woman living in a small community near the epicenter died when her home collapsed. Authorities also said that a hospital in Chilpancingo, Guerrero’s capital, suffered major structural damage and various patients were evacuated.

Residents and tourists in Mexico City and Acapulco rushed into the streets when the shaking began. Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada said that one person died after suffering an apparent medical emergency followed by a fall while evacuating a building.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake occurred at a depth of 21.7 miles, 2.5 miles north-northwest of Rancho Viejo, Guerrero, which is in the mountains about 57 miles northeast of Acapulco.

Sheinbaum resumed her press briefing a short time after the quake.

José Raymundo Díaz Taboada, a doctor and human rights defender who lives on one of the peaks ringing Acapulco, said he heard a strong rumble noise and all the neighborhood dogs began barking.

“In that moment the seismic alert went off on my cellphone,” he said, ”and then the shaking began to feel strong with a lot of noise.”

He said the shaking was lighter than in some previous quakes and he had prepared a backpack of essentials to be ready to leave as the aftershocks continued.

He said he had been unable to reach some friends who live along the Costa Chica southeast of Acapulco because communications were cut.

DEIR AL BALAH, Gaza Strip — A grandmother and her 5-year-old grandson burned to death in Gaza when their tent caught fire while cooking, as thousands of Palestinians endure colder weather in makeshift housing.

The nylon tent in Yarmouk caught fire Thursday night while a meal was being prepared, a neighbor said. A hospital official said that two Palestinian men were killed by Israeli gunfire on Friday in Gaza.

The shaky 12-week-old ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas militant group has largely ended large-scale Israeli bombardment of Gaza. But Palestinians are still being killed by Israeli forces, especially along the so-called Yellow Line that delineates areas under Israeli control.

On Friday, American actor and film producer Angelina Jolie visited the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.

Wintry weather hits tent cities

Over the past few weeks, cold winter rains have repeatedly lashed the sprawling tent cities, causing flooding, turning Gaza’s dirt roads into mud and causing damaged buildings to collapse.

Aid groups say not enough shelter materials are getting into Gaza during the truce. Figures recently released by Israel’s military suggest it hasn’t met the ceasefire stipulation of allowing 600 trucks of aid into Gaza a day, though Israel disputes that finding.

Israel has said throughout the war that Hamas was siphoning off aid supplies, preventing the population in Gaza from receiving them. Last month, the World Food Program said that there have been “notable improvements” in food security in Gaza since the ceasefire.

Palestinians have long called for mobile homes and caravans to be allowed in to protect them against living in impractical and worn out tents.

Actor visits Rafah crossing

Jolie met with members of the Red Crescent on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing and then visited a hospital in the nearby city of Arish to speak with Palestinian patients on Friday, according to Egyptian officials.

Her visit sought to raise support for the displaced and humanitarian workers in the crises in Gaza as well as in Sudan, Jolie’s team said in a statement.

“What needs to happen is clear: the ceasefire must hold, and access must be sustained, safe and urgently scaled up so that aid, fuel and critical medical supplies can move quickly and consistently, at the volume required,” Jolie said about Gaza.

Reopening the crossing, which would allow Palestinians to leave Gaza — especially the ill and wounded who could get specialized care unavailable in the territory — has been contentious. Israel has said that it will only allow Palestinians to exit Gaza, not enter, until militants in Gaza return all the hostages they took in the attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which triggered the war. The remains of one hostage are still in Gaza.

Israel also says Palestinians wanting to leave Gaza will have to get Israeli and Egyptian security approval. Egypt, meanwhile, says it wants the crossing immediately opened in both directions, so Palestinians in Egypt can enter Gaza. That’s a position rooted in Egypt’s vehement opposition to Palestinian refugees permanently resettling in the country.

For more than two decades until 2022, Jolie was a special envoy to the U.N. refugee agency.

Gaza’s humanitarian situation

On Friday, the foreign ministers of Arab and Muslim countries, including Egypt, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, expressed concern about Gaza’s humanitarian situation.

The situation has been “compounded by the continued lack of sufficient humanitarian access, acute shortages of essential life-saving supplies, and the slow pace of the entry of essential materials,” according to the joint statement.

The Palestinian death toll from the war is at least 71,271, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between militants and civilians in its count. The Israel-Hamas war began with the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage.

On Friday, two Palestinian men were killed in separate incidents by Israeli gunfire in the Khan Younis area of southern Gaza, a hospital official said. Israel’s military said troops operating in the southern Gaza Strip killed a person who “crossed the Yellow Line and approached the troops, posing an immediate threat to them.”

West Bank raids

Meanwhile, Israel continues operating in the occupied West Bank.

On Friday, the Palestinian Prisoners media office said that Israel carried out numerous raids across the territory, including the major cities of Ramallah and Hebron. Nearly 50 people were detained, following the arrest of at least 50 other Palestinians on Thursday, most of those in the Ramallah area.

Israel’s military said there were arrests made of people “involved in terrorist activity.” Last week, a Palestinian attacker rammed his car into a man and then stabbed a young woman in northern Israel, killing both of them, police said.

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society says that Israel has arrested 7,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem this year, and 21,000 since the war began. The number arrested from Gaza isn’t made public by Israel.

A solo hiker who authorities believe was killed by a mountain lion on a remote Colorado trail on New Year’s Day was not the first person to encounter one of the predators in the area in recent weeks.

Gary Messina said he was running along the same trail on a dark November morning when his headlamp caught the gleam of two eyes in the nearby brush. Messina used his phone to snap a quick photo before a mountain lion rushed him.

Messina said he threw the phone at the animal, kicked dirt and yelled as the lion kept trying to circle behind him. After a couple of harrowing minutes he broke a bat-sized stick off a downed log, hit the lion in the head with it, and it ran off, he said.

The woman whose body was found Thursday on the same Crosier Mountain trail had “wounds consistent with a mountain lion attack,” said Kara Van Hoose with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. An autopsy is scheduled for next week, said Rafael Moreno with the Larimer County Coroner’s Office.

Prior warnings and the hunt for a culprit

Wildlife officials late Thursday tracked down and killed two mountain lions in the area — one at the scene and another nearby. A necropsy will help determine if either or both of those animals attacked the woman and whether they had neurological diseases such as rabies or avian flu.

A search for a third mountain lion reported in the area was ongoing Friday, Van Hoose said. Nearby trails remained closed while the hunt continued. Van Hoose said circumstances would dictate whether that lion is also killed.

Based on the aggressiveness of the animal that attacked him on Nov. 11, Messina suspects it could be the same one that killed the woman on New Year’s Day.

“I had to fight it off because it was basically trying to maul me,” Messina told the Associated Press. “I was scared for my life and I wasn’t able to escape. I tried backing up and it would try to lunge at me.”

The 32-year-old man from nearby Glen Haven, Colorado, reported his encounter to wildlife officials days later who posted signs to warn people about the animal along trails in the Crosier Mountain area northeast of Estes Park, Van Hoose said. The signs were later removed, she said.

Mountain lions don’t often attack humans

Mountain lion sightings in that area east of Rocky Mountain National Park are common, Van Hoose said, because it offers good habitat for the animals: It’s remote with thick forests, rocky outcroppings and lots of elevation changes.

Yet attacks on humans by the animals are rare, and the last suspected fatal encounter in Colorado was in 1999, when a 3-year-old boy disappeared in the wilderness and his tattered clothes were found more than three years later. In 1997, a 10-year-old boy was killed by a lion and dragged away while hiking with family members in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Two hikers on Thursday saw the victim’s body on the trail at around noon from about 100 yards away, Van Hoose said. A mountain lion was nearby and they threw rocks to scare it away. One of the hikers, a physician, attended to the victim but did not find a pulse, Van Hoose said.

The victim will be publicly identified following the autopsy by the coroner, who is also expected to provide a cause of death.

Mountain lions — also known as cougars, pumas or catamounts — can weigh 130 pounds and grow to more than 6 feet long. They primarily eat deer.

Colorado has an estimated 3,800 to 4,400 of the animals, which are classified as a big game species in the state and can be hunted.

Back away slowly. Do not run

Thursday’s killing would be the fourth fatal mountain lion attack in North America over the past decade, and the 30th since 1868, according to information from the California-based Mountain Lion Foundation. Not all of those deaths have been confirmed as mountain lion attacks.

Most attacks occur during the day and when humans are active in lion territories, indicating the animals are not seeking out the victims, according to the advocacy group. About 15% of attacks are fatal.

“As more people live, work, and recreate in areas that overlap wildlife habitat, interactions can increase, not because mountain lions are becoming more aggressive, but because overlap is growing,” said Byron Weckworth, chief conservation officer for the foundation.

To reduce the risk travel in groups, keep children close and avoid dawn and dusk when lions are most active, Weckworth said. During an encounter, maintain eye contact with the lion, make yourself appear larger, and back away slowly; don’t run, he said.

Last year in Northern California, two brothers were stalked and attacked by a lion that they tried to fight off. One of the brothers was killed.