What happened
Donald Trump has confirmed that he authorised the CIA to carry out covert operations in Venezuela and said he was considering land-based strikes against drug cartels. The order allows the agency to act independently or alongside US forces. US strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean have already killed 27 people, which UN experts have condemned as “extrajudicial executions”.

Who said what
At the White House, the US president said he had authorised the CIA for “two reasons really”: that Venezuela “emptied their prisons into the United States” and because “a lot of drugs (are) coming in”.

The military build-up is “substantial”, said Julian E. Barnes and Tyler Pager in The New York Times. The US has about 10,000 troops in the region, mostly based in Puerto Rico, along with Marines on amphibious ships, eight Navy warships and a submarine in the Caribbean. But any strikes on Venezuelan territory would be a “significant escalation”.

What next?
Qatar is trying to act as a mediator as tensions continue to rise amid fears of a direct confrontation between Washington and Caracas.

What happened
New research has found that tropical rainforest trees in Queensland have shifted from absorbing carbon to releasing it. The change, which affects trunks and branches, but not roots, began about 25 years ago as hotter, drier conditions increased tree mortality and slowed growth. For decades these forests had been considered reliable carbon sinks, helping offset human emissions, but this balance is now in jeopardy.

Who said what
“This is the first tropical forest of its kind to show this symptom of change,” said the study’s lead author Dr Hannah Carle from Western Sydney University. However, the research suggests that a “decline of carbon storage in woody biomass in Australia could be a sign of things to come for rainforests elsewhere in the world”, said Peter de Kruijff on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

What next?
Researchers stress the need for continued long-term monitoring to determine whether other tropical forests will approach the same tipping point, but warn that the reduced capacity of these forests to store carbon also underscores the urgency of accelerating emissions reductions worldwide.

A controversial novel about migrants arriving in Europe could soon be on a bookshelf near you – but it was written more than 50 years ago.

Published in 1973, Jean Raspail’s “The Camp of the Saints” depicted an overwhelming “influx of migrants”, said The Times, and it’s now enjoying a new lease of life after endorsements from Marine Le Pen and Steve Bannon made it a “totem for the hard right”.

Raspail’s “depiction of the migrants” is “savagely, even gleefully, racist” and it’s “the most controversial novel” from a “serious” author in the past five decades, according to the broadsheet. Even the “most militant of its admirers must admit” that it’s an “ugly book”.

It’s “become an object of reflexive condemnation”, said The Spectator, although many of those condemning it have “never read a word” of the book. In it, a million migrants from India land in the south of France in a flotilla of small boats. Other migrants start to arrive in Europe in search of a new life and the continent becomes divided and overrun.

The story’s “wilder excesses, plotlines and ending stretch the limits of credulity”, said the Daily Mail, and it reads “like a war reporter’s despatch from the mouth of hell”. It’s a “brutal, frequently sickening read”.

A spokesperson for the Vauban Books, the independent American publisher behind the reprint, told The Spectator that “some people will be very angry that we are bringing it out”, adding that distributors could well object to the title, so “there may be a battle ahead”.