WAR CRIMES: Both Democrat and Republican leaders in Congress are beginning to say that US forces may have committed a war crime in killing survivors of an attack on a suspected drug boat off South America in September.

  The Washington Post reported on Friday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a verbal order to kill everyone aboard boats suspected of smuggling drugs, leading a military officer to carry out a second strike on those who had survived an attack in early September.

  “Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” Republican Rep. Mike Turner, of Ohio said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”  Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine also said on CBS that if the report was accurate, the attack “rises to the level of a war crime.”

  It’s not just killing survivors, but the attacks themselves that have been under legal question. Although President Trump and Hegseth have declared the drug runners to be terrorists, they have not attacked the US. Rep. Turner said, “There are very serious concerns in Congress about the attacks on the so-called drug boats down in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the legal justification that’s been provided.”

THE REGIME:

— A 19-year-old college freshman who was brought into the US when she was 7 was deported to Honduras after trying fly to surprise her family for Thanksgiving in Austin, Texas. Any Lucia López Belloza is a student at Babson College outside Boston.

  López  was deported despite a court order barring that while her case was pending. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told The Boston Globe that an immigration judge had ordered Ms. López deported in 2015, when she was a child. López, her family, and her lawyer say they’ve seen no evidence of such an order.

— President Trump commuted the seven-year sentence of convicted private equity fraudster David Gentile, 59, who had reported to prison only on November 14^th. Gentile and co-defendant, Jeffry Schneider, had been found guilty of securities and wire fraud in bilking victims of $1.6 billion.

  In a Thanksgiving day social media post, Alice Marie Johnson, Trump’s “pardon czar,” said she was “deeply grateful to see David Gentile heading home to his young children.”

  No reason was given for Gentile being let off the hook. A lawyer for victims told the NY Times, “This is not a case that should be political. This guy belongs in prison.”

— Northwestern University agreed to pay $75 million for the Trump administration to drop investigations into claims of unlawful discrimination, race-based admissions, and antisemitism. They are the 6^th university to make such a deal.

PARDON ME: Little known to most people in the US is that while he drives the war effort in Gaza, Israeli prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been the defendant in a long-running corruption trial. He is in many ways the Trump of Israel both politically and ethically. Netanyahu was indicted in 2019 on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, but the wheels of justice grind slowly in Israel.  The trial drags on

  Now Netanyahu is asking  President Isaac Herzog for a pardon before the trial concludes. Like Trump, the prime minister says he is too busy to be convicted of a crime. In his pardon request he cited “security and political reality” while claiming that having to appear in court three times a week presents “an impossible demand.” 

   THE OBIT PAGE: Tom Stoppard, the cerebral and clever Czech-born English playwright who wrote  the Tony-winning “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and shared an Oscar for the 1998 romantic comedy “Shakespeare in Love,” died at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88.

  In all, Stoppard won five Tonys, including for his best-known play, “The Real Thing” in 1982. 

   “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” was about two hapless characters plucked from Shakespeare’s Hamlet who engage in repartee about fate, free will, identity, and death. In both Hamlet and the Stoppard play, the two are executed. 

   Stoppard could dazzle with words and ideas:  

  “Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?”

  “What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.”

   “For all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.”

  Stoppard was criticized for having great cause or message in his work. “Some writers write because they burn with a cause which they further by writing about it,” He wrote in The Sunday Times of London in 1968. “I burn with no causes. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.”

THE SPIN RACK: The number of dead in the Hong Kong Apartment towers fire is up to 151. Seven towers burned. — A shooting Saturday night at a children’s birthday party in California’s Central Valley left three children and one adult dead and 11 others injured. — Former child acter Zachery Ty Bryan, who was featured in the long-running Tim Allen sitcom “Home Improvement,” has been arrested for the 6^th time in five years. With a record for DUI, domestic violence, and assault, the 44-year old was busted for violating his probation. — New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, a bachelor until he was 56, married Alexis Lewis, 38, a director of a Los Angeles-based a real estate investment firm. — American Mikaela Shiffrin, the winningest skier in World Cup history, won her third straight World Cup slalom race at Copper Mountain in Colorado.   

BELOW THE FOLD: Lane change. On the brink of taking Ole Miss to the college football playoffs, coach Lane Kiffen jumped ship to LSU. Crowds of fans gathered at the University-Oxford Airport yesterday booing and displaying a finger as Kiffin and his family boarded a pair of planes bound for Baton Rouge. They weren’t saying, “We’re number one.”

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