With so much news around you'd be forgiven for not paying too much attention to an incident off the coast of Venezuela last week.
But in quieter times it would likely be seen as a major escalation between two regional rivals - one of which happens to be the world's most powerful country. And something, as tensions rise, probably worth keeping an eye on.
On the morning of 2 September, US military drones struck a boat travelling from a Venezuelan port in the southern Caribbean Sea, killing all 11 people on board.
The US called it a warning to drug-runners. Venezuela called it murder.
The order for this lethal strike in international waters came straight from the top. Announcing details of the operation on his social media, US President Donald Trump said it was "a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists", referring to the Venezuelan crime cartel - designated a "foreign terrorist organisation" by the administration in January.
The president went on to say that Tren de Aragua was operating under the control of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, "responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western hemisphere".
Then he warned "anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America" to beware. Allies applauded, with Vice President JD Vance calling it the "highest and best use of our military".
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, "we are going to wage combat against drug cartels that are flooding American streets and killing Americans".
And Pete Hegseth head of the Department of Defence - recently renamed the Department of War - told Fox News, "it won’t stop with just this strike ... anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate".
Others, though, were shocked and appalled.
"What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial," fellow republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky wrote on X.
Legal experts said it was a blatant violation of international and US domestic law.
Under international human rights law, lethal force may be employed "only as a last resort when it is strictly necessary to protect human life, and only where less harmful means (for example, interception or capture of the boat) are not available," Christine Ryan of Columbia Law School in New York told RTÉ News.
But the administration remained defiant.
In response to a comment calling the killing of citizens of another nation without due process a "war crime," Mr Vance wrote: "I don’t give a sh*t what you call it".
Speaking amid reports that the vessel had turned around and was heading back to shore, Venezuela’s interior minister Diosdado Cabello said the people on board were not gang members.
He told state television the government had "done our investigations here in our country and there are the families of the disappeared people who want their relatives".
In claiming responsibility, he said the US had "openly confessed to killing 11 people".
The US administration certainly appears to have opened a new front in the 'war on drugs' that is has been fighting for decades - since June 1971 to be precise, when it was first launched by then president Richard Nixon.
Every year, tens of thousands of Americans die from drug overdoses.
A frequently quoted study found that more Americans died from fentanyl in just two years than were killed in combat in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
Now, it looks like the US military is gearing up for a new fight.
"There’s more where that came from," Mr Trump said, speaking to reporters after the boat incident.
To his point, over the past few months, the US has been building up its military presence in the Caribbean.
"The Donald Trump administration has deployed a significant military presence to the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela," wrote Roxanna Vigil, international affairs expert at Council of Foreign Relations.
"This includes at least eight warships, a submarine, and other assets, along with approximately 4,000 marines and sailors," she added.
The US has also reportedly deployed ten F-35 fighter jets to the US territory of Puerto Rico.
This all signals a strong likelihood of more 'kinetic' action, experts said.
"Look at what they’ve got in the armada off the coast of the Caribbean right now - destroyers, cruisers, a Marine Expeditionary Unit," a former special operator with the US military told RTÉ News, on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak publicly.
"They are not there for sightseeing," he said.
"I can tell you that Marine Expeditionary Units can specialise in raids on terrorist camps," he added.
He said the US should deploy its military capability to attack cartels operating in South American countries.
Flying 450 miles into Mexico would take around two hours in a V-22 Osprey, he said.
"You could actually do the raid in the morning and be back in time to pick up your kids from school that day," he said.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum warned that US unilateral action on Mexican soil would cross a "red line" of national sovereignty.
And Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro said counter-narcotic operations were a "fabricated pretext" to overthrow his government. He said he would deploy military defences to hundreds of locations across the country in response to the US build-up.
Washington makes no secret of its desire to see Mr Maduro behind bars, offering a $50m reward for information leading to his arrest.
The US certainly has a long history of regime-change in Latin America, since the Monroe Doctrine declared it Washington’s sphere of influence, some 200 years ago.
And CIA-backed military coups ousted multiple democratically elected governments across the region during the Cold War.
But in recent years, the focus has shifted to drugs. And for some politicians in Washington, bombing a boat is the show of force they’ve been looking for.
Early this year, Dan Crenshaw, republican congressman from Texas and Mike Waltz (the sacked national security adviser who is now due to take up his post as UN Ambassador to the United Nations) introduced legislation to "put us at war" with the cartels.
Last week Mr Crenshaw, a former US Navy SEAL, called the strike on the boat a "welcome escalation". It was Mr Trump doing what he was elected to do, he said.
US law enforcement had previously pursued a policy of "interdiction", meaning intercepting suspected drug-running vessels and seizing contraband, he said.
"Interdiction is expensive," he wrote on X, adding: "Know what’s cheaper and way more effective? Making them wonder if a bomb is about to drop on their head."
But the escalation is far from welcome in other political quarters.
On Thursday, Ilhan Omar, Democratic Congresswoman from Minnesota, brought forward a resolution seeking to curb Mr Trump’s executive use of US military power.
"There was no legal justification for the Trump Administration’s military escalation in the Caribbean," she told the Intercept publication, adding that only Congress had the power "to declare war".
Backing the resolution, Texas Congressman Greg Casar said it was illegal for the president to circumvent Congress.
"Donald Trump cannot be allowed to drag the United States into another endless war with his reckless actions," he said.
Legal experts agree. Under US law, there was no congressional authorisation to use force, Christine Ryan, of Columbia Law School said.
"Rebranding the victims as 'terrorists' does not confer such authority," she said.
Laws of war also do not apply, she added, because the US had not "demonstrated that it is in an armed conflict with the victims or with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua".
Supporters point to the targeted killing of designated terrorists like suspected ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria in 2019 or US citizen Anwar al Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.
"There were legal challenges then too," said the former US military special operator.
But experts warn taking a leaf out of the 'war on terror' playbook, could have serious and unpredictable consequences.
"Any human rights lawyer can tell you that the US government’s post-9/11 policies not only made the US less safe from terrorist threats, but they also provided a blueprint that authoritarian regimes worldwide exploited to justify their own repression within and beyond borders," Ms Ryan said.
