Trump's Caribbean Surge Costs Billions; Space Crew Arrives

U.S. Military Conducts Airstrikes in Syria, While Space Crew Docks at ISS

WASHINGTON - The U.S. military launched a series of airstrikes against Islamic State group targets in Syria on Saturday, in retaliation for a December ambush that resulted in the deaths of two U.S. soldiers and one American civilian interpreter, according to NPR News. Simultaneously, four members of NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 mission docked at the International Space Station, as reported by NPR News. These events occurred amidst ongoing U.S. military operations in other parts of the world, including the Caribbean, where costs have reached billions of dollars.

U.S. Central Command stated that American aircraft conducted 10 strikes against more than 30 IS targets between February 3rd and Thursday, hitting weapons storage facilities and other infrastructure, according to NPR News. The strikes were a response to the December ambush.

Meanwhile, the Crew-12 mission, which included two NASA astronauts, Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, French astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian astronaut Andrei Fedyaev, blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida before dawn on Friday morning, as reported by NPR News. The crew docked at the ISS on Saturday afternoon.

The U.S. military's presence in the Caribbean has also been a focus of attention. Bloomberg calculations show that the operational price tag of the ships deployed there reached more than $20 million a day at its peak from mid-November until mid-January, according to Fortune. The article also mentioned the cost of the military posture in the Caribbean is costing billions.

In other news, scientists have discovered how parasitic wasps castrate moth larvae hosts by injecting them with a domesticated virus that causes cells in the larvae's testes to die, according to Nature News.