The United States seized two sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela in back-to-back actions in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea, officials said Wednesday, and is removing sanctions to enable the shipping and sale of oil from the South American country to markets worldwide.
U.S. European Command announced the seizure of the merchant vessel Bella 1 for “violations of U.S. sanctions” in a social media post. The U.S. had been pursuing the tanker since last month after it tried to evade a U.S. blockade on sanctioned oil vessels around Venezuela.
Then, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revealed that U.S. forces also took control of the tanker Sophia in the Caribbean. Noem said in a social media post both ships were “either last docked in Venezuela or en route to it.”
Noem said that both ships are part of a large “ghost fleet” of sanctioned vessels that carry oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela in defiance of Western sanctions, mostly to customers in Asia.
The Trump administration is “selectively” removing sanctions to enable the shipping and sale of Venezuelan oil to global markets, according to an outline of the policies published Wednesday by the Energy Department.




Israeli forces clashed Tuesday with students during a raid at Birzeit University, north of Ramallah in the West Bank, in what the military said was an operation aimed at disrupting a pro-terror gathering.
Ask anybody about the Jewish vote for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in the election, and they’ll tell you he lost it badly. If they saw the news coverage, the headlines put a number on it: One-third went to Mamdani, and two-thirds went to his opponent Andrew Cuomo. To backers of Israel, the support for Mamdani was too high. To others, it was read as a sign that Mamdani was too divisive for the Democratic Party coalition—alienating large segments of New York City’s Jewish electorate.
Ukraine's allies said Tuesday they had agreed to provide the country with multilayered international defense guarantees as part of a proposal to end Russia's nearly 4-year-old invasion of its neighbor.
Approaching the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the official plaque honoring the police who defended democracy that day is nowhere to be found.
The Pentagon is mounting a six-month review of women in ground combat jobs, to ensure what it calls the military "effectiveness" of having several thousand female soldiers and Marines in infantry, armor and artillery, according to a memo obtained by NPR.
The Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the so-called Epstein files, a court filing has revealed, as Democrats step up criticism of the Trump administration’s “lawlessness” for keeping records under seal.
A major Texas teachers’ union filed a federal lawsuit against the state on Tuesday challenging what it describes as unconstitutional investigations into hundreds of educators who posted comments on social media following the September killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.





























