Britain will scale up action against Russia’s shadow fleet after helping the US seize the Marinera oil tanker bound for Russia yesterday. Defence Secretary John Healey said the vessel had undermined sanctions by transporting seven million barrels of Iranian oil over the past four years, the proceeds from which had been used to fund “terrorism, threats and instability across the world”. A US immigration agent has shot dead a 37-year-old woman in her car in Minneapolis after she allegedly tried to run over immigration officers. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said the officer was responding to an “act of domestic terrorism”, but the city’s mayor accused the government of “trying to spin this as an action of self-defence”, calling the claim “bullshit”. People who come off weight-loss jabs regain their lost pounds around four times faster than those who stop conventional dieting and exercise. According to new research, those who quit the GLP-1 drugs return to their pre-treatment weight within a year, compared to four years for those who lose weight through lifestyle changes.

The details of Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping are now trickling out, says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian, and it’s looking more and more like a “putsch” – a highly militarised abduction to elevate his more amenable deputy into power. Since April last year, Venezuela’s new president, Delcy Rodríguez, and her brother Jorge, president of the National Assembly, had reportedly been hatching the plan with Washington via that “hotspot of informal diplomacy”, Qatar. According to the Miami Herald, the siblings presented themselves as a more palatable version of Madurismo, and, convinced that such a power transition would provide unfettered access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, Washington got on board. By this telling, everything last week was “staged to look outrageous”, right down to Delcy Rodríguez’s initial condemnation of the kidnapping as atrocious.

That the whole affair is atrocious in its breaking of international law must be acknowledged. But “the biggest surprise is that there is so much surprise”. The US has rarely paid much attention to international law. Most American presidents, after initially obeying George Washington’s 1796 isolationist appeal to stand aloof from distant conflicts, have eventually found the global potency of the White House “irresistible”. Woodrow Wilson pledged he wouldn’t fight in World War One before doing exactly that, and Franklin D Roosevelt intervened in World War Two just one year after declaring to America’s mothers: “I shall say it again and again and again, your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” John F Kennedy pledged to “assure the survival and the success of liberty”, then escalated conflict in Vietnam. Trump is a very different president, in all sorts of ways. But on Venezuela he’s just like his many predecessors who “revelled in the possibilities and deployment of US might”.

🌎💪🏻 The Trump administration is clearly serious about reinforcing the “Monroe Doctrine”, says William Galston in The Wall Street Journal, the 1823 declaration by US president James Monroe asserting US dominance over the Western hemisphere. Washington is no longer interested in playing the global role it assumed after World War Two. Instead, it is moving towards a “spheres of influence” approach to world affairs, in which far off wars like Ukraine – and perhaps Taiwan – are of little salience, but local thugs like Maduro must be dealt with.

Thanks to the booming stock market and Donald Trump’s general loosening of regulations, Wall Street bankers had a bumper year in 2025, says Rob Copeland in The New York Times. And they’re paying themselves accordingly. The chief executives of Citi (whose shares rose more than 65% after the bank slashed tens of thousands of jobs) and Goldman Sachs (shares up 53%) pocketed more than $100m each. Richard Fairbank, boss of Capital One (shares up 36%), trousered more than $300m. And JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon enjoyed a combination of salary, bonuses, dividends, stock grants and appreciating bank stocks that yielded a whopping $770m – more than $2m a day.

Here’s a “rare heartening statistic”, says Janice Turner in The Times: since 2022, social media use worldwide has declined by 10%. And it’s young people leading the charge. Scornful of “selfie-stick fools” and those who overshare online, they are increasingly ditching Instagram in favour of so-called “grandma hobbies” like knitting and baking. Today, the instruction “touch grass” – ie move away from your screen and into the “tangible world” – is perhaps more relevant to Boomers and Gen X. They’re the ones still scrolling mindlessly and sending friends and family links to “weapons-grade slop”. Drop your phones, oldies, and get outside.

In the first months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, says Eli Lake in The Free Press, Marco Rubio looked like the “odd man out”. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff was being described as the “real secretary of state” and the ideological momentum was with JD Vance’s isolationists. That dynamic is starkly captured in the famous photo of Vance and Trump berating Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, as Rubio sits uncomfortably on a sofa, looking every bit the “Little Marco” of Trump’s cruel 2016 election campaign nickname. Now, after US special forces snatched Venezuelan tyrant Nicolás Maduro, Rubio might be the “second most powerful man in Washington”.

Last week it was he who was at Trump’s elbow in Mar-a-Lago, watching the culmination of his own hawkish realism unfold in Caracas, with Vance peeking in on a video link. Rubio’s ideological victory can be detected in the growing nervousness everywhere from Colombia to Cuba, whose hated regime Rubio’s parents fled decades ago. What is the secret to his success? For one thing, he has avoided embarrassing the White House with amateurish gaffes, unlike, for example, former national security adviser Mike Waltz, who accidentally added the editor of The Atlantic to a super-secret war-planning group on the messaging platform Signal. He has also taken a pragmatic approach to the Trump court: playing solidly for the team rather than messing around with leaking or power-play shenanigans. He has befriended Vance – they talk daily and co-ordinate their advice to Trump – rather than taking him on as a potential rival. And he speaks a frank, American language of right and wrong, of “freedom versus tyranny”, that Trump understands, and likes. As the US president turns more toward foreign adventures and away from domestic headaches, “Marco doesn’t seem so little any more”.

Next month’s Grammy Awards will see the “Best Album Cover” category reinstated for the first time in more than 50 years, says Elise Ryan in AP News. Previously wrapped into the “best recording package” category, won by Charli XCX and her team for her album Brat’s “pop culture-infiltrating green” last year, it’s now being separated out to recognise the impact of cover art in the digital age. This year’s nominees are Wet Leg’s Moisturiser; Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos; Tyler, the Creator’s Chromakopia; Djo’s The Crux; and Perfume Genius’s Glory.

When Donald Trump is stretching the truth, says Marie-Rose Sheinerman in The Atlantic, he nearly always uses the same figure: 92%. In recent months he has cited the percentage as his winning margin in a North Carolina county election (it was really 16%); the proportion of the Gulf of Mexico’s shoreline controlled by the US (it’s 46%); the fall in egg prices (actually 12.7%); and his vote share among veterans and farmers (in reality, 65% and 78% respectively). Before the 2024 election, he said 92% of journalists are “sick” people. “That one, admittedly, is difficult to fact-check.”

It’s the Growler, says Alistair MacDonald in The Wall Street Journal: a signal-jamming jet that has become a key tool in US operations like the one in Caracas last weekend. The Boeing EA-18G – flown by a techy Navy unit called the “Zappers” – has special tools on board that can remotely disable the enemy’s radar or baffle operators by fooling the sensors into seeing multiple aircraft that aren’t really there. They also carry “anti-radiation” missiles, which automatically detect and then obliterate radar systems. Analysts say so-called “electronic warfare” was largely neglected in Iraq and Afghanistan but has proved essential in Ukraine to counter drones and other high-tech kit.