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.