Tanker seized. U.S. military forces seized a sanctioned oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, a move that inflamed an already tense standoff between Washington and Caracas.

U.S. officials said the seizure was a “judicial enforcement action” carried out by the Coast Guard with support from the Navy. The ship has been on the U.S. sanctions list since 2022, and it was seized while trafficking Iranian oil to Cuba in violation of international sanctions on Tehran.

“We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela,” Mr. Trump said at a White House roundtable. “Large tanker. Very large. Largest one ever seized, actually. It was seized for a very good reason,” he said.

Mr. Trump said the U.S. would likely keep the oil.

Venezuelan officials called the seizure “blatant theft and an act of international piracy.” Foreign Minister Yvan Gil accused the U.S. of trying to plunder its oil under the guise of cracking down on drug trafficking.

“The true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been revealed,” Mr. Gil said. “It’s not migration. It’s not drug trafficking. It’s not democracy. It has always been our natural resources.”

Mr. Trump, who has warned of possible U.S. attacks against land-based targets in Venezuela, hinted that more developments were forthcoming, saying, “Other things are happening.”

The seizure of the oil tanker signals that Mr. Trump is turning up the pressure for regime change against Venezuela’s socialist dictator, Nicolas Maduro. The Trump administration has repeatedly accused Mr. Maduro of running a massive drug trafficking operation, a claim the Venezuelan leader denies.

The Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 0.25%, its third successive cut, with a weak job market overtaking inflation fears as the central bank’s main concern.

The Federal Open Market Committee lowered its benchmark rate to 3.5%-3.75% because job gains have slowed and the unemployment rate has edged upward in recent months.

“A good part of the slowing likely reflects a decline in the growth of the labor force, due to lower immigration and labor force participation, though labor demand has clearly softened as well,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said. “The downside risks to employment appear to have risen in recent months.”

The decision moved monetary policy in Mr. Trump’s preferred direction. But it’s not aggressive enough for a White House that wants bold action from the central bank and a soon-to-be-named successor to Mr. Powell.

Mr. Trump believes even lower rates will jump-start the economy as he confronts gripes about “affordability” heading into the midterm election season. His recent appointee to the Fed, Stephen Miran, pushed for a deeper, 0.5% cut while two committee members, Austan Goolsbee and Jeffrey Schmid, wanted to keep rates frozen.

The federal deficit has declined in the new fiscal year, and analysts said there’s one obvious reason for the improvement: Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

Two months into fiscal 2026, federal spending is roughly static, but revenue is up by 18%. Some of the revenue is from payroll and individual income taxes; the rest is customs duties. That includes tariff revenue, which is running $50 billion ahead of last fiscal year at the same point.

All told, the government’s income was $112 billion higher over the past two months than it was at the same time in 2024.

“That increase was caused largely by changes in tariff rates that began in February 2025 and reflects the enactment in July of the 2025 reconciliation act,” the Congressional Budget Office said in its analysis of the data.

Overall, the government has collected $740 billion in revenue and spent nearly $1.2 trillion in the new fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. The resulting deficit is $458 billion.

Tariffs on imported Italian pasta have been delayed as a result of the government shutdown. The administration’s plan to slap a huge tariff that would double prices and leave store shelves empty won’t hit until at least February, and possibly next spring, a Trump administration official told The Washington Times.

That gives the Italian companies more time to work with the Commerce Department, possibly reducing or eliminating the penalty.

The latest tariff threat followed complaints from two U.S. producers, macaroni and cheese maker Wacky Mac and Ronzoni, which produces a full line of pasta. They accused Italian pasta exporters of artificially lowering prices in order to expand their sales in U.S. grocery stores, specialty markets and restaurants.

No to Obamacare extensions. House Republicans are planning to vote on a health care package that does not renew enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies, prompting a group of centrist Republicans to launch a discharge petition to try to force a vote on a two-year extension.

GOP leaders presented 10 health care proposals to their conference and are planning to vote on some next week, while continuing work on the others next year. One proposal they ruled out is extending enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies set to expire Dec. 31.

Allowing the COVID-era expansion of the subsidies to lapse is expected to more than double out-of-pocket premium costs for the 22 million Americans who are currently on subsidized Obamacare plans.

Democrats “broke the American health care system,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican.

“They caused premiums to skyrocket,” he said. “And now they have the audacity to tell Republicans that the only way to save it is to throw hundreds of billions of dollars to health insurance companies, which would merely fuel a system that is ripe with fraud, waste and abuse. You cannot be an arsonist and a firefighter at the same time.”

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, Pennsylvania Republican, launched the discharge petition to try to force a vote on his bill to extend the enhanced subsidies for two years with some changes, like an income cap and fraud guardrails.

He said lawmakers need to look at the issue from outside Washington’s “echo chamber” and think about the people who may not be able to afford health coverage for 2026 if Congress doesn’t act.

Deportation ping-pong. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to “immediately” release Kilmar Abrego Garcia, ruling that the migrant’s long-running detention violates his rights.

Judge Paula Xinis, an Obama appointee to the court in Maryland, said the government has never produced a deportation order to show that Mr. Abrego Garcia faces imminent removal. So she said his arrest and continued detention weren’t justified.

“No such order of removal exists for Abrego Garcia,” the judge wrote.

Mr. Abrego Garcia is the most prominent illegal immigrant in the country. His case became a major cause for Democrats who rallied to his defense after he was arrested and flown back to El Salvador in March despite an immigration judge’s order that he not be returned to his home country.

Judge Xinis ordered that he be brought back, but the administration resisted, finally moving to return him to the U.S. after it secured a criminal indictment against him on a charge of migrant smuggling.

The judge in the criminal case granted Mr. Abrego Garcia pretrial release, but he was quickly rearrested in his immigration deportation case.

The Department of Homeland Security decried the judge’s decision.

“This is naked judicial activism by an Obama-appointed judge. This order lacks any valid legal basis, and we will continue to fight this tooth and nail in the courts,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s limits on transgender troops got a boost from a federal appeals court, which ruled that a lower court that tried to block him didn’t show enough deference to his decision-making.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in a 2-1 decision, said Mr. Hegseth had reasons for excluding troops who suffer from gender dysphoria, a psychological condition where a person struggles to reconcile their birth sex with their gender identity.

“Here, the evidence supporting the Hegseth Policy was more than sufficient to support the choices made,” wrote Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee, joined by Judge Neomi Rao, another Trump appointee.

The judges also rejected the lower court’s finding that Mr. Hegseth’s decision-making was poisoned by “animus” against transgender persons.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the administration to force disclosure of the Justice Department opinion that provides the legal backing for Mr. Trump to carry out attacks on vessels he says are carrying drugs toward the U.S.

The lawsuit also wants to see the July directive that Mr. Trump signed authorizing the strikes.

Opponents of the strikes have questioned the slim public justification that government officials have given, and they filed an open-records request in October asking for the documents.

The deadline for a response has passed with no documents produced, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights said in the lawsuit.

A federal judge accused Mr. Trump of using National Guard troops to create a “national police force” and ordered him to relinquish control of the California troops he’s commandeered.

Judge Charles Breyer, a Clinton appointee to the court in California, said that means ending Mr. Trump’s ongoing troop deployment to Los Angeles, and it means returning control of the Guard back to Gov. Gavin Newsom — ending the president’s ability to send the state’s troops to Chicago or Portland, Oregon.

He delayed his ruling for five days to give the administration a chance to appeal, but delivered a fierce rebuke to Mr. Trump along the way.

“The founders designed our government to be a system of checks and balances. Defendants, however, make clear that the only check they want is a blank one,” he wrote.

The judge said the reasons why Mr. Trump federalized National Guard troops in the first place — to quell eruptions of violence in Los Angeles — are long over, yet the president has still maintained control over 300 of the state’s troops, keeping them in the city to protect federal buildings.

The Times Editorial Board warns of Europe’s “increasingly brazen assaults” on free speech.

Michael McKenna calls on Mr. Trump to kill the “pointless” corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards.

Tom Basile writes that Republicans need to scrutinize the country’s statehouses to make sure their legislators aren’t RINOs.

Ian Andre Roberts, the illegal immigrant Iowa school superintendent who registered to vote in Maryland, is a mere symptom of the problems with the state’s voter rolls, writes Nicolee Ambrose.