It's Wednesday the 7th of January. Welcome to the PDB afternoon bulletin. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage.

All right, let's get briefed.

First up, the U.S. military seizes two sanctioned oil tankers, one in the North Atlantic,

one in the Caribbean, including a Russian vessel that spent weeks trying to evade enforcement tied to Venezuelan oil shipments.

Later in the show, we'll return to our coverage of Iran,

where demonstrations continue to spread nationwide. Casualties rise, and Tehran signals that it

may be losing its grip. But first, our afternoon spotlight. In a matter of hours, U.S.

forces have seized two sanctioned tankers tied to Venezuela's crude oil,

operating thousands of miles apart, one in the North Atlantic and one of the Caribbean,

in a sign that Washington's oil blockade now reaches far beyond Caracas's backyard.

We'll start with a tanker called the Bella One, which has been playing a game of cat and mouse

with U.S. authorities for weeks now, evading the Coast Guard, changing its flag, and changing

and repainting its name on the hall, well, that should do it, as well as painting a Russian

flag on the side.

But the game came to an abrupt end today when the Bella One, newly renamed the Marinera, was boarded by U.S.

authorities under a federal court warrant for sanctions violations.

U.S. officials say the ship is part of Russia's shadow fleet of tankers tied to Venezuela's

illicit oil trade. As we've covered here on the PDB, Russia's shadow fleet is made up of vessels that

routinely changed names and flags and ownership structures to obscure their movements and evade

enforcement. U.S. European Command confirmed the seizure in a post on X, noting that its

tanker was intercepted in international waters after extensive tracking.

Secretary of War Pete Hegeset amplified the message in a post of his own,

...