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The US Coast Guard is in “active pursuit” of another vessel in international waters near Venezuela as tensions in the region continue to escalate.

US authorities have already seized two oil tankers this month – one of them on Saturday.

Sunday’s pursuit related to a “sanctioned dark fleet vessel that is part of Venezuela’s illegal sanctions evasion”, a US official said. “It is flying a false flag and under a judicial seizure order.”

Washington has accused Venezuela of using oil money to fund drug-related crime, while Venezuela has described the tanker seizures as “theft and kidnapping”.

US President Donald Trump last week ordered a “blockade” of sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving the country.

Venezuela – home to the world largest proven oil reserves – has accused the Trump administration of trying to steal its resources.

US authorities have not yet officially confirmed Sunday’s pursuit, and the exact location and name of the tanker involved is not yet known.

As of last week, more than 30 of the 80 ships in Venezuelan waters or approaching the country were under US sanctions, according to data compiled by TankerTrackers.com.

Saturday’s seizure saw a Panamanian-flagged tanker boarded by a specialised tactical team in international waters.

That ship is not on the US Treasury’s list of sanctioned vessels, but the US has said it was carrying “sanctioned PDVSA oil”. In the past five years the ship also sailed under the flags of Greece and Liberia, according to records seen by BBC Verify.

“These acts will not go unpunished,” the Venezuelan government said in response to Saturday’s incident. It added that it intended to file a complaint with the United Nations Security Council and “other multilateral agencies and the governments of the world”.

Venezuela is highly dependent on revenues from its oil exports to finance its government spending.

In recent weeks, the US has built up its military presence in the Caribbean Sea and has carried out deadly strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug-smuggling boats, killing around 100 people.

Sanctions also were placed on some of President Maduro’s relatives and on businesses associated with what the US calls his illegitimate regime.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Friday: “It is clear that the current status quo with the Venezuelan regime is intolerable for the United States.”

He added that the goal of the Trump administration is to change that dynamic.

His comments were criticised by Venezuela’s foreign minister who accused Rubio dragging the US down the path of “regime changes”.

It has provided no public evidence that these vessels were carrying drugs, and the military has come under increasing scrutiny from Congress over the strikes.

The Trump administration has accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of leading a designated-terrorist organisation called Cartel de los Soles, which he denies.

The administration of President Donald Trump has announced it will halt the visa lottery programme that allowed the suspect in the Brown University shooting to enter the United States.

The lottery awards approximately 50,000 immigrant visas each year, according to the US government.

But Trump has long opposed the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme, sometimes known as the DV Programme. On Friday, his Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revealed that he had directed her to end the lottery immediately.

She also identified the suspect as Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who received his green card — a certificate for permanent residency — through the lottery in 2017.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem wrote in her social media statement.

“At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS [US Citizenship and Immigration Services] to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”

Campaign to end visa lottery

Friday’s announcement is not the first time Trump has sought to wind down the diversity visa lottery.

Trump has long sought to narrow the country’s pathways to legal immigration, and he has used crime as a pretext for doing so.

Noem herself pointed out that, in 2017, Trump “fought” to shut down the diversity visa lottery in the wake of an attack in New York City that saw a truck ram into a crowd of people, killing eight.

Speaking at a graduation ceremony for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in December 2017, Trump — then in his first term as president — called on Congress to “end the visa lottery system”.

“They have a lottery. You pick people. Do you think the country is giving us their best people? No,” Trump said.

“What kind of a system is that? They come in by lottery. They give us their worst people.”

The Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme was established in 1990 to ensure applicants from underrepresented countries had access to the US immigration system.

Immigration rights advocates have long argued that pathways to permanent residency are narrow for those who do not already have a spouse, relatives or some other kind of sponsor in the country.

The visa lottery helps to answer that need, by creating an alternative route to residency.

The lottery system selects visa recipients randomly, but critics argue it remains a long-shot avenue to gain US residency, and even successful applicants must still pass a rigorous screening process after the lottery.

While the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme used to accept 55,000 applicants each year, in 2000 that number was lowered to its current level, according to the American Immigration Council.

A suspect identified

Friday’s decision to immediately suspend the lottery comes as new details emerge about Neves Valente, a physics scholar found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire after a nationwide manhunt.

The search began on December 13, when gunfire erupted on the campus of Brown University, a prestigious Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island.

The school’s fall semester was at its conclusion, and the exam period had begun. Students in the Barus and Holley physics laboratory were taking their end-of-course exams when a suspect, clad in black, entered the building and opened fire, killing two students and injuring nine others.

The physics lab was close to the edge of campus, and the suspect was able to escape on foot undetected.

The manhunt included several false starts, as authorities said they quickly detained a person of interest, only to release the individual without charges.

Then, on November 15, law enforcement officials announced that a plasma physics scholar named Nuno Loureiro had been found dead at his home, after suffering multiple gunshot wounds.

Loureiro was also a Portuguese immigrant, and he served as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a highly regarded science institution.

It was not immediately clear that the two shooting incidents were related, and authorities faced pressure to bring the Brown University shooter to justice, as the manhunt dragged on.

But on Thursday night, officials announced they had discovered Neves Valente dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and that they believed him to be responsible for both attacks.

Neves Valente had previously studied in a PhD programme at Brown, though he did not complete his degree, and he had been Loureiro’s classmate in Portugal.

Visa revocations

The administration of President Trump has a track record of revoking visas and terminating immigration programmes after high-profile attacks.

On November 26, for example, two National Guard members from West Virginia were shot while on patrol in Washington, DC, as part of Trump’s crime crackdown in the capital.

The suspect in that case was identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who had previously worked with allied forces during the US-led war in Afghanistan.

One of the National Guard soldiers, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, ultimately died from her wounds.

Trump responded to the incident by announcing he was halting all visa applications and asylum requests from Afghan nationals, despite outcry from human rights and veterans groups.

The Republican leader also said he would pursue a “permanent pause” on entry for immigrants from “all third-world countries”.

In the aftermath of the shooting, the Trump White House tightened entry for 19 countries it had identified in June as “high risk” and expanded the list of restrictions to include 20 more countries.

Trump has also taken targeted actions to strip individuals of their immigration status following shootings.

After the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk in September, the Trump administration announced it was yanking visas from six foreign nationals who posted disrespectful comments or memes online about the attack. They hailed from countries ranging from Argentina to Brazil, Germany to Paraguay.

Free-speech advocates said the decision was a clear violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects the freedom of expression.

But the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to boot foreign nationals that do not align with its policy priorities.

“Aliens who take advantage of America’s hospitality while celebrating the assassination of our citizens will be removed,” the US State Department wrote in response.

The suspect in the Kirk shooting is a 22-year-old US citizen named Tyler James Robinson from Utah.

Studies have repeatedly shown that US-born citizens are more likely to commit violent crimes than immigrants.

JEJU ISLAND, South Korea, Dec. 11 (UPI) — The South Korean government has apologized to the province of Jeju Island for honoring the late Col. Park Jin-gyeong, who led a deadly repression operation during the early stages of the Jeju Massacre.

Seoul’s Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs made its apology Wednesday for issuing Park the national merit certificate.

“Although the disposition was carried out in accordance with legal procedures, we extend our sincere apologies to the Jeju 4.3 victims, their families and the people of Jeju,” the ministry said in a statement.

Park was commander of the 9th Regiment of the Korean Constabulary on Jeju following the April 3, 1948, uprising, when some 350 armed members of the South Korean Workers’ Party Jeju branch attacked 12 police stations.

To squelch the revolt, Park led a military campaign of village sweeps and mass arrests of thousands that terrorized the local population. Park was assassinated in the early hours of June 18, 1948, by a subordinate officer, and though only on the island for about six weeks, he is widely seen as having paved the way for the massacres that would follow.

According to the official Jeju 4.3 Investigation Report, Park is quoted in testimony from a subordinate officer as having stated during his inauguration ceremony that: “In order to suppress the riot, it is fine if 300,000 Jeju people are victimized.”

About 30,000 islanders — 10% of Jeju’s population at that time — were killed during the Jeju Massacre of 1947 to 1954, which is widely referred to as the Jeju 4.3 Incident, or simply as Jeju 4.3, in Korean.

In its statement Wednesday, the ministry said Park was issued the national merit certificate on Nov. 4 following an application submitted by his bereaved family.

The national merit designation is a formal state honor, granted in the president’s name, that honors and commemorates an individual’s contributions and sacrifices to the nation.

The honor has been met with staunch opposition on the island.

The local government issued a statement Wednesday expressing its “deep regret” over the registration of Park as a national merit recipient, stating it will continue to work to establish “a historical record based on fact so that the truth of the Jeju 4.3 Incident and the honor of its victims are not undermined.”

It said the province is “concerned” that it made the decision to confer the honor on Park without considering “the historical context of 4.3 could cause confusion and harm within the local community.”

The Jeju government said that Park was given the honor for having been awarded a military medal decades ago, and that this current system for conferring awards harms the victims of the Jeju Massacre.

In response, the local government will install a sign at Park’s memorial on Monday that will include information about the massacre, including Park’s activities during the roughly 40 days he was on Jeju.

“The truth of 4.3 has been confirmed not through any particular viewpoint or political interpretation, but on the basis of the state’s official report and the accumulated body of research. Jeju Province will continue to faithfully convey the historical truth of 4.3 through fact-based explanations,” Jeju Gov. Oh Young-hoon said in a statement.

“We will continue to take responsible action to ensure that the honor of the victims and their families is not damaged and that the truth is set right.”

The ministry said it will work to prepare measures to ensure that similar issues do not occur in the future.

“Once again, we extend our sincere apologies to the Jeju 4.3 victims, their bereaved families and the people of Jeju,” it said.

The apology came on the same day a court ruled that Tae Yong-ho, a former politician of the conservative People’s Power Party, had defamed the Jeju 4.3 victims and bereaved families by making false statements.

In early 2023, controversy erupted on Jeju after Tae claimed the uprising of April 3, 1948, was initiated by North Korean founder Kim Il Sung and his communist party.

The official government investigation report said there is “no concrete evidence that the events were directed by the instructions of the headquarters of the South Korean Labor Party.”

Following Tae’s comments, right-wing political organizations erected 80 banners around the island that advertised his remarks. The banners were promptly removed by local officials.

The court on Wednesday ordered Tae to compensate the complainant, the the Jeju 4.3 Bereaved Families Association.