By DAVID KLEPPER and AAMER MADHANI

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump demanded Wednesday that Venezuela return assets that it seized from U.S. oil companies years ago, justifying anew his announcement of a “blockade” against oil tankers traveling to or from the South American country that face American sanctions.

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Trump cited the lost U.S. investments in Venezuela when asked about his newest tactic in a monthslong pressure campaign against leader Nicolás Maduro, suggesting his administration’s moves to confront leaders in Caracas are at least somewhat motivated by disputes over oil investments, along with accusations of drug trafficking. Some sanctioned tankers already are diverting away from Venezuela.

“We’re not going to be letting anybody going through who shouldn’t be going through,” Trump told reporters of his call for a blockade. “You remember they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil not that long ago. And we want it back. They took it — they illegally took it.”

U.S. oil companies dominated Venezuela’s petroleum industry until the country’s leaders moved to nationalize the sector, first in the 1970s and again in the 21st century under Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Compensation offered by Venezuela was deemed insufficient, and in 2014 an international arbitration panel ordered the country’s socialist government to pay $1.6 billion to ExxonMobil.

While Venezuela’s oil has long dominated relations with the U.S., the Trump administration has focused on Maduro’s links to drug traffickers, accusing his administration of facilitating the shipment of dangerous drugs into the U.S. In his social media post Tuesday night, Trump said Venezuela was using using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes.

U.S. forces last week seized an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast amid a massive military buildup that includes the Navy’s most advanced aircraft carrier.

The Trump administration also has carried out a series of strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that have killed a combined total of at least 99 people, including four in a strike Wednesday. Those attacks have prompted questions from lawmakers and legal experts about their legal justification. Trump also has said he is considering strikes on land.

Trump’s talk of ‘stolen assets’

Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, likened Venezuela’s move to nationalize its oil industry to a heist.

“American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,” Miller wrote on social media Wednesday. “Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”

Venezuela first moved to nationalize its oil industry in the 1970s, a process that expanded under Chávez, who nationalized hundreds of private businesses and foreign-owned assets, including oil projects run by ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. That led to the arbitration panel’s 2014 order.

“There is a case that can be made that Venezuela owes this money to Exxon. I don’t think it’s ever been paid,” economist Philip Verleger said.

Trump blamed his predecessors for not taking a harder line against Venezuela over the asset seizures.

“They took it away because we had a president that maybe wasn’t watching,” Trump said Wednesday. “But they’re not going to do that again. We want it back. They took our oil rights — we had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back.”

Chevron has a waiver from the U.S. government to continue oil production in Venezuela, and the Texas-based oil giant says its operations have not been disrupted.

Venezuela’s debt to Chevron “has decreased substantially” since the company’s license to resume exporting Venezuelan oil to the U.S. was first granted in 2022, said Francisco Monaldi, a Venezuelan oil expert at Rice University in Houston. He said the amount is not public.

A new designation for Maduro’s government?

There was no change Wednesday to the list of foreign terrorist organizations after Trump said in his post that the “Venezuelan Regime” has been designated as one.

Officials at several national security agencies were told not to take Trump’s remarks about the designation literally and they should be treated as a figure of speech, according to a U.S. official involved in the discussions.

That official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal interagency communications, also stressed that the “blockade” Trump announced applies only to previously sanctioned vessels against which certain actions are already authorized, such as the seizure last week.

The State Department, which oversees the foreign terror list, didn’t respond to requests for clarification.

Trump’s Justice Department in 2020 indicted Maduro on narcoterrorism charges and U.S. authorities have alleged that Venezuela’s leaders have looted the country and profited from the trafficking of drugs. Last month, the Trump administration designated a group linked to Maduro — the Cartel de los Soles — as a terrorist organization.

Venezuela decries American ‘piracy’

Nicolas Maduro speaks at a rally marking the anniversary of the Battle of Santa Ines, which took place during Venezuela’s 19th-century Federal War, in Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Maduro called United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday for a conversation “regarding the current tensions in the region,” U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said.

“During the call, the secretary-general reaffirmed the United Nations’ position on the need for member states to respect international law, particularly the United Nations Charter, exert restraint and de-escalate tensions to preserve regional stability,” Haq said.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil demanded in a letter to the U.N. Security Council, which was obtained by The Associated Press, that the U.S. immediately release the “kidnapped crew” and return the oil illegally confiscated on the high seas.

In addition to urging the Security Council to condemn the taking of the tanker, Gil urged the U.N.’s most powerful body for a written statement stating that it hasn’t authorized actions against Venezuela “or against the international commercialization of its oil.”

While the strikes on alleged drug boats have raised questions about the use of military force, Trump’s seizure of the tanker and other actions against sanctioned entities are consistent with past American policy, said retired U.S. Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, now a professor at Syracuse University.

He also noted that from a military standpoint, seizing sanctioned oil tankers and imposing a blockade are far less risky than direct military confrontation.

“U.S. policy supports peaceful, democratic transition in Venezuela,” Murrett said. “If Maduro agrees tomorrow to step down and have a free and open election, I think we’d be delighted, Democrats and Republicans alike.”

Associated Press writers Matthew Lee in Washington, Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, Cathy Bussewitz in New York and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

By Corinne Purtill, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — When Greg heard about the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner, and the alleged involvement of their son Nick, the news struck a painfully familiar chord.

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It wasn’t the violence that resonated, but rather the heartache and desperation that comes with loving a family member who suffers from an illness that the best efforts and intentions alone can’t cure.

Greg has an adult child who, like Nick Reiner, has had a long and difficult struggle with addiction.

“It just rings close to home,” said Greg, chair of Families Anonymous, a national support program for friends and family members of people with addiction. (In keeping with the organization’s policy of anonymity for members, The Times is withholding Greg’s last name.)

“It’s just so horrible to be the parent or a loved one of somebody that struggles with [addiction], because you can’t make any sense of this,” he said. “You can’t find a way to help them.”

Every family’s experience is different, and the full picture is almost always more complicated than it appears from the outside. Public details about the Reiner family’s private struggles are relatively few.

But some parts of their story are likely recognizable to the millions of U.S. families affected by addiction.

“This is really bringing to light something that’s going on in homes across the country,” said Emily Feinstein, executive vice president of the nonprofit Partnership to End Addiction.

Over the years, Nick Reiner, 32, and his parents publicly discussed his years-long struggle with drug use, which included periods of homelessness and multiple rehab stints.

Most recently, he was living in a guesthouse on his parents’ Brentwood property. Family friends told The Times that Michele Singer Reiner had become increasingly concerned about Nick’s mental health in recent weeks.

The couple were found dead in their home Sunday afternoon. Los Angeles police officers arrested Nick hours later. On Tuesday, he was charged with their murder. He is currently being held without bail and has been placed under special supervision due to potential suicide risk, a law enforcement official told The Times.

Experts in substance use cautioned against drawing a direct line between addiction and violence.

“Addiction or mental health issues never excuse a horrific act of violence like this, and these sort of acts are not a direct result or a trait of addiction in general,” said Zac Jones, executive director of Beit T’Shuvah, a nonprofit Los Angeles-based addiction treatment center.

The circumstances around the Reiners’ highly publicized deaths are far from ordinary. The fact that addiction touched their family is not.

Nearly 1 in 5 people in the U.S. has personally experienced addiction, a 2023 poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found.

Two-thirds of Americans have a family member with the disease, a proportion that is similar across rural, urban and suburban dwellers, and across Black, Latino and white respondents.

“Substance use disorders, addiction, do not discriminate,” Jones said. “It affects everyone from the highest of the high [socioeconomic status] to people that are experiencing homelessness on Skid Row. … There is no solution that can be bought.”

During interviews for the 2015 film “Becoming Charlie,” a semi-autobiographical film directed by Rob Reiner and co-written by Nick Reiner, the family told journalists that Nick, then in his early 20s, had been to rehab an estimated 18 times since his early teens. Nick Reiner has also spoken publicly about his use of heroin as a teenager.

Such cycles of rehab and relapse are common, experts said. One 2019 study found that it took an average of five recovery attempts to effectively stop using and maintain sobriety, though the authors noted that many respondents reported 10 or more attempts.

Many families empty their savings in search of a cure, Feinstein said. Even those with abundant resources often end up in a similarly despairing cycle.

“Unfortunately, the system that is set up to treat people is not addressing the complexity or the intensity of the illness, and in most cases, it’s very hard to find effective evidence-based treatment,” Feinstein said. “No matter how much money you have, it doesn’t guarantee a better outcome.”

Addiction is a complex disorder with intermingled roots in genetics, biology and environmental triggers.

Repeated drug use, particularly in adolescence and early adulthood when the brain is still developing, physically alters the circuitry that governs reward and motivation.

On top of that, co-occurring mental health conditions, traumas and other factors mean that no two cases of substance abuse disorders are exactly the same.

There are not enough quality rehabilitation programs to begin with, experts said, and even an effective program that one patient responds to successfully may not work at all for someone else.

“There is always the risk of relapse. That can be hard to process,” Greg said.

Families Anonymous counsels members to accept the “Three Cs” of a loved one’s addiction, Greg said: you didn’t cause it, you can’t cure it and you can’t control it.

“Good, loving families, people that care, deal with this problem just as much,” he said. “This is just so common out there, but people don’t really talk about it. Especially parents, for fear of being judged.”

After the killings, a family friend told The Times that they had “never known a family so dedicated to a child” as Rob and Michele Reiner, and that the couple “did everything for Nick. Every treatment program, therapy sessions and put aside their lives to save Nick’s repeatedly.”

But the painful fact is that devotion alone cannot cure a complex, chronic disease.

“If you could love someone into sobriety, into recovery, into remission from their psychiatric issues, then we’d have a lot fewer clients here,” Jones said. “Unfortunately, love isn’t enough. It’s certainly a part of the solution, but it isn’t enough.”

If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, help is available. Call 988 to connect to trained mental health counselors or text “HOME” to 741741 in the U.S. and Canada to reach the Crisis Text Line.

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government admitted Wednesday that the Federal Aviation Administration and the Army played a role in causing the collision last January between an airliner and a Black Hawk helicopter near the nation’s capital, killing 67 people.

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The official response to the first lawsuit filed by one of the victims’ families said that the government is liable in the crash partly because the air traffic controller violated procedures about when to rely on pilots to maintain visual separation that night. Plus, the filing said, the Army helicopter pilots’ “failure to maintain vigilance so as to see and avoid” the airline jet makes the government liable.

But the filing suggested that others, including the pilots of the jet and the airlines, may have also played a role. The lawsuit also blamed American Airlines and its regional partner, PSA Airlines, for their roles in the crash, but those airlines have filed motions to dismiss.

At least 28 bodies were pulled from the icy waters of the Potomac River after the helicopter apparently flew into the path of the American Airlines regional jet while it was landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport in northern Virginia, just across the river from the nation’s capital, officials said. The plane carried 60 passengers and four crew members, and three soldiers were aboard the helicopter.

Robert Clifford, one of the attorneys for the family of victim Casey Crafton said the government admitted “the Army’s responsibility for the needless loss of life” and the FAA’s failure to follow air traffic control procedures while “rightfully” acknowledging others –- American Airlines and PSA Airlines -– also contributed to the deaths.

The families of the victims “remain deeply saddened and anchored in the grief caused by this tragic loss of life,” he said.

The National Transportation Safety Board will release its report on the cause of the crash early next year, but investigators have already highlighted a number of factors that contributed, including the helicopter flying too high on a route that allowed only scant separation between planes landing on Reagan’s secondary runway and helicopters passing below. Plus, the NTSB said, the FAA failed to recognize the dangers around the busy airport even after 85 near misses in the three years before the crash.

Before the collision, the controller twice asked the helicopter pilots whether they had the jet in sight, and the pilots said they did and asked for visual separation approval so they could use their own eyes to maintain distance. FAA officials acknowledged at the NTSB’s investigative hearings that the controllers at Reagan had become overly reliant on the use of visual separation. That’s a practice the agency has since ended.

Witnesses told the NTSB that they have serious questions about how well the helicopter crew could spot the plane while wearing night vision goggles and whether the pilots were even looking in the right spot.

NASHUA, N.H. (AP) — A pilot was taken to the hospital with injuries Wednesday after a small plane crashed into a residential neighborhood in southern New Hampshire, authorities said.

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Emergency crews found the aircraft upside down in a snow bank in the parking lot of a wooded condominium complex in Nashua Wednesday afternoon.

Police said the pilot was the only person on board and was the only person injured. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating.

The Velocity V-Twin plane crashed at the Cannongate Condominiums shortly after departing from the nearby Nashua Airport around 2:10 p.m. local time, according to the FAA.

Aerial video from NBC10 Boston showed damage to the roof of one of the condos near the crash site.