Mike Baker

It's Monday, the 20th of April.

Welcome to the President's Daily Brief.

I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage.

All right, let's get briefed.

First up, well, it seems like just 72 hours ago that the Iranian regime was announcing that they were reopening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping.

Huzzah!

And the White House was announcing that a deal with the regime was very close.

But a lot can change in 72 hours.

Shortly after those apparently positive developments, Iran reversed course, announcing that the waterway will remain closed until the U.S.

ends the blockade on Iranian ports.

The regime then fired on commercial vessels, and the U.S.

in turn stopped and boarded an Iranian ship, reportedly attempting to evade the blockade.

Now, I'm no ceasefire negotiator or a special envoy, but I'd say that what we have here is a failure to communicate.

I'll have the details.

Later in the show, in an historic move, U.S.

officials travel to Cuba, signaling a potential diplomatic opening, even as Washington tightens the screws on the communist island's economy.

Plus, Maduro is gone, and now the purge is underway, with his former allies being removed one by one as a new power structure takes hold.

And in today's back of the brief, a very interesting story, an unsettling pattern continues to emerge as an 11th scientist dealing with sensitive U.S.

information turns up dead.

It's a string of deaths and disappearances within the scientific community that has law enforcement and the intel community baffled.