Three converging events will shape the next ten days in the Middle East. President Trump’s nuclear deadline for Iran expires as the IAEA board convenes in Vienna on March 2 and Secretary Rubio meets Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on February 28. Two carrier strike groups are positioned in the Arabian Sea. Iran responded with naval exercises that closed portions of the Strait of Hormuz.
Tehran enters those talks carrying the weight of its own admissions. The head of Iran’s largest cemetery confirmed that more than 70 percent of protest dead brought to his facility bore execution-style finishing shots. He blamed terrorists. Forensic evidence points to the Revolutionary Guard.
Venezuela’s National Assembly passed a unanimous amnesty law releasing hundreds of political prisoners — then carved out an exception targeting opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and anyone who supported the U.S. operation that removed Maduro.
The United Nations may not survive to referee any of it. Washington owes $2.19 billion to the regular budget alone. Secretary-General Guterres warned cash could run out by July. The Trump administration paid $160 million — four cents on the dollar.
A UN Security Council report found more than twenty terrorist organizations operating from Afghan soil under Taliban patronage. Three months after an Afghan national with CIA-vetted credentials shot two National Guard members near the White House, the FBI still hasn’t determined whether he was a directed operative or a self-radicalized attacker.
In Nigeria, 80 percent of global anti-Christian violence occurs within one country’s borders. Funding to address it is collapsing.
Peru swore in its eighth president in a decade. He was in court the next morning.
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