A momentous week

UNITED STATES: President Donald Trump addressed the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Thursday morning during a momentous week that saw him acquitted on impeachment charges and take part in a public stand-off with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at his State of the Union address. Pelosi sat four chairs away onstage at the breakfast as the president held up copies of The Washington Post and USA Today with their acquittal headlines and took on conservative author Arthur Brooks, the event’s keynote speaker, for saying political opponents should not be treated as “enemies.”

UKRAINE: Russian forces this week resupplied rebels fighting in eastern Ukraine, delivering ammunition, weapons, and other military equipment across the border in an area not under Kyiv control.

Ukrainian groups along with an American pastor working in the country petitioned U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to remove U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch in 2018, according to BuzzFeed, for her support of LGBTQ rights in Ukraine and leading a delegation of 60 embassy staff members in a gay pride march. Yovanovitch, whom Trump fired from the post last year, formally retired this week and wrote about it in The Washington Post on Thursday.

CHINA: The nightmare for hundreds of Americans leaving Wuhan includes 16 hours of paperwork and processing before boarding a long flight to California, where the evacuees face 14 days quarantined for coronavirus. In the United States, 12 people have been diagnosed with the virus, with a global death toll reaching 600 and 27,000 ill.

SYRIA: Idlib, one of the last areas outside Assad regime control, has been almost entirely in the hands of al-Qaeda and Turkish-backed militias (supported by the United States and the U.K.). On Wednesday, with backing from Russian warplanes and Iranian troops, Syrian forces captured the strategic town of Saraqeb along with six other towns, pressing into the central area of the last rebel stronghold in the country. Idlib fighting has displaced an estimated 500,000 Syrians in two months.

ISIS took advantage of Turkey’s October invasion of northeast Syria, increasing attacks by 20 percent, according to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (I felt one of those).

BANGLADESH will provide formal education for Rohingya refugee children 14 and under—a long-awaited move that comes more than two years after Myanmar’s attacks on Rohingya villages forced nearly 1 million to flee. Last month, the International Court of Justice ordered Myanmar, also known as Burma, to take steps to protect the largely Muslim Rohingya population as it prosecutes genocide charges on their behalf.

I’M READING Inside the Church of Almighty God: The Most Persecuted Religious Movement in China by Massimo Introvigne.

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