Globe Trot: Did Iran try to buy nuclear tech from Argentina?

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ARGENTINA got way more interesting this week. Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor now believed murdered (and framed for suicide) while investigating Buenos Aires bombings linked to Hezbollah, was onto an Iranian plot to buy nuclear technology via the president’s husband (a former president), according to testimony from an Argentine intelligence officer. Last year, President Cristina Kirchner vowed to disband the intelligence services, saying they have not “served the interests of the country.”

“From the U.S. side, the Obama State Department has systematically neglected the dangerous liaisons among Venezuela, Argentina, and Iran. As dramatic evidence of Iran’s deadly provocations in our own neighborhood continues to come to light, it is fair to ask whether its cluelessness was by accident or design.”

MIDDLE EAST: Yesterday religious leaders in Washington presented the Obama administration with a 278-page report, documenting genocide against Christians and Yazidis in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. The report contains staggering charts of incidents—just in 2016—where Islamic State militants targeted Christians, along with a list of more than 1,100 Christians murdered by Islamic militants.

“History will record the recent atrocities committed against religious minorities in the Middle East as genocide,” said Carl Anderson, CEO of the Knights of Columbus, at a news conference Thursday. “The question is whether America will be remembered as courageous.” The Obama administration faces a March 17 deadline to report to Congress on its genocide findings. By law its obligation is to act before genocide has taken place—“the corresponding duty to act, arises at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed”—for obvious reasons.

YEMEN: Tom Uzhunnalil, the priest kidnapped by Islamic militants March 4 during an attack on a Sisters of Charity convent and nursing home where 16 were killed, is still missing.

UGANDA: Lawmakers passed a bill making it tougher to process foreign adoptions, but also closing loopholes that allowed for human trafficking.

UNITED STATES: Reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s account of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy doctrine, writes expert (and Marco Rubio adviser) Max Boot, “the conclusion I came to was that Obama was born in the wrong country.”

I found fascinating the spectrum of Obama’s own advisers who challenged him to strike Syria after Assad used chemical weapons—and he refused. And this: “ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States,” he told me in one of these conversations. “Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.”

KOSOVO: You think politics are out of control in the United States? In Kosovo, lawmakers shoot tear gas at their opponents.

NEXT WEEK: I’ll be in Nashville, speaking March 18 from 1-2 p.m. at the first of three Teach Them Diligently conferences. I look forward to seeing students and families there—stop by!—and promoting my upcoming book, They Say We Are Infidels, which will be available at the conference, and is ready now for pre-ordering.

Mindy Belz

Mindy, a former senior editor for WORLD Magazine, wrote the publication’s first cover story in 1986. She has covered wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Africa, and the Balkans and is author of They Say We Are Infidels: On the Run From ISIS With Persecuted Christians in the Middle East. Mindy resides in Asheville, N.C.

@MindyBelz