Week in Review: Iran and North Korea in Nuclear Collusion, Putin’s Russia Gains Ground, Democratic Party Shifts Left, and More

Week in Review: Iran and North Korea in Nuclear Collusion, Putin’s Russia Gains Ground, Democratic Party Shifts Left, and More

Mark Wilson/Getty Images, Xinhua/Getty Images, Martha de Jong-Lantink

Week in Review: Iran and North Korea in Nuclear Collusion, Putin’s Russia Gains Ground, Democratic Party Shifts Left, and More

All you need to know about everything in the news this week

March 3, 2017

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Highlights:

Will Iran get nukes from North Korea?

  • “Iran is steadily making progress towards a nuclear weapon and is doing so via North Korea,” two nuclear experts wrote in a new paper published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies on Tuesday.
  • The experts claim the collusion between the two rogue states creates a way for Iran to clandestinely circumvent the nuclear deal implemented with world powers on Jan. 16, 2016.
  • Under the Obama administration, planes from North Korea flew directly to Iran without having to stop in a nation like China for rigorous nuclear proliferation inspections.
  • This week’s Trumpet Hour and Gerald Flurry’s free booklet The King of the South show how a nuclear-armed Iran will be stopped once and for all.

    • Luhansk officially adopts the Russian ruble

  • Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an executive order that authorized the recognition of passports, birth certificates, death certificates, diplomas, vehicle registrations and other documents from the separatist regions of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
  • On Monday, officials in Luhansk announced that the Russian ruble would be the official currency of their breakaway territory beginning on March 1.
  • After Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote: “Russia’s attack on Georgia in August marks the beginning of a dangerous new era in history. This was the first military strike of a rising Asian superpower—and there will be more!”
  • Luhansk and Donetsk are the latest victims of Putin’s attempts to revive the Soviet empire.

    • Chinese naval base in Djibouti nears completion

  • After two years of media pronouncements and public relations campaigns, and after one year of construction, China’s naval base in the East African nation of Djibouti is now a reality: It will begin operations later this year.
  • Djibouti Foreign Minister Mahmoud Ali Youssouf told the Financial Times that the number of Chinese personnel would probably number “a few thousand.”
  • The base will provide maintenance facilities for ships and helicopters, docks for commercial ships and military vessels, and storage facilities for weapons.
  • This is “a huge strategic development,” Prof. Peter Dutton of the Naval War College told the New York Times. “China has learned lessons from Britain of 200 years ago. This is what expansionary powers do.”

    • Democratic Party shifts harder to the left

  • On Saturday, the Democratic National Committee elected former United States Labor Secretary Tom Perez as its new chairman.
  • Perez was once described by the vice president of strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit libertarian think tank, as “possibly the most dangerous person in the [Obama] administration.”
  • Within moments of his election, Perez made the strategically savvy move of making Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota his deputy chairman and declaring him the new “face of the Democratic Party.”
  • Ellison has past ties to Marxist organizations and experience in community organizing. He said in a January interview: “It’s time for people to get active, to get involved, to vote and to organize. … Trump must be stopped, and people power is what we have at our disposal to make him stop. We need mass rallies. We need them all over the country. We need them in Texas. We need them in D.C. We need them in Minnesota.”

    • Other news:

  • Iran conducted large-scale naval exercises in the northern Indian Ocean on February 26. They were part of Operation Velayat 95, which ran from February 13 to March 1, and included drills in an area of nearly 800,000 square miles from the Strait of Hormuz leading into the Persian Gulf, around the Saudi Peninsula to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait leading into the Red Sea.
  • On Tuesday, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte apologized to Germany for failing to prevent the beheading of German national Jürgen Gustav Kantner by the Philippine Islamist group Abu Sayyaf. The German government released a statement, saying, “We’ve all got to stand together in the fight against terrorists.”

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