The war that the United States and Israel launched against Iran on February 28 is now in its third month, and its geography keeps expanding. On Friday, the United Arab Emirates confirmed it had intercepted three ballistic missiles fired from Iran, with one striking an energy facility in the Fujairah emirate and injuring three Indian nationals, Al Jazeera reported. The same day, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar spoke by phone to discuss Pakistan’s ongoing effort to revive ceasefire negotiations between Tehran and Washington. Neither government announced any new meetings.
The ceasefire Pakistan brokered in early April lasted three weeks before it began to fray. The two delegations met in Islamabad in mid-April and narrowed some gaps without closing them. The core deadlock hasn’t moved: Washington is asking Iran to halt its nuclear program and surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium before sanctions are lifted. Tehran is asking for the war to formally end and the naval blockade on its ports to be lifted before the nuclear question is addressed. Both sides are asking the other to go first.
If you want the precedent for where a tanker war in the Persian Gulf goes, 1987 is the year to study. The Iran-Iraq War had been running for seven years when the United States decided to reflag Kuwaiti oil tankers and escort them through the Strait of Hormuz under the American flag. The Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, eight years in. What Friday’s strike on Fujairah tells you is that the Gulf states are now inside the conflict’s geography in a way they weren’t six weeks ago, and that changes the calculation for everyone with a refinery on the coast.
The Palestinian delegation to the United Nations dropped its bid for a senior General Assembly post this week, following an American pressure campaign that a former State Department official described as unprecedented. NPR reported that a State Department cable issued May 19 instructed U.S. diplomats in Jerusalem to tell Palestinian officials to withdraw Ambassador Riyad Mansour’s candidacy for one of the 21 vice president slots at the General Assembly, or face possible consequences including visa revocation. The cable cited Mansour’s record of describing Israeli actions in Gaza as genocide and said his candidacy “fuels tension” and “undermines” the administration’s Gaza policy.
Mansour withdrew. Lebanon’s ambassador will fill the slot instead. The Palestinian delegation said Mansour would refrain from running for a vice president position for the next two years, a phrase that several observers noted appears calibrated to the remaining length of President Trump’s current term.
A former State Department official told NPR: “Short of extreme situations like Russian espionage or election interference, using visa restrictions is extremely rare. It’s counterproductive because you need diplomats to work out problems between countries.” The United States has applied pressure to UN processes for decades, typically through the Security Council veto. Using visa leverage to shape General Assembly elections is a different instrument, and it doesn’t have an obvious stopping point.
Cuba’s minister of energy and mines, Vicente de la O Levy, confirmed Wednesday what had been increasingly evident in Havana: the island has run out of diesel. Al Jazeera reported that the fuel blockade the United States imposed in February, targeting tankers from Mexico’s Pemex and cutting off Venezuelan oil shipments after the U.S. intervention there, had achieved its effect. Blackouts in Havana are running 20 to 22 hours a day. Schools and universities are closed. Only 44 of the city’s 106 garbage trucks are operating.
The comparison to Cuba’s “Special Period” after the Soviet Union’s collapse is hard to avoid for anyone who followed the island in the early 1990s. When Soviet oil disappeared in 1991, Cuba contracted into a years-long crisis that reshaped daily life entirely, from how people ate to how they moved through cities. That one unfolded over years, and Cuba survived it. What the current blockade has done in three months is a different speed entirely.
The World Health Organization declared the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda a public health emergency of international concern on May 17. According to the WHO, the outbreak involves the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, not the Ebola-Zaire strain responsible for the 2014-2016 West Africa epidemic. As of May 20, approximately 600 suspected cases have been reported with 139 suspected deaths. Fifty-one cases in DRC are confirmed. Two confirmed cases have appeared in Kampala, Uganda.
The vaccine situation is the central concern. The 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak, which killed more than 11,000 people, produced two approved vaccines for Ebola-Zaire. There are no approved therapeutics or vaccines for Bundibugyo. Health workers in Ituri Province, where the outbreak started, told UN News they feel underprotected and undertrained for this specific pathogen. Ituri has been one of the most conflict-affected provinces of DRC for two decades, which means the baseline health infrastructure for containing any outbreak is already under stress before the first case arrives.
Bolivia’s president has been in office less than six months and is already facing a survival question. NPR reported that President Rodrigo Paz annulled a land mortgage law on May 13 after it triggered widespread protests, but the demonstrations continued and grew. Miners, teachers, farmers, and workers have kept the main roads into La Paz blocked for two weeks. At least three people died after emergency vehicles were blocked from reaching hospitals. Business groups estimate the blockades are costing Bolivia more than 50 million dollars a day.
The backdrop is a country in its worst economic crisis in 40 years. Year-on-year inflation hit 14 percent in April. The vice president, a former police officer named Edman Lara, is feuding openly with Paz. The formal demand from the streets has moved past the land law: protesters are now calling for resignation.
Bolivia has a well-worn path through this kind of crisis. In October 2003, the Gas War ousted President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada after protests over natural gas privatization turned violent and more than 60 people were killed. In 2019, Evo Morales resigned under military pressure following disputed elections. Paz is six months in, facing inflation his government didn’t create and a coalition that’s already fractured. The pattern is familiar. What’s different this time isn’t much.
Walmart said Thursday it will likely put its tariff refund money toward cutting prices in its stores. NPR reported that Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey told investors on an earnings call that customers at the chain’s gas stations have begun filling up with fewer than 10 gallons “for the first time since 2022.” The U.S. government last week began refunding tariff payments to importers that had paid higher customs fees before the Supreme Court struck down most of the Trump administration’s tariff structure. Walmart is now the largest retailer to say it will pass those refunds on as price reductions.
Rainey drew a clear line on the earnings call. The high-income customer, he said, is “spending with confidence.” The lower-income consumer is “more budget-conscious and perhaps navigating financial distress.” That’s the CFO of the country’s largest retailer, on a public call, describing two economies running side by side under the same price tags.
And one more thing worth reading.
Tomorrow, Lorraine Kessler returns to territory she’s been mapping with precision in the Letters section: what to do with the person in your life who makes every room about themselves. Her new piece, How to Deal With a Narcissist, publishes Saturday. If this week’s news, full of competing pressures and people who don’t seem to hear each other, has worn you down in ways that follow you home, Lorraine’s writing tends to be the most useful kind of remedy for it. Her recent column on the same terrain: “You can’t change Patricia. Not at sixty-seven, not at any age. People who turn conversations back to themselves don’t do it strategically. It’s simply how they inhabit a room.”
It is Friday. Iranian missiles flew over the Gulf. A Palestinian ambassador withdrew under American pressure. Cuba went dark. An Ebola strain without a vaccine crossed into Uganda. Bolivia’s capital sat under siege. And the biggest retailer in America told its investors that the lower-income shopper is in financial distress. That’s the day.
