Iran and Israel

• Newly public U.S. intel suggests Iran could strike "Israeli soil" within the next 24-48 hours - even though that would be a brazen move that may exacerbate their proxy war into a real war.
• The U.S. believes its intel is credible enough to restrict travel within Israel for U.S. government employees and issue travel warnings for private U.S. citizens. Israel is taking the warning seriously too: it's cancelling leave for soldiers and disabling sensitive GPS that adversaries could use to support attacks.
• SecState Blinken even lobbied his Chinese, Turkish, Saudi, and European counterparts to try to dissuade Iran from attacking Israel directly, and the U.S. sent its top military commander for the Middle East, Gen. Michael Kurilla, to Israel to discuss the latest intel and gameplan with Israeli commanders.
• Today's ominous urgency over the U.S. warning would seem to contradict a more cautious message Iran conveyed to the U.S. on Sunday via Omani intermediaries: unnamed sources say Iran has "been very clear" that it would retaliate against Israel's Damascus strike in a "controlled" and "non-escalatory" way and planned "to use regional proxies" rather than strike Israel directly. We shall see.

• There's a new bargaining chip on the table for Israel-Gaza negotiations: Israel is currently restricting the ~90% of Gazans crowded into the south of the strip from moving north - even if they live in the north and are only displaced in the south - but would consider letting 150,000 of them return with no security checks under the latest ceasefire proposal.
• In return, Israel wants a list of female, elderly, and sick hostages who are still alive. Hamas has thus far refused to give a full list of its hostages - though its officials said it was having trouble locating 40 living hostages who fit those criteria for an exchange.

• Bloomberg reported that U.S. and Venezuelan officials met secretly in Mexico last week to try to align on an extension to oil sanctions relief measures enacted in October that expire April 18.
• Pres. Maduro didn't help his case for sanctions relief: right after relief measures were announced in October, he promptly reneged on pledges to let the opposition compete against him in a fair election.

• Ukraine passed a new mobilization bill designed to quell the public discontent that bubbled up when Pres. Zelensky signed a bill lowering the draft age recently. The new mobilization measure aims to refresh Ukraine's fighting forces without a draft by adding financial incentives for those who volunteer to fight and penalizing those who evade service.
• Russia destroyed Kyiv's largest power generation plant in a missile attack yesterday, and Zelensky blasted the West for "turning a blind eye" to his requests for more air defenses to intercept Russian missiles.

• Local broadcaster Tele Sahel shared a clip of a Russian transport plane landing at Niamey airport and said it and the trainers and technicians aboard were there to "install an air defence system…to ensure complete control of our airspace."
• It's been less than a month since Niger's junta revoked the military agreement its civilian predecessors signed with the U.S. As of a couple weeks ago, the U.S. still had troops at its $100 million drone base in Niger and was quietly trying to convince the junta not to evict them. I believe they're still there while U.S. and Nigerien officials negotiate what the Pentagon called a "dynamic" situation.
• Meanwhile, the WSJ recently reported that the U.S. is also in talks with Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Benin - currently fairly stable West African countries with far less risk of a coup than Sahel nations like Niger - to use their airfields for drone operations.

• Vietnam sentenced real estate tycoon Truong My Lan to death in a show trial for its largest-ever fraud case: Lan was convicted of fraud totalling $12.5 billion, which is almost 3% of Vietnam's 2022 GDP - but still around a quarter of the $44 billion in loans she took out from the bank she used to run.
• The court ordered Lan to repay her former bank $26.9 billion, and some analysts noted that the purpose of the death penalty - as opposed to a lengthy prison sentence - was perhaps to incentivize her to return as much money as she can scrounge up to get her sentence commuted.