http://archive.today/2026.10.04-183038/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/04/world/middleeast/houthis-oil-attack-saudi-arabia-yemen.html

The Saudi-backed government of Yemen on Sunday announced a major military campaign against the Houthi militia, a key Iranian ally, plunging the Middle East even deeper into war.

In a televised speech, Rashad al-Alimi, the leader of the internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government, said that the government was seeking to reclaim all the territory it had lost to the Houthis over the past 12 years.

Much of the government operates from Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

The two sides have been battling since 2014, when the Houthis took over the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, forcing out the government. Saudi Arabia led a bombing campaign to try to restore the government, contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from violence, hunger and disease. The Houthis eventually created a de facto state in northern Yemen.

A truce in 2022 brought a fragile peace. But the conflict reignited this year, after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in February.

The latest cycle of violence began in July, after the Houthis accused Saudi Arabia of bombing Sanaa’s airport. The Houthis responded by launching drone and ballistic-missile attacks inside Saudi Arabia, while also declaring a blockade on Saudi shipping in the Red Sea.

The Houthis and Saudi Arabia, which supports government* financially and militarily, have also attacked each other directly.

It was not immediately clear what role the United States or other Saudi allies might play in the government’s counteroffensive. Britain recently announced that it would provide limited refueling support to Saudi warplanes, while American officials have provided intelligence and targeting support to Saudi Arabia to counter the Houthis in recent months.

* Sic.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/all-b-1-bombers-returning-to-us-from-uk-base/ar-AA2dyH41

The U.S. removed all its B-1 bombers from the U.K.’s RAF Fairford air base, a decision made due to security concerns over suspected terror plots against the facility, American officials said Sunday.

The decision represents a shift for the U.S., which has used the military base northwest of London as a hub for launching bomber strikes in Iran. Until their recent departure, a dozen B-1s had been stationed at the base.

With its long runway, the Fairford base was used extensively by the U.S. to launch B-1 and B-52 attacks against Iran. The base was important for U.S. air operations as it shrunk the distance American bombers would need to fly compared with flights from the continental U.S.

As the war dragged on, the B-52s left and some B-1s returned to the U.S., but a dozen B-1s still remained.

Flight trackers observed B-1 bombers leaving from the RAF Fairford base this weekend.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/the-mystery-man-shadowing-kimberly-guilfoyle-as-she-pushes-deals-across-europe/ar-AA2cZNGl

Kimberly Guilfoyle was a long way from Mar-a-Lago.

A U.S. Embassy official said the ambassador traveled to Bulgaria “to advance American interests: increasing sales of U.S. LNG to European partners and decreasing European dependence on Russian gas.”

The Bulgarian government, she told people, should deal with a Greek construction firm called Aktor Group, a newcomer to the gas business that had teamed up with a Greek state-backed energy company to bring in liquefied natural gas from the U.S. “There is no doubt that this is kind of an official position of the U.S. government,” said a person familiar with the talks.

A one-time prosecutor who morphed into a MAGA icon, Guilfoyle is parlaying her ambassadorship to Greece into one of the Trump administration’s most important diplomatic roles. The former Fox News host has crisscrossed the Balkans to help Europe wean itself from Russian energy, via a “vertical gas corridor” meant to receive U.S. LNG in Greece and pipe it toward Ukraine.

U.S. Embassy staffers spent years pushing for the vertical gas corridor.

Sitting beside the 57-year-old ambassador in an audience with the Bulgarian president was a 39-year-old named Christos Marafatsos. He has attended so many of her meetings that some foreign officials mistook him for her chief of staff. In fact, he is a top lobbyist for Aktor, whose CEO had flown Guilfoyle to the country on a private jet.

Guilfoyle first met Alexandros Exarchou, Aktor’s CEO, on Nov. 1, the day she arrived in Athens, lawyers for the company said.

Lawyers for Aktor said the company began retaining Marafatsos after Exarchou attended a September 2025 lunch for top Greek energy players with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum where the vertical gas corridor was discussed. After the lunch, Exarchou contacted DEPA, the Greek state-backed company, and proposed a joint venture that would “lead the charge in supplying non-Russian LNG across Southeast Europe,” the lawyers said.

In November, Aktor announced a joint venture, Atlantic-SEE LNG, that would be split 60-40 between it and DEPA, a Greek state-backed energy company. In the months since, Aktor and its joint venture have signed memorandums of understanding and commercial agreements with gas companies in Bulgaria, Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Romania. A $6 billion deal Guilfoyle helped Aktor secure in Albania would, if completed, have the country buy gas from the company through 2050.

In March, at a dinner in Athens attended by Greek and U.S. officials, Guilfoyle got into an argument with Greece’s energy minister, Stavros Papastavrou, in front of the other guests. Referring to the impending collapse of the Romanian government, Guilfoyle told the group, “We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here,” according to a person who attended the dinner and others who were told about it.

It is unclear whether all the deals will come to fruition. On Friday, Ukraine’s state-owned gas company told the Journal negotiations have halted over future purchases from Atlantic-SEE.

http://archive.today/2026.09.24-004702/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/us/politics/uss-lincoln-attempted-suicides.html

Eight sailors who were part of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln strike group attempted to take their lives during its long deployment in support of the war against Iran, according to a letter from the Navy.

One of those sailors assigned to the Lincoln’s air wing “went overboard from the ship” in early August and was recovered by one of the carrier’s rescue helicopters, Hung Cao, the acting Navy secretary, said in the letter. A second sailor attempted to go overboard in March but was stopped by shipmates, Mr. Cao wrote.

The new information about the crew aboard the Lincoln and the other ships in the strike group was released to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, who pressed the Navy for information about the crew.

Adm. Brad Cooper, who oversees U.S. operations in the Middle East, insisted in a statement posted on social media in August that “the Lincoln currently has among the lowest number of cases related to mental health” among the Navy’s 11 active aircraft carriers.

The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.

The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.

It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.

The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.

In this particular instance, the analyst queried a chatbot about some intelligence reporting on the ship’s manifest that originated with US Special Operations Command Pacific, based in Hawaii. It was not clear whether the chatbot was a commercially available one or a US government product.

“The internal tools are mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick,” a former senior US official familiar with the AI systems used by military and intelligence analysts.

The bot fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings and reached its fateful conclusion about the material the ship was carrying.

The analyst then used AI again to package the findings into a standard intelligence report — the kind that is trusted by military officials — and disseminated it.

For some older intelligence officials — even those who broadly support the use of AI inside the military — AI has put pressure on analysts to produce and disseminate intelligence faster, opening the door for mistakes. Young analysts in particular, several sources said, are natives on these tools and more likely to trust them uncritically.

“AI allows you to get to a bad idea faster,” one of the sources said.

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http://archive.today/2026.09.13-103443/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/13/world/middleeast/iran-hard-liners-sabotaged-peace-deal.html

Masoud Pezeshkian, the president of Iran, was riding high in early July, fresh off the successful negotiation of a peace agreement with the United States, and had traveled to neighboring Iraq for part of a weeklong funeral spectacle for Iran’s slain supreme leader.

Suddenly he got stunning news.

Iranian forces had opened fire on three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, setting ablaze a Qatari L.N.G. tanker and damaging other vessels. Iran was under siege in world opinion.

Outraged, Mr. Pezeshkian phoned Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, the commander in chief of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and in a raised voice called the actions reckless and demanded answers, according to five Iranian officials and two Guards members familiar with the events.

General Vahidi told the president that he had neither authorized nor had advance knowledge of the strike, the five officials said. The nation’s Supreme National Security Council, which plays a critical role in both the war and negotiations, had also been in the dark, he said.

In fact, much of the country’s leadership was unaware that a fringe hard-line faction had decided to act on its own. Ultimately, those clandestine efforts derailed a push by more moderate pragmatists in Iran to reach an end to hostilities with the United States and repair their nation’s ailing economy.

When Mr. Pezeshkian demanded to know who had struck the three ships, he was told that commanders in the field had acted on their own, in line with an order empowering them to attack any ship violating Iran’s control of the Strait without waiting for approval from central command, according to the officials with knowledge of these discussions.

“The attack on the ships was orchestrated with the goal to blow up the memorandum of understanding with Trump and to kill the prospects of any future negotiations and deal,” Alireza Namvar Haghighi, an Iran expert and former official who still has close contacts in the government, said in an interview from Canada.

Divisions persist, and the hard-liners who have committed Iran to escalation are in an even stronger position. This past week, Iran and the United States traded attacks, with Iran repeatedly targeting American naval vessels for the first time, and the United States blowing up at least eight Iranian oil tankers.

http://archive.today/2026.08.27-195134/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/27/us/politics/cia-director-russia-ukraine.html

John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, made a secretive visit to Moscow this week to privately share his bleak assessment of the state of the Russian war against Ukraine, and to urge the Russians to cut a deal before their military and economic situation gets worse, current and former officials said.

C.I.A. analysts have long questioned whether Mr. Putin’s advisers have given him honest assessments of the war’s trajectory and toll.

Some officials said they hoped that Mr. Putin, a former intelligence officer himself, would see a message from the C.I.A. director as more urgent and credible than communications through normal diplomatic channels.

The private message that Mr. Ratcliffe delivered to Mr. Bortnikov about Ukraine echoed some of the director’s public statements.

Last month, Mr. Ratcliffe spoke out pointedly about Russian troop losses during the war, and Moscow’s inability to advance on the battlefield. He noted that the life expectancy of a Russian soldier on the front lines was less than 35 minutes.