US defense officials claim they have no boots on the ground in Yemen, despite a recent acknowledgement that US forces are indeed present in the war-torn Gulf state, a 27 January report from The Intercept shows.
But that doesn’t mean the US will stop fighting in Yemen. Per the administration, it will continue to strike al-Qaeda and ISIS militants in the country to ensure they can’t use it as a base to hatch plots against America. The US has been targeting terrorists in Yemen, most of them against al-Qaeda, since 2002 and has killed around 1,000 people in strikes. Stopping that campaign, experts say, might give the terrorists more space to operate.
So ending support for the fight against the Houthis, and continuing the fight against America-threatening terrorists — that’s pretty straightforward. What isn’t as clear is what the second element, supporting Saudi Arabia’s defense, means in practice.
The biggest complication here is what defines an “offensive” versus a “defensive” move. Say the Houthis attack Saudi Arabia, which experts I spoke to expect they will continue to do. The rebels launched missiles at an airport and airbase in Saudi Arabia in 2019, and at Saudi oil stations last year. Under international law, Riyadh has the right to retaliate in a commensurate way.
The UAE-backed National Assembly of the Southern Transitional Council (STC) called on its forces to secure a military takeover and annexation of the entirety of Yemen’s southern territory during a meeting on Monday, the Arab Weekly reported. The STC is intensifying its push for secession, seeking a partition corresponding with the borders of the former states of North Yemen and South Yemen, which existed prior to the country’s 1990 unification.
So when the Intercept’s Lee Fang kicked off the 8th installment of the Twitter files, I was not expecting much at all. After all, Fang was one of the authors of the very recent garbage Intercept story that totally misunderstood the role of CISA in the government and (falsely) argued that the government demanded Twitter censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. The fact that the evidence from the Twitter files totally disproved his earlier story should at least result in Fang questioning his understanding of these things.
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LibsOfTikTok was ‘whitelisted’.
Thus, it’s not at all surprising that Twitter clearly has a similar whitelist feature. This was actually somewhat revealed in an earlier Twitter File when Bari Weiss, thinking she was revealing unfair treatment of the @LibsOfTikTok account, actually revealed it was on a similar Xcheck style whitelist that clearly showed a flag on the account saying DO NOT TAKE ACTION ON USER WITHOUT CONSULTING an executive team.
Twitter’s most recent transparency report, published in July, shows that it took action on 4.3 million accounts in the second half of 2021 and removed 5.1 million pieces of content. You could cherry-pick a few of those decisions to fit almost any ideological narrative. Right-wing commentators aren’t the only people complaining about platforms’ actions. Some Black and LGBTQ social-media users have also objected that they’re being unfairly moderated, as automated tools take down posts containing words and phrases deemed offensive. Distrust of Big Tech’s power is universal.
The incoming prime minister said that he wants to build on the Abraham Accords, which his former government signed in 2020 to establish diplomatic ties with Bahrain and the UAE. Netanyahu said it’s “up to the leadership of Saudi Arabia if they want to partake in this effort.”
Saudi officials recently reaffirmed that they seek a Palestinian state as a precondition for normalizing with Israel. But in order to form a coalition government, Netanyahu gave Religious Zionism party leader Bezalel Smotrich, an ultranationalist settler, sweeping powers over the West Bank.
ON MONDAY MORNING, 30 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter to the White House that attempted to gingerly open a conversation about a potential diplomatic end to Russia’s war on Ukraine. The door was slammed shut by the evening, met with enough fury to elicit a “clarification” in the form of a statement from caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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