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Two US Navy Seals who went missing during an operation to seize Iranian weapons said to be bound for Houthi rebels in Yemen have been declared dead, the US military has said.
The development followed a 10-day “exhaustive” search that failed to find the special forces personnel, US Central Command said. The operation during which the Seals went missing was said to be “the first seizure of lethal, Iranian-supplied advanced conventional weapons” to the Houthis since attacks on shipping began last November.
The US and Britain launched strikes on dozens of Houthi rebel targets in January, and US forces have since hit a number of missile sites that Washington says posed a threat to vessels.
What’s happening now? The Houthis have not been deterred and continue to attack ships. Ordinary Yemenis are paying the price in a country with some of the highest rates of acute malnutrition.
What about shipping? The attacks have caused about 70% of shipping that normally passes through the Bab el-Mandeb strait to be diverted thousands of miles around Africa.
Middle East thrust into ‘apocalyptic’ humanitarian crisis by war and turmoil
The situation in the Middle East has probably “never been worse” since the UN humanitarian agency began collating records in 1991, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has warned.
With tens of millions of people across the region dependent on aid, UN agencies believe an “apocalyptic” humanitarian crisis is under way. Four overlapping crises – Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen – are piling pressure on agencies, while Israel’s war in Gaza is intensifying historical tensions and connecting conflicts.
It is likely that even worse times are to come, said Jens Laerke, a senior official at OCHA in Geneva. Laerke asked whether the world was “entering an age of war”, as global leaders were “reaching for the gun to resolve their differences as a first option”.
Israeli forces are “besieging” the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s ambulance centre, leaving vehicles unable to reach the injured in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.
The death toll in Gaza has reached 25,295, with 63,000 injured in Israeli strikes, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Ron DeSantis put too many eggs in the ‘war on woke’ basket
After Ron DeSantis dropped out of the Republican presidential race, the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief examined whether DeSantis misjudged timings on culture war topics.
“DeSantis was billed as Trump without the baggage. He turned out to be Trump without the votes,” wrote David Smith after Florida’s governor endorsed Trump. DeSantis positioned himself to the right of Trump on several issues, but his awkward persona and a series of campaign missteps, including a disastrous launch on social media, combined to undermine his chance at challenging the former president for the Republican nomination.
What did he try? DeSantis made a lot of political hay in Florida by criticizing responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, but those attacks appear to have lost their resonance nationwide, while his encouragement of groups that aim to keep race and LGBTQ+ issues out of schools also played badly nationally. DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban in Florida is broadly unpopular, too.
Has ‘anti-woke’ had its day? Maybe not quite – but Trump has recently spoken in vaguer terms on some culture war issues (though not immigration, where he speaks in chilling fashion about newcomers “poisoning the blood” of the country) and abortion.
In other news …
More than 45 people have been buried in a landslide in Yunnan province, south-west China, according to state media. Authorities launched an emergency response that included more than 200 rescue workers. The cause has not yet been explained, though China has experienced a series of natural disasters in recent months.
UN staff in Iraq are allegedly demanding bribes for helping companies win contracts on postwar reconstruction projects, a Guardian investigation has found. The alleged kickbacks are just one type of corruption claim the Guardian has learned about in the $1.5bn program, backed by 30 countries.
The UK has shown a panel of UN experts satellite images of North Korean cargo shipments to Russia amid efforts to trigger an official investigation into weapons deals violating international sanctions. North Korea has been accused of supplying arms to Russia since September and the relationship between Pyongyang and Moscow looks like it is expanding.
Stat of the day: Asbestos kills an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people in the US each year
Asbestos kills between 12,000 and 15,000 people in the US each year, with about 2,500 deaths related to mesothelioma, an aggressive type of incurable cancer linked to asbestos exposure, annually. Now, those affected by asbestos are accusing a Koch Industries-owned company and its lawyers of using a controversial bankruptcy maneuver to dodge paying millions in compensation to its former employees. “He didn’t know that he was being poisoned,” said the daughter of one victim.
Don’t miss this: From work to rehab, to clubbing with Trump, Abel Ferrara tells all
Last time Ryan Gilbey interviewed the director Abel Ferrara, it was 1996 and Ferrara nodded off before asking Gilbey to score some cocaine. Almost three decades on, Ferrara has been sober for 11 years and is preparing for the release of his latest feature, Padre Pio, starring Shia LaBeouf as a priest at the end of world war one. Ferrara, 72, talks about his journey to sobriety, seeing Donald Trump in New York nightclubs, and US politics: “My country’s been fucking crazy since the day I was born. It’s business as usual.”
Last Thing: Mastering the art of meong
The Guardian’s Emma Beddington – a self-proclaimed a black-belt starer into space – asks whether this is the year meong, a Korean suffix used for activities involving staring into stillness, could achieve hygge-like status. South Korea is home to an annual “space-out” competition.
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