Indian Ocean
US, UK conduct joint strikes on more than a dozen Houthi targets in Yemen: 'Specifically targeted'
The United States and United Kingdom carried out more than a dozen strikes against Iranian-backed Houthi targets in Yemen on Saturday, with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and New Zealand, two U.S. officials told Fox News. The targets were hit successfully and include weapons storage facilities, and drone and missile launchers. The operation hit five Houthi-controlled locations in Yemen and is a response to the near-daily Houthi attacks involving Iranian drones and anti-ship ballistic missiles, a senior U.S. official said. The fourth round of American and British strikes came days after a British cargo ship was hit by a Houthi missile. In a joint statement, the U.S, U.K. and the other allied countries said: "In response to the Houthis' continued attacks against commercial and naval vessels transiting the Red Sea and surrounding waterways, today the militaries of the United States and United Kingdom, with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, conducted an additional round of strikes against several targets in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen."
US warns of 'disaster' amid oil slick in Red Sea from ship hit by Houthis
The United States military has warned of an "environmental disaster" after an attack by Yemen's Houthi rebels on a cargo ship caused an oil slick in the Red Sea. The Iran-aligned group hit the United Kingdom-owned, Belize-flagged bulk carrier Rubymar on February 18 with multiple missiles. It was sailing through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait which connects the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, on its way to Bulgaria after leaving Khor Fakkan in the United Arab Emirates. Extensive damage prompted the crew, all of whom are safe, to abandon the ship. US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed on Saturday that the ship was now "anchored but slowly taking on water", which it said has caused a 29-kilometre (18-mile) oil slick.
US, coalition forces destroy 6 Houthi one-way attack drones
U.S. Central Command announced Thursday that American aircraft and a coalition warship have shot down six Houthi one-way attack drones in the Red Sea. The unmanned aerial vehicles were identified as "likely targeting U.S. and coalition warships and were an imminent threat," it said, noting that the drones were taken out around 4:30 a.m. "Later, between 8:30 a.m. and 9:45 a.m., the Houthis fired two anti-ship ballistic missiles from southern Yemen into the Gulf of Aden," Central Command also wrote in a post on X. "The missiles impacted MV Islander, a Palau-flagged, U.K.-owned, cargo carrier causing one minor injury and damage. The ship is continuing its voyage." The attack comes after the Pentagon earlier this week confirmed that the Houthis shot down a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone off the coast of Yemen on Monday.
US conducts four 'self-defense strikes' against Houthi weapons preparing to launch: CENTCOM
The U.S. military conducted "self-defense strikes" against Houthi missiles and a launcher prepared to fire from Yemen toward the Red Sea on Wednesday, U.S. Central Command announced. Between 12 a.m. and 6:45 p.m. local time on Wednesday, four self-defense strikes were launched in response to seven mobile Houthi anti-ship cruise missiles and one mobile anti-ship ballistic missile launcher aimed at the Red Sea, the agency said. Also, in an act of self-defense, CENTCOM said its forces shot down a one-way attack unmanned aircraft system. U.S. Central Command announced more "self-defense strikes" against Houthi terrorists in Yemen after American forces located missiles and a launcher prepared to fire toward the Red Sea. The missiles, launchers and the unmanned aircraft system were all determined to have originated from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen.
Yemen's Houthis claim attacks on Israeli, US ships
Yemen's Houthi rebels say they have targeted what they claim to be an Israeli cargo ship, the MSC Silver, in the Gulf of Aden near the entrance to the Red Sea with a number of missiles. Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Sarea did not elaborate, but in a statement on Tuesday said the group had also used drones to target a number of United States warships in the Red Sea and Arabian Sea as well as sites in the southern Israeli resort town of Eilat. However, the British maritime security firm Ambrey said the container ship targeted by the Houthis on Tuesday was Liberia-flagged and headed for Somalia. The operator was publicly listed as [in] cooperation with ZIM and regularly called [at] Israeli ports," the Ambrey advisory note said. Zim Integrated Shipping Services Ltd, commonly known as ZIM, is a publicly held Israeli international cargo shipping company based in Israel.
Yemen's Houthi rebels continue to launch attacks despite month of US-led airstrikes
Former Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller joined'Fox & Friends' to discuss the latest on the escalation in the Middle East as the U.S. continues to strike Iranian proxies. Despite a month of U.S.-led airstrikes, Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels remain capable of launching significant attacks -- just this week, they seriously damaged a ship in a crucial strait and apparently downed an American drone worth tens of millions of dollars. The continued assaults by the Houthis on shipping through the crucial Red Sea corridor -- the Bab el-Mandeb Strait -- against the backdrop of Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip underscore the challenges in trying to stop the guerrilla-style attacks that have seen them hold onto Yemen's capital and much of the war-ravaged country's north since 2014. Meanwhile, the campaign has boosted the rebels' standing in the Arab world, despite their own human rights abuses in a yearslong stalemated war with several of America's allies in the region. And the longer their attacks go on, analysts warn the greater the risk that disruptions to international shipping will begin to weigh down on the global economy.
Houthis Say They Shot Down a U.S. Drone Off Yemen
If the Houthis' claims are confirmed, this will have been the second time the group has shot down an American drone since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and Israel's response, plunged the region into crisis. The downing of a Reaper drone, the mainstay of the American military's aerial surveillance fleet, is another escalation of violence between the United States and Iran-backed groups in Yemen, Iraq and Syria. The episodes have intensified over the past two months, underscoring the risk that the conflict between Israel and Hamas could spiral into a wider war. The United States struck five Houthi military targets, including an undersea drone, in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen on Saturday, according to a statement from the military's Central Command. The use of the underwater drone is believed to have been the first time that the Houthis have employed such a weapon since they began their campaign against ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden on Oct. 23, the statement said.
Quantitative causality, causality-guided scientific discovery, and causal machine learning
Liang, X. San, Chen, Dake, Zhang, Renhe
It has been said, arguably, that causality analysis should pave a promising way to interpretable deep learning and generalization. Incorporation of causality into artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, however, is challenged with its vagueness, non-quantitiveness, computational inefficiency, etc. During the past 18 years, these challenges have been essentially resolved, with the establishment of a rigorous formalism of causality analysis initially motivated from atmospheric predictability. This not only opens a new field in the atmosphere-ocean science, namely, information flow, but also has led to scientific discoveries in other disciplines, such as quantum mechanics, neuroscience, financial economics, etc., through various applications. This note provides a brief review of the decade-long effort, including a list of major theoretical results, a sketch of the causal deep learning framework, and some representative real-world applications in geoscience pertaining to this journal, such as those on the anthropogenic cause of global warming, the decadal prediction of El Niรฑo Modoki, the forecasting of an extreme drought in China, among others. Keywords: Causality, Liang-Kleeman information flow, Causal artificial intelligence, Fuzzy cognitive map, Interpretability, Frobenius-Perron operator, Weather/Climate forecasting 1. Introduction Causality analysis is a fundamental problem in scientific research, as commented by Einstein in 1953 in response to a question on the status quo of science in China at that time (cf. the historical record in Hu, 2005).The recent rush in artificial intelligence (AI) has stimulated enormous interest in causal inference, partly due to the realization that it may take the field to the next level to approach human intelligence (see Pearl, 2018; Bengio, 2019; Schรถlkopf, 2022). In the fields pertaining to this journal, assessment of the cause-effect relations between dynamic events makes a natural objective for the corresponding researches.
Houthis claim to shoot down US MQ-9 Reaper drone in Red Sea
Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane joins'Fox Report' to discuss strikes in Yemen, Iraq and Syria by the U.S. and U.K forces. Two U.S. officials have confirmed to Fox News that an Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone crashed near Yemen after Houthi rebels claimed to have shot down an American aircraft. "We can confirm that a U.S. Air Force MQ-9 crashed off the coast of Hodeidah, Yemen, and are investigating the cause," a U.S. official told Fox News. The officials stressed that it was unclear if the Houthis were involved. If they are, it would be the second time since November 2023 that the Iranian-backed militant group has taken out a Reaper drone, which has a wingspan of 66 feet and costs about 32 million.
Graph-based Virtual Sensing from Sparse and Partial Multivariate Observations
De Felice, Giovanni, Cini, Andrea, Zambon, Daniele, Gusev, Vladimir V., Alippi, Cesare
Virtual sensing techniques allow for inferring signals at new unmonitored locations by exploiting spatio-temporal measurements coming from physical sensors at different locations. However, as the sensor coverage becomes sparse due to costs or other constraints, physical proximity cannot be used to support interpolation. In this paper, we overcome this challenge by leveraging dependencies between the target variable and a set of correlated variables (covariates) that can frequently be associated with each location of interest. From this viewpoint, covariates provide partial observability, and the problem consists of inferring values for unobserved channels by exploiting observations at other locations to learn how such variables can correlate. We introduce a novel graph-based methodology to exploit such relationships and design a graph deep learning architecture, named GgNet, implementing the framework. The proposed approach relies on propagating information over a nested graph structure that is used to learn dependencies between variables as well as locations. GgNet is extensively evaluated under different virtual sensing scenarios, demonstrating higher reconstruction accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art.