Reza Pahlavi, exiled crown prince of Iran, weighs in on Iranian threats to shut the Mediterranean Sea amid war with Israel and the threat America faces from the country and its proxies. The U.S. Navy fired anti-ship ballistic missiles on Tuesday against incoming Iran-backed Houthi missiles in the Red Sea, signaling a significant escalation in the region, a senior defense official told Fox News. The Navy engaged three ballistic missiles provided to Yemen's Houthis by Iran. It was the first time the Navy shot down an incoming ballistic missile using an anti-ship ballistic missile. The USS Laboon and assets from the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group shot down 12 one-way attack drones, three anti-ship ballistic missiles and two land attack missiles fired by the Houthis over a 12-hour period, U.S. Central Command said.

Yemen's Houthi rebel group has said that it carried out drone attacks targeting the Israeli port city of Eilat, as well as a commercial vessel in the Red Sea, as the Iran-backed group steps up attacks that it says are a means of pressuring Israel to end its war in Gaza. Speaking on Tuesday, Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea said the group conducted drone attacks on Eilat and "other areas in occupied Palestine". Sarea said the group also launched missiles at an MSC United vessel in the Red Sea after it rejected three warning calls. The statement comes several hours after a British maritime group said it received reports of an incident involving a vessel off the coast of Yemen, saying that drones were sighted and an explosion was heard. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) on Tuesday said the incident took place about 60 nautical miles (111km) outside of Yemen's Hodeidah port.

After Mr. Biden was informed of the Erbil attack on Christmas morning, he ordered the Defense Department to prepare response options, White House officials said. Later in the day, the president authorized strikes that were conducted around 8:45 p.m. Eastern time. Mr. Biden chose Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated facilities that had been used to launch unmanned aerial drone attacks, officials said. Last month, the United States struck an operations center and a command-and-control node south of Baghdad used by Kataib Hezbollah. The group's political wing is part of the coalition of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani of Iraq.

A Japanese-owned commercial tanker was attacked by a drone launched from Iran in the Indian Ocean on Saturday, causing a fire but leaving no one injured, the U.S. Department of Defense said. The Liberian-flagged, Netherlands-operated chemical tanker was struck about 370 kilometers off India "by a one-way attack drone fired from Iran," the Pentagon said in a statement, adding the fire on board has been extinguished. The Associated Press reported the tanker had ties with Israel, citing a British maritime security firm. The tanker, which was carrying 20 Indians and one Vietnamese, had left Saudi Arabia on Tuesday and was heading to Mangalore, southwestern India, according to the U.S. Defense Department and the Indian Coast Guard. But the vessel decided to head to Mumbai for repairs and to have the damage assessed with the assistance of the Indian Coast Guard.

Former CENTCOM Spokesperson and retired U.S. Army Colonel Joe Buccino discusses Iran's involvement in Houthi attacks and the U.S.' approach to deterrence and response. Iran appears to have struck a ship off the Indian coast with an unmanned aerial vehicle, a U.S. official told Fox News on Saturday. It comes as Houthi militants targeted multiple cargo ships on Saturday, as the group fired two anti-ship ballistic missiles into international shipping lanes located in the Southern Red Sea, according to U.S. Central Command. No ships were impacted by the ballistic missiles, officials said. The USS Laboon shot down four unmanned aerial drones on Saturday which originated from areas that the Houthis control in Yemen.

The United States on Tuesday imposed a new round of sanctions against 10 entities and four individuals for their involvement in procuring materials for the production of drones in Iran. The sanctions target a network spanning Iran, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Indonesia led by Hossein Hatefi Ardakani, according to the U.S. State and Treasury Department. Ardakani and Gary Lam, who worked for a Chinese company, and their co-conspirators were named as defendants in a Justice Department press release. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) drill held by Iranian army in Semnan, Iran on January 5, 2021. The U.S. said these individuals and entities were involved in the procurement of sensitive goods, including U.S.-origin electronic components, for one-way attack drones produced by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force Self Sufficiency Jihad Organization and its drone program.

The weather forecasting system is important for science and society, and significant achievements have been made in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to medium-range weather forecasting. However, existing AI-based weather forecasting models still rely on analysis or reanalysis products from the traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems as initial conditions for making predictions, preventing them from being fully independent systems. As a crucial component of an end-to-end global weather forecasting system, data assimilation is vital in generating initial states for forecasting. In this paper, we present an AI-based data assimilation model, i.e., Adas, for global weather variables, which learns to generate the analysis from the background and sparse observations. Different from existing assimilation methods, Adas employs the gated convolution module to handle sparse observations and the gated cross-attention module for capturing the interactions between observations and background efficiently, which are guided by the confidence matrix to represent the availability and quality of observations. Then, we combine Adas with the advanced AI-based weather forecasting model (i.e., FengWu) and construct the first end-to-end AI-based global weather forecasting system: FengWu-Adas. Experiments demonstrate that Adas can assimilate the simulated global observations with the AI-generated background through a one-year simulation and generate high-quality analysis stably in a cyclic manner. Based on the generated analysis, FengWu-Adas exhibits skillful performance and outperforms the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) in weather forecasting over seven days.

Traditional NER systems are typically trained to recognize coarse-grained entities, and less attention is given to classifying entities into a hierarchy of fine-grained lower-level subtypes. This article aims to advance Arabic NER with fine-grained entities. We chose to extend Wojood (an open-source Nested Arabic Named Entity Corpus) with subtypes. In particular, four main entity types in Wojood, geopolitical entity (GPE), location (LOC), organization (ORG), and facility (FAC), are extended with 31 subtypes. To do this, we first revised Wojood's annotations of GPE, LOC, ORG, and FAC to be compatible with the LDC's ACE guidelines, which yielded 5, 614 changes. Second, all mentions of GPE, LOC, ORG, and FAC (~44K) in Wojood are manually annotated with the LDC's ACE sub-types. We refer to this extended version of Wojood as WojoodF ine. To evaluate our annotations, we measured the inter-annotator agreement (IAA) using both Cohen's Kappa and F1 score, resulting in 0.9861 and 0.9889, respectively. To compute the baselines of WojoodF ine, we fine-tune three pre-trained Arabic BERT encoders in three settings: flat NER, nested NER and nested NER with subtypes and achieved F1 score of 0.920, 0.866, and 0.885, respectively. Our corpus and models are open-source and available at https://sina.birzeit.edu/wojood/.

The tensions spilling over from the war in Gaza to merchant shipping in the Red Sea escalated on Saturday when Britain and the United States said their militaries had shot down more than a dozen attack drones. The Houthis, an armed group that controls much of northern Yemen, have been staging drone and missile assaults on Israeli and American targets since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel. They have said they intend to prevent Israeli ships from sailing the Red Sea until Israel stops its war on Hamas, which rules Gaza. Both the Houthis and Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, are backed by Iran. The shipping industry was also bracing for potential economic fallout as the Red Sea, a vital sea lane, is increasingly drawn into the regional unrest.

The United States and United Kingdom authorities say their warships have shot down 15 attack drones over the Red Sea as Israel's war on Gaza threatens to spread in the region. The US Central Command (CENTCOM) on Saturday said its guided-missile destroyer responded to a wave of drones from "Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen" over the Red Sea, downing 14 suspected attack drones. It described the launches as "one-way attack drones", saying they were "shot down with no damage to ships in the area or reported injuries". UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps also said the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Diamond fired a Sea Viper missile and destroyed a drone that was "targeting merchant shipping". Meanwhile, Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis said the group attacked the Israeli city of Eilat on Saturday with a swarm of drones, according to spokesman Yahya Sarea who referred to the Red Sea resort city as being in "southern occupied Palestine".