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Yemen’s cholera epidemic has reached one million suspected cases, the International Committee of the Red Cross said on Thursday, with war leaving more than 80 percent of the population short of food, fuel, clean water and access to healthcare.

Yemen, one of the Arab world’s poorest countries, is embroiled in a proxy war between the Houthi armed movement, allied with Iran, and a U.S.-backed military coalition headed by Saudi Arabia. SponsoredThe United Nations says Yemen is suffering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and eight million people are on the brink of famine.

A new wave of cholera is expected in March or April. “It’s probably unavoidable. We need to be ready to face another big epidemic,” said Poncin, adding that cholera may become a long-term burden as it has in Haiti. “The places where the war is active are the ones most at risk for increase of disease.” The latest emergency is diphtheria, a disease not seen in Yemen for 25 years, which has affected 312 people and killed 35. It has not spread explosively, as cholera did, but diphtheria outbreaks can affect many thousands, and there is a global shortage of diphtheria anti-toxin. Yemen has enough for 200-500 patients, Poncin said.

BEIRUT, LEBANON (3:42 P.M.) – Moments ago, reports came in that Russian Ground Forces troops entered the Koneko Gas Field and its attached company headquarters area in eastern Deir Ezzor province at the invitation of Kurdish-led forces. The information, disseminated by Syrian military reports, claims that an agreement has been brokered between Russia and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces whereby the Syrian government will be allowed to assume control over the gas field. If true, then the scope of any backdoor agreements reached between Moscow and Washington regarding the transfer of energy assets held by Kurdish-led militias back to the rightful ownership of the Damascus government may yet encompass wider dimensions (i.e. future transfers) – although there is absolutely no evidence to suggest this is in fact the case.

Nonetheless, the unexpected transfer of the Koneko Gas Field by the SDF to the Syrian government does now raise questions as to whether or not the hitherto competition between the Syrian Arab Army and Kurdish-led militias to seize control of the much larger Al-Omar Oil Field from ISIS further south is still on.

President Trump signed an executive order Friday allowing the Air Force to recall as many as 1,000 retired pilots to active duty to address a shortage in combat fliers, the White House and Pentagon announced.By law, only 25 retired officers can be brought back to serve in any one branch. Trump's order removes those caps by expanding a state of national emergency declared by President George W. Bush after 9/11, signaling what could be a significant escalation in the 16-year-old global war on terror."We anticipate that the Secretary of Defense will delegate the authority to the Secretary of the Air Force to recall up to 1,000 retired pilots for up to three years," Navy Cdr. Gary Ross, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement. But the executive order itself is not specific to the Air Force, and could conceivably be used in the future to call up more officers and in other branches.

A changing-places moment brought about by Russia-gate is that liberals who are usually more skeptical of U.S. intelligence agencies, especially their evidence-free claims, now question the patriotism of Americans who insist that the intelligence community supply proof to support the dangerous claims about Russian ‘hacking” of Democratic emails especially when some  veteran U.S. government experts say the data would be easily available if the Russians indeed were guilty. One of those experts is William Binney, a former high-level National Security Agency intelligence official who, after his 2001 retirement, blew the whistle on the extraordinary breadth of NSA surveillance programs. His outspoken criticism of the NSA during the George W. Bush administration made him the subject of FBI investigations that included a raid on his home in 2007. Even before Edward Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing, Binney publicly revealed that NSA had access to telecommunications companies’ domestic and international billing records, and that since 9/11 the agency has intercepted some 15 trillion to 20 trillion communications. Snowden has said: “I have tremendous respect for Binney, who did everything he could according to the rules.”

I spoke to Binney on Dec. 28 about Russia-gate and a host of topics having to do with spying and America’s expanding national security state.

Bernstein: Your expertise was in the Soviet Union and so you must know a lot about bugging.  Do you believe that Russia hacked and undermined our last election?  Can Trump thank Russia for the result? Binney:  We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an article on this in July.  First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic world, the NSA would know.  Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points on the fiber lines, taking in everything.    Mark Klein exposed some of this at the AT&T facility in San Francisco. This is not for foreigners, by the way, this is for targeting US citizens.  If they wanted only foreigners, all they would have to do was look at the transatlantic cables where they surface on the coast of the United States.  But they are not there, they are distributed among the US population. Bernstein: So if, in fact, the Russians were tapping into DNC headquarters, the NSA would absolutely know about it. Binney: Yes, and they would also have trace routes on where they went specifically, in Russia or anywhere else.  If you remember, about three or four years ago, the Chinese hacked into somewhere in the United States and our government came out and confirmed that it was the Chinese who did it, and it came from a specific military facility in Shanghai.  The NSA had these trace route programs embedded by the hundreds across the US and all around the world.

Debkafile, an Israeli website close to the military intelligence, has reported that the Trump administration has decided to take a series of punitive measures against the Palestinian Authority (PA) after its successful campaign on Jerusalem in the UN General Assembly. In a report issued on 23 December, the Israeli website cited its sources in Washington as stating that President Trump had decided to sever contacts and relations with the PA and President Mahmoud Abbas. According to Debkafile, the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan under preparation in Washington will not be submitted to Ramallah but only to Israel and the relevant Arab governments. These steps were taken after the PA had been warned more than once, and told to drop its campaign against the Trump pronouncement on Jerusalem because of its negative impact on the region, according to the Israeli website. It added that the White House move was communicated to the PA through a third Arab party. The Israeli website further reported that the US will not publicly announce its freeze of aid to the PA. However, the administration will stop support and delay the resumption of economic projects backed by US institutions and re-examine them. President Trump also decided not to invite Palestinian officials to the White House, State Department and US Treasury, and not to receive Palestinians at the US National Security Council where they used to participate in meetings aimed at shaping US strategy in the Middle East. According to the Israeli website: “The US will halt its contributions to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), an estimated one billion dollars per annum” and will order Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar to reduce the amount of aid provided to the Authority. While no official statements were made by the US administration or the PA, the Israeli website confirmed that US officials have informed Saeb Erekat, the PA’s chief negotiator, that there is nothing to discuss with him anymore.