Daniel Larison recaps the War on Yemen:

The Saudi-led intervention has been going on for over eleven months, and in that time it has failed in all of its stated objectives. The Houthis have not been driven from the capital, the former president has not be restored to power (not that most Yemenis would want him there now anyway), and the intervention certainly hasn't produced the stability that the Saudis laughably claimed to be bringing. [...]

Yemenis have been sorely deprived of basic necessities for almost an entire year thanks to the Saudi-led blockade, and the majority of the population is starving or at great risk of doing so. At least four-fifths of the population is in need of humanitarian assistance. The country's health care system has all but collapsed, medical facilities are coming under repeated attack (including repeated bombings by coalition aircraft), medicine and fuel are in short supply, and the lack of access to clean water has made the spread of disease much worse. Every problem Yemen had before the intervention has grown far worse than it was, and the country's infrastructure has been wrecked by the coalition bombing campaign that the U.S. supports. [...]

Since the Saudis and their allies started pummeling Yemen with indiscriminate bombing and the use of inherently indiscriminate cluster munitions last March, the U.S. has been reliably backing the Saudis in this unnecessary and indefensible war with weapons, refueling, and intelligence.The U.S. has helped the Saudis to whitewash and obscure their crimes, and the Obama administration has done this despite credible reports from multiple human rights organizations and the U.N. that the Saudi-led coalition is likely guilty of war crimes and possibly even crimes against humanity.

The U.S. not only continues to whitewash the Saudi crimes but is still actively propagandizing and reinforcing the false Saudi claim that Iran is in cahoots with the Houthis. I have yet to see even one picture from the war in Yemen that shows any Iranian weapon or munition. There are lots of pictures though that show Houthis using weapons they pilfered from incompetent Saudi troops or their proxies.

Tragedy strikes as military alliance recklessly prepares for imaginary threat.

On Monday, a Norwegian military exercise turned tragic for a civilian commuter in rural Nord Toendelag County in central Norway. Norwegian police and military officials report that one person was killed when a tank collided with a car as it crossed a country roadway.

The tank intercepted the roadway as part of the Cold Response NATO exercises taking place in the sparsely populated section of Norway.

According to Lt. Col. Aleksander Jankov, speaking on behalf of the Norwegian Armed Forces, the tank involved in the accident was a Norwegian "armoured recovery vehicle."

Serbia's president has praised Russian efforts in fighting terrorists in Syria, saying that if Moscow hadn't intervened, the Middle Eastern country would have ceased to exist as a sovereign state. The statement comes in stark contrast to NATO's assessment of the situation.

Tomislav Nikolic emphasized the need for Russian military involvement in Syria, stating that "If it [Russia] didn't intervene, Syria would be a country of the so-called Islamic State [IS, ISIS/ISIL]," in an interview with TASS on Tuesday.

The Serbian leader was quoted as saying that the Russian military is essential to protecting peace in Syria and countering the jihadist threat, which might spread globally and affect other countries, including Russia, if not contained at this stage.

"Russia should be in the military aspect involved in the protection of Syria at the request from Syria, as it would mean protection from terrorism, and it is much better to be protected from it in Syria than in Russia," he added, pointing out that the strategy employed by the Russian government is in fact akin to that of the US, which on numerous occasions has used its forces to fight terror overseas.

Last Monday, the US State Department published the last batch of declassified emails from a private, unsecured server used by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state. This latest release draws to a close a year-long review by US intelligence agencies of 52,000 pages of Clinton emails, ostensibly motivated by concerns over possible leaks of classified material.

To date, more than 30,000 emails dating from Clinton's four-year tenure as secretary of state have been released to the public. Clinton played a central role in the prosecution of aggressive wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Libya as well as the carrying out of drone assassinations and other illegal actions in a number of additional countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Yet in its extensive reporting of the email scandal, the American media has virtually ignored the actual content of these emails, which contain a wealth of information about the day-to-day functioning of the Clinton State Department.

A review of even a small sampling of the emails, which are available on the State Department's web site, reveals the reason why: the emails are a damning indictment of the criminal activities of not only Hillary Clinton herself, but the entire imperialist state apparatus, with the corporate-controlled media in tow. The emails could easily serve as evidence in future war crimes trials of Clinton and other top US officials.

Turkish police clashed with female protesters to disperse hundreds of people, rallying for women's rights in Istanbul ahead of International Women's Day. They fired rubber bullets and arrested at least one female activist.

The protest on Sunday gathered in response to an order from the governor of Istanbul, who banned the annual March 8 rally citing security concerns. Hundreds of women filled the square in the Kadikoy district on the Asian side of Istanbul chanting slogans and carrying banners.

The latest release of Hillary Clinton emails includes a sobering, confidential 2010 letter (excerpt below) from ex-Ambassador Joe Wilson in which the former diplomat reflects on a trip he had recently made to Iraq, the devastation caused by the war, and how waste and racism are obstructing the rebuilding process.

Wilson was an early critic of the Bush-Cheney administration's lies in the run-up to the war in 2003. His wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, was outed by White House staffers as part of an effort to discredit him.

The opening paragraph of his letter describes the society-wide destruction he witnessed upon traveling to the country:

My trip to Baghdad (September 6-11) has left me slack jawed. I have struggled to find the correct historical analogy to describe a vibrant, historically important Middle Eastern city being slowly bled to death. Berlin and Dresden in World War II were devastated but they and their populations were not subjected to seven years of occupation that included ethnic cleansing, segregation of people by religious identity, and untold violence perpetrated upon them by both military and private security services. I have not been to Gaza but suspect that the dehumanizing effects are somewhat similar. ... The occupation and especially the walling off of neighborhoods have destroyed the very fabric of the urban society.

Turkish guards routinely shoot at Syrian refugees stranded at the border, a researcher at Amnesty International has told RT, adding that the number of people being shot has recently spiked. According to Andrew Gardner, these cases are far from being isolated.

"There have been many reports of incidents on the border. We collected information on this as early as 2014, when we received many reports of people being shot when they were trying to cross the border irregularly," Gardner said.

He added that the current situation in war-torn Syria has led to a spike in the number of migrants being assaulted by Turkish border guards.

Many security experts believe that the FBI and NSA can already hack into an iPhone without Apple's help, using a number of techniques such as "infrared laser glitching" or "de-capping." Edward Snowden backed this up last month in a virtual interview with Johns Hopkins University. These techniques, although risky to the chip, are already in use by the most advanced hackers and, very likely, the NSA.

Even John McAfee has spoken publicly and explained how unlocking the iPhone is 'trivial.' In an interview with Russia Today, McAfee detailed the brief process.

I am going to tell the world exactly how we do this. Now I'll probably lose my admission to the world hackers' community, however I want to tell you. You need a hardware engineer and a softer engineer. The hardware engineer takes the phone apart, and copies the instruction set, which are the iOS and applications and your memory. And then you run a program called a disassembler, which takes all the ones and zeros and gives you readable instructions. Then the coder sits down and he reads through. What he is looking for is the first access to the keypad, because that is the first thing you do, when you input your pad. It'll take half an hour. When you see that then he reads the instructions for where in memory this secret code is stored - it is that trivial - a half an hour.

If the government already has its own access to the iPhone, then the FBI's chosen "debate" with Apple is an exercise in wearing down public resistance to the surveillance state.

A leading Israeli doctor and medical ethicist has called for the prosecution of doctors responsible for thousands of unauthorised and often illegal experiments on small children and geriatric and psychiatric patients in Israeli hospitals.

An investigation by the government watchdog, the state comptroller, has revealed that researchers in 10 public hospitals administered drugs, carried out unauthorised genetic testing or undertook painful surgery on patients unable to give informed consent or without obtaining health ministry approval.

At one hospital, staff pierced children's eardrums to apply an experimental medication yet to be approved in any country. At another, patients with senile dementia had their thumbprints applied to consent forms for experimental drugs.

Israel's health minister, Dan Naveh, said he was "shocked" at what he described as a failure of his department and some of Israel's hospitals.

Dr Jacques Michel, the former director of Hadassah hos pital who triggered the comptroller's inquiry with a public warning about the abuses in 2001, yesterday called for the prosecution of the doctors.

"These doctors should be punished very severely because they really are criminals," said Dr Michel, who is head of the committee that approves medical experimentation at Hadassah, which is not among the accused hospitals.

"They should be stripped of their licences to practise and they should be prosecuted. If you don't show by example that the medical profession does not accept this kind of conduct the phenomenon will go on and on.

"It's not an isolated phenomenon. It spread through different institutions."

With a series of blatant measures, Saudi Arabia and its regional allies are evidently trying to destabilize Lebanon. The development is apiece with how Saudi Arabia and Turkey have both sought to undermine the ceasefire in Syria and to escalate that conflict to a region-wide level.

A New York Times report this week poses a rather naive conundrum: "Diplomats and analysts have spent several weeks trying to understand why the Saudis would precipitously start penalizing Lebanon - and perhaps their own Lebanese allies - over the powerful influence of Hezbollah, which is nothing new".

Well, here's a quick answer: Russia's very effective squelching of the covert war for regime-change in Syria. That has sent Saudi Arabia and Turkey into a paroxysm of rage.

Russia's military intervention in Syria to defend the Arab state from a foreign-backed covert war involving myriad terrorist proxy groups, has dealt a severe blow to the machinations of Washington, its NATO allies and regional client states.

While Washington and its Western partners seem resigned to pursue regime change by an alternative political track, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are stuck in the covert-war groove. They are betting that the terrorist proxy armies they have weaponized can somehow be salvaged from withering losses inflicted by Russian airpower in combination with the ground forces of the Syrian Arab Army, Iranian military advisors and the Lebanese Hezbollah militia.