And good morning. It's Sunday, February 4th. I'm Ali Valshi. We begin today with the latest on the situation in the Middle East.

Early this morning, local time, U.S. Central Command conducted another strike in Yemen against a Houthi anti-ship cruise missile,

which was preparing, they say,

to be launched against vessels in the Red Sea, right around this area down here.

It's the latest in an almost daily series of similar strikes that the United States has conducted

against the Houthis, which are related to, but not part of yesterday's much bigger U.S.-led coalition

air strikes, which were also against the Houthis in Yemen. Now, you can see here, this is the

territory under Houthi control in Yemen. This is Saudi Arabia, Oman, Israel's up there. It's important

to note that while the Houthis

control a large swath of territory in Yemen, they're not the internationally recognized

government in charge of the entire country. These coalition strikes, by the way, also came in

response to the months-long spree of Houthi attacks on international vessels, both military and merchant, in the

Red Sea. Americans hit 36 Houthi targets across 13 locations in Yemen, including underground

weapons, storage facilities, missile systems, launchers, air defense systems, and radar.

The attacks were conducted not just by the U.S., but also with the

United Kingdom, with intelligence and logistics support from Australia, Bahrain, Denmark, Canada,

the Netherlands, and New Zealand. And they follow the U.S. and UK-led coalition strikes.

It's hard to keep track of this, that were conducted back on January 22nd and

on January 11th, although the international coalition involved in those strikes was a little bit

different. The Biden administration is also stressing that all these actions against the Iranian-backed

huthies are different from Friday's U.S. air strikes against Iranian-backed proxy forces

and their Iranian handlers that were operating in Iraq and Syria, which hit more than 85 targets

...