Washington continues to reel this week from the Signal chat leak revealed in Jeffrey Goldberg's story in The Atlantic, becoming a major scandal for President Donald Trump and members of his Cabinet. The incident has also brought public attention to what the U.S. military is doing in Yemen.

Clearing global shipping lanes
The White House has said that strikes against the Houthi group, which have played a key role in Yemen's ongoing civil war, are "due to attacks on Navy ships and shipping" in the Red Sea by the Iran-backed Islamist group, said Military.com. The bombardment will end the "minute the Houthis say 'we will stop shooting at your ships, we will stop shooting at your drones,'" said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week to Fox News. The campaign is about "freedom of navigation" and "restoring deterrence."

The Houthis had "pledged to restart their attacks on Israeli-linked vessels" in the wake of Israel's renewed bombardment of Gaza this month, said Responsible Statecraft. The group's previous attacks led to "economic disruption," with predominantly European-based commerce being "rerouted away from the region." During those assaults, the group used a "loose definition of what constitutes an Israeli ship, meaning other vessels could be targeted as well," said The Associated Press.  

Saber-rattling in Iran's direction
The U.S. attacks are also "meant to send a warning signal to Iran," with whom the president wants to "broker a deal" over nuclear weaponry, said The New York Times. Vice President J.D. Vance seemed to acknowledge this facet in the Signal conversation detailed by Goldberg. Given that most of the disrupted trade in the region was European, the "strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message," said Vance on Signal. 

Iranian backing of the Houthis is "central" to the group's operational capacity, Andrew Borene, a member of the Atlantic Council's Counterterrorism Project, said in a council analysis. With the Houthis having "positioned themselves within Iran's 'Axis of Resistance,'" the U.S. needs a "more comprehensive allied approach" as "airstrikes alone won't be enough to push the Houthis out of Yemen or restore stability to one of the world's most vital trade routes."

Since the 1950s, South Korea has been the source of the largest international export of adoptees primarily sent overseas to Western countries. Now, for the first time, the country acknowledges that private adoption agencies committed widespread fraud, including falsifying documents to expedite shipping adoptees, with little to no government oversight. 

What did the commission expose?
Following its investigation, the government-established Truth and Reconciliation Commission admitted that the South Korean government failed to implement proper oversight over how private adoption agencies facilitated overseas adoptions in the wake of the "devastating economic aftermath of the Korean War," said The Wall Street Journal. During the decades after the war ended in 1953, the government used the adoptions of more than 140,000 children as a "cost-effective alternative to strengthening domestic child welfare policies," said the commission.

South Korea's export of babies "peaked in the 1980s, with as many as 8,837 children shipped abroad in 1985," said the Times. Children were "sent abroad like luggage," said the commission. The landmark report resulted from a three-year investigation into the complaints of 367 adoptees throughout Europe, Australia and the U.S.

What might be the investigation's outcome?
The commission's report might not be news to adoptees. Still, it's a "significant victory in the sense that we are finally receiving acknowledgment of what has happened to us over the years​," Anja Pedersen, a girl who was sent to Denmark under another child's name, said to The New York Times. 

The findings will "carry repercussions beyond South Korea," said the Times. Some of the receiving countries, such as Norway and Denmark, have started their own investigations into international adoptions.

Not everyone was satisfied with the results of the commission. Some adoptees and one of the commission investigators "criticized the cautiously written report, acknowledging that investigative limitations prevented the commission from more strongly establishing the government's complicity," said The Associated Press. The commission recommended the government issue an official apology and develop plans to assist the adoptees who discovered that their adoptions were the result of fraud.