What happened
President Donald Trump yesterday canceled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army officer convicted of murdering 13 troops at Fort Hood. The decision followed “significant blowback from both Republicans and Democrats,” plus former military leaders and the Catholic Church, said The Associated Press.

Who said what
Hasan is a “very bad and evil man,” Trump said on social media, but “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device.” Cancelling the broadcast is a “significant rebuke” of Hegseth, said The Washington Post. Trump has stuck with him “through numerous controversies” despite Hegseth’s “flagging support” even among Republicans. 

Trump was “initially full-throated in his approval” of broadcasting Hasan’s death, Axios said. It “took roughly a week for the plan to crumble” amid a “chorus of negative sentiment.” Even Vice President JD Vance “expressed doubt about it,” The New York Times said. Trump privately began wavering after learning “Hasan is paralyzed.”

What next?
Hasan will “die, as scheduled, by firing squad” on Dec. 3, Trump said. Family members of his victims can watch “if they so choose.” 

What happened
A 16-year-old yesterday shot dead three children and a teacher at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon. The unidentified teen entered the building by shooting a locked door and opened fire before being shot dead minutes later by an armed “community member” who “pursued him into the school,” Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said at a news conference. The children killed were 5, 8 and 11, and a 7-year-old child and 54-year-old teacher were critically injured. The shooter used a pump-action shotgun purchased by his mother, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. 

Who said what
Yesterday’s “spasm of violence is part of a long string of school shootings that have stricken the nation” over the past 30 years, “leaving deep and lasting scars on communities” and sometimes the “entire country,” The New York Times said. “It’s just something that we live with here in America,” Leah Schwartz, who heard the gunshots while walking her dog, told the Times. “It’s exhausting.”

The “tragedy at Silver Rail Elementary marks the 36th shooting on K-12 school grounds this year,” CNN said. It was the “28th mass killing in the U.S. this year,” said the AP, and the third in the past week.

What next?
The Bend-La Pine school district canceled classes, sports and extracurricular activities today at all 32 of its schools.

A militia led by a former honey and herb trader is “changing the Saudi-Houthi war,” said The Telegraph. The Southern Giants emerged in southern Yemen in 2015 during the civil war, and are now the country’s “most feared militia.” Their ideology is “rooted in Salafism, an austere, ultraconservative strand of Sunni Islam” that regards Shia groups, such as the Iran-backed Houthis, as “heretics.”

Believed to control up to 70,000 fighters, the Southern Giants have become “one of Yemen’s most formidable military forces,” said Al Jazeera. Last week, the militia took a leading role in an operation to retake the strategically vital Red Sea port of Mocha, captured by the Houthis last month. The Yemeni government claims that Mocha and the coastal road along the crucial Bab el-Mandeb Strait are now under its control again, “one of their first major military gains in years.”

For now, the Southern Giants represent the Saudi-led coalition’s “cutting edge” in the fight to roll back Houthi gains and pry back “leverage over global shipping,” said The Telegraph. But the militia also represents the “most dangerous fault-line” in the alliance between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

The UAE trains and funds the Southern Giants and ensures they are “lavishly supplied with tanks, artillery, modern armour, guided missiles,” The Telegraph said. Saudi and UAE interests are aligned for now, but how the Emiratis use their Yemen proxy force will shape not just current battles but “the longer struggle for control of Yemen’s south.”