The spike in attacks claimed by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the Red Sea is dangerously increasing tensions in a bottleneck for international maritime trade and fuelling fears of an uncontrolled regional spillover of Yemen's longstanding conflict.

Since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza, Yemen's Houthi rebels have threatened to attack any ship heading to Israeli ports and stepped up their raids.

One of President Joe Biden's favorite stories is about his first international summit after taking office, when he declared that "America is back" in the wake of Donald Trump's erratic and isolationist leadership.

"For how long?" responded one of the other leaders in the room.

By Nicholas R. Micinski, University of Maine; Adam G. Lichtenheld, Stanford University, and Kelsey Norman, Rice University

As a result of the monthslong Israeli air and ground campaign in northern Gaza Strip, more than 1.8 million of the strip's population have been displaced from their homes. And with the operation heading into Gaza's south, many are now fleeing areas they were told would be safer.

Sometime in the early 2010s, Yekaterina Duntsova's eldest daughter drew a picture of her debating Russian President Vladimir Putin live on prime-time TV.

A decade on, the little-known journalist and mom-of-three from a small town in western Russia recalls the drawing as a joke about her civic activism — but says it also carried a "message about the future."

Significant dates in Vladimir Putin's 24 years in power in Russia:

Dec. 31, 1999 — In a surprise address to the nation, President Boris Yeltsin announces his resignation and makes Putin, the prime minister he appointed four months earlier, the acting president.

Fatah, the largest Palestinian party, has seen its popularity plunge during the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, from where the Islamists violently ousted rivals Fatah in 2007.

Fatah's chosen path of negotiations has not brought about the Palestinian state promised by the Oslo Accords of 1993, and Hamas -- after choosing violence instead -- has seen its popularity soar.

When Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen launched missiles and hit three commercial ships in the southern Red Sea last weekend, it triggered an immediate question: Will the U.S. military strike back?

The Houthis have sharply escalated their attacks against ships as they sail toward the narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait. And U.S. Navy ships have shot down an array of drones headed their way and believed to have been launched by the militant group from territory it controls in Yemen.

For all Palestinian parents, Marwan Tamimi said, there comes a moment they realize they're powerless to protect their children.

For the 48-year-old father of three, it came in June, when Israeli forces fired a large rubber bullet that struck the head of his eldest son, Wisam. A week later, Marwan said, soldiers came for the 17-year-old, dragging him out of bed with a fractured skull.

All these years later, the scene still is almost too bizarre to imagine: a tearful president and his perplexed aide, neither very religious, kneeling in prayer on the floor of a White House bedroom in the waning hours of a shattered presidency.

Until the embittered end, Henry Kissinger was one of the trusted few of a distrusting Richard Nixon. That trust, combined with Kissinger's intellectual heft and deft manipulation of power, made him a pivotal player in a tense period in American history, a giant of U.S. foreign policy and a fixture in international relations for decades to come.

Already weeks into their deployment, Israeli soldiers in Israel's north are settling in for a long, tense standoff with Hezbollah across the border in Lebanon.

Until a truce with Hamas went into effect in the Gaza Strip to the south on Friday, the Israel-Lebanon border saw near-daily exchanges of fire with the Iranian-backed group.