UN: Warring parties in Yemen agree on major prisoner trade

Yemen’s warring sides have agreed to implement a long-delayed and major prisoner swap, the United Nations said on Sunday, in a sign that talks to end the disastrous war between the country's internationally recognized government and its Houthi rebels could be making progress.

It would be the “first official large-scale” exchange of its kind since the beginning of the conflict, according to the U.N.

The prisoner swap deal was seen as a breakthrough during 2018 peace talks in Sweden. The Houthis and the internationally recognized government agreed then to several confidence-building measures, including a cease-fire in the strategic port city of Hodeida.

Yemeni Shiite Houthis hold their weapons as they chant slogans during a protest against U.S. President Donald Trump's Mideast plan in Sanaa, Yemen, Friday, Jan. 31, 2020. (AP PhotoHani Mohammed)

Implementation of the tentative peace plan stumbled amid ongoing military offensives and a deep-seated distrust between the two sides.

The conflict also has been a theater for the regional rivalry between Iran, which backs the Houthi rebels, and Saudi Arabia, which leads a military coalition supporting the internationally recognized Yemeni government.

The U.N. mission in Yemen said that both the rebels and Yemeni government had decided to “immediately begin with exchanging the lists for the upcoming release” of prisoners. Sunday's statement came after seven days of meetings between the two sides in Jordan’s capital, Amman.

“Today the parties showed us that even with the growing challenges on the ground, the confidence they have been building can still yield positive results,” the U.N. envoy Martin Griffiths said.

The talks were co-chaired by Griffiths’ office and the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC.

Griffiths urged both parties to move forward with the agreed-upon prisoner exchange “with the utmost sense of urgency.” He did not elaborate when they would start the exchange.

Franz Rauchenstein, the head of the ICRC in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, welcomed the step as “encouraging.”

“Today, despite ongoing clashes, we saw that the parties have found common humanitarian ground that will allow many detainees to return to their loved ones,” Rauchenstein said.

The war in Yemen has also spawned the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, leaving millions suffering from food and medical shortages. It has killed over 100,000 people, including fighters and civilians, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, which tracks violence reports in Yemen.

Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdel-Salam said they would release 1,400 prisoners including Saudis and Sudanese.

Yemeni Foreign Minister Mohammed Abdullah al-Hadrami said he welcomed the “phased agreement” to release prisoners, in a tweet Sunday.

The breakthrough in talks came after another weekend of violence in Yemen.

Strikes on Saturday killed more than 30 civilians in the mountainous northern Yemeni Jawf province, the U.N. humanitarian chief for the country said.

The Houthis accused the Saudi-led coalition of launching retaliatory airstrikes, after they shot down a coalition warplane over Jawf.

The renewed clashes threatened to overshadow the hopes raised by back-channel talks in the Gulf state of Oman between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis.

The talks focus on interim agreements, such as re-opening Yemen’s main international airport in Sanaa, which was shut down by the Saudi-led coalition in 2016. In a sign of progress, two United Nations flights ferrying dozens of seriously ill Yemenis abroad for treatment took off last week from the rebel-held capital, the first since the start of the air blockade.

The conflict in the Arab world’s poorest country erupted in 2014, when the Iran-allied Houthis seized the capital and much of the country’s north. A Saudi-led coalition, determined to restore the authority of Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Hadi's government, launched a military intervention months later.

That coffee you slurped this morning? It’s 600,000 years old.

Using genes from coffee plants around the world, researchers built a family tree for the world's most popular type of coffee, known to scientists as Coffea arabica and to coffee lovers simply as “arabica.”

The researchers, hoping to learn more about the plants to better protect them from pests and climate change, found that the species emerged around 600,000 years ago through natural crossbreeding of two other coffee species.

“In other words, prior to any intervention from man,” said Victor Albert, a biologist at the University at Buffalo who co-led the study.

These wild coffee plants originated in Ethiopia but are thought to have been first roasted and brewed primarily in Yemen starting in the 1400s. In the 1600s, Indian monk Baba Budan is fabled to have smuggled seven raw coffee beans back to his homeland from Yemen, laying the foundation for coffee’s global takeover.

Arabica coffee, prized for its smooth and relatively sweet flavor, now makes up 60% - 70% of the global coffee market and is brewed by brands such as Starbucks, Tim Horton's and Dunkin'. The rest is robusta, a stronger and more bitter coffee made from one of arabica's parents, Coffea canephora.

To piece together arabica coffee’s past, researchers studied genomes of C. canephora, another parent called Coffea eugenioides, and more than 30 different arabica plants, including a sample from the 1700s — courtesy of the Natural History Museum in London — that Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus used to name the plant.

The study was published Monday in the journal Nature Genetics. Researchers from Nestlé, which owns several coffee brands, contributed to the study.

The arabica plant’s population fluctuated over thousands of years before humans began cultivating it, flourishing during warm, wet periods and suffering through dry ones. These lean times created so-called population bottlenecks, when only a small number of genetically similar plants survived.

Today, that renders arabica coffee plants more vulnerable to diseases like coffee leaf rust, which cause billions of dollars in losses every year. The researchers explored the makeup of one arabica variety that is resistant to coffee leaf rust, highlighting sections of its genetic code that could help protect the plant.

The study clarifies how arabica came to be and spotlights clues that could help safeguard the crop, said Fabian Echeverria, an adviser for the Center for Coffee Research and Education at Texas A&M University who was not involved with the research.

Exploring arabica’s past and present could yield insight into keeping coffee plants healthy – and coffee cups full – for future early mornings.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

FILE - Mohammed Fita picks coffee beans on his farm Choche, near Jimma, 375 kilometers (234 miles) southwest of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Saturday, Sept. 21 2002. Wild coffee plants originated in Ethiopia but are thought to have been primarily roasted and brewed in Yemen starting in the 1400s. (AP Photo/Sayyid Azim, File)

FILE - Arabica coffee beans harvested the previous year are stored at a coffee plantation in Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala, on May 22, 2014. In a study published in the journal Nature Genetics on Monday, April 15, 2024, researchers estimate that Coffea arabica came to be from natural crossbreeding of two other coffee species over 600,000 years ago. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo, File)