The United States didn’t skip a beat last weekend when it officially ended the war in Afghanistan, then launched its new mission to justify the nearly 11,000 American soldiers remaining in the country. A ceremony was held Sunday that declared the 13-year war against the Taliban and insurgents was concluded. The very same ceremony was used to proclaim the start of operation “Resolute Support,” which calls for keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan to advise and train the Afghan military.   read more

The Marshall Islands has asked the International Court of Justice to order nations with nuclear weapons to engage in talks to ban the weapons. The action is directed at the U.S., Russia, Britain, France and China, as well as India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea. The Marshall Islands contend the original five nuclear powers promised in 1968 to negotiate a nuclear disarmament treaty, which never came about.   read more

Investigators from the state prosecutor’s office in Azerbaijan raided the Baku offices of Radio Free Europe (RFE), confiscating computers and other items and ordering the office closed. Staff members were held incommunicado during the December 26 raid. Three weeks ago, Khadija Ismayilova, an investigative journalist and contributor to U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, was jailed in Baku.   read more

Maj. Jason Brezler alerted his superior officers to the presence of an Afghan police chief, Sarwar Jan, with ties to the Taliban at Forward Operating Base Delhi. Jan kept an entourage of young male sex slaves, one of whom in August 2012 opened fire on Marines at the base, killing three and wounding one. Brezler and another Marine, Captain Andrew Terrell, had previously expelled Jan from an Afghan village for keeping the sex slaves.   read more

To protest the persecution of Navalny, who has demonstrated against Putin and led anti-corruption investigations against Russian officials, demonstrators created a Facebook page to spread the word about a demonstration. But Russian authorities demanded that Facebook block the page, and the company complied with the order. The Russian government claimed the demonstration represented an illegal and unauthorized event that would “infringe the public order."   read more

More than 300 Brazilians came to the School of the Americas, located at Fort Benning, Georgia, where instructors “recommended interrogation techniques like torture, execution, blackmail and arresting the relatives of those being questioned,” according to a Pentagon manual released in 1996. Among their victims was Dilma Rousseff, who was a political activist in the 1960s and is now Brazil’s president.   read more

The U.S. is obligated under the International Convention on Torture to investigate any U.S. citizen accused of torturing someone, and the U.N. high commissioner for human rights said he welcomes the prosecution of CIA personnel who either ordered or carried out the torture against detainees. “The convention lets no one off the hook — neither the torturers themselves, nor the policy-makers, nor the public officials who define the policy or give the orders,” said the commissioner.   read more

As part of the U.S. campaign to undermine Soviet control over Afghanistan, USAID provided school books in local Afghan languages that taught children how to become jihadists. The books are “filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, [and] have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum,” said the Post in 2002. Not only did many of the books survive, but the Taliban is reprinting the books to help those who want to destroy the U.S.   read more

France will put $60 million into a fund to be administered by the United States that will go to survivors, their spouses and their estates who were transported via SNCF railway to German death camps. Between March 1942 and August 1944, SNCF transported about 76,000 Jews and others to the Nazi camps. Fewer than 3% survived.   read more

At first aid groups weren’t targeted by insurgents. But that’s changed in part because of “increased use by the American government and other foreign donors of private aid contractors...which blurred the lines" between independent and government aid groups. Life for independent aid workers in Afghanistan started getting worse after the Afghan military and U.S. Special Forces began showing up at their health clinics, which raised suspicions among residents over the workers’ impartiality.   read more

The movie, "The Interview," stars Seth Rogan and James Franco as television reporters recruited by the CIA to kill Kim Jong-un. With a storyline like that, it may prove to be quite a Christmas gift from Sony to the North Korean leader, as it feeds right into the government’s propaganda machine aimed at its involuntarily captive domestic audience. But that doesn’t mean Kim was pleased to be mocked. When word of the movie first surfaced, North Korean officials “reacted furiously” to it.   read more

Memories of the massacre have not disappeared, nor have the camps themselves. They have become permanent urban slums that now are attracting another kind of refugee: Syrians fleeing their war-torn country. The influx from Syria has caused the populations of Sabra and Shatila to double in size to a combined 40,000 people in both camps. "More than a million people who have streamed from Syria into Lebanon...are radically reshaping neighborhoods like these,” wrote Anne Barnard.   read more

Some television news networks also were subjected to the intrusion, including the Canadian Broadcasting Network and NBC. Dell, Ferrari, National Geographic and Verizon Wireless were also among those attacked. The hackers left behind a pop-up screen that informed visitors to the websites that read: “You’ve been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.”   read more

The Parliament on Thursday adopted a nonbinding resolution calling for the dissolution of Google. The vote was merely symbolic because the legislative body lacks the legal authority to force Google to divest portions of its empire. But it demonstrated just how fed up Europeans are with the growing might and invasive capabilities of American technology.   read more

Cyberwarriors are at it again, this time with a malicious program called Regin that has infected computers in Russia, Saudi Arabia and other countries and is so complex that security experts say it probably came from the United States, Britain or another Western government.   read more

FSA member Assam Murad said: “There’s no way we would fight ISIS after the U.S. military campaign against them.” An alliance is reportedly being formed between ISIS and four groups that were at war earlier this year. About a thousand al-Nusra Front fighters joined ISIS in just one week. Civilians are beginning to welcome ISIS as well for the group’s social measures and its tough-on-crime Sharia law.   read more