| Ransomed: The race to free 226 Christian hostages in Syria Posted: 06 Dec 2016 04:43 PM PST  SAARLOUIS, Germany (AP) — Deep inside Syria, a bishop worked secretly to save the lives of 226 members of his flock from the Islamic State group — by amassing millions of dollars from his community around the world to buy their freedom.
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| Military doctor denies Chelsea Manning's request to have records reflect gender change Posted: 06 Dec 2016 04:33 PM PST  The decision further stymies Manning's attempts to be treated as a woman while imprisoned at the Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas, said the document filed on Monday in federal court in Washington in relation to on ongoing lawsuit. Manning has been the focus of an international debate over government secrecy since she provided more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
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| Obama: Terror fight needs coalitions, no 'false promises' Posted: 06 Dec 2016 04:31 PM PST  President Barack Obama on Tuesday used his final address on global terror to defend his approach to the fight, calling for coalition-building to continue battlefield successes while rejecting the use of torture. Highlighting the lines drawn during his eight years as commander in chief, Obama did not mention Donald Trump by name, but he clearly addressed his successor, who has yet to spell out his own counterterrorism strategy. "Rather than offer false promises that we can eliminate terrorism by dropping more bombs or deploying more and more troops or fencing ourselves off from the rest of the world, we have to take a long view of the terrorist threat," Obama said.
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| Syrian troops enter Aleppo's Old City, poised for war's biggest victory Posted: 06 Dec 2016 03:14 PM PST  By John Davison and Stephanie Nebehay BEIRUT/GENEVA (Reuters) - Syria's army and allies pushed into rebel-held parts of Aleppo's Old City on Tuesday, a monitoring group said, looking closer than ever to achieving their most important victory of the five-year-old civil war by driving rebels out of their last urban stronghold. A rebel official said they would never abandon Aleppo, after reports that U.S. and Russian diplomats were preparing to discuss the surrender and evacuation of insurgents from territory they have held for years. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said talks with the United States on a rebel withdrawal would begin in Geneva as soon as Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning.
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| Obama defends counterterrorism plan before handover to Trump Posted: 06 Dec 2016 02:58 PM PST  TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Closing out two terms as a president at war, Barack Obama staunchly defended his counterterrorism strategy as one that rejected torture, held to American values and avoided large-scale troop deployments, in an implicit effort to shape the strategy his successor might employ.
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| Obama defends record on terrorism in national security speech Posted: 06 Dec 2016 02:51 PM PST  By Ayesha Rascoe TAMPA, Fla. (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday warned that the United States would not be able to wipe out terrorism with military might as he offered a sweeping defense of his administration's national security record. In his final major speech on counterterrorism as president, Obama argued that his administration had been able to make al Qaeda "a shadow of its former self" and had put Islamic State on its heels, but said terrorism would remain a threat to the United States. "Rather than offer false promises that we can eliminate terrorism by dropping more bombs or deploying more and more troops or fencing ourselves off from the rest of the world, we have to take a long view of the terrorist threat and we have to pursue a smart strategy that can be sustained," Obama said during a speech at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.
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| Iraqi army launches fresh assault toward Mosul center Posted: 06 Dec 2016 02:04 PM PST  By Ahmed Rasheed and Patrick Markey BAGHDAD/ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraqi army units surged toward the center of Mosul on Tuesday in an attack from the city's southeastern edges that could give fresh impetus to the seven-week-old battle for Islamic State's Iraqi stronghold. Campaign commander Lieutenant General Abdul Ameer Rasheed Yarallah was quoted by Iraqi television as saying troops had entered Salam Hospital, less than a mile (1.5 km) from the Tigris river running through the city center. If confirmed, that would mark a significant advance by the Ninth Armoured Division, which had been tied up for more than a month in close-quarter combat with Islamic State on the southeastern fringes of the city.
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| Iraq launches new push in southeast Mosul Posted: 06 Dec 2016 12:12 PM PST  MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — After weeks of unchanging front lines, the Iraqi army rolled Tuesday into a southeastern Mosul neighborhood held by Islamic State militants, taking a hospital before meeting stiff resistance, the military said.
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| Court filing: In Army's eyes, Chelsea Manning still a man Posted: 06 Dec 2016 11:56 AM PST  A military prison psychologist has refused to recommend that Chelsea Manning's gender be changed to female in her Army service record, complicating the transgender soldier's quest to wear a feminine hairstyle at the men's prison where she is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking classified information, according to a court document.
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| NATO, EU make show of unity amid uncertainty posed by Trump Posted: 06 Dec 2016 09:29 AM PST  BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO and the European Union made a public show of unity Tuesday in the face of criticism from Donald Trump, hailing their deepening cooperation as the U.S. president-elect insists European allies start pulling their own military weight.
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| Iraq journalist murdered in Kirkuk Posted: 06 Dec 2016 08:45 AM PST  Gunmen killed the head of a local radio station in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Tuesday, the latest in a string of such murders in the troubled country. "Unidentified gunmen driving a white car assassinated Mohammed Thabet al-Obeidi," a Kirkuk police colonel told AFP, adding that the journalist was on his way to work in the city centre when he was shot. The 38-year-old was in charge of a radio station called Baba Gurgur that broadcasts in Arabic, Kurdish and Turkmen, and also worked for the state-run Iraqi Media Network.
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| Ransomed: The freeing of 226 Christians from Islamic State Posted: 06 Dec 2016 08:39 AM PST  SAARLOUIS, Germany (AP) — The millions in ransom money came in dollar by dollar, euro by euro from around the world. The donations, raised from church offerings, a Christmas concert, and the diaspora of Assyrian Christians on Facebook, landed in a bank account in Iraq. Its ultimate destination: the Islamic State group.
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| Syrian army seizes areas of Aleppo from rebels: state media, monitors Posted: 06 Dec 2016 08:35 AM PST Syrian government forces recaptured several areas near Aleppo's Old City from rebels on Tuesday, state media and the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The areas captured were mostly to the east and northeast of the Old City, but the army and its allies were also pressing forward to its southeast, state television and the Observatory reported. If government forces close the less than one-mile gap between the Old City's citadel and a neighborhood to the east, it will seal off another pocket of rebel control and significantly reduce opposition-held territory that has shrunk rapidly in recent weeks. |
| Last jihadists being hunted down in Libya's Sirte Posted: 06 Dec 2016 08:29 AM PST  Forces loyal to Libya's unity government said Tuesday they were hunting down the last jihadists in the city of Sirte after the Islamic State group's ouster from its former bastion. The pro-GNA force announced its full control of Sirte on Monday, in a major blow to the jihadists, and that dozens of IS fighters had surrendered. Sirte's fall comes as IS also faces a string of military setbacks in Syria and Iraq.
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| Key Reuters photographs from 2016 Posted: 06 Dec 2016 08:13 AM PST  From Syria's festering conflict to the Bastille Day attack in Nice, Reuters photographers have been on the scene to record the biggest news stories this year. A young woman tearing off the niqab she had been forced to wear for two years until U.S.-backed forces liberated her northern Syrian village from Islamic State and a Brazilian mother cradling her daughter who was born with microcephaly are among the most memorable images from 2016. "Moments before I captured this image of Ieshia Evans I had my back turned photographing face-to-face confrontations between the police and the demonstrators," Bachman said in his account.
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| Golden Netanyahu statue put up secretly as protest Posted: 06 Dec 2016 07:37 AM PST  A four-metre-high golden statue of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was raised secretly in a Tel Aviv square in a free speech protest Tuesday, sparking political debate and online humour. It was put up overnight illegally in the centre of the Israeli commercial capital in a square named after former premier Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist. Israeli artist Itay Zalait claimed responsibility, saying he wanted to spark a debate on freedom of speech by replicating the kind of statue erected by dictatorial regimes.
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| Iraqi man convicted in Sweden of war crimes Posted: 06 Dec 2016 06:33 AM PST STOCKHOLM (AP) — A Swedish court has convicted a 24-year-old Iraqi man of war crimes for posting macabre pictures on Facebook after fighting extremists in Iraq — in the first such case in Sweden. |
| Iraqi troops enter another IS-held neighborhood in Mosul Posted: 06 Dec 2016 03:07 AM PST BAGHDAD (AP) — The Iraqi army says troops have entered another neighborhood held by the Islamic State group in the southeastern part of Mosul. |
| Obama's UN envoy refers to Armenian genocide Posted: 06 Dec 2016 02:52 AM PST  WASHINGTON (AP) — Has the Obama administration quietly recognized the World War I-era killing of Armenians as genocide?
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| Islamic State shifts defenses to east Mosul: coalition commander Posted: 06 Dec 2016 02:40 AM PST  By Patrick Markey ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) - Islamic State has brought its forward defenses from western Mosul towards the east as it fights against Iraqi forces in the battle to liberate the city, a coalition commanding general said. Iraqi special forces are slowly edging through districts in eastern Mosul, Islamic State's last stronghold in Iraq, where they face suicide attacks, snipers and mortars from militants dug in among the civilian population. Commanders expected the western half of the city, divided by the Tigris River, to be the tougher battle, but Islamic State - which has controlled the city for two years - appears to be committing its defenses to the east against the Iraqi forces, which are backed by Western-led coalition air strikes.
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| In Afghan province, government woos allies against Islamic State Posted: 06 Dec 2016 02:09 AM PST  By Hamid Shalizi WAMA, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Afghan authorities are appealing to local elders in the remote eastern province of Nuristan to help prevent militants loyal to Islamic State from expanding into new territory. The initiative comes as fighters and their families, scattered in recent months by U.S. and Afghan air strikes and special forces ground operations, seek new safe havens. The mountainous and thickly forested province bordering Pakistan is seen by Afghan authorities as a potential new base for the self-proclaimed offshoot of Islamic State, whose desire to stoke sectarian tensions was underlined this year in a series of high-profile attacks.
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| Center among leaders in filing Freedom of Information Act suits Posted: 06 Dec 2016 02:00 AM PST A willingness to go to court to obtain government records |
| ‘Trump Has Already Created Lots of Chaos’ Posted: 06 Dec 2016 02:00 AM PST Shortly after news broke of Donald Trump's phone call with the head of Taiwan—the first direct communication between American and Taiwanese leaders in 37 years—one of the leading Chinese scholars of U.S.-China relations offered a stunning proposal: If the U.S. president-elect took similar actions as president, the Chinese government should suspend the world's most important (and precarious) partnership. "I would close our embassy in Washington and withdraw our diplomats," said Shen Dingli, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. "I would be perfectly happy to end the relationship." |
| Iraqi troops push towards central Mosul from southeast Posted: 06 Dec 2016 01:47 AM PST  Iraqi army units launched a fresh assault in southeast Mosul on Tuesday and a senior commander was quoted as saying an armored division had advanced to within less than a mile (1.5 km) of the Tigris River running through the city center. Iraqi television quoted operations commander Lieutenant-General Abdul Ameer Rasheed Yarallah as saying troops had entered the Salam Hospital in the southeastern neighborhood of Wahda, close to the river. An army colonel told Reuters the offensive, backed by fresh reinforcements and launched at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, aimed to overwhelm Islamic State militants who have been waging fierce counter attacks against the army in the east of the city.
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| Turkish, US military chiefs meet at Incirlik air base Posted: 06 Dec 2016 12:01 AM PST ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkey's military says the country's military chief has held talks with his U.S. counterpart during a previously announced visit to an air base in southern Turkey. |
| World leaders face risks in reconciling with past enemies Posted: 05 Dec 2016 11:40 PM PST  Reconciliation can be tricky. It took 70 years for an American president to visit the site of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and nearly 75 for a Japanese leader to announce he would visit Pearl Harbor, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did Monday.
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| Today in History Posted: 05 Dec 2016 09:01 PM PST Today in History |
| Radical Islam breeds in deprived corner of Serbia Posted: 05 Dec 2016 08:12 PM PST  In a country proud of its Orthodox Christianity, the Serbian city of Novi Pazar is a place apart: young bearded men in ankle-length trousers stroll the streets, the restaurants don't serve alcohol, and the call of the muezzin punctuates the daily routine. Faced with massive unemployment and a feeling of exclusion against the backdrop of the Syrian war, this Muslim majority area of southwest Serbia has become a breeding ground for Islamist extremists. "Death in the way of Allah in Syria, 14 May 2013, aged 27" was a notice once posted on the concrete walls of Novi Pazar, which lies in the region of Sandzak.
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| Factbox: Trump fills top jobs for his administration Posted: 05 Dec 2016 06:41 PM PST (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Monday he would name retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The following is a list of Republican Trump's selections for top jobs in his administration. All the posts but that of national security adviser require Senate confirmation: DEFENSE SECRETARY: JAMES MATTIS Mattis is a retired Marine Corps general known for his tough talk, distrust of Iran and battlefield experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. |
| Top U.S. Marine's wish-list for Trump goes well beyond troop hikes Posted: 05 Dec 2016 06:13 PM PST  By Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Marine Corps Commandant General Robert Neller, like much of the Pentagon top brass, is pretty happy about President-elect Donald Trump's campaign pledge to rebuild America's military after years of congressionally imposed spending caps. "That's a lot," Neller told Reuters in an interview. Neller, like many of his Pentagon colleagues, thinks America's military needs to shift quickly to prepare for more sophisticated adversaries than the insurgents the United States has been fighting in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
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