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The C.I.A. is expanding its covert operations in Afghanistan, sending small teams of highly experienced officers and contractors alongside Afghan forces to hunt and kill Taliban militants across the country, according to two senior American officials, the latest sign of the agency’s increasingly integral role in President Trump’s counterterrorism strategy.

The assignment marks a shift for the C.I.A. in the country, where it had primarily been focused on defeating Al Qaeda and helping the Afghan intelligence service.

The C.I.A. has traditionally been resistant to an open-ended campaign against the Taliban, the primary militant group in Afghanistan, believing it was a waste of the agency’s time and money and would put officers at greater risk as they embark more frequently on missions.

Few countries exemplify the tragedy of the Arab Spring like Libya. The fall of the 42-year dictatorship of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi brought a decade of anarchy as competing governments, militias and foreign powers struggled to seize control of the oil-rich country. The United States and NATO allies that had backed the anti-Qaddafi uprising with a bombing campaign largely turned their backs after he fell, and past United Nations efforts to forge a government foundered in the chaos.

Libyans have a chance to clamber out of the mess. A cease-fire of sorts has been holding since October, and a broad-based political forum convened by the United Nations in November managed to appoint a prime minister and a three-member presidential council charged with leading the country to elections this coming December.

But if there’s to be any chance for peace, the foreign powers that have flooded Libya with weapons, drones and mercenaries — primarily Russia, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates

Addressing Republican donors at his Florida resort on Friday night, Donald Trump said Qassem Suleimani was “saying bad things about our country” before the US president authorised the drone strike which killed the Iranian general and pitched the Middle East to the brink of war.

The speech was not open to reporters but CNN obtained a recording of Trump’s remarks at Mar-a-Lago, which it said undermined official explanations for the decision to kill Suleimani at Baghdad airport on 3 January.

Congress was not informed of the strike in advance, its eventual notification was heavily classified and a congressional briefing prompted bipartisan protest. Democrats have proposed legislation to rein the president in.

At least 80 Yemeni soldiers attending prayers at a mosque were killed and 130 others injured in ballistic missile and drone attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels, the UN Special Envoy for Yemen reported Sunday

Yemen has been embroiled in a yearslong civil war that has pitted a coalition backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

Yemen's Ministry of Defense said the attack was "to avenge the killing of the Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani," who died in a US drone strike in Iraq on January 3. The ministry offered no evidence to show how it might know the rebels' motive.Read MoreThe attack does come, however, as several nations in the Middle East ready themselves for retaliatory attacks by Iranian-backed militias.Yemen's Defense Ministry said "the armed forces will remain the solid rock that breaks the ambitions" of Iran's goal of destabilizing security in Yemen and the wider region, according to a statement carried by Yemeni state news agency Saba.The Houthis did not make any immediate claim of responsibility.

ounting evidence shows that the Chinese Communist Party is running an extralegal campaign of mass internment of more than one million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other predominantly Muslim minorities in the western frontier province Xinjiang

Uighurs and other indigenous peoples are stripped of their traditions, culture, and language. China continues to deceive the world about the scale and depravity of this project but, by contrast with its mendacity regarding the coronavirus pandemic, it is not clear that it needs to do so: The world is not paying much attention.

This project has included the forced migration of millions of ethnic Han Chinese to settle this internal frontier. In the process, the Islamic way of life prevalent in the region has come under dire threat.

In the remaining days of his administration, President Trump is rushing to put into effect a raft of new regulations and executive orders that are intended to put his stamp on business, trade and the economy.

Previous presidents in their final term have used the period between the election and the inauguration to take last-minute actions to extend and seal their agendas.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday banning transactions with eight Chinese software applications, including Alipay.

stemming from U.S. support for Saudi Arabia and the Emirates as they have waged a disastrous war in Yemen, using American equipment in attacks that have killed thousands of civilians

For many young and working class people across the country, the Bernie Sanders campaign brought hope for the first time in their lives.

I cannot vote for him.

, I have seen firsthand how desperately Americans need his life-saving policies. I cried with folks who had lost everything because of pharmaceutical industry greed, natural disasters and crushing student and medical debt.

A renewed buildup of Russian troops near the Ukrainian border has raised concern among some officials in the United States and Europe who are tracking what they consider irregular movements of equipment and personnel on Russia’s western flank.

The renewed movements of Russian forces in the area come as the Kremlin embraces a harder line on Ukraine. Russian officials from President Vladimir Putin on down have escalated their rhetoric in recent months, attacking Kyiv’s Western ties and even questioning its sovereignty.

The situation also comes as the simmering 7½-year conflict between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region enters a new stage. On Oct. 26, Ukraine’s military confirmed it had used a Turkish-made drone against a position in Donbas, the first time Kyiv has employed the technology in combat, prompting an outcry from Moscow.

t feels like a gold rush,” says Timnit Gebru. “In fact, it is a gold rush. And a lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it. But it’s humans who decide whether all this should be done or not. We should remember that we have the agency to do that.”

something that the frenzied conversation about AI misses out: the fact that many of its systems may well be built on a huge mess of biases, inequalities and imbalances of power.

As the co-leader of Google’s small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images

haven’t we been adapting to new technologies for most of human history? If we’re going to use them, shouldn’t the onus be on us to be smart about it

This line of reasoning avoids what should be a central question: Should lying chatbots and deepfake engines be made available in the first place?

A.I.’s errors have an endearingly anthropomorphic name — hallucinations — but this year made clear just how high the stakes can be

Russia is advancing in the east behind a barrage of artillery that has strained Ukrainian defenses and Western unity over support for a protracted war.

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that the U.S. would be sending Ukraine the high mobility artillery rocket system, or HIMARS. "This new package will arm them with new capabilities and advanced weaponry, including HIMARS with battlefield munitions, to defend their territory from Russian advances," he said in a statement.

He said that combined with their targeting capacity aided by commercial drones and counter battery radars, the systems would provide a “distinct qualitative and quantitative improvement” to Ukraine’s combat capability.

The dominant question in American politics today, scholars say, is the relationship between democracy and the capitalist economy. “And to understand capitalism,” said Jonathan Levy, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University and the author of “Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America,” “you’ve got to understand capitalists.”

The new work marries hardheaded economic analysis with the insights of social and cultural history, integrating the bosses’-eye view with that of the office drones — and consumers — who power the system.

I like to call it ‘history from below, all the way to the top,’

The big secret of the Obama administration’s approach to national security, which neither party has had a strong incentive to admit, is that the president’s first-term policies have mostly been a continuation of policies put in place during George W. Bush’s second term, when the Cheneyite maximalism of the immediate post-9/11 era was tempered by a dose of pragmatism.

the president has mostly governed – sometimes by choice, sometimes out of necessity – as a steward of the powers Bush successfully claimed and the war-on-terror architecture that he established. What’s more, in his presidency’s biggest decisions about the use of force abroad – the Afghan surge, the Libya intervention, the escalated drone campaign (and the “kill list” that accompanies it), the green light on the raid to get Bin Laden – Obama has almost always erred on the side of hawkishness and expanded executive authority.

An acknowledgment of consensus is always better than a bogus disagreement, and Romney’s decision to play up his areas of concord with the president didn’t just serve the cause of reassuring swing voters worried by his sometimes hyper-hawkish rhetoric: It served the cause of truth as well.

The U.K. said it would deploy tanks and drones alongside 800 troops in Eastern Europe, the first of several expected moves by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to help counter growing fears about Russia in the region.

“This is about two things: reassurance, and that needs to be done with some formidable presence, and deterrence,” Mr. Fallon said. “This is not simply a trip-wire….This is a serious military presence.”

The answer to the question of how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been to partition “Palestine” into two states. This assumes, however, that the parties only have a dispute over land; but that has never been the case. The conflict has always had political, religious, historical, geographical and psychological dimensions. The international community’s unwillingness to accept this reality has led to the continued fantasy that a two-state solution is possible.

The Palestinians have never been prepared to share any part of the land they claim as their own.

Jews have no place in the Islamic world — except as second-class citizens (dhimmis) under Muslim rule

Afghan Taliban announce successor to Mullah Mansour

The Afghan Taliban have announced a new leader to replace Mullah Akhtar Mansour who was killed in a US drone strike.

Analysts say it is unlikely the group will change direction under hardline religious scholar Akhundzada.