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Syrian rebels group, including Islamists formerly linked to al-Qaeda, launched a military offensive to break the government’s siege of Aleppo, the last major rebel-held city in Syria where 275,000 people have been trapped for months.

Russian and Syrian airstrikes have pounded the rebel-held eastern part of the divided city. Civilian targets, humanitarian convoys, and hospitals have been struck. The government controls the western portion of Aleppo

rebels fired missiles at al-Nayrab, in the east of the city, killing 15 people and wounding 100 others

Rebels in Syria have announced a big offensive aimed at breaking the government siege of east Aleppo.

In response, Russia's defence ministry said it had asked permission from President Vladimir Putin to resume air strikes against the rebels after a 10-day pause, Russian media report.

Russia suspended its air campaign on 18 October to allow evacuations of sick and wounded people but few have heeded the call to leave.

the United States government is still responding at an analog pace to a low-grade, though escalating, digital conflict.

to anyone who reads between the lines and knows a bit of the back story not included in the report, the long lag times between detection and reaction are stunning.

The delays reveal fundamental problems with American cyberdefenses and deterrence that President-elect Donald J. Trump will begin to confront in two weeks

Syria conflict: IS 'destroyed helicopters' at Russian base

New satellite imagery appears to reveal extensive damage to a strategically significant airbase in central Syria used by Russian forces after a reported attack by so-called Islamic State (IS).

Four helicopters and 20 lorries were destroyed in a series of fires inside the T4 base last week, the images from intelligence company Stratfor suggest

For the tens of thousands of spectators who cheered on Russia's spectacular military show on Monday, this was as much about looking to the past -- as preparing for the future

Over the past decade, billions have been spent modernizing and retraining a lumbering fighting force inherited from the Soviet Union.

Huge investments have been made in a new generation of nuclear missiles, tanks, and fighter jets. Even the military's uniforms have been given a slick new makeover

President Trump’s mental state is like a train that long ago left freewheeling and iconoclastic, has raced through indulgent, chaotic and unnerving, and is now careening past unhinged, unmoored and unglued.

Trump’s White House staff is at war with itself. His poll ratings are falling at unprecedented speed. His policy agenda is stalled. F.B.I. investigations are just beginning. This does not feel like a sustainable operation.

On the other hand, I have trouble seeing exactly how this administration ends. Many of the institutions that would normally ease out or remove a failing president no longer exist.

I’m not blaming liberals for Miller’s grim fanaticism. I am noting merely that right-of-center students are often mocked, isolated, and anathematized on campus, and their response is often, sadly, a doubling down on whatever it is that progressives hate. Before too long, they start adopting brattish and obnoxious positions — just to tick off their SJW peers and teachers. After a while, you’re not so much arguing for conservatism as against leftism, and eventually the issues fade and only the hate remains.

Think Ingraham and Coulter and Yiannopoulos. They are reactionaries in the classic sense: Their performance-art politics are almost entirely a reaction to the suffocating leftism that they had to endure as they rose through the American education system.

As a young, lonely conservative in college, I now wince at recalling, I threw a Champagne party to welcome Reagan’s cruise missiles to Britain. Of course I knew better — and could have made a decent argument for deterrence instead of behaving like a brattish dick. But I didn’t. I wanted to annoy and disrupt the smugness around me. If you never mature, this pose can soon become your actual personality — especially when you realize that it can also be extremely lucrative in the conservative-media industrial complex.

ping Money, if Not All Trump Seeks

Over the next two weeks, the military services will be scrambling to get their wish lists in front of top defense officials, hoping their requests for more troops, planes, ships and missiles will be stuffed into President Trump’s proposed $54 billion increase in the Pentagon budget.

The services are betting that Mr. Trump will eventually win a large enough chunk of the money so that they can do a bit of everything, like reversing recent declines in the number of soldiers and Marines and breaking logjams over how many high-tech jets and ships they can afford to build.

Hiroshima is a book about what happened in Japan, to Japan, in August 1945. It is a book about five Japanese and one German hibakusha, or bomb survivors. It is not a book which concerns itself with what the bombing meant for America in military terms, but rather what it meant for the people of Hiroshima in the most human terms.

Inevitably, it also contains within it two Americas. One is the America which develops and uses—not once, but twice—a weapon of a destructive capability which far outstrips anything that has come before, the America which decides what price some other country’s civilian population must pay for its victory. There is nothing particular to America in this—all nations in war behave in much the same way. But in the years between the bombing of Hiroshima and now, no nation has intervened militarily with as many different countries as America, and always on the other country’s soil; which is to say, no nation has treated as many other civilian populations as collateral damage as America while its own civilians stay well out of the arena of war. So that’s one of the Americas in Hiroshima—the America of brutal military power.

But there’s another America in the book, that of John Hersey. The America of looking at the destruction your nation has inflicted and telling it like it is. The America of stepping back and allowing someone else to tell their story through you because they have borne the tragedy and you have the power to bear witness to it. It is the America of The New Yorker of William Shawn, which, for the only time in its history, gave over an entire edition to a single article and kept its pages clear of its famed cartoons. It is the America which honored Hersey for his truth telling.

pay a fine next week

military weapons from Cuba onboard

Chong Chon Gang

Iran is facing a water shortage potentially so serious that officials are making contingency plans for rationing in the greater Tehran area, home to 22 million, and other major cities around the country. President Hassan Rouhani has identified water as a national security issue, and in public speeches in areas struck hardest by the shortage he is promising to “bring the water back.”

Iran’s water troubles extend far beyond Lake Urmia, which as a salt lake was never fit for drinking or agricultural use. Other lakes and major rivers have also been drying up, leading to disputes over water rights, demonstrations and even riots.

Dam construction was given renewed emphasis under Mr. Rouhani’s predecessor as president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who as an engineer had a weakness for grand projects. Another driving force is the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which through its engineering arm, Khatam al-Anbia Construction, builds many of the dams in Iran and surrounding countries.

A bill to create a Japanese National Security Council is set to pass in the nation's parliament, as China's rising maritime assertiveness and North Korea's nuclear ambitions give Prime Minister Shinzo Abe greater leeway to tighten his grip on foreign and defense policies.

Seen as an important step in Mr. Abe's push for Tokyo to expand its role in regional security, the new council is also viewed as a backdoor for the premier to ramp up Japan's military, which is strictly bound under the nation's postwar constitution to a self-defense role.

The idea of creating a U.S.-style NSC has gained traction in recent years as Japan experienced a string of national-security related incidents that prompted it to boost its defense spending and capabilities. These policies have been viewed with caution by Beijing and Seoul amid tensions over historical and territorial issues.

The army disabled the cellphone networks, so residents scramble to higher ground to capture stray signals from Afghan networks. And Internet cafes were shut, on orders from the Taliban, after complaints that young men were watching pornography and racy movies.

That ban distressed families that use the Internet to communicate with relatives working in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and across the Persian Gulf states.

Journalists face particular risks.

In the telling of some American officials, the C.I.A. drone campaign in Pakistan has been a triumph with few downsides

and the pace of the strikes, which officials frequently describe as “surgical” and “contained,” has dropped sharply over the past year.

Pakistani town that has become a virtual test laboratory for drone warfare,

North Korea and South Korea fired hundreds of artillery shells across their disputed western sea border on Monday, escalating military tensions a day after the North threatened to conduct more nuclear tests.

Earlier on Monday, North Korea told the South that it would conduct live-fire military drills in seven zones along the maritime border, which hugs the southern coast of North Korea.

“This is a premeditated provocation to test our will to defend the maritime border, and if the North provokes again using our response today as an excuse, we will act decisively,” Mr. Kim said. “We have increased our vigilance along the western frontier islands and boosted weapons’ readiness there.”