One day this month, a pair of Russian Mi-17 assault helicopters delivered two teams of Afghan commandos, their faces obscured by black masks, in a touch-and-go landing at this camp in a lush valley encircled by frosty peaks about 50 miles from Kabul.

A training squadron drawn from the most secretive counterterrorism units fielded by the United States and its NATO allies watched as the Afghan commandos stormed and cleared a three-story office building that was left conspicuously unfinished ”” the kind of structure favored by insurgents.

This is the combination of Afghan and allied troops that the Obama administration and the government in Kabul say will assume an increasing share of the combat burden in Afghanistan as the NATO alliance gradually hands over responsibility for security operations to Afghan troops.

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Responding to Carson’s testimony at a House Subcommittee on Africa hearing in July 2012, Subcommittee Chairman, U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ), remonstrated that poverty alone does not drive people to violence. And in any case, Boko Haram is well funded by outside Islamists. “Heavy machine guns” and “buses and pickup trucks mounted with machine guns” are just the latest examples to show that Boko Haram is not just a motley crew of impoverished, marginalized local Muslims. In February 2013 it was revealed that hundreds of Boko Haram members had trained for months in terrorist camps in northern Mali with the local “Ansar Dine” al Qaeda of Mali. Their former chef, explained that he cooked for over 200 Nigerians who had “arrived in Timbuktu in April 2012 in about 300 cars, after al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) swept into the city.”

In its 2013 Nigeria briefing, human rights group Justice for Jos +, a project of Jubilee Campaign USA, remarked, “Ironically, in northern Nigeria, it is Christians who are totally disenfranchised politically, economically, and socially in their own states and by their own ethnic groups due to their religious identity.” This is worse than just “political marginalization,” Mr. Carson! Justice for Jos + continues, “Christians are regarded as inferior to Muslims and suffer ongoing, systematic and comprehensive discrimination even by local and (Sharia) state governments.”

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Beijing is engaged in systematic cyber spying on the US military and private businesses to acquire technology to boost military modernisation and strengthen its capacity in any regional crisis, according to the Pentagon.

In its annual report to Congress on the People’s Liberation Army, the Pentagon gives new emphasis to the threat of cyber-espionage from China, an issue that has been the subject of top-level complaints to Beijing by Washington.

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In a time when the whetted and arbitrary deficit-reduction knife is cutting bone out of critical U.S. government programs, the image of shopping bags stuffed with CIA cash handed off on a monthly basis to Afghan President Hamid Karzai ”” who reigns over one of the most corrupt governments on the planet ”” has outraged many Americans.

The New York Times, which revealed the years of payoffs this week, noted that “there is little evidence the payments bought the influence the CIA sought.”

In fact, regular cash handouts of this type may do the opposite. They may well have enabled Karzai’s frequent and theatrical outbursts against U.S. officials and policies, not to mention his collusion with some of his country’s most corrupt and abusive officials. Such payoffs signal to Karzai ”” or other leaders like him ”” that he enjoys the unwavering support of the CIA, no matter what he does or says, and embolden him to thumb his nose at the United States whenever he feels like it.

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Israel’s reported airstrikes in Syria ”” and the threat of a retaliatory strike by the Syrian government ”” are likely to accelerate the decision-making of the Obama administration, which was already moving toward a sharp escalation of U.S. involvement in the two-year-old crisis.

Senior officials said the deployment of U.S. troops to Syria remains unlikely, but they have indicated that a decision will come within weeks on options ranging from the supply of weapons to the Syrian rebels to the use of U.S. aircraft and missiles to ground President Bashar al-Assad’s air power by destroying planes, runways and missile sites inside Syria.

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Recent Israeli strikes inside Syria may have exposed weaknesses in the regime’s air defenses and could embolden the U.S. and its allies to take more steps to aid rebels fighting the regime there, said lawmakers on Sunday.

“The Russian-supplied air defense systems are not as good as said,” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Leahy, who heads the appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations, said the Israeli defense forces were using American-made F-16 Fighting Falcon jets to launch the missiles against Syrian targets.

“Keep in mind the Israelis are using weapons supplied by us,” Leahy said. “They have enormous prowess with those weapons.”

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The airstrike that Israeli warplanes carried out in Syria was directed at a shipment of advanced surface-to-surface missiles from Iran that Israel believed was intended for Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese organization, American officials said Saturday.

It was the second time in four months that Israel had carried out an attack in foreign territory aimed at disrupting the pipeline of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah. The missiles, known as Fateh-110s, had been sent to Syria by Iran and were being stored at an airport in Damascus when they were struck in the attack, according to an American official.

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A US government-appointed panel urged Washington Tuesday to step up pressure on Pakistan over religious freedom, warning that risks to its minorities have reached a crisis level.

In an annual report, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom also raised concerns about what it called a worsening situation in China, as well as problems in Egypt, Iran, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia and other nations.

The commission, which advises the government but does not make decisions, called for the United States to designate Pakistan, among eight other countries, as a “country of particular concern,” meaning it could be subject to sanctions if it fails to improve.

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In the thirty or so years that I have been following EU affairs ”“ or is it nearer 35 years now since I studied in French literature in Paris, and German philosophy in Mainz ”“ I have never seen ties between Europe’s two great land states reduced so low.

The French Socialist Party crossed a line by lashing out at Chancellor Angela Merkel in person. It is one thing to protest “German austerity”, it is quite another to rebuke the “selfish intransigence of Mrs Merkel, who thinks of nothing but the deposits of German savers, the trade balance recorded by Berlin and her electoral future”.

There is no justification for such an ad hominem attack. German policy is indeed destructive, but that is structural. It is built into the mechanisms of EMU and the anthropological make-up of the enterprise.

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President Hamid Karzai acknowledged Monday that the Central Intelligence Agency has been dropping off bags of cash at his office for a decade, saying the money was used for “various purposes” and expressing gratitude to the United States for making the payments.

Mr. Karzai described the sums delivered by the C.I.A. as a “small amount,” though he offered few other details. But former and current advisers of the Afghan leader have said the C.I.A. cash deliveries have totaled tens of millions of dollars over the past decade and have been used to pay off warlords, lawmakers and others whose support the Afghan leader depends upon.

The payments are not universally supported in the United States government. American diplomats and soldiers expressed dismay on Monday about the C.I.A.’s cash deliveries, which some said fueled corruption. They spoke privately because the C.I.A. effort is classified.

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The nephew of bishop Yohanna Ibrahim, one of the two archbishops kidnapped in Syria a week ago, said he hopes Syrian Christians will not use the incident as an incentive to flee the country.

Bishop Ibrahim, head of the Syriac Orthodox Church in Aleppo, was kidnapped last Monday, alongside his counterpart from the Greek Orthodox Church, Bishop Boulos Yaziji, close to the Turkish border.The driver of the vehicle, Fathallah Kaboud, was killed.

Kaboud had been the personal chauffeur of bishop Ibrahim for a number of years. He leaves behind a wife and two children.

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In the latest reported attack on a high-ranking Syrian official, Prime Minister Wael Nader al-Halqi survived what appeared to be an assassination attempt Monday in an upscale neighborhood of the capital, Damascus, when a car bomb exploded near his convoy, according to state-run media and opposition reports saying that a bodyguard was killed.

The reports said the attack had taken place in Mezze, a central district where many senior officials live. The prime minister was reportedly unhurt, thought state media said others had been injured. Video on state television showed a car reduced to a charred skeleton and, nearby, a bus with its windows shattered.

The assault fit a pattern of attempts to attack high officials.

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To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking, in conjunction with other Governments, to document the scale and nature of the alleged use of sexual violence as an instrument of war by the Government of Syria and other parties involved in the conflict in Syria….

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the extent of the use of sexual violence as an instrument of war in Syria….

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what resources they are providing, either unilaterally or as part of international action, to ensure that victims of sexual violence in Syria are provided with the necessary medical and trauma support.

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Set amid the rolling plains outside Aleppo, the town of al-Safira looks just like another vicious battleground in Syria’s civil war. On one side are lightly-armed rebels, on the other are government troops, and in between is a hotly-contested no-man’s land of bombed-out homes and burned-out military vehicles.

The fight for al-Safira is no ordinary turf war, however, and the prize can be found behind the perimeter walls of the heavily-guarded military base on the edge of town. Inside what looks like a drab industrial estate is one of Syria’s main facilities for producing chemical weapons – and among its products is sarin, the lethal nerve gas that the regime is now feared to be deploying in its bid to cling to power.

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The Anglican bishops of the West Indies have urged their governments to hold fast and resist pressure from Britain and the United States to legalize gay rights and gay marriage.

In a statement released on 25 April 2013 following the House of Bishops meeting in Barbados, bishops of the Church the Province of the West Indies (CPWI) reiterated their belief in marriage “defined as a faithful, committed, permanent and legally sanctioned relationship between a man and a woman.”

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Since the very first days of the Syrian conflict in March 2011, we have prayed as we watched in horror and sorrow the escalating violence that has rent this country apart. We have grieved with all Syrians – with the families of each and every human life lost and with all communities whose neighbourhoods and livelihoods have suffered from escalating and pervasive violence.

And today, our prayers also go with the ancient communities of our Christian brothers and sisters in Syria. The kidnapping this week of two Metropolitan bishops of Aleppo, Mar Gregorios Ibrahim of the Syriac Orthodox Church and Paul Yazigi of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, and the killing of their driver while they were carrying out a humanitarian mission, is another telling sign of the terrible circumstances that continue to engulf all Syrians.

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The White House said on Thursday that American intelligence agencies now believed, with “varying degrees of confidence,” that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons, but it said it needed conclusive proof before President Obama would take action.

The disclosure, in letters to Congressional leaders, takes the administration a step closer to acknowledging that President Bashar al-Assad has crossed a red line established by Mr. Obama last summer, when he said the United States would take unspecified action against Syria if there was evidence that chemical weapons had been used in the civil war.

The White House emphasized that, “given the stakes involved,” the United States still needed “credible and corroborated facts” before deciding on a course of action. The letter, signed by the president’s director of legislative affairs, Miguel E. Rodriguez, said the United States was pressing for a “comprehensive United Nations investigation that can credibly evaluate the evidence and establish what happened.”

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Humanitarian agencies are running low on funds to help millions of people affected by the war in Syria, prompting one United Nations official to warn: “Our capacity to do more is diminishing.”

Syria’s two-year-old war has fueled a humanitarian catastrophe in the region, U.N. officials say. The U.N.’s Security Council has demanded an end to the escalating violence and condemned human rights abuses by all sides.

“Our agencies and humanitarian partners have been doing all we can. The needs are growing, while our capacity to do more is diminishing,” U.N. Under-Secretary General Valerie Amos said in a video appealing for worldwide support of aid efforts.

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The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews.

From his hospital bed, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has acknowledged his role in planting the explosives near the marathon finish line on April 15, the officials said. The first successful large-scale bombing in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era, the Boston attack killed three people and wounded more than 250 others.

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Israel’s senior military intelligence analyst said Tuesday that the Syrian government had repeatedly used chemical weapons in the last month, and criticized the international community for failing to respond, intensifying pressure on the Obama administration to intervene.

“The regime has increasingly used chemical weapons,” said Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, research commander in the intelligence directorate of the Israeli Defense Forces, echoing a recent finding by Britain and France. “The very fact that they have used chemical weapons without any appropriate reaction,” he added, “is a very worrying development, because it might signal that this is legitimate.”

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[…An] important strand of the British effort is what the UK government calls the “Prevent” strategy. This involves the police and local authorities working with Muslim organisations and communities to ensure that British nationals who become radicalised are identified and encouraged to channel their anger before they resort to violence.

Professor Michael Clarke, an expert on counter-terrorism at the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank, says the strategy has had some success. “It is about getting the Muslim community to accept responsibility for people in their midst, helping to identify those who are radicalised and working with the police and local authorities to stop them before they plan attacks,” he says….like a number of UK experts, he argues that the US has been slow to tackle “homegrown” jihadism pre-emptively. “The Americans find it hard to accept that jihadism can arise from within their own society. They still feel the phenomenon is pushed into the US by outside forces or foreign actors.”

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed suspected marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 at the request of the Russian government, but didn’t find evidence of suspicious activity and closed the case, an FBI official said Friday.

The fact that the FBI spoke with Mr. Tsarnaev, who was killed Friday morning in a firefight with authorities, is likely to become a focal point of the post mortem into how the attack was able to be carried out at the Boston Marathon. It also speaks to the challenge faced by authorities as terrorism morphs to some extent from the complex international plots of a decade ago to small-scale attacks carried out by individuals located within U.S.

U.S. counterterrorism policy has since 2001 focused largely on killing terrorists overseas or preventing them from getting into the U.S. But the Boston bombings show how the diffusion of terrorist tactics easily transcends borders. Countering small groups of individuals inside the U.S. can be a bedeviling assignment.

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We have no way of knowing how this all ends. One problem is that the smartest solution””having Germany and perhaps a handful of other northern countries leave the euro for a new currency (the Deutche Mark 2.0, or a “neuro” for northern Europe)””would make life easier in the south. The south based euro would fall in value, but since debts and contracts are denominated in that currency, the adjustment would be the same as in a normal devaluation. This course would likely lead quickly to a new burst of growth in the south, though inflation and other problems would take a toll over time.

But the euro’s break up day would cause a lot of problems for Germany and its northern friends….

So we’re in an interesting situation. The crisis is crippling the south, but the south has no power to resolve the crisis. The crisis isn’t comfortable for the north but still looks less painful than the solution. So the north, which has the ability to resolve the crisis, doesn’t have the will to do it and the south, which has the will, lacks the ability.

Read it all (and please note that the Financial Times article by Wolfgang Münchau which is mentioned, entitled “The riddle of Europe’s single currency with many values,” is indeed a must read as Mr. Read says).

Cybersecurity needs to be taken seriously by everyone. We continue to think of cyberthreats in military or classical warfare terms, when in fact cyber can simply render the military paradigm irrelevant. The whole information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure must be regarded as an “ecosystem” in which everything is interconnected. It functions as a whole; it must be defended as a whole.

Today, almost everything we do depends on a digitized system of one kind or another. Our critical infrastructure ”” our electrical, water or energy production systems and traffic management ”” essentially interacts with, and cannot be separated from, our critical information infrastructure ”” private Internet providers, lines of telecommunications and the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (Scada) systems that run everything from nuclear power plants to delivery of milk to our supermarkets.

Understanding that cybersecurity means defending the entirety of our societies, we need to re-examine many assumptions of security. In cyberwarfare, it is much harder to identify the attacker, and therefore to know how to retaliate.

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US Secretary of State John Kerry has said an anticipated missile launch by North Korea would be a “provocative act” and “huge mistake”.

The North has moved two missiles to its east coast and South Korea is on alert.

Speaking in Seoul, Mr Kerry reconfirmed the US’s commitment to protecting itself and its allies.

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“Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.” So asserted German Chancellor Angela Merkel late last year, causing a stir. Merkel echoed a concern expressed by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who warned in a 2011 speech that Christians face a “particularly wicked program of cleansing in the Middle East, religious cleansing.”

Now, this is not about clerks who say “Happy Holidays” or bans of nativity scenes in public schools. Merkel spoke of real persecution of hundreds of millions of Christians around the world. Indeed, a 2011 Pew Forum study found that Christians are harassed in 130 countries, more than any of the world’s other religions.

The just-released book Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians provides the gory details behind these statistics….

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North Korea said on Tuesday it would restart its only nuclear reactor to provide plutonium for its weapons program, an announcement that added to already-heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula and drew swift international criticism.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was “deeply troubled” by the rising tensions. “Nuclear threats are not a game,” he said at a news conference in Andorra. “The current crisis has already gone too far.”

Later Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called the North’s recent belligerent rhetoric “unacceptable” and said the U.S. will defend itself as well as South Korea and Japan from any threat from the North, the Associated Press reported.

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Richard Bejtlich was a cyber-specialist for the U.S. Air Force in the 1990s, a time when the U.S. military was going on the offense in the cyberwar. He remembers the day he realized how important a software vulnerability can be to a cyberweapons designer.

“Myself and a couple other guys, we found a zero day vulnerability in Cisco routing equipment,” Bejtlich recalls. “And we looked at it, and we said, ‘Did we really find this? Can we really get into these Cisco routers?'”

They could, and so Bejtlich and his colleagues reported it to Cisco. They thanked him and said they’d fix it. Days later, he was talking to some friends who worked on the offensive side of the unit, and they had quite a different reaction to them reporting the bug to Cisco.

“They said, ‘You did what? Why didn’t you tell us? We could have used this to get into all these various hard targets,'” he says.

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China surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s biggest trading nation last year as measured by the sum of exports and imports of goods, official figures from both countries show.

U.S. exports and imports of goods last year totaled $3.82 trillion, the U.S. Commerce Department said last week. China’s customs administration reported last month that the country’s trade in goods in 2012 amounted to $3.87 trillion.

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Senior U.S. officials are pressing to mark for the killing or capture of the self-proclaimed mastermind of last month’s attack on an Algerian natural-gas facility that claimed the lives of 37 foreign hostages, including three Americans.

Adding the Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar to a U.S. targeted-killing list would represent a significant U.S. expansion into northwestern Africa, extending the reach of the U.S. program of drone strikes and other lethal counterterrorism operations, which have concentrated on Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan.

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