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Taliban council agrees to temporary cease-fire in Afghanistan

The Taliban said Sunday they have agreed to a temporary cease-fire nationwide.

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N Korea begins key meeting before year-end deadline for US

North Korea has opened a high-profile political conference to discuss how to overcome “harsh trials and difficulties," state media reported Sunday, days before a year-end deadline set by Pyongyang for Washington to make concessions in nuclear negotiations. The ruling Workers’ Party meeting is a focus of keen attention as some observers predict North Korea might use the conference to announce it would abandon faltering diplomacy with the U.S. and lift its moratorium on major weapons test. The Korean Central News Agency reported that leader Kim Jong Un presided over a plenary meeting of the party's Central Committee convened in Pyongyang on Saturday.

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Iran blasts France for 'interference' over jailed academic

Tehran accused Paris on Sunday of "interference" in the case of an Iranian-French academic held in the Islamic republic, saying she is considered an Iranian national and faces security charges. France said Friday it summoned Iran's ambassador to protest the imprisonment of Fariba Adelkhah and another academic, Roland Marchal of France, saying their detention was "intolerable".

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Turkey evacuates wounded after deadly Mogadishu blast

A Turkish military cargo plane landed in the Somali capital on Sunday to evacuate people badly wounded in a devastating truck bombing that killed at least 90 people including two Turkish nationals. The plane also brought emergency medical staff and supplies, the Turkish embassy said in a tweet, adding these had been taken to a Turkish-run hospital in Mogadishu. Somali Information Minister Mohamed Abdi Hayir Mareye told state media that 10 Somalis who were badly wounded in Saturday's blast would be evacuated to Turkey.

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Republican senator says ‘there are virtually no rules’ for impeaching Trump

A Republican senator has said there are “virtually no substantive rules” for impeachment as he avoided criticising Mitch McConnell for pledging to coordinate with Donald Trump in the impending Senate trial.John Kennedy, a senator for Louisiana, was asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if he was “disturbed” by Mr McConnell’s pledge, as Republican senator Lisa Murkowski said she was earlier this week.

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Thai SEAL dies of blood infection a year after cave rescue

A Thai navy SEAL who was part of the dramatic rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach from a flooded cave has died of a blood infection contracted during the risky operation, the Royal Thai Navy said. Petty Officer 1st Class Bayroot Pakbara was receiving treatment but his condition worsened after the infection spread into his blood, according to an announcement on the Thai navy SEAL’s Facebook page. Lt. Cmdr. Saman Gunan died while resupplying oxygen tanks on July 6, 2018.

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Hanukkah stabbing that injured five called 'domestic terrorism' by New York governor

A stabbing at the house of a Hasidic rabbi in New York which left five injured has been condemned as “domestic terrorism” by the state’s governor. Andrew Cuomo said the attack during a gathering to celebrate Hanukkah was evidence of a “cancer” spreading in America as he warned of a surge in “hatred”. Police named the suspect arrested as Grafton E. Thomas, 37. He will face five counts of attempted murder and one count of burglary. The attack happened around 10pm on Saturday in Monsey, an area with a large population of ultra-Orthodox Jews which is about 35 miles north of the city of New York. Witnesses described a man bursting into the home of the rabbi, Chaim Rottenberg, where dozens of people had gathered on the seventh night of Hanukkah. The assailant’s face was said to have been partially covered by a scarf and he brandished a large knife. Guests reportedly fought back by throwing tables and chairs. Police said the stabbings happened at around 10 p.m. Credit: REUTERS The exact status of the victims was unclear on Sunday evening but one person was said to have been very seriously wounded. The rabbi’s son was among those injured. Aron Kohn, 65, who witnessed the attack told The New York Times: “I was praying for my life. He started attacking people right away as soon as he came in the door. We didn’t have time to react at all.” “We saw him pull a knife out of a case. It was about the size of a broomstick.” The attacker later attempted to enter a synagogue next door before fleeing the area. A witness noted the assailant’s license plate number and alerted the police, with a suspect later being arrested in Harlem. Extra police patrols were organised for three areas of Brooklyn, a New York borough with a large Jewish population, in the wake of the stabbing. In Britain, the chief constable of West Midlands Police said he would provide reassurance to local Jewish communities. Investigators cordoned off the large home on Forshay Road yellow crime scene tape Credit: Seth Harrison/The Journal News via AP Mr Cuomo, who has been New York governor since 2011, said: “It is domestic terrorism. These are people who intend to create mass harm, mass violence, and generate fear based on race, colour, creed. That is the definition of terrorism. “Just because they don't come from another country doesn't mean they are not terrorists. They should be prosecuted as domestic terrorists." "We are not going to let this poison spread. No one else can defeat this county, but this country can defeat itself.” The stabbing is the latest in a string of brutal attacks that have alarmed the Jewish community, leading to renewed concerns about anti-Semitisim in America. Earlier this month a shooting in a Jersey City kosher market saw three people inside the store and a police officer killed. The two attackers also died in a standoff with police. In October 2018, a gunman killed 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history. Mr Coumo, speaking outside the rabbi’s house on Sunday, said: “This is an intolerant time in our country. We see anger, we see hatred exploding." He added: “It is an American cancer on the body politic." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country “unequivocally condemns” the “vicious attack”. He pledged to “cooperate in every way” with the local authorities to help stamp out anti-Semitism. It is not known how the suspect will plead. Ivanka Trump, a senior White House adviser and daughter of the US president, issued a call for more political action to tackle anti-Semitism in the wake of the attack. She tweeted: "The increasing frequency of anti-Semitic violence in New York (and around the country) receives far too little local governmental action and national press attention."

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Louisa May Alcott’s Courageous Career as a Civil War Nurse

The Christmas release of director Greta Gerwig’s new film version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women presents a fresh opportunity for Alcott’s 19th-century classic to be read as a book that speaks to the present feminist moment. But it will be a shame if the renewed interest in Alcott that Gerwig has sparked does not also lead to a long-overdue appreciation of Alcott’s heroism in the Civil War.In 1862, two weeks before Christmas, Alcott left her home in Concord, Massachusetts, to serve the Union cause by working in a military hospital in Washington, D.C. In Little Women Alcott made the Civil War the background for her story of the March sisters and their mother, but in 1862 the Civil War became central to Alcott’s life.In the Union Hotel Hospital, a former Georgetown tavern in which she worked, Alcott saw death firsthand, and, like the doctors and nurses in the hospital, became vulnerable to the disease and infection the wounded troops brought with them.Men Will Love ‘Little Women’ Too. I Can’t Believe I Have to Say That.Walt Whitman’s account in Specimen Days of his work at the modern Union hospital in Washington, D.C., is far better known than Alcott’s. When we think of the suffering experienced by the soldiers of the Civil War, the quote most often cited is Whitman’s “the real war will never get in the books.”Alcott’s stories of her Civil War experiences appeared serially in May and June 1863 in the Commonwealth, a Boston anti-slavery newspaper. They are as moving as anything Whitman wrote about the war and were published together in August 1863 under the title Hospital Sketches long before Specimen Days appeared in book form.Alcott began her Civil War nursing service as a novice. On Dec. 16, 1862, the carts she saw drawing up to the hospital to which she had been assigned were not, as she first thought, farmer’s market carts carrying produce. They were carts bearing wounded and dying men from the battle of Fredericksburg, where the Union Army endured one of its worst defeats of the war, suffering 13,000 casualties. There was no time for Alcott to absorb the war gradually or get used to the sight of a veteran “with an arm blown off at the shoulder.”Alcott soon realized her duties were as much psychological as physical: “Having got the bodies of my boys into something like order, the next task was to minister to their minds,” she observed early in Hospital Sketches. The doctors, after doing their best for their patients, had no hesitation in giving Alcott the unwelcome task of telling men who were dying that they would not survive their hospital stay.“I could have sat down on the spot and cried heartily, if I had not learned the wisdom of bottling up one’s tears for leisure moments,” Alcott wrote of an especially painful assignment to deliver the bad news. She did as told. Then she stayed with the soldier to the end.When the soldier died, he was holding Alcott’s hand so tightly that she needed help prying open his grip. Even when her hand got back its color, the white marks of the dead soldier’s fingers remained. “I could not but be glad that through its touch, the presence of human sympathy, perhaps had lightened that hard hour,” Alcott remarked.Over the course of her time in Washington, Alcott became better at learning to deal with the suffering around her, but she never shut her eyes to the wrongs she saw. She was especially sensitive to the racism of the North. “The nurses were willing to be served by the colored people, but seldom thanked them, never praised, and scarcely recognized them in the street,” she noted. In her postscript to Hospital Sketches, she observed that the next hospital she hoped to work in would be one for “colored regiments.”That next assignment never came. As a result of her hospital work, Alcott contracted pneumonia and typhus. At the end of six weeks at the military hospital that she called Hurly-burly House because of its disorganization, Alcott’s father, the famed educator Bronson Alcott, came to Washington to take her home. As her biographer Susan Cheever has written, “She left for the war a vigorous and energetic woman; she returned a true casualty.”Alcott suffered from mercury poisoning that came from the doses of calomel medicine the doctors in Washington prescribed for her, and the physician treating her at her home in Concord added to her difficulties, ordering her head shaved on the grounds the shaving would lower her fever. Sick as she was, Alcott thought she had no grounds for complaint given the horrors she had witnessed in Washington. As she wrote in her understated conclusion to Hospital Sketches, “I shall never regret the going, though a sharp tussle with typhoid, ten dollars and a wig are all the visible results of the experiment; for one may live and learn much in a month.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Scuffles break out in Paris as pensions protesters, 'yellow vests' march

Protesters marching against the French government's planned pension reform clashed with the police in Paris on Saturday as police fired tear gas to disperse some groups of demonstrators. French trade unions have spearheaded nationwide strikes since early December in an outcry over President Emmanuel Macron's pensions overhaul, disrupting schools, railways and roads, while lending support to regular protests. On Saturday "yellow vests" - an anti-government movement that sprung up a year ago as a backlash against the high cost of living - joined a rally of several thousand people against the pensions shake-up.