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The Kurdish "peshmerga" carried for years the heaviest burden of the fight against the IS with practically no military support. However, they advanced boldly and steadily from the North and Northeast on Mosul, while the Iraqi army is taking months to recapture Mosul with a very scant allied military support. The current situation of prolonged war results from the hasty and announced withdrawal of coalition troops prematurely initiated in 2011 when total victory against islamist forces was already in sight.  

Jan. 12.─ Iraqui and Western coalition commanders had promised a rapid victory in Mosul when they launched an offensive to retake the city from Islamic State (IS) in October. But the battle for Iraq’s second city has lasted three months, and Iraq’s prime minister says it will continue for at least as long again.

IS fighters initially put up stronger resistance than expected. After stalling in December, Iraq’s army has made rapid gains in the eastern half of the city over the past ten days. IS leaders have retreated to the west, blowing up the remaining bridges over the Tigris river as they left. But as the Iraqi army consolidates its hold on Mosul’s east, the siege of the west will intensify. A fresh assault across the river is not planned until early March. What is the scene on the ground—and how are the 1.1m civilians left in the divided city coping?

Worrying experiments with a new form of social control   

When communism crumbled in the Soviet Union, 25 years ago this week, the Chinese Communist Party seemed to many to be heading irreversibly downwards. Yes, the tanks had left Tiananmen Square after crushing a revolt in 1989, but the war appeared lost. Even China’s breakneck growth, which took off a year after the Soviet collapse, looked likely only to tear the party further from its ideological bedrock. In 1998 President Bill Clinton intimated that he foresaw an inevitable democratic trajectory. He told his Chinese counterpart, Jiang Zemin, that China was “on the wrong side of history”.

Yet, while the West has suffered from the financial crisis and the fallout after a failed attempt to implant democracy in the Middle East, China’s Communist Party has clung on to its monopoly of power. Its leaders behave as if China will never have to undergo the democratic transformation that every rich country has passed through on the way to prosperity. Instead they seem to believe that the party can keep control—and some officials are betting that the way to do so lies in a new form of digital dictatorship.

A party apart

"We can say, we have said, repeatedly over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party," Assange declared in an interview.

Assange says he is "1,000% confident" that Russia was NOT the source for hacked Democratic emails which were published by WikiLeaks

London, Jan.3.─ WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said Barack Obama is 'trying to delegitimize the Trump administration' by claiming the Russian government hacked Democrats' emails during the bitter presidential election.

Assange, whose interview with Sean Hannity will air on Fox News tonight [Jan.3], also reiterated his claims that Russia was not the source of the hacks.

^{According to inteligence reports
North Korea has ten nuclear warheads
and it is building more.
It is still developing ballistic missiles
capable of delivering them.
Analysts believe that North Korea
will be able to deliver
intercontinental nuclear warheads
by the end of 2018 or early 2019.}

Pyongyang won't give up its nuclear warfare program  

Seoul, Dec.27.─ Thae Yong-ho, who defected to South Korea in August while serving as a minister at North Korea's embassy in London, warned at a press conference in Seoul on Tuesday that North Korea will accelerate its nuclear program in 2017, that China won’t stop it, and that international bribes won’t induce dictator Kim Jong Un to abandon nuclear weapons. This is notable because until this summer Mr. Thae was a senior diplomat—for North Korea.