global conflict

U.S. officials, describing administration plans to significantly reduce the Guantanamo population over the next six months, said they are in talks with a wide range of countries that they hope will accept all 64 detainees now approved for transfer.

Officials in Moscow confirmed Friday that North Korean despot Kim Jong Un may attend ceremonies next year commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. It would be Kim's first public foreign visit since coming to power in December 2011.

Constitutional Court Secretary Martín Guzmán announced in a press conference that justices of the country's highest court had agreed with a constitutional appeal filed by the Prosecutor's Office against a previous ruling by a lower court judge. A new trial could begin on Jan. 5.

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay – The United States has assured Uruguay that "no information exists" to link to terrorist activities to six former Guantanamo prisoners now living in the South American country, Uruguay's President José Mujica said Tuesday. Mujica also showed a letter in which the refugees express their "eternal gratitude."

At least three people were killed and four wounded as heavily armed Australian police early Tuesday dramatically stormed a central Sydney cafe to end a day-long siege sparked when an Iranian-born Islamist took more than a dozen people hostage.

In downtown San José, just west of the Cementerio de Obreros, sits a forgettable lot of urban real estate where the municipality and the Public Works and Transport Ministry park garbage trucks and heavy equipment. But on this same spot 73 years ago, an internment camp was erected by the government to hold hundreds of German-Costa Rican prisoners after the United States and Costa Rica entered World War II in December 1941.

The Senate report shows that Redha al-Najar was tortured by the CIA for nearly 700 days. He was subjected to isolation in total darkness, sound disorientation techniques, sense of time deprivation, limited light, cold temperatures, sleep deprivation, blaring loud music for 24 hours a day, bad food, and humiliation and degradation such as being made to wear a diaper and having no access to toilet facilities, hooding and shackling.

"This image of the CIA supposedly having run amok and having done all this torture stuff on its own will stick with a large part of the American public," said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst who had a 28-year career in the intelligence community.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee spent five years investigating the CIA's post-Sept. 11, 2001, detention and interrogation program. Its findings, released Tuesday, are at times harrowing. The CIA and former officials vehemently dispute many of the conclusions. In a statement, the agency said the report has "too many flaws for it to stand as the official record of the program."

People demand security and justice. When they get neither, the result is a serious rupture of the bond between the state’s institutions, the people and their representatives.