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

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The lack of a distress call and flight data recorder coupled with mangled and charred wreckage will make finding the cause of a fiery airplane crash in Louisiana extremely challenging, federal officials said Sunday. National Transportation Safety Board Vice Chairman Bruce Landsberg said at a press conference that it could take 12 to 18 months to figure out why the two-engine Piper Cheyenne fell from the sky about a minute after taking off from the Lafayette Regional Airport on Saturday.

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Russia says it has deployed its first hypersonic missiles which President Putin claims are capable of transporting nuclear warheads at 27 times the speed of sound. The location of the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle has not been confirmed but has been widely reported to be the Urals, a mountain range in western Russia. Sergei Shoigu, Russia's defence minister confirmed that the missiles entered service at 10am Moscow time on Friday, describing their deployment as a "landmark event".  Vladimir Putin said that the missiles put Russia ahead of the rest of the world. "Not a single country possesses hypersonic weapons, let alone continental-range hypersonic weapons," he said, arguing that the West was "playing catch-up with us". "The Avangard is invulnerable to intercept by any existing and prospective missile defence means of the potential adversary." Vladimir Putin said that the West is now "playing catch-up" Credit: REUTERS Moscow said the Avangard is launched on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile but it can make sharp manoeuvres on the way to its target, making it more difficult to intercept. The Russian government had announced the missiles last year and in March 2018 Mr Putin likened the missile to a "meteorite" and a "fireball" in a state address. The Avangard, which Mr Putin said could penetrate current and future missile defence systems, can carry a nuclear weapon of up to two megatons. The Pentagon responded to the deployment by saying it would "not characterise the Russian claims" about the Avangard's capabilities. The United States has its own hypersonic missile programme, as does China, which in 2014 said it had carried out a test flight. The US has been developing hypersonic weapons in recent years. In August, Mark Esper, the defence secretary, said the Pentagon was some years from deploying its own missiles.

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As Indian protests against a new citizenship law have intensified, so has police use of "lathis", sturdy sticks used to whack, thwack and quell dissent since British colonial times -- to sometimes deadly effect. At least 27 people have died in the past two weeks of protests, mostly from bullets, but hundreds more have been injured in clashes between demonstrators and riot police wielding the bamboo canes. "From being used as means to regulate crowds, lathi has turned into a lethal weapon," said V. Suresh, the secretary general of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), a non-profit rights group.

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The US military has carried out "defensive strikes" in Iraq and Syria against the Kataib Hezbollah militia group, the US Pentagon said on Sunday, two days after a US civilian contractor was killed in a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base. The Pentagon said it targeted three locations of the Iranian-backed Shia Muslim militia group in Iraq and two in Syria. The locations included weapons storage facilities and command and control locations the group had used to plan and execute attacks on coalition forces. The United States had accused the group of the 30-plus rocket attack on Friday that killed the US civilian contractor and injured four US service members and two members of the Iraqi Security Forces near the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. "In response to repeated Kataib Hizbollah attacks on Iraqi bases that host Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) coalition forces, US forces have conducted precision defensive strikes ... that will degrade KH's ability to conduct future attacks against OIR coalition forces" chief Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said in the statement. In Iraq, several Iraqi militia fighters were killed on Sunday in an air strike on their headquarters near the western Qaim district on the border with Syria, military sources and militia commanders told Reuters. Earlier this month, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iranian-backed forces for a series of attacks on bases in Iraq and warned Iran that any attacks by Tehran or proxies that harmed Americans or allies would be "answered with a decisive US response." This is a breaking story, more to follow

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President says governors of New York and California should ‘politely’ ask him for help in latest broadsideDonald Trump has continued to use America’s homelessness crisis to attack his political opponents in California and New York, tweeting on Saturday that homelessness should be “easy” to handle and that the governors of the two liberal states should ask him for help.Workers and activists on the front lines of the crisis have repeatedly said that Trump’s “tough talk” on homelessness is concerning, and that some of his proposed policies will only make the situation worse.As the number of homeless people has increased sharply in cities across California, some local politicians have already tried to try to penalize people for being homeless, rather than addressing root causes of the crisis, including unaffordable rents and evictions pushing people on to the streets.Meanwhile, Trump has continued to fuel anxiety by repeatedly suggesting he might try to implement some kind of police crackdown in California to clear the streets of encampments.On Christmas Day, Trump attacked California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for his “bad job” on “taking care of the homeless population in California”.“If he can’t fix the problem, the Federal Govt. will get involved!” the president said.On Thursday, Trump attacked Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who has lead the effort to impeach him, and told her to “clean up her filthy dirty District & help the homeless there”.On Saturday, Trump wrote that fixing the homeless crisis “would be so easy with competence!”The governors of California and New York “must do something”, Trump wrote, and if they “can’t handle the situation, which they should be able to do very easily, they must call and ‘politely’ ask for help.”In September, a report from Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers concluded that “policing may be an important tool to help move people off the street and into shelter or housing where they can get the services they need”.Trump told reporters that month he was concerned about homeless people living on “our best streets, our best entrances to buildings”, places “where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige”.“We can’t let Los Angeles, San Francisco, and numerous other cities destroy themselves,” he said, citing his concern that “foreign tenants” who moved to the cities because of the “prestige” now wanted to leave because of the homeless people and tents on the streets.Violent attacks directly targeting homeless people have risen in California in the past year: in Los Angeles alone, there have been at least eight incidents in which people threw makeshift explosives or flammable liquids on homeless people or their tents, according to officials and the Los Angeles Times.Trump’s repeated tweets about homelessness have been labeled “vile and reprehensible” by activists.Diane Yentel, the president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), noted on Thursday that Trump had proposed drastically shrinking or eliminating federal programs that keep the lowest-income people affordably housed, an important prevention measure that keeps people from becoming homeless.“In California, over 37,000 of the lowest-income people are at risk of eviction from this Trump proposal alone,” Yentel said.She also noted that Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development had “proposed allowing homeless shelters to discriminate and refuse shelter to transgender and other LGBTQ people, subjecting them to high risk of violence”.Homelessness is continuing to rise across California: a year-end Guardian investigation found that homelessness had increased 16% in Los Angeles, 17% in San Francisco, 42% in San Jose, 47% in Oakland, and 52% in Sacramento county, home to the state’s capital. Many people were experiencing homelessness for the first time, and both families and seniors are increasingly struggling with homelessness.Trump’s focus on homelessness in California and elsewhere is not the first time he has suggested that he could “easily” solve complex social problems in cities where Democrats hold political power.During his presidential campaign, Trump claimed that an unnamed Chicago police official had told him that violence in Chicago could be stopped “in one week” if officers were allowed to be “very much tougher than they are right now”.Chicago typically has the highest total number of murders of any American city, though other smaller cities, including St Louis, have higher per capita murder rates.

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The U.S. launched strike against Iranian military targets in Syria following a Friday attach in Iraq that killed one American.

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