Tehran hits out at 'audacity of US officials' who accused Islamic Republic of stoking tension in Iraqi capital.

Milomir Savcic is accused of commanding troops to capture, imprison, kill and bury hundreds of Bosnian Muslims.

Pan-Arab body urges warring sides in Libya against 'interference' amid Turkish push to send troops.

US vulnerability exposed as hundreds surround heavily fortified compound in Iraqi capital to protest against attacks.

Sonos has a good reputation for building quality speakers, but its latest move has disappointed some buyers, reports Engadget. From a report: Recently, the company offered a trade-up program, giving legacy customers 30 percent off the latest One, Beam or Port. In exchange, buyers just had to "recycle" their existing products. However, what Sonos meant by "recycle" was to activate a feature called "Recycle Mode" that permanently bricks the speaker. It then becomes impossible for recycling firms to resell it or do anything else but strip it for parts. Sonos suggests that after bricking the device in Recycle Mode, users drop it off at a recycling facility or give it to Sonos to do the same. However, those facilities are unable to resell the products, which could bring around $200 to $250 in good condition. The problem was brought home by Twitter user @atomicthumbs, who works at an e-recycling facility. "This is the most environmentally unfriendly abuse and waste of perfectly good hardware I've seen in five years working at a recycler," he said in a series of tweets. "We could have sold these and ensured they were reused, as we do with all the working electronics we're able. Now we have to scrap them."

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Demonstrators demand end to US 'intervention', as Iraqi protesters elsewhere distance themselves from embassy tensions.

In an Associated Press investigation, migrants recount ordeals in EU-funded detention centres run by human traffickers.

Rob Barry and Dustin Volz, reporting for Wall Street Journal: The hackers seemed to be everywhere. In one of the largest-ever corporate espionage efforts, cyberattackers alleged to be working for China's intelligence services stole volumes of intellectual property, security clearance details and other records from scores of companies over the past several years. They got access to systems with prospecting secrets for mining company Rio Tinto, and sensitive medical research for electronics and health-care giant Philips NV. They came in through cloud service providers, where companies thought their data was safely stored. Once they got in, they could freely and anonymously hop from client to client, and defied investigators' attempts to kick them out for years. Cybersecurity investigators first identified aspects of the hack, called Cloud Hopper by the security researchers who first uncovered it, in 2016, and U.S. prosecutors charged two Chinese nationals for the global operation last December. The two men remain at large. A Wall Street Journal investigation has found that the attack was much bigger than previously known. It goes far beyond the 14 unnamed companies listed in the indictment, stretching across at least a dozen cloud providers, including CGI Group, one of Canada's largest cloud companies; Tieto Oyj, a major Finnish IT services company; and International Business Machines. The Journal pieced together the hack and the sweeping counteroffensive by security firms and Western governments through interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the investigation, hundreds of pages of internal company and investigative documents, and technical data related to the intrusions. The Journal found that Hewlett Packard Enterprise was so overrun that the cloud company didn't see the hackers re-enter their clients' networks, even as the company gave customers the all-clear.

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You don't need special glasses to see what it looks like when smart people run out of ideas. From a column: The breakout hit of the Consumer Electronics Show in 2010 was a television set. Hard to believe now, maybe, but it's true; for one shining moment, the Toshiba Cell TV was the most exciting new thing in tech. Its name invoked the overkill processors inside. It was one of the first sets to promise "Net TV Channels" that would let you stream directly from Netflix or Pandora. And it could show pictures in three dimensions. [...] Five years later, 3D TV was dead. You probably haven't thought about it since then, if you even did before. But there's maybe no better totem for the last decade of consumer technology. It's what happens when smart people run out of ideas, the last gasp before aspiration gives way to commoditization. It was the dawn of all-internet everything, and all the privacy violations inherent in that. And it steadfastly ignored how human beings actually use technology, because doing so meant companies could charge more for it. What I remember most from those press conferences in 2010 was the assuredness that millions of people somehow actively wanted to have to put glasses on their faces in order to watch television. Even then, it made no sense. TV viewing has always been a large passive experience, something to do while you're doing other things. And besides that, only certain types of shows -- movies, maybe some sports -- actually benefited from 3D in the first place. Or would, if the television sets were any good; most of the early ones stuttered and flickered even when you sat dead center in front of them. Stray a few feet to either side, and the viewing angle shot the experience altogether. It gets worse. Different manufacturers backed different 3D TV formats and technologies, meaning one set of glasses wouldn't necessarily work on a competitor's set. The simple act of watching in 3D caused eye strain in a significant chunk of the population. And the list of available things to watch never hit critical mass.

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Here's a fun end-of-year game. 1. Think of the ending of Scarface. 2. Now think of movies you wish had the same ending. Examples: Forrest Gump. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Any movie starring Tom Hanks.

In Part Two of this series, ethnic Kazakhs say they believe there is nothing they can do to bring their abusers to justice.

Fireworks have long been a staple of New Year's Eve celebrations in Germany, with revelers setting off their own pyrotechnics in the annual reverie of booze and exuberance known in the country as "Silvester." But for the first time this year, Berlin will join dozens of other German cities and communities in instituting a partial ban on private fireworks, with three zones in the capital designated fireworks free on New Year's Eve. From a report: Most official and private fireworks displays will continue as normal -- including the spectacular show at Berlin's iconic Brandenburg Gate -- and skies over much of the country will still be alight, saturated with the sound of millions of tiny explosions. But as the decade comes to a close, Germany's commitment to one of its most enduring New Year's Eve traditions seems to be wavering. The reasons vary: Berlin's ban is focused on public safety, while Aachen, a town in western Germany that limited the use of high-flying fireworks, is worried about potential damage to its historic buildings. And some areas pointed to environmental and health concerns over the fine dust particles created by the explosions.

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The picture of Jules in Pulp Fiction is from (I think) the first scene of the movie. Here's the actual quote. "Say 'what' again. Say 'what' again, I dare you, I double dare you motherfucker, say what one more Goddamn Time!" As Will Campbell says on Quora: "This entire movie is basically one bag of brilliant quotes." True. As I slog my way through the end of the last season of The Newsroom, I realize that some script writing is basically one big bag of terrible quotes. Inserted into actual conversations. And the director makes the characters scream the awful quotes as if they're being tortured. It gets so bad at times I turn the volume off. I dream of the characters killing each other in a Scarface-like ending. I think I have to go back into therapy to find out why I need to see the very end of this terrible show. (BTW one in five scenes is actually pretty good, like every scene with the Assistant Deputy EPA Administrator. And every scene with Olivia Munn is amazing. She's magnetic.)

Space reserved for ideas that belong at the end of a year.

How, after Nepal's 2015 earthquake, a father's words and a boy making his way to school offered a lesson in resilience.