The Taliban called on Afghans to expel the United States from Afghanistan on Saturday just as they said Afghan mujahideen fighters had done to Soviet forces 25 years ago to the day. Related Stories

In a statement issued on the 25th anniversary of the final Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, a national holiday for Afghans, the Taliban sought to connect the steady departure of U.S. and NATO troops ahead of a year-end deadline to the end of the decade-long Soviet occupation.

"Today America is facing the same fate as the former Soviets and trying to escape from our country," the Taliban said in a statement emailed to reporters by Qari Yousef Ahmadi, a spokesman for the group.

"The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is calling on its people to deal with today's invaders the same they did with the yesterday's invaders," he said, using the name the Taliban government used during its repressive 1996-2001 rule.

In line with the so-called Geneva accords, a last convoy of Soviet soldiers crossed a bridge connecting northern Afghanistan with the then-Soviet Union on February 15, 1989.

Ukrainian ex-premier, Yulia Timoshenko, says she would run for the top office. Presidential elections in Ukraine are scheduled for May 25. Timoshenko, who has now been freed from jail, has left a Kharkov clinic and travelled to Kiev by special flight.

"Yulia Timoshenko has moved to Maidan (Independence Square)," said Arseny Yatsenyuk, leader of the Batkivshchnina faction. He had earlier announced that former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko was en route to Independence Square in Kiev, the focal point of pro-European demonstrations, after being released earlier on Saturday.

"Yulia is on her way to Maidan [Independence Square]," Yatsenyuk said after a telephone conversation with Tymoshenko in the presence of reporters.

One minute before, witnesses and Batkivshchyna confirmed that Tymoshenko had been discharged from the clinic in Kharkov where she had been receiving treatment since May 2012.

She left the hospital premises with a motorcade.

Stanley Kramer's masterpiece Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) stands alone as the finest film about judges ever made. In the film, four Nazi judges are placed on trial at Nuremberg before a panel of three American judges. Three of the German judges are Nazi thugs but one of them, Ernst Janning (played by Burt Lancaster), was quite different. Janning had been a famous and aristocratic legal scholar, a drafter of the Weimar constitution, and a man who detested Hitler and the Nazis. Yet he remained on the bench under the Third Reich. All defendants are convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The chief American judge, Dan Haywood (played memorably by Spencer Tracy), brushes aside the various excuses offered by defense counsel Rolfe (a role for which Maximilian Schell won an Oscar).

The Nuremberg war crime trials presented many thorny jurisprudential issues, such as the problem of ex post facto criminal law and the issue of how the court obtained jurisdiction over the defendants. In particular, what justification is there for an international (rather than a German) tribunal to try a case in which the offenses were committed by Germans against other Germans?

It is a fact that since 9-11-2001, the US Government has been in the business of destroying countries and using NATO as it principle instrument. That was stated more than a decade ago by then US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and later by General Wesley Clark. The Pentagon drew up a list of 7 states that were to be destroyed: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Syria and they have systematically proceeded to destroy all of the Countries on the list. The strategy in Ukraine is the same, US/NATO/EU are promoting the destabilization and the breakup of Ukraine in order to achieve the NATO goal of moving into Ukrainian territory closer to Russia. Harvard Professor Francis Boyle, a US based Russian expert who was invited to the Soviet Union to lecture spoke on these issues and more in an interview with the Voice of Russia.

While Russia was distracted into believing that the US wanted a reset US foreign policy was being planned and dictated by rabid Russia haters like Zbignew Brzezinski and Richard Pipes. Brzezinski wants to breakup Russia into approximately 68 parts and has placed his protégés in key US foreign policy posts. According to Mr. Boyle Brezezinski has staffed the Obama administration with his acolytes and protégées, including the US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, a specialist in color revolutions. At the end of the day the US plan is to see the breakup of the Russian Federation, that is the goal.

The Venezuelan government is to send two army battalions to Táchira state, which borders Colombia, to combat a "grave" case of opposition-promoted disorder in the area.

According to press reports and an eyewitness testimony provided to Venezuelanalysis.com, the capital city of Táchira state, San Cristóbal, has been almost brought to a standstill in recent days by street barricades set up by hard-line opposition activists.

According to such reports, in recent days almost no transport has been able to circulate, while the great majority of shops and businesses have been closed. Authorities warn that the street blockades are impeding the delivery of food and gasoline, and claim that transport workers have been threatened.

The government also suspects that "paramilitaries and criminal gangs" are involved in the actions, with the complicity of the local opposition mayor, Daniel Ceballos.

The Iraqi Government's accusation of an external Al-Qaeda takeover was made to justify a ferocious siege and bombardment of the Fallujah and Ramadi.

Conflict and carnage on a scale unseen since the height of the Occupation nearly a decade ago have broken out in Iraq's Anbar Province. Over 140,000 people have been made homeless since fighting started at the end of last year. According to the UN, 65,000 people fled the fighting in the towns of Fallujah and Ramadi in one week alone.

Some commentators see the violence as a spillover from the Syrian conflict. Others analyse it in terms of Sunni tribesmen in dispute. When Iraq's corrupt government earned a rebuke from the usually inert UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who called on Nuri al-Maliki to address the root causes of the conflict, the Iraqi prime minister retorted, "We do not hold dialogue with al-Qaeda."

The pernicious narrative, peddled by the Iraqi Government and picked up in the mainstream media, that Al-Qaeda had taken over Fallujah, was a long way from the truth. But it helped to secure an immediate delivery of arms to the Iraqi regime from its US puppeteers to help quell the protests in Anbar.

I've been away for the past week so I wasn't able to write anything on the unfolding turmoil in Venezuela, but I've been following the situation closely and in recent days have grown increasingly frustrated with (a) the total lack of balanced reporting on Venezuela in the international media, including left-liberal publications like The Guardian; (b) the seeming ease with which comrades on the libertarian left ignore the events in Venezuela as if it were somehow "irrelevant" to our cause, simply because we're not supposed to have any close ideological affinity with chavismo; and (c) the ill-informed basis on which many activists and even several major movement pages have taken the side of the protesters against the government, unquestioningly sharing the propaganda of the right-wing opposition and echoing dangerously superficial and wrongheaded interpretations about the protests. I intend to write more on this later, but here are some initial reflections:

Mexico's most wanted drug kingpin, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, has been captured, President Enrique Pena Nieto announced on Saturday. The arrest comes as a major victory for the government in its bloody war with drug cartels.

Guzman is the head of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel and is known as one of the world's most powerful organized crime bosses.

The Sinaloa Cartel has smuggled billions of dollars worth of cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine into the United States, and fought brutal wars with other Mexican gangs over turf and drug trafficking routes, Reuters reports.

Occasionally shoot-outs between drug criminals and mexican police get captured by video.

Now I know why some look so well-schooled in the art of mayhem. They were trained by the best: US Special Forces.

I stumbled on this video while looking for something else. I bet, like me, you never heard this story.

But we sure heard the Bushbama administration and friends wringing hands about a few US bought rifles ending up in Mexico - even though the ATF did all but roll out a red carpet for the illegal trade under the direction of the Bushbama Justice Department.

James Bloodworth, when he isn't applauding Obama's murderous drone attacks on Pakistan, occasionally takes time out to complain about leftists supporting the Venezuelan government. He claims that Venezuela has become a "nightmare"and that, despite elections that he appears to acknowledge are clean and transparent, Venezuelans are, nevertheless, "living under tyranny" because of the government's "unwillingness to tolerate dissent".

Bloodworth says that he supported the Chavista movement when a US backed coup violently ousted Hugo Chavez in 2002. "I have no trouble remembering which side I was on" he claims - very dubiously as I'll explain.

Bloodworth doesn't remember that Leopoldo Lopez was among the leaders of that coup. This video shows Leopoldo Lopez and Henrique Capriles (a state governor who ran against Maduro in April of 2013) supervising the illegal "arrest" of a Chavez government minister during the 2002 coup. Bloodworth objects to Lopez's arrest for leading protests over the past few weeks that are clearly aimed at repeating what happened in 2002, but Bloodworth never considers an incredibly obvious point. Lopez would have been locked up for decades (if he were lucky) had he participated in the violent overthrow of the UK or US governments. If not for the Venezuelan government's unusually high tolerance for dissent, Lopez and Capriles (his "moderate" ally) would never have been around to lead protests, much less hold public office as Capriles now does. One can only shudder at what their fate would have been in the USA after participating in a briefly successful coup. Chelsea Manning has been locked up for years and openly tortured simply for exposing human rights abuses and embarrassing the US government. Manning will not be leading violent protests or holding public office (even if she wanted to) any time soon.