The AP count is the same as the Defense Department’s tally, last updated Wednesday at 10 a.m. EST.

At least 1,703 military service members have died in Afghanistan as a result of hostile action, according to the military’s numbers.

Outside of Afghanistan, the department reports at least 119 more members of the U.S. military died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Of those, 11 were the result of hostile action.

The AP count of total OEF casualties outside of Afghanistan is four more than the department’s tally.

The Defense Department also counts three military civilian deaths.

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177 of the suicide cases were active-duty soldiers, CBS noted. Throughout much of this year, the suicide rate amounted to one soldier taking their own life per day. In response, the military introduced a number of suicide awareness and prevention programs, including dedicating a day in September in which all active troops had to go through suicide prevention training.

Earlier this year, the Washington Post attributed high suicide numbers “in part [to ] the stress on the force after more than a decade of lengthy and multiple deployments for many troops in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta also noted that “Substance abuse, financial distress and relationship problems — the risk factors for suicide — also reflect problems … that will endure beyond war.”

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ABC News reported that during the Black Friday sales last month, Americans bought a record number of guns, with the FBI conducting background checks on 154,000 purchases of firearms.

For the month of November, the number surged to 2 million inquiries.

Lawrence Keane, vice president of gun industry group National Shooting Sports Foundation, told CNN Money in November that modern sporting rifles, a term that he prefers to assault weapons, are "the most popular type of rifles being bought today by Americans."

He said they are used by hunters, target shooters, veterans returning from warzones such as Afghanistan, and citizens who want to protect their property from looters in the wake of recent storms.

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Khaled El-Masri was kidnapped in Macedonia by the authorities there and handed over to U.S. custody. He was flown to Afghanistan in December 2003 and interrogated there until his release in May 2004, when he was dumped on a mountain road in Albania. Thursday's European court decision focused on Macedonia's role, ruling that the government must pay El-Masri 60,000 euros in damages, but carries important implications for U.S. accountability over the use of torture in its war on terror.

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All this seemed to many to be a rough replay of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Yet, as the mass demonstrations against the Muslim Brotherhood recently in Tahrir Square and across Egypt have shown, an Islamic Egypt, while still likely, is far from inevitable.

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Thanks to a no-bid deal worth $22 million, U.S. Special Ops have moved to a new Blackwater-owned and operated base -- Camp Integrity. "It’s highly unusual for U.S. military forces to take up official residence on a privately owned facility, " reported Ackerman, noting, "According to Lt. Col. Tom Bryant, the spokesman for Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan, it’s only supposed to be temporary, as the command plans to move to Bagram Air Field by summer 2013. But Camp Integrity is already shaping up to be a crucial location for an Afghanistan war that’s rapidly changing."

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Ignoring a veto threat, the Senate voted 98-0 for the legislation that authorizes money for weapons, aircraft and ships and provides a 1.7 percent pay raise for military personnel. After a decade of increasing Pentagon budgets, the vote came against the backdrop of significant reductions in projected military spending and the threat of deeper cuts from the looming "fiscal cliff" of automatic spending cuts and tax increases.

The bill reflects the nation's war-weariness after more than a decade of fighting in Afghanistan, the messy uncertainty about new threats to U.S. security and Washington belt-tightening in times of trillion-dollar-plus deficits. Spending solely on the base defense budget has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, but the latest blueprint reins in the projected growth in military dollars.

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Using national administrative data from the Veteran Administration’s largest supported housing program — the Housing and Urban Development-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing (HUDVASH) program — between January 2008 and April 2011, the study assessed nearly 100 Iraq and Afghanistan vets (who made up just over 2 percent of all the veterans who went through HUDVASH during that time.

The researchers highlighted key findings:

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Dear President Obama,

Nothing you don’t know, but let me just say it: the world’s a weird place. In my younger years, I might have said “crazy,” but that was back when I thought being crazy was a cool thing and only regretted I wasn’t.

I mean, do you ever think about how you ended up where you are? And I'm not actually talking about the Oval Office, though that’s undoubtedly a weird enough story in its own right.

After all, you were a community organizer and a constitutional law professor and now, if you stop to think about it, here’s where you’ve ended up: you’re using robots to assassinate people you personally pick as targets.  You’ve overseen and escalated off-the-books robot air wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, and are evidently considering expanding them to Mali and maybe even Libya.  You’ve employed what will someday be defined as a weapon of mass destruction, launching history’s first genuine cyberwar against a country that isn’t threatening to attack us.  You’ve agreed to the surveillance of more Americans every which way from Sunday than have ever been listened in on or (given emailing, texting, and tweeting) read.  You came into office proclaiming a “sunshine” policy and yet your administration has classified more documents (92,064,862 in 2011) than any other in our history.  Despite signing a Whistleblower Enhancement Protection Act, you’ve used the Espionage Act on more government whistleblowers and leakers than all previous administrations combined, and yet your officials continue to leak secret material they see as advantageous to the White House without fear of prosecution.  Though you deep-sixed the Bush administration name for it -- “the Global War on Terror” (ridding the world of GWOT, one of the worst acronyms ever) -- you’ve accepted the idea that we are “at war” with terror and on a “global battlefield” which (see above) you’re actually expanding.  You’re still keeping uncharged, untried prisoners of not-quite-war in an offshore military prison camp of injustice that, on the day you came into office, you promised to close within a year.  You’re overseeing planning that, according to recent reports, will continue the Afghan War in some form until at least 2017 or possibly well beyond.  You preside over an administration that has encouraged the further militarization of the CIA (to which you appointed as director not a civilian but a four-star general you assumedly wanted to tuck safely away during campaign season).  You’ve overseen the further militarization of the State Department; you’ve encouraged a major expansion of the special operations forces and its secret presidential army, the Joint Special Operations Command, cocooned inside the U.S. military/  You’ve overseen the further post-9/11 expansion of an already staggering national security budget and the further growth of our labyrinthine “Intelligence Community” -- and though who remembers anymore, you even won what must have been the first prospective Nobel Prize for Peace more or less before you did a damn thing, and then thanked the Nobel Committee with a full-throated defense of the right of the U.S. to do what it pleased, militarily, on the planet! And if that isn’t a weird legacy-in-formation, what is?

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Relin committed suicide in the Portland-area town of Corbett on Nov. 14, deputy Multnomah County medical examiner Peter Bellant said late Sunday night.

He said Relin died of blunt force head injury, but declined to provide any other details.

Relin was co-author with Greg Mortenson of "Three Cups of Tea," which recounts how Mortenson started building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The book came under scrutiny last year when "60 Minutes" and Jon Krakauer alleged that it contained numerous fabrications.

In April, U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon rejected a lawsuit by four people who bought the book, dismissing claims that the two authors, the publisher, and a charity conspired to make Mortenson into a false hero to sell books and raise money for the charity. Haddon called the claims overly broad, flimsy and speculative.

Mortenson had denied any wrongdoing, though he has acknowledged some of the events in "Three Cups of Tea" were compressed over different periods of time. The New York Times reported that Relin did not speak publicly about the charges.

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"I am her secretary, answering her phones. I am her bodyguard, protecting her. When she's out, I must be with her," her father told the AP in October. Now, CBS reports that the rapper, who has been gaining attention for her release of "Our Neighbors" earlier this fall, has started receiving menacing text messages and death threats against family members. "They told [Firooz's mother] 'If your daughter appears on TV again, we will cut off your head,'" said Firooz.

Firooz's uncle has cut off relations with her, but her parents continue to support the singer.

Music producer Fared Rastagar, who recorded Firooz's song, told CBS, "Some female singers have stopped singing because of threats from the Taliban. Some have left the country." Firooz, however, plans to stay. "Yes of course it's difficult," Firooz said. "But it's easier than being a refugee."

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The link in question was one that might have given many Facebook users pause. According to an affidavit filed by N. T. Elias, a special agent with the FBI, the video, titled "Dua of Sheikh Muhammad al Mohaisany masjid al haram makkah," appeared "to be a prayer for the success of the mujahideen and features various photos including Al-Qa'ida leaders Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, 9/11 attacks, bloodied adults and children, and Islamic fighters."

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Initially the administration had wanted to establish rules to smooth the transition in the event of a Romney administration. "The matter may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6. ...[but] the administration is still pushing to make the rules formal and resolve internal uncertainty and disagreement about exactly when lethal action is justified."

From the Times:

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It couldn’t be clearer now that, from the shirtless FBI agent to the “embedded” biographer and the “other other woman,” the “fall” of David Petraeus is playing out as farce of the first order.  What’s less obvious is that Petraeus, America’s military golden boy and Caesar of celebrity, was always smoke and mirrors, always the farce, even if the denizens of Washington didn’t know it.

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Hamid Karzai's statement late Sunday came at a sensitive time - just days after the beginning of negotiations on a bilateral security agreement that will govern the U.S. military presence in the country after the majority of troops draw down in 2014. Karzai's critics say he frequently strikes populist, nationalist stances that give him leverage in talks with the Americans.

In the statement, the Afghan president said some detainees are still being held by U.S. forces even though Afghan judges have ruled that they be released. He also decried the continued arrest of Afghans by U.S. forces.

Karzai spokesman Aimal Faizi on Monday told reporters that more than 70 detainees continue to be held by the Americans despite being ordered released by Afghan courts.

The two countries signed the detainee transfer pact in March but the handover of detention facilities has been slowed by the U.S., which has argued both that the Afghans are not ready to take over their management and insisted that the Afghan government agree to hold without trial some detainees that the U.S. deems too dangerous to release.

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