Kurdish forces made further gains against ISIS at Kobani in the final days of 2014, while the Peshmerga are preparing an offensive to drive the jihadis from Kurdish lands in Iraq.
Warplanes under the command of renegade Gen. Khalifa Haftar fired missiles at Misrata's rebel-held airport, as Libya's oil exports remain effectively paralyzed by civil war.
Another major bust of an accused Mexican cartel operative in Chicago this time involves the Guerreros Unidos—the gang named in the the disappearance of 43 college students.
Official ceremonies marked ground-breaking on Nicaragua's inter-oceanic canal project—marred by angry campesino protests, with scores detained and injured.
Riverboats were sent to evacuate a rainforest village after it was raided by an isolated indigenous band, apparently pushed from its lands by illegal loggers and narco-traffickers.
Brazil's Congress concluded work for the year, having failed to approve a constitutional amendment aimed at gutting the process of indigenous land demarcation.
Israel's Supreme Court issued a rare ruling to demolish a Jewish settlement at Amona in the West Bank. The settlers pledge resistance as a deadline for eviction looms.
Three were killed in southeastern Turkish town of Cizre in clashes between Islamist militants of the Huda-Par and followers of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
A Hamas leader said that the draft resolution for Palestinian statehood presented to the UN Security Council is "disastrous," and has "no future in the land of Palestine."
With regime bombardment intensifying, Syrian rebel factions in Aleppo announced a new "Shamiyya Front"—a further consolidation of "moderate" Islamist forces.
National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) militants shot dead at least 50 adivasis, or tribal people, in a wave of coordinated attacks across India's northeast state of Assam.
A case related to the Sinaloa Cartel's Chicago connection provided further fodder for the increasingly plausible theory that the DEA protected Mexico's biggest crime machine.
