Chefs Harris Salat and Tadashi Ono both own Japanese restaurants in New York. Together, they've written a cookbook called "Japanese Soul Cooking." It's not about fancy stuff like sushi, but rather, Japanese comfort food - things like gyoza, soba, tempura - and curry.

Almost as soon as a Russian court convicted activist Alexei Navalny of embezzlement, on highly dubious grounds, in July 2013, U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul tweeted his disappointment at the “apparent political motivations in this trial.” Within minutes that comment echoed across Russia’s social media landscape, eventually generating nearly 1,000 retweets and getting picked up by numerous media outlets.

A coalition of Caribbean nations is threatening to sue 11 European countries over the lingering effects of the Atlantic slave trade. But while they have a slim chance of seeing reparations granted in court, they could gain political leverage by elevating the issue at the United Nations. The controversial move could have widespread repercussions for countries that facilitated the slave trade — and benefits for those who suffered from it.

After outer space, any terrestrial trip has got to feel like a comedown. But this morning, at exactly 10:30 am GMT, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfied tweeted,“Good morning, Ireland! Happily headed to Dublin and Belfast. Hoping to learn a cúpla focals [a couple of words].” (Some on Twitter proceeded to correct the former International Space Station commander that the proper usage is “focail”.)

By all rights, Iceland -- a remote Arctic island inhabited by just 320,000 people -- should be a forgotten backwater. And for most of its history, it was. But in recent decades, the former Danish colony has begun to attract outsized attention from abroad. After its banks were fully privatized in 2003, foreign money poured into the financial sector, which grew to almost ten times the size of national GDP before bursting in a matter of days in October 2008.

The new year will see a changing of the guard in Brussels, with top posts at NATO and the major European institutions changing hands. NATO will get a new secretary-general; new presidents will be sought for the EU Commission, the European Council, and the European Parliament; and hopefuls will jostle to succeed Catherine Ashton as the EU's foreign-policy chief.

The European Union has probably never experienced anything like it before: Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s government pretended to negotiate an association agreement, only to back out at the last minute. EU leaders felt duped; in Moscow, however, the mood was celebratory.

Serbia and Turkey will sign a cooperation protocol next year to be able to make researches on Ottoman archives as well as Serbian archives. The protocol envisages opening some Turkish documents in Serbian archives to Turkish researchers as well as to help Serbian researchers benefit from the documents in Ottoman archives, Director General of State Archives of Serbia Miroslav Perisic told AA on Monday.