Colombia suddenly calls off peace talks with rebels – Nigeria retakes a symbolic town – The US might have problems with one of its most important Asian military bases – And more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

Colombia has suspended peace talks with the FARC rebel group after the apparent kidnapping of an army general.  Rebels abducted Brigadier General Ruben Dario Alzate Mora on Sunday.  President Juan Manuel Santos is demanding the captors return the Brigadier “safe and sound”, and ordered government negotiators not to go to Havana for Monday’s now-postponed resumption of talks.  The FARC and other Leftist groups have been fighting the government for some five decades.

Nigeria’s military says it has recaptured Chibok town from Boko Haram militants, and some reports indicate that many Islamists were killed in Sunday’s operation, done in conjunction with local vigilantes.  The military made it a priority to retake Chibok, the town from which Boko Haram abducted more than 200 schoolgirls earlier this year, setting off international outrage.  Villagers say the Islamists maintain a presence in surrounding villages, and area isn’t safe just yet.

An opponent of relocating a US military base won the election for governor of Okinawa, Japan.  Takeshi Onaga won a solid mandate with a crushing 100,000 vote margin.  He now represents a majority of Okinawans that oppose moving the Futenma Air Base from the center to the more remote north of the Island, those residents would like to see it gone altogether.  Futenma is one of several US bases on Okinawa hosting 26,000 troops.

At least four people are dead in landslides in southern Switzerland and northern Italy.  The region has gotten more rain in a few days as normally falls in an average year.  On each side of the border, the torrential downfall lossened hillsides, and houses slid down and broke apart.  Two people died in Switzerland and two died in Italy.  Italy’s Ticino River burst its banks, and Lakes Lugano and Maggiore are dangerously high.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is annoying historians with his claim that Muslims “discovered” America centuries before Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue.  There’s absolutely no physical evidence backing it up, and the Americas certainly were not “discovered” as there were already people living there before the age of colonization.  Erdogan’s idiotic boast is based on a diary entry in which Columbus writes of seeing a mosque on a hill in Cuba.  Since there are no ruins of anything on that hill, historians have generally agreed that Columbus was commenting on the hill’s shape.  And that guy leads a NATO nation.  SMDH.