Peace in Syria will have to wait – East Asia’s right-wingers aren’t finding any common ground to pierce their nationalism – Brazil attempts to explain why its spying is nicer than America’s – And how many examples of “too many guns” can America ignore?

The United States and Russia failed to set a date on a peace conference to end the Syrian Civil War.  Here’s what the war looked like today.  The two sides are stuck on any role Iran might play in the talks, and on who would represent Syria's opposition.  The Arab League is chairing the talks and hopes to bring the US and Russia together again on 25 November, in hopes of beginning peace talks before the end of the year.

Special court in Bangladesh sentenced 152 border guards to death for taking part in a bloody insurrection in 2009.  The guards were upset over their working conditions and took over their headquarters in the capital, with fighting spilling over from town to town until 74 people were dead.  Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina barely escaped the violence.  160 more mutineers were sentenced to life terms, others got ten years in prison.

Conservative leaders are butting heads in East Asia:  Japan is “disappointed” in recent comments by South Korea’s president, that talks would be pointless.  President Park Geun-hye says Tokyo must do more to apologize for World War II atrocities, such as the abuse of the “comfort women”.  But conservative, nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appears to be moving away from that, he’s expected to pay a visit to a controversial shrine to the country’s war dead that also venerates some of Japan’s worst war criminals. 

This guy is getting a lot of good press for helping animals abandoned in the Fukushima Radiation Zone.

Brazil says its surveillance on foreign diplomats is “completely different” than the phone and email eavesdropping that the US National Security Agency (NSA) performed on President Dilma Rousseff and other Brazilian officials.  Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardoso said agents who photographed US, Russian and other diplomats in Brazil (as exposed by the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper) acted lawfully to ensure no spying was going on.  Brazil is upset by revelations that the NSA eavesdropped on Rousseff’s personal mobile and hacked the computer network of state-run oil company Petrobras.

Germany has summoned the British Ambassador to respond to spying allegations.  The UK’s Independent newspaper reports that the British embassy in Berlin may house a top-secret listening post.  The paper also reports that an American intercept “nest” on top of its embassy in Berlin – less than 150 meters from Britain’s own diplomatic mission – is believed to have been shut down last week as the US scrambled to limit the damage from revelations that it listened to mobile phone calls made by Chancellor Angela Merkel.

An Austrian court sentenced members of a neo-nazi group to prison terms up to six years.  The members of the “Objekt 21” group were found guilty of making statements glorifying the nazi past, something illegal in Austria since the passage of the Nazi Prohibition Act of 1947.  Police say the gang members were also involved in drugs and weapons dealing, and prostitution.

This Jaguar might be trapped in a concrete pen in a zoo somewhere, but he’s still got the whole predator thing going on.

Police say the South Sudanese asylum-seeker who allegedly stabbed three people to death on a bus in rural Norway was slated for deportation.  His application for asylum in Norway had been turned down, because he had made an earlier asylum bid in Spain.  A 19-year-old woman and two men in their fifties were killed.

A young man, dressed in black and firing an AK-47-style assault weapon, threw a shopping mall outside New York City into chaos near closing time.  But it appears 20-year old Richard Shoop didn’t intend to kill anyone, he likely tried to commit what’s known as “suicide by cop” – goading police into a gun battle he intended to lose.  Witnesses said he fired into the ceiling.  Ultimately, Shoop spared the officers the responsibility - hours after police evacuated the Garden State Mall in northern New Jersey, they found his body in a remote area, dead of a self-inflicted wound.  His family has no idea why he snapped.  But it’s just another tale of a troubled young man with a powerful weapon on the loose in America.