Int’l help needed in Afghanistan BRUSSELS — Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani appealed today for sustained international help for his insurgency-wracked country, promising international donors that the government would concentrate its future efforts on tackling rampant poverty.“We are facing social collapse,” Ghani told representatives from more than 70 nations and dozens of agencies and non-governmental organizations gathered in Brussels to try to drum up billions of dollars to keep the Afghan government afloat.“We are going to be relentlessly focused on reduction and elimination of poverty as our central task,” he said, noting that 39 percent of the Afghan population lives on less than $1.35 a day.But donor fatigue has grown over the 15 years of international efforts in Afghanistan since a U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban for harboring former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. The European Union, hosting the conference, has been struggling to raise around $3 billion that Kabul will need each year. The last donor conference, in Tokyo in 2012, secured $4 billion in annual subsidies for development.The Taliban have proved tenacious, waging an increasingly powerful insurgency around the country. Afghan forces battled Taliban fighters in the northern city of Kunduz for the third straight day today and American helicopters provided air support to troops on the ground.Despite the setbacks, and rampant corruption, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that “it’s important today that the international community sends a strong message of support.”

Man, 113, celebrates his bar mitzvahJERUSALEM — The world’s oldest man has finally celebrated his bar mitzvah — a hundred years later than usual.Israel Kristal, 113, has lived through both World Wars and survived the Auschwitz concentration camp. Earlier this year, Guinness World Records awarded him a certificate as the world’s oldest man.But there was a ceremony the supercentenarian observant Jew longed for even more.Born in Poland in 1903, Kristal missed his bar mitzvah — the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony celebrated when a boy turns 13 — because of World War I.His daughter, Shulamith Kuperstoch, said his children, grandchildren and nearly 30 great-grandchildren gathered over the weekend to mark the occasion. She said he was very pleased as he recited the traditional Jewish prayer of gratitude while surrounded by loved ones.