President Juan Manuel Santos has said that he expects the permanent bilateral ceasefire with the FARC guerrillas to go into effect on December 16 instead of January 1 of next year as he had previously announced. He said he will also ask the UN Security Council for a mandate to verify the definitive truce. The FARC has been insisting on a bilateral ceasefire for quite some time and has implemented more than one unilateral ceasefire. The peace talks in Havana, Cuba have been going on since 2012 and recently set a March 23 deadline for a final peace agreement.