The suspect in Monday’s attack on a Christmas market in the German city of Berlin has been shot dead by police in Italy. Italian officials confirmed that Anis Amri, a Tunisian national, was killed by the police in a shootout outside Milan around 3 a.m. Friday, ending a brief but intense manhunt across Europe.
Ever since the dawn of the atomic age man has faced the problem of proliferation of nuclear weapons and their potential for destroying the world and laying waste to vast swathes of the planet. After their initial use by the U.S. during the end of the second world war to force an unconditional surrender by Japan, nuclear weapons have not been used by either the East or West. Some have argued that as a matter of fact nuclear weapons have managed to keep the peace till now by acting as a deterrent, as all sides in a nuclear conflict face the prospect of mutual assured destruction (MAD).
Submitted by Brian Cloughley via Strategic-Culture.org,
The battle for Aleppo is officially over.
Having concluded the evacuation of rebels from their last enclave in the eastern part of the city, the Syrian army said Aleppo has returned to government control, ending the 4-year rebel control over parts of the city that years ago was the largest metropolitan center in Syria and is now a landscape out of Call of Duty. The evacuees have been taken to rebel-held territory in the countryside west of Aleppo and in Idlib province.
In a curious convergence of superpower opinions, earlier on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called for the country to reinforce its military nuclear potential. In a speech that recapped military activities in 2016, Putin said the army's preparedness has "considerably increased" and called for continued improvement that would ensure it can "neutralise any military threat".