War

A truck plowed into a crowd at a busy Christmas market in western Berlin leaving at least nine dead according to Berlin police, and over 50 people injured.

Local media, citing police at the scene, said first indications pointed to an attack on the market, situated near the fashionable Kurfuerstendamm avenue and at the foot of the ruined Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church that was kept as a ruin after World War Two. A police spokesperson told German media that they are treating the truck incident in Berlin as a terrorist attack.

Barack Obama, the president who promised change, actually provided more of the same. As the 44th President of the United States prepares to exist stage left, he can congratulate himself on becoming the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to bomb seven different countries back to the Stone Age. The president who preached hope also kept the military-industrial complex in fine fettle, selling a record $115 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia, the world’s most repressive regime, and destabilized entire regions, creating vacuums for terrorists to thrive.

Syrian authorities have urged the international community to intervene after US-backed rebels were caught illegally using mustard gas on civilians. According to the government in Syria, a batch of documents proving that chemical weapons were used against Syrian citizens was handed over to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on December 12. Authorities also delivered samples from the shell containing mustard gas to The Hague. RT.com reports: “We have provided all the documents to the mission, they were vetted and accepted.

Military experts are warning that North Korea has recently improved its weapons and military capabilities across the board and is far more dangerous than previously thought. Sputnik reports: Last week, it was reported that the country had developed an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear payload to the US mainland. Only a crucial insulation issue remained to be solved to make the device truly threatening.

While the UN condemns Syrian and Russian "atrocities" in the battle over East Aleppo, which as noted previously was a key victory for the Assad regime in the past week, one which will end the stalemate and sway the balance of power in the ongoing war between regime forces and US-coalition armed rebels, little attention had been paid to the subversive tactics employed by such "moderate rebels" as the al Qaeda linked al-Nusra front.