The Federal College for Security Studies (BAKS), for example, accuses Moscow of "neo-imperial aggression" against Eastern Europe and calls for a revival of the "nuclear deterrence" strategy. According to BAKS, the idea of a nuclear weapons-free world should be considered as "unrealistic" - after all, "disarmament is not the primary raison d'être of a nuclear weapon."

The government-affiliated German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) sees it similarly, and opposes particularly a general ban on nuclear weapons, proposed by a United Nations working group. Such a "nuclear arms ban treaty" would be in contradiction to NATO's role as a "nuclear alliance," SWP claims. It would, however, be "conceivable" to strengthen the" linkage between conventional and nuclear capacities" and the "inclusion" of nuclear arms "in exercise scenarios."

The US will continue its push at Pentagon reform with a focus on tech development and ties with Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is keeping an eye on continuing mergers within the defense industry while striving to streamline the foreign military sales process.

In the Mideast, Sunni-Shiite cross-currents will continue to roil the region: The Saudis may send special forces into Syria; a Saudi-led coalition has been battling Houthis in Yemen; Egypt is engaged in Libya and the Sinai; an Islamic counter-terror coalition of Islamic nations was announced in December, but details remain sketchy.

Meanwhile, major weapon acquisitions continue, including Rafale fighter aircraft sales to Egypt and Qatar and a possible Eurofighter Typhoon buy by Kuwait. Across Europe, numerous military programs and industry moves are in progress, driven by strategic and economic forces. In the Asia-Pacific region, China’s aggressive military expansion and territorial claims across the South China Sea and along its border with India continue to set the agenda.

In Taiwan, a new party is expected to win presidential elections in Taiwan this month, unseating a more China-friendly government, while the nation’s Navy is moving ahead on a design program for attack submarines. North Korea, after recently announcing it tested a hydrogen bomb, continues to pursue a nuclear-armed ballistic missile force. India will revive, or make milestone decisions on, procurement of air-independent propulsion submarines, an advanced medium combat aircraft and the indigenous Future Infantry Combat Vehicle.

According to the laws of the States, the military fleet the country needs to have is no less than 11 active aircraft carriers, but in recent years their number was reduced to ten. It happened once in 2013, the US Congress approved a reduction in the number of military ships in this category to 10 after the ship "USS Enterprise" was decommissioned after 50 years of service.

The discrepancy will remain until the final commissioning of the new aircraft carrier "Gerald R Ford". Originally it was planned that the ship will go into service with the US Navy in 2016, but the Commission informed the lower house of Congress last year that the ship will be ready for operation no earlier than 2021. By the way, the cost has already reached $14 billion, 6 years before entry of the ship into operation.

Well, guess what? Now, you suddenly may have a mental disorder, at least according to scientists at the University of Northern Colorado who conducted a case study about the obsession of eating healthy. This new eating disorder is called orthorexia nervosa (ON) and is said to be driven by a fear of being unhealthy and disgust for low-quality food.

The psychologists conducting the study argue that healthy eating can become dangerous if one becomes fixated on the types of ingredients in food, how the food is cooked, and what materials are used to prepare it. Those “suffering” from orthorexia may take extra time to prepare their food and carefully consider what they are willing to eat.

In this day and age, 90% of grocery store shelves, at least in the United States, are filled with processed foods, most of which are scientifically engineered to create physical and psychological dependency. Mega-portion processed meals have lead to spiking rates of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and obesity. Shouldn’t conscientious effort to prepare and eat healthy foods be called sensible and smart instead of potentially dangerous?

New figures released disclosed the scale of the violence in the city on New Year's Eve, which showed 30 more sexual assaults than were previously reported. Cologne Police said that 379 offences were committed on that night, of which 150 were sexual assaults.

"Those in focus of criminal police investigations are mostly people from North African countries," police said in a statement. "The majority of them are asylum-seekers and people who are in Germany illegally." Questions are being asked about why it took more than a week for the authorities to acknowledge that asylum-seekers are among the suspects in the attacks, amid claims of a cover-up.

And asylum-seekers are still flooding into Europe. The German interior ministry believes another 1 million will attempt to cross Turkey to Europe this year, according to Spiegel.

The expert said that many heads of state and government of the EU states considered Merkel’s handling of the migrant crisis to be erroneous. "In all probability, she will either have to change her policy or step down as the chancellor," the expert added. According to him, the scandalous New Year attacks in Cologne have taken the already hard situation in the European Union almost to a deadlock.

"What’s happened can mark the beginning of the end to the career of Angela Merkel who used to have such a great influence in Europe," Bernd Rigert said. "The attacks on women in Cologne are strengthening the positions of politicians who are opposed to the policy of receiving refugees. It is a hard time for the chancellor," Rigert emphasized. Even prior to the Cologne attacks, it was clear the European Union was unlikely to work out a common migrant policy.

Angela Merkel has also come under serious internal political pressure. It is obvious that Merkel will be unable to live up to her promise given to the Christian Social Union party to decrease the number of migrants in the country. "She can no longer rely on the European solidarity," the Deutsche Welle expert stressed.

In the United States momentum is gaining in the presidential race where the primary topics of discussion are issues of foreign policy. However, all applicants' attention is focused on Russia, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and Europe has very little emphasis. In this regard, European countries are beginning to rethink the transatlantic partnership and common purpose.

Also, in recent years more doubt in the world has been caused by the US leadership. EG notes that the current crisis in relations between the US and Europe is of a very serious and systemic nature. So to overcome this it will be very difficult, and given that Americans today are busy with other things, it is almost impossible.

Moreover, the relations between the US and Europe are not only staggered, but also relations within the European Union itself. The migration crisis has shown how easily European leaders are ready to abandon the main principle of the EU - open borders. And while the borders between European countries remain open, the question of restrictions is being discussed at the highest level.

Despite protests from Washington, the UK joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which was created by the Chinese to compete with the American-Japanese Asian Development Bank. The British, venturing in the conflict with the United States, are trying by all means to maintain London as the leading global financial centre. And without good relations with China, this would be extremely difficult in the foreseeable future to achieve.

The experts believe that in 2016 the contradictions between European countries and the USA will affect the position of the West on the Ukrainian crisis, including the anti-Russian sanctions. But transatlantic relations will no longer be a priority both for Europe and for America.

A standoff between the rival Koreas has deepened since last week's test, the North's fourth. Seoul on Monday continued anti-Pyongyang propaganda broadcasts across the border and announced that it will further limit the entry of South Koreans to a jointly run factory park in North Korea.

Outside North Korea, Kim faces widespread condemnation and threats of heavy sanctions over the North's disputed claim of a hydrogen bomb test. Internally, however, Kim's massive propaganda apparatus has looked to link the test to Kim's leadership so as to glorify him and portray the test as necessary to combat a US-led attempt to topple the North's authoritarian system.

"If the enemy provokes, retaliate speedily and accurately without hesitation," Han told commanders of the Army's Missile Command during his field inspection on Saturday, according to the ministry. The visit was made as part of a series of military counteractions South Korea took after the North claimed to have successfully conducted a hydrogen bomb test on Wednesday.

Two days after the test, South Korea resumed its loudspeaker broadcasts critical of North Korea along the inter-Korean border in psychological warfare designed to agitate front-line North Korean soldiers. In response, North Korea began its own such broadcasts, but also began deploying troops toward the border with South Korea. A lot of troops.

A 4.7-magnitude tremor was followed 30 seconds later by another 4.8-magnitude quake centered in a sparsely populated area about 20 miles northwest of Fairview, Oklahoma, about 97 miles northwest of Oklahoma City. The quakes struck at depths of 2.1 and 3.7 miles below the surface. The twin earthquakes occurred at 10:27 pm CST Wednesday night and were felt from central Kansas to southern Oklahoma and the eastern Texas panhandle, including in Wichita, Kansas, and the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. Two others were reported in the far northern Oklahoma City metropolitan area east-northeast of Edmond, and a third occurred around midday Thursday near Perry in north-central Oklahoma.

This was one of 30 separate earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or greater reported in Oklahoma within a 19-hour span from Wednesday evening through early Thursday afternoon. Twenty-seven of those, including the two strongest quakes mentioned above, were clustered in southern Woods County.

The move comes as China reported its biggest annual drop in foreign exchange reserves on record in 2015, while the central bank has allowed a sharp slide in the Yuan currency to multi-year lows, raising fears of more capital flight. All banks in certain trading hubs, including Shenzhen, received the order recently, the people added. They declined to be identified because they are not allowed to speak to the media.

While three sources for this story claim they were told that this is an effort to stem the outflow of capital, a different source says something altogether different is taking place: the belief in China is that the US Dollar is now worthless and will soon totally collapse as a currency, leaving everyone who holds dollars, broke. That's why China is doing everything it can to shed US Dollar currency. The way it's being done, however, is a "useful guise" for the Chinese to prevent the collapse from taking place too early and leaving them stuck with trillions in useless US dollars.

Here’s the most dramatic statistic: 450 of 452 suicide terror attacks in 2015 were perpetrated by Muslim extremists. One of the remaining two attacks was carried out by the Kurdish underground. The other was perpetrated by a woman supporter of a leftist group in Turkey.

Even the attack in Turkey initially attributed to a “leftist group” may actually also have been carried out by a Muslim. According to media reports, police were investigating if the perpetrator was a Russian woman “radicalized by Wahhabi ideology.” If that turns out to be the case, that would mean 451 of the 452 attacks were perpetrated by Muslim extremists.

“Unlike what people usually think, last year was not exceptionally ‘wild’ as regards suicide attacks. There were far fewer attacks than in 2014, although the number of fatalities remained almost the same — 4,370 people killed in 2015 as compared with 4,400 people the year before.” Which means, “to put it another way, the terror attacks are more deadly.”

In a draft policy statement jointly issued by the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Education, federal bureaucrats have — on their own initiative — subordinated parents to a secondary role in the rearing of their children.

While the draft is neither finalized nor binding (yet), it serves as a clear shot across the bow of every freedom-loving parent who naively believes that his parenting principles, priorities and practices will be protected and respected by government.

The entire purpose of the 18-page statement is to explain, promote and bureaucratically implement what the departments call “family engagement.” This term sounds like something every good parent would inherently want, but here’s how the government defines it: “the systematic inclusion of families as partners in children’s development, learning and wellness.”

That’s right: the government is going to include you, the parent, as a partner in rearing your child. Are we supposed to thank it for this privilege?

But an investigation by researchers from the University of Wisconsin has uncovered that, despite years of denial, the FDA has known since at least the 1970s that nitrites cause cancer, and yet continues to pander to the meat industry in allowing their use.

Meat curing has been around forever, with the historical record showing that this process allowed ancient cultures to preserve meats for extended periods of time, especially during periods of food scarcity. People didn’t have refrigerators back then, remember, so they had to come up with novel ways of food preservation that would get them through harsh weather conditions and other volatile environmental factors.

The fact that people have been curing meats since time immemorial isn’t necessarily a problem. Salt, after all, is a natural curing agent that, in and of itself, isn’t harmful. It’s when salt is transformed through synthetic chemical alterations – in this case, as nitrites – that it becomes harmful. And these same nitrites, according to independent scientists, have been the subject of intense debate over the years concerning their safety.