America’s anti-Assad ally, Qatar, the chief financiers of the Muslim Brotherhood, negotiated with the neutralist Lebanese government, to swap the 26 imprisoned Al Qaeda jihadists for 16 Lebanese soldiers who had been captured by Al Qaeda in Lebanon. Lebanese and Syrian Al Qaeda are called Al Nusra. Al Nusra had captured these soldiers in Lebanon this past summer.

Lebanon will get its 16 soldiers back, and Al Qaeda (Al Nusra) will get its 26 fighters back, including the former wife of ISIS’s founder, Sheikh Ibrahim Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. London’s Daily Mail headlined about her on 21 February 2015, “Scheming Bride of ISIS they all idolise: Mesmerising tale of wife of terror chief who inspires girls to join bloody ranks.” So, she’s free again, to rejoin the US-led forces.

The scientists concluded that nearly 33 percent of the world’s adequate or high-quality food-producing land has been lost at a speed surpassing nature’s ability to replace diminished soil. “Soil is lost rapidly but replaced over millennia and this represents one of the greatest global threats for agriculture,” said Duncan Cameron, professor of Plant and Soil Biology at the University of Sheffield, as quoted by Phys.org. He added that “erosion rates from ploughed field’s average 10-100 times greater than rates of soil formation.”

The erosion of soil has mostly occurred due to a loss of structure caused by the continuous disturbances of crop planting and harvesting. If soil is repeatedly turned over, it is exposed to oxygen and its carbon is released into the atmosphere – a combination which results in the soil failing to bind as effectively. As a result, the soil’s ability to store water decreases, which negatively impacts its ability to effectively act as a buffer to floods and a healthy base for plants. Deforestation has also been dubbed detrimental to soil health.

The researchers, who spoke at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change on Wednesday, described the loss as “catastrophic,” adding that major changes to agricultural practices must be made.

Perhaps among Obama's advisors there are a few who are not drowning in hubris and can understand this sea change. Sputnik news reports that some high-level security advisors to Obama have advised him to withdraw US military forces from Syria and give up his plan to overthrow Assad. They advised Obama to cooperate with Russia in order to stop the refugee flow that is overwhelming Washington's vassals in Europe. The influx of unwanted peoples is making Europeans aware of the high cost of enabling US foreign policy. Advisors have told Obama that the idiocy of the neoconservatives' policies threaten Washington's empire in Europe.

Several commentators, such as Mike Whitney and Stephen Lendman, have concluded, correctly, that there is nothing that Washington can do about Russian actions against the Islamic State. The neoconservatives' plan for a UN no-fly zone over Syria in order to push out the Russians is a pipedream. No such resolution will come out of the UN. Indeed, the Russians have already established a de facto no-fly zone.

Putin, without issuing any verbal threats or engaging in any name-calling, has decisively shifted the power balance, and the world knows it.

Washington's response consists of name-calling, bluster and more lies, some of which is echoed by some of Washington's ever more doubtful vassals. The only effect is to demonstrate Washington's impotence. If Obama has any sense, he will dismiss from his government the neoconservative morons who have squandered Washington's power, and he will focus instead on holding on to Europe by working with Russia to destroy, rather than to sponsor, the terrorism in the Middle East that is overwhelming Europe with refugees.

If Obama cannot admit a mistake, the United States will continue to lose credibility and prestige around the world.

“Since last weekend, migrants going to the hospitals must be accompanied by police with K-9 units. Many migrants have AIDS, syphilis, open TB, and many exotic diseases that we, in Europe, do not know how to treat them. For now, the local hospital staff has not come down with the diseases they brought here, but, with so many hundreds of patients every day — this is just a question of time.”

In one shocking incident a medic also claimed how migrants stabbed the doctors who tried to save a tiny eight-month-old baby which had been “dragged across half of Europe for three months.” She said: “The child died in two days, despite having received top care at one of the best pediatric clinics in Germany. The physician had to undergo surgery and two nurses are laid up in the ICU. Nobody has been punished. The local press is forbidden to write about it, so we know about it through email.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced during a news conference that he had asked Garry McCarthy, police superintendent since May 2011, to resign. The mayor also said he was creating a new police accountability task force. The white officer, Jason Van Dyke, was charged a week ago with first-degree murder in the killing of Laquan McDonald. The video, from a patrol car's dashboard camera, was released on the same day.

High-profile killings of black men at the hands of mainly white law enforcement officials in US cities have fueled demonstrations for some two years, stoking a national debate on race relations and police tactics. Emanuel, a Democrat and former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, said he was responsible for what happened in the case, the same as the police superintendent. He said the creation of the task force was meant to rebuild trust in the police department of one of the country's largest cities.

At the suggestion of his economic chief, Cardinal George Pell, Francis has set up a “Working-Party for the Economic Future” which brings together the Secretariat of State, or prime minister’s office, the Vatican Bank and other agencies. Francis has told the panel “to address the financial challenges and identify how more resources can be devoted to the many good works of the Church, especially supporting the poor and vulnerable,” Danny Casey, director of Pell’s office at the Secretariat for the Economy, said in an interview.

The pope’s initiatives come as five people stand trial in the Vatican over the leak of confidential documents in two books published last month that described corruption, mismanagement and wasteful spending by church officials. Those on trial deny wrongdoing.

Francis, 78, has pushed for more openness and transparency in Vatican financial and economic agencies but he has faced resistance from the Rome bureaucracy.

It’s the latest sign of the major change in sentiment sweeping across Scandinavia’s biggest economy as the Sweden Democrats - a party with neo-Nazi roots - forces itself into the mainstream of Swedish politics. It became the country’s third-biggest party in last year’s election and managed to block the government’s first budget, forcing it to form a pact with the core opposition parties in an effort to prevent the Sweden Democrats from disrupting lawmaking.

The government is tightening rules for family re-unifications and enforcing border controls. While the measures have had some effect, Loefven said the inflow of asylum seekers is still unsustainable and has urged other EU countries to do more. As many as 190,000 asylum seekers are expected to arrive in Sweden this year alone, a development that is overwhelming authorities in a country of 10 million where housing shortages are already an issue.

Held three weeks after the Paris attacks that left 130 people dead, the referendum was originally scheduled to take place in 2016 but was moved up so it wouldn't interfere with the campaign for Britain's EU referendum, due to be held before 2017. A majority of left- and right-wing parties in the Danish parliament approved the principle of a referendum in December 2014, despite the opposition of the eurosceptic, anti-immigration Danish People's Party (DPP).

The party, which emerged as the country's second-biggest in June legislative elections, has held significant sway over Danish politics for more than a dozen years, providing right-wing minority governments with support to pass legislation in parliament in exchange for its tighter immigration policies. "More EU? No thanks," read the DPP's campaign posters.

Marine Le Pen’s National Front would get 28 percent of votes in the first round of elections starting December 6, the same as a combination of parties including Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republicans and the centrist MoDem, according to an Ifop opinion poll published in Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper. President Francois Hollande’s Socialists would get 22 percent, with as many as 54 percent of voters abstaining, according to the survey.

The regional elections are the first political test for Hollande since the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. With the country reeling from the violence and grappling with border controls, National Front candidates are showing “a significant increase” in support across the country, BVA said.

“At the moment we have received additional information confirming that oil from the deposits controlled by Islamic State militants enters Turkish territory on industrial scale,” he said. “We have every reason to believe that the decision to down our plane was guided by a desire to ensure security of this oil’s delivery routes to ports where they are shipped in tankers,” Putin said.

Speaking in Paris on Monday, President Recep Erdogan said that he will leave office if there is proof of Turkey’s cooperation with IS. “We are not that dishonest as to buy oil from terrorists. If it is proven that we have, in fact, done so, I will leave office. If there is any evidence, let them present it, we’ll consider it,” he said, as quoted by TASS.

The publication was announced in Berlin on Tuesday by Professor Andreas Wirsching and Dr Christian Hartmann of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History. Mein Kampf is already widely available around the world but not in the country where Hitler wrote it in the1920's and which made him rich. Filled with anti-Jewish, anti-Slavic slurs, it was the blueprint for his later wars of conquest across Europe and the Holocaust.

The copyright passed to the state of Bavaria following his suicide in the Berlin bunker in April 1945, along with all his possessions. The new version of his autobiography and political viewpoint will be an annotated edition of the book which, during the 12 years the Nazis ruled Germany, was more popular than the Bible.

Even though the researchers had no plans to produce a live baby, their work once again raised the issue of how soon science will be able to engineer designer babies and, just as importantly, whether doing so is ethical. “Science is moving at such a rapid pace that society can’t put off much longer deciding what it thinks about the concept,” says Peter Schattner, a scientist and author of “Sex, Love and DNA: What Molecular Biology Teaches Us About Being Human.”

“Abortion has long been a challenging and controversial issue, but with our increased ability to use fetal DNA to glimpse into the potential child’s future, the moral issues have multiplied.” As science progresses, parents may be able to choose a child based not just on the sex but on such criteria as a child’s likelihood of excelling in sports or mathematics.

A technological innovation that can strategically edit out specific stretches of DNA could ultimately lead to the genetic modification of children, and should be halted before it starts being used, they argued. "Like so many powerful new technologies, gene editing holds potential for both great benefit and great harm," an open letter published by the groups said.

"The implementation of heritable human genetic modification — often referred to as the creation of 'genetically modified humans' or 'designer babies' — could irrevocably alter the nature of the human species and society.