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.

The freewheeling conversations have become a trademark of his papacy and the few times he takes direct questions from journalists. Francis, who visited Kenya, Uganda and the Central African Republic, also said the continent was "a martyr of exploitation" by wealthy countries who lust after its natural resources and try to impose Western values instead of concentrating on development.

The pope was asked if the UN climate summit in Paris would mark a turnaround in the fight against global warming. "I am not sure, but I can say to you 'now or never'," he said. "Every year the problems are getting worse. We are at the limits. If I may use a strong word I would say that we are at the limits of suicide."

He spoke of retreating glaciers in Greenland and low-lying countries at risk from rising sea levels. "I am sure that the (Paris delegates) have goodwill to do something. I hope it turns out this way and I am praying that it will," he said.

World leaders launched an ambitious attempt on Monday to hold back the earth's rising temperatures, with the United States and China - the world's biggest carbon emitters - urging the UN climate summit in Paris to mark a decisive turn in the fight against global warming.

Our junior doctors are about to walk out on strike because they don't want their overtime pay cut back. The jungle camp at Calais feels ready to explode into violence, with a 'nouvelle jungle' planned for a quiet village in Kent. And a vote on military intervention in Syria looks likely to split the Labour Party and fail in the Commons, calling into question our role in the world.

The Americans and Canadians have been perfectly clear. This Treaty on Climate Change Emissions is not going to be legally binding. And, in fact, it is not going to be a treaty at all. It is just hot air and paperwork. You'd think hot air is the last thing the climate needs. With America and Canada already greasing themselves to slide out of any deal, India and China are oiling themselves up to do the same.

China still builds at least one coal-fired power station a week and accounts for a third of all global emissions. It is the world's largest emitter of carbon, a position proudly held since 2007. They make big promises. But their population lives blinded by smog. India has been clear it will spend two decades increasing the burning of fossil fuels, boosting emissions to full capacity, in order to drag 300 million people above the poverty line.

As African nations follow on the coat-tails of India, trying to drag themselves out of abject poverty and feed the millions with nothing to eat, are we seriously asking them to care about emissions? My personal view is there are some inconvenient climate truths we don't get to hear much about, thanks to liberal lefties… Of the world's best 50 models on climate change, 95 per cent predicted that Antarctic Sea ice would decrease over the past 30 years. It increased.

Global-warming alarmists even went on a jolly expedition to prove their point in the Antarctic and ended up trapped in ice they’d said wasn't there. Climate-change scientists have been shivering in their short-sleeved shirts to find excuses for why the earth hasn't warmed as predicted. Scientists are floundering. Having worked at the Met Office, I can tell you their salaries depend on climate change being real.

But right now, with terror on our doorstep and ISIS in our midst, should world leaders be chatting about climate change as a top priority?