Tired of seeing the bloodshed and Syrian suffering, Anna Alboth organised a mass march from Berlin to Aleppo, happening now.

She is the organiser of the Civil March for Aleppo. While others were sitting around the dinner table with their families, Alboth and others from all over Europe were preparing for a month-long walk from Berlin to Syria.

They plan to walk through Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and Turkey - the Balkan route backwards - 20 kilometres a day in freezing temperatures, with the aim of sleeping in tents and sports halls. The journey is expected to take over three months.

Trump announced his plan to ban all Muslims from entering the United States until US leaders "can figure out what is going on."
To justify his proposal, he cited a flawed poll from June 2015 that portrayed American Muslims as increasingly radical. According to this poll, 51 percent of Muslims in the United States believe they should have the choice to be governed by Shariah law (Islamic religious law) instead of US laws, and nearly 20 percent believe "the use of violence in the United States is justified in order to make Shariah the law of the land in this country."
Conway's firm, The Polling Company, conducted this poll for the Center for Security Policy, a think tank run by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration defense official. Gaffney is a right-wing extremist who frequently pushes wild conspiracy theories and has often been at odds with other conservative leaders. He's claimed there is "mounting evidence" that President Barack Obama is a secret Muslim; alleged that Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood (Gaffney's think tank claimed Abedin is one of six Muslim Brotherhood operatives working inside the Obama administration); and suggested the federal government, the media, and the financial sector have all been infiltrated by "Shariah-adherent" Muslims. (One of Gaffney's Islamophobic themes is conflating radicalism with adherence to Islamic religious law).

Gaffney has also been part of Groundswell, a DC-based group of conservative advocates, which included Bannon, that has plotted strategies for injecting far-right messages into the national political discourse. Before joining Trump's campaign, Bannon, as chairman of Breitbart News, hosted Gaffney on his daily radio show 29 times. Gaffney also has been a frequent columnist at Breitbart. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Gaffney "one of America's most notorious Islamophobes." Gaffney is not part of Trump's transition team, but he has expressed hope that his ideas will help guide the president-elect. He is a fringe figure, but his voice has been amplified in the age of Trump.

But her poll had serious methodological problems. Most notably, it was an opt-in online poll, not a random sampling of Muslims in the United States. That means it was not scientific and wasn't a reliable indicator of American Muslims' attitudes as a whole. On its website, the American Association for Public Opinion Research cautions that opt-in polls "may not be reliable" and warns that "this type of sample is not based on the full target population." Regarding Conway's poll, Democratic pollster Mark Mellman wrote last year, "One cannot say that it represents the views of American Muslims. For many, that fact is sufficient to dismiss the poll." Mellman also took issue with how the poll questions were worded, contending that they were vague and misleading and designed to make American Muslims appear radical. "In short," he wrote, Conway's polling company and Gaffney's group "created an issue where none is apparent, except perhaps to a small minority."

Abu Nimr was killed in Damascus just weeks after he filmed his daughters talking about how they would carry out a suicide attack

Nimr came to fame after a video was released online showing the militant sitting next to his two daughters encouraging them to carry out suicide attacks.

In a video that went viral and horrified millions around the world, Nimr asked his nine and 10-year-old daughters: "You want to surrender so that you're raped and killed by the infidels?"

"You want to kill them, no? We're a glorious religion, not a religion of humiliation, isn't that so darling?"

The video was verified by sources close to Al-Arabiya news and released to coincide with a suicide bombing that took place outside a police station in a Damascus suburb on 16 December.

It’s not hyperbole to say the United States, and in fact the world, will need some luck to get out of this one alive. So let’s concentrate on making our own luck.

The people who run America have constructed a political system that’s like a glitchy killer robot, one even they can’t control anymore.

Working as designed it murders African Americans and pregnant women and opioid addicts. The Iraq War was a minor hiccup that caused it to obliterate a country, several thousand Americans, and hundreds of thousands of people all around the world. The housing bubble was a more serious bug that liquidated hundreds of thousands more from the poorer half of the rich world.

But with Donald Trump, for perhaps the first time, the robot totally ignored the commands of its creators and now has everyone in its crosshairs.

If there’s anything to learn from history, it’s that elites don’t dismantle their beloved killer robots on their own. Either regular people — including you reading this right now — will deactivate this one, or it will never happen at all. Not a single person knows exactly how to pull this off. But one thing’s for sure: Trump’s rise proves that whatever it is we’ve been doing isn’t working.

Federal ethics experts for former Democratic and Republican administrations warned Thursday that President-elect Donald Trump is creating a major conflict of interest by allowing his Virginia vineyard to seek special temporary visas for foreign workers.

Trump, who is president of the Charlottesville vineyard that applied this month for H2 visas for six foreign workers, will soon run the U.S. government, which determines whether to grant those visas.

“This is a powerful example of why Donald Trump needs to make a definitive break, not just with his operational interests but his ownership interests, by appointing an independent trustee to liquidate all that,” said Norm Eisen, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who was chief White House ethics lawyer for President Obama from 2009 to 2011.

He called the situation “a classic conflict of interest.”