Over the weekend, the President-elect received two journalists from mainstream European print media for a joint interview in Trump Tower, New York: The Times of London and the German magazine Bild.

The event was videotaped and we are seeing today on television and on the respective websites of these papers some of the remarkable sound bites from the interview, particularly those which the British or the Germans will take very much to heart.

Defying any sense of journalistic integrity and loyalty to the truth, the Washington Post did it again — publishing Fake News for clicks — which had the desired effect of worldwide outrage to suit a tightly-defined political agenda.

This latest astounding deviation from the facts, however, makes indisputably clear the weaponization of news. Journalists and media outlets make mistakes from time to time, but a pattern and practice of publishing unfounded, unverified, and fraudulent articles cannot be characterized simply as irresponsible.

We are in the midst of an information war of epic proportions — led haplessly astray of the truth with the Post leading the way — and it's a dangerous and frightening portent of things to come, not the least of which will be propagandized truth and heavy-handed censorship.

On Friday, WaPo published an article claiming President-elect Donald Trump fired Washington, D.C., National Guard Major General Errol R. Schwartz — just in time for the inauguration — and that he would be forced to leave his post as soon as the president takes the oath of office.

But that isn't true.

"My troops will be on the street," Schwartz told the Post. "I'll see them off, but I won't be able to welcome them back to the armory." He added he would "never plan to leave a mission in the middle of a battle."

In the past week, the Obama administration overturned a decades­-old policy toward Cuban immigrants, forged two major agreements to address racial bias in big-city police departments and approved an unexpected cut in mortgage insurance premiums for hundreds of thousands of low-income and first-time home buyers.

Officials even made time, after years of lobbying, to add the rusty patched bumble bee to the list of endangered species.

In the final days before President Obama leaves office, administration officials are rushing to complete dozens of tasks that will affect millions of lives and solidify the president's imprint on history. But in many cases, their permanence is uncertain, and President-elect Donald Trump is already pledging to undo some of them after taking office.

"He is clearly using executive power aggressively and trying to do as much as possible in his final days," Princeton University history and public affairs professor Julian Zelizer said in an email. "It is clear that a president who was once reluctant to use the power of his own office has changed his heart, especially now that he sees a radically conservative Congress and Republican president-elect are getting ready to dismantle much of what he has done."

On Thursday alone, the administration designated three new national monuments and expanded another two in sites including a forest in the Pacific Northwest and a school for freed slaves in South Carolina; took away one of the special immigration privileges Cubans arriving in the United States without visas have enjoyed for 50 years; announced sanctions designations against 18 senior Syrian officials for their role in the use of chlorine as a chemical weapon in 2014 and 2015; awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Vice President Biden; and accused Fiat Chrysler of cheating on national emission standards for some of its diesel trucks.

For weeks, congressional Republicans and members of the Trump transition team have questioned why the White House is pressing ahead given that the GOP will control both the executive and legislative branch for at least the next two years.

President-elect Trump calls NATO "obsolete". Freeloaders, time to pay up for US protection.

Finally a US president calling out NATO for what it is...a useless, military alliance that represents a relic of days gone by, where corrupt politicians scream about "Russian aggression", so as to line their pockets with huge sums of military industrial complex kickbacks.

Or as Donald Trump so aptly put it...NATO is "obsolete."

The FBI to date has released only two videos recording the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, a fact that has led to numerous conspiracy theories about the source of destruction as an inside job. One query is why the FBI seized eyewitness tapes of the Pentagon's partial destruction in the first place. The speed and completeness of the seizures, and the scarcity of actual footage, are among the more puzzling aspects of the investigation. However, the FBI says it has released all relevant videos of the incident.

Videos from Nearby Businesses

The FBI's speedy retrieval of the tapes is corroborated by several witnesses, among them Jose Velasquez, a gas-station supervisor whose security cameras allegedly recorded the moment of impact when Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. "Within minutes, the FBI was there and took the film," Velasquez told the Richmond Times Dispatch. In addition, according to Gertz and Scarborough's "Inside the Ring," a hotel near the Pentagon may have captured footage on its security camera. This footage was seized by the FBI, who said the tapes didn't record the attack.

FBI Claims Little Internal Footage

The lack of footage available from the Pentagon's own security cameras has also raised questions. In 2002, the FBI released clips from two security cameras, both located north of the crash site. These show only a bloom of flame -- the impact and explosion -- and are set too far away from the impact site to provide any details for significant evidence. The bureau says that there were no other security cameras recording footage.

An inquiry into "fake news" is set to be launched by an influential cross-party committee of MPs within months amid fears the phenomenon is undermining democracy.

Executives at Facebook, Google and Twitter are expected to be called into Parliament and grilled on whether they are doing enough to stop the trend.

The Commons Culture Committee is discussing launching the inquiry internally and hopes it can begin holding sessions by late spring or early summer.

Damian Collins, the Tory chairman of the committee, told the Telegraph he fears "malicious" fake news is especially damaging around elections.

On January 4, President Igor Dodon of Moldova met with Vadim Krasnoselskiy, the head of the unrecognized Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (Transnistria). The meeting took place in Bendery, on the right bank of Dniester river, on the territory of the Transnistria. It was initiated by the president of Moldova.

Igor Dodon was elected Moldovan president on November 13 on a platform advocating improved relations with Russia. [Report on the election here.]

The Putin administration has found a new enemy to add to its list of globalists, human rights advocates, the European Union and the Islamic State: tobacco.

More than 30 percent of Russian adults smoke, which is apparently so objectionable to a government reviled for human rights abuses and attacks on press freedom that total tobacco prohibition may now be on the cards.

According to The Times, Russia's health ministry is considering banning cigarettes for anyone born after 2015. "This goal is absolutely ideologically correct," said Nikolai Gerasimenko, a member of the Russian parliament's health committee, in a chilling statement reminiscent of Soviet era proclamations.

The proposal sparked immediate criticism, with Elena Topoleva-Soldunova, a member of the Russian public chamber, warning "counterfeit tobacco could lead to even more harm to people's health."

An influential parliamentary committee will investigate an Israeli embassy plot to "take down" a UK government minister.

The chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee said on Sunday that disgraced Israeli embassy senior political officer Shai Masot's discussion of a "hit list" of MPs was "interference in British politics of the murkiest kind."

Crispin Blunt, a lawmaker from Prime Minister Theresa May's ruling Conservative Party, told the Mail on Sunday that "I hope to include this matter in the committee's wider inquiry into the Middle East peace process."

After undercover footage revealed the plot, Masot was swiftly thrown under the bus. He was sent back to Israel and fired from his government position.

The affair has been deeply embarrassing for Israel, with ambassador Mark Regev making a grovelling apology to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.

The footage also shows Masot calling Johnson an "idiot."

In two separate, and quite striking, interviews with Germany's Bild (paywall) and London's Sunday Times (paywall), Donald Trump did what he failed to do in his first US press conference, and covered an extensive amount of policy and strategy, much of which however will likely please neither the pundits, nor the markets.

Among the numerous topics covered in the Bild interview, he called NATO obsolete, predicted that other European Union members would join the U.K. in leaving the bloc and threatened BMW with import duties over a planned plant in Mexico, according to a Sunday interview granted to Germany's Bild newspaper that will raise concerns in Berlin over trans-Atlantic relations. Furthermore, in his first "exclusive" interview in the UK granted to the Sunday Times, Trump said he will offer Britain a quick and "fair" trade deal with America within weeks of taking office to help make Brexit a "great thing". Trump revealed that he was inviting Theresa May to visit him "right after" he gets into the White House and wants a trade agreement between the two countries secured "very quickly".

Trump told the Times that other countries would follow Britain's lead in leaving the European Union, claiming it had been deeply ­damaged by the migration crisis. "I think it's very tough," he said. "People, countries want their own identity and the UK wanted its own identity."