Police in Vienna has stepped up security following a warning about a potential terror attack employing explosives or firearms between the Christmas and New Year holidays. According to police, the warning was issued to several European capitals.

In a statement issued on Saturday, Austrian police said that the warning came from an unidentified "friendly intelligence service" just days before Christmas, offering mostly general information about the possible attacks without specifying potential targets or exact dates.

It added that "several possible names of potential attackers were mentioned, who were checked and the investigation based on (these checks) has so far yielded no concrete results."

"We do not know if these people exist in real life, or if they are only names with no real person behind them. We have no evidence that they are in Vienna, and we have no evidence that they are even in Europe," Christoph Poelzl, a spokesman for Vienna police, said as quoted by the Guardian.

Poelzl refused to give any further details concerning the terror warning as he did not reveal the list of European capitals mentioned in the warning.

In the view of the warning, Vienna authorities said that no public events would be canceled but police surveillance will increase in the places expected to attract large numbers of people during the specific period. Police will also pay closer attention to suspicious bags.

Germany is seeking economic cooperation with Russia, offering 2 billion euro to participate in the construction of a Moscow-Kazan high-speed railway, the Russian Railways reported Friday.

China Railway Group and Russian Railroad have kicked off a new project to design and build a high-speed railway between Moscow and the southeastern city of Kazan. It is expected that the line would be extended to Beijing, reducing the duration of a rail journey between Moscow and China's capital to 48 hours.

"We have a proposal from our German colleagues on signing a similar (Russia-China) memorandum on cooperation, where they make commitments on financing of up to €2 billion in the project on various conditions," Vice President of Russian Railways (RZD) Aleksandr Misharin told journalists.

Misharin stated that the project would seek additional financial support next year, though a contract has not yet been signed. Earlier, China agreed to invest some $6 billion to fund the proposed railway. The cost of the 700 kilometer Moscow-Kazan rail line is calculated to be some $21.4 billion. The train is expected to travel at speeds of up to 400 kilometers per hour.

Under the new line, travelers would take three and half hours to get from Moscow to Kazan, compared to the current 14 hours. According to a statement made earlier by Misharin, the railway will take up to 10 years to build and, "in terms of scale and significance," could be compared to the Suez Canal.

​A recent poll conducted by the German-Russian Chamber of Commerce (ANK) has found that 80 percent of companies that have trade links with Russia believe that economic sanctions are not having their desired effect.

The Dutch government is set, once the holidays are over, to come to a consensus on whether to start bombing 'IS targets' in Syria. In the following interview by Dutch news channel NPO2 on the December 17, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad explained why he thinks The Netherlands has no place in Syria. Should the NATO member-state start dropping bombs in Syria, Assad says this would constitute an illegal act under international law.

In response, Dutch foreign affairs minister Bert Koenders told Dutch news outlet NOS that Assad is not the kind of president who should be teaching the Netherlands a lesson about international law. "He throws barrels bombs on his own population and is responsible for mass killings and large numbers of refugees," Koenders said.

Given that there is in fact no evidence that Assad's forces are indiscriminately killing civilians, it appears that Dutch officials are parroting everything the US government has been spouting in recent years about Syria and the removal of its legitimately-elected president. Perhaps the Dutch foreign affairs minister needs to be reminded of the following:

Many armchair critics of this 'dictator' [Assad] are probably unaware that he was re-elected just last year, after 3 years of fighting a war against foreign mercenaries. In the 2014 elections:

• 73.42% of the population turned out to vote;
• 88.7% of whom voted for Assad;
• So, 65% of Syrians voted for Assad.

This was in the midst of a refugee crisis. While many countries allowed Syrians within their borders to vote at their respective embassies, Belgium, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE and the United States did not allow the elections to be held in their Syrian embassies.

While Koenders and other Western officials cannot provide evidence to show that Assad is the 'evil dictator' they claim him to be, and that the Syrian people are 'against' him, Assad himself is very clear about the situation and refers to the facts every time. The president further shows that he is pragmatic and is willing to cooperate with other countries, as long as they do not support terrorists.

Unfortunately, cooperation with Western nations has proven to be difficult because they refuse to communicate with the Syrian government and prefer to conduct unilateral operations. The results of the Western coalition's 'war against Islamic State' have been meager to say the least. As Assad says in this interview:

"Western politics regarding terrorism, is not objective, and not realistic, and actually not only not productive; it's counter-productive. What is the reality? The reality is that ISIS has been expanding since the coalition started in 2014."

You can watch the full interview (22 minutes) below. A transcript is also provided, courtesy of the Syrian Arab News Agency:

In 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin touched upon a whole array of pressing international issues, and it seems that the world was ready to listen as each remark made global headlines.

2015 saw Russian President Vladimir Putin discuss a spate of hot-button topics, with his thoughtful and sharp remarks quickly grabbing international headlines. Here is a list of some of Putin's most outstanding remarks at important occasions throughout the year, including his meetings with senior foreign officials, his address to the Russian Upper House (Federal Assembly), as well as his interviews and at his keynote press conference:

Russia will create counter-terrorism operational headquarters in several key coastal areas, including the Crimean Peninsula, the Far East and the Arctic. The relevant decree was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday, the Kremlin website reported. The decree orders the establishment of "operational headquarters in marine areas for the organization of planning the use of forces and means for federal counter-terrorism operations in the cities of Kaspiysk, Murmansk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Simferopol and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk."

The HQs will also be planning counter-terror operations in other maritime areas, in which Russia exercises its sovereignty, as well as on vessels flying under the Russian flag. The decision made by the counter-terrorism operational headquarters is to become binding for all state agencies represented in them. According to the decree, the HQs will be headed by the commanders of the Border Guard Service of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in corresponding responsible areas.

The Caspian Sea port of Kaspiysk is in Russia's southern Republic of Dagestan. Murmansk lies above the Arctic Circle on the shores of the Kola Bay, an inlet of the Barents Sea. Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is the largest city of the Far Eastern Kamchatka Peninsula, washed by the Bering and Okhotsk Seas. The city of Simferopol is the administrative center of the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea. Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk is on the Sakhalin Island in the Pacific Ocean, not far from Japanese territorial waters.

The Syrian army's special forces destroyed a chemical weapons workshop of the ISIL terrorists in the province of Lattakia.

The Syrian troops also seized a large number of equipment used for making chemical weapons, medical equipment and medicine, with raw materials which carried made-in-Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia lables.

"The equipment seized in this region shows that the terrorists intended to launch chemical and biological attacks in a bid to accuse the Syrian government of using such weapons," an unnamed Syrian army field commander told the Arabic-language media outlets.

Since April of 2015, the Republic of Burundi has been beset by a violent protest movement organised by NGOs financed by the United States and the European Union. These so-called 'civil society' organisations have engaged in mass murder, arson, and sabotage in a concerted attempt to spread anarchy in the country on behalf of neocolonial interests.

The Burundian government has become a target of Africom, US neocolonial rule in Africa which advocate the creation of a strong state with a multi-vectored foreign policy. Important contracts have been signed in recent years with Russia and China for the exploitation of natural resources such as nickel. The country is also moving closer into the orbit of the BRICS countries. This is why it is being attacked by Western-backed political subversion.

Pierre Nkurunziza, the country's president, is among the most popular leaders in Africa today. The reason for this is quite simple. Since coming to power in 2005, Nkurunziza has built more schools than all the combined rulers since independence. A keen ecologist, Nkurunziza is known to spend weekends working in the fields with peasants. He has initiated a vast tree-planting programme to protect the country's environment. The Burundian government intends to turn the country into a major exporter of fruit and free medical care for pregnant women has been provided in newly constructed healthcare centres throughout the country.

For those who have followed the meteoric - and completely implausible - rise of Islamic State, it's easy to become desensitized to the group's apparent brutality.

As we documented in "Inside The ISIS Propaganda Machine: An Up-Close Look At A Militant Media Strategy," the group produces nearly 40 pieces of propaganda each and every day via a sprawling network of discrete production units located in a dozen countries. Although most of the propaganda pieces actually aren't murder montages, many of them are and when you're churning out that much material, eventually you start to run out of ideas. That, presumably, is why more "creative" execution methods like drowning people in cages and hanging soldiers upside down from a swing set before lighting them on fire have recently given way to less imaginative, Kim Jong Un-style tactics like executing prisoners with a TOW and running people over with tanks.

Once you've seen enough of these clips, revulsion slowly turns to disbelief as the footage is at times so violent that one begins to question if it's real. As desensitizing as the material ultimately is, ISIS (or whoever is actually behind all of this) has a remarkable penchant for taking things up a notch just when you thought they had reached peak-sickening.

Washington will not share intelligence data on Islamic State positions in Syria and will not accept Moscow's offer to cooperate on rooting out terrorism until Moscow changes its position on Syrian President Bashar Assad's future, the Pentagon said.

Ever since the start of the Russian campaign in Syria in late September, Moscow has been offering to share information with the US-led coalition against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), urging Washington to reciprocate. After months of extensive diplomatic efforts by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defense, and the Kremlin, the Pentagon is still refusing to enter the proposed cooperation.

"We are not going to cooperate with Russia on Syria until they change their strategy of supporting Assad and instead focus on ISIL," US Defense Department Spokesperson Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza told Sputnik on Friday.

Christmas could not have been merrier or greener for the homeless on the streets of Denver: They were treated to some holiday joints handed out by volunteers in the city where marijuana is legal to enjoy.

In an attempt to engage Colorado's homeless community in a unique way, and to spread some love to those without a home on Christmas day, a group of volunteers from Cannabis Can took to the streets at 4:00pm, handing out 1,000 pre-rolled joints. The group focused their community efforts on the Colfax, Lawrence and Broadway areas.

The NGO has stated that it is addressing the issue of homelessness in America with a completely new approach, by sharing big warm hugs and some green magic.

"Cannabis can make a difference,' is kind of what we're standing for," Nick Dicenzo, the founder of the non-profit, told Denver's KMGHTV. "Merry Christmas, Happy Cannamas - would you like some rolling papers?"