So up to 3 million people took to the streets of Paris, including 40 heads of state, to denounce the murders of 17 victims of a streak of Takfiri terror attacks this past week.

Where were they?

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Afghanistan? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the Shia of Saudi Arabia? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against Shia of Bahrain? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Chechnia? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the Serbian people? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against Libyan people? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the Syrian people? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Iraq? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Kurdistan? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Lebanon? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Nigeria? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Pakistan? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of India? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Russia? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Somalia? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Kenya? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Yemen? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Algeria? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Indonesia? Nowhere.

Where were these 3 millions and 40 heads of state when abject Takfiri terror was unleashed against the people of Iran? Nowhere.

Why not?

Police Commissioner Helric Fredou, Number Two Police Officer of the Regional Service of France's Judicial Police (JP), Limoges, (Haute-Vienne), "committed suicide on the night of Wednesday to Thursday at the police station."

Commissioner Helric Fredou was part of the police investigation into the Charlie Hebdo terror attack.

Terror suspects Cherif and Said Kouachi who were shot dead by police on January 9, spent their high-school years in the Limoges region. No doubt this was the object of Fredou's police investigation. Yet police and media reports state that on that same Wednesday he was involved in a meeting with the family of one of the Charlie Hebdo victims.

On Wednesday, as part of the Charlie Hebdo investigation, he dispatched a team of police officials under his jurisdiction. He is reported to have waited for the return of his team for a debriefing. Immediately following the police debriefing, he was involved in preparing his police report.

According to media reports, he committed suicide at around 1am on Thursday, within hours of the police debriefing. He used his own police weapon, a SIG-Sauer to "shoot himself in the head".

At the time of his death, police claim to have not known the reason for his alleged suicide. This was reflected in their official statements to the media: "It is unknown at this time the reasons for his actions".

However, a back story appears to have been inserted simultaneously, most likely from the very same police media liaisons, who then told the press that Fredou was 'depressed and overworked'. For any law enforcement officer in France, it would seem rather odd that anyone would want to miss the biggest single terror event of the century, or history in the making, as it were. (21st Century Wire,)

For several weeks now the anti-Russian stance in the US press has quieted down. Presumably because the political leadership has moved its attention on to other things, and the media flock has followed suit.

Have you read much about Ukraine and Russia recently?

I thought not, despite the fact that there's plenty of serious action - both there as well as related activity in the US - going on that deserves our careful attention.

As I recently wrote, the plunging oil price is a potential catalyst for stock market turmoil and sovereign instability. Venezuela is already circling the drain, and numerous other oil exporters are in deep trouble as they foolishly expanded their national budgets and social programs to match the price of oil; something that is easy to do on the way up and devilishly tricky on the way down.

But consider the impact on Russia. From the Russian point of view, everything from their plunging ruble to bitter sanctions to the falling price of oil are the fault of the US, either directly or indirectly. Whether that is fair or not is irrelevant; that's the view of the Russians right now. So no surprise, it doesn't dispose them towards much in the way of good-will towards the West generally, and the US specifically.

Madrid wants to see changes made to the treaty governing the visa-free Schengen area, which would allow Spain to introduce border controls to stem the tide of Islamic militants returning from the Middle East, the country's interior minister has said.

"We are going to back border controls and it is possible that as a consequence it will be necessary to modify the Schengen treaty," Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz told the daily El Pais in an interview on Saturday.

"The existing mobility in the European Union is facilitating the movements (of jihadists) to any country and also to our country," he continued.

The minister and his European counterparts are set to discuss the future of Schengen during a meeting in Paris on Sunday.

Diaz is not the first European politician to consider revamping or altogether suspending the Schengen zone in response to the deadly attacks in and around Paris this week, which left 20 dead, including three attackers.

On Friday, The leader of France's rightwing Front National (FN), Marine Le Pen, told French President Francois Hollande that the country should "immediately suspend Schengen to be able to control our borders" in what she called an "essential element in the fight against terrorism."

NATO's civilian figurehead Jens Stoltenberg this week urged Russia to be a partner against terrorism. He was speaking the day after the deadly gun attack on a magazine in Paris where 12 people, including three police officers, were killed by assailants purporting to be affiliated with radical Islamists.

During a visit to Germany, the NATO general secretary called upon Moscow to be "an ally in the fight against terrorism" - adding: "We think it is important that Russia, which is our biggest neighbour in Europe, and NATO are working together on important issues like fighting terror."

Well, how about that for a screeching U-turn? After all, has it not become NATO policy, since the Ukraine crisis blew up last year, to terminate all security co-operation with Russia in a bid to ostracise the latter?

Only a few weeks ago, Stoltenberg and other NATO officials were accusing Russia of being the biggest threat to security in Europe, asserting without evidence that Moscow has aggressive designs on Ukraine, the Baltic states and other eastern European countries. According to NATO, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is on a revanchist revamp of the Soviet Empire, casting a sinister spectre over the entire continent.

The former Norwegian premier has been banging the war drum against Russia in perfect timing with the same hostile beat as his predecessor, the insufferable Danish robot Anders Fogh Rasmussen. When Stoltenberg took over the NATO role last mid-year his first official visit was to rush to Poland in a pointed show of solidarity with eastern European members of the US-led military alliance, who he claimed were living under the shadow of Russian "expansionism".

Stoltenberg's military counterpart in NATO, four-star American General Philip Breedlove has for months been sounding like a broken record, reiterating over and over that Russian forces have invaded Ukraine to subvert the Western-backed Kiev regime. Breedlove has never produced any verifiable evidence to support his wild assertions that are posited as "top intelligence".These tiresome incendiary claims have strangely become muted recently, suggesting more than a hint of disingenuousness from the General. How can Russia be launching military invasions month after month with no cumulative evidence to that effect, and then, lo and behold, all is quiet on the eastern front, as must be gleaned from Breedlove's recent insouciance on the matter.

The Full Paris Match interview of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, granted in Damascus on November 28th.

Paris Match: Mr. President, three years into this war, and considering how things have turned out, do you regret that you haven't managed things differently at the beginning, with the appearance of the first signs of the revolution in March 2011? Do you feel that you are responsible for what happened?

Bashar el Assad: Even in the first days of the events, there were martyrs from the army and the police; so, since the first days of this crisis we have been facing terrorism. It is true that there were demonstrations, but they were not large in number. In such a case, there is no choice but to defend your people against terrorists. There's no other choice. We cannot say that we regret fighting terrorism since the early days of this crisis. However, this doesn't mean that there weren't mistakes made in practice. There are always mistakes. Let's be honest: had Qatar not paid money to those terrorists at that time, and had Turkey not supported them logistically, and had not the West supported them politically, things would have been different. If we in Syria had problems and mistakes before the crisis, which is normal, this doesn't necessarily mean that the events had internal causes.

The International Business Times unpublished a story that suggested that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, carried out the attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hedbo.The Jan. 8 story's headline was "Charlie Hebdo Attack and Mossad Link: Is Israel Venting Its Fury for France's Recognition of Palestine State?."

According to a screenshot of the article posted on Twitter, the International Business TImes said that "Mossad of Israel is a prime contender" for who was behind yesterday's attack on Charlie Hebdo.

"It is believed that Israel has a grouse against France, especially because French MPs voted in favour of recognising the Palestinian state and also France voted against Israel at the UN recently, conspiracy bloggers such as 'Aangirfan' note," the article said.

iMediaEthics asked IB Times editor-in-chief Peter S. Goodman for more information about the article and how it made it to publication. "The article was published by our site in India, which serves an Indian audience. It was edited in Bangalore," Goodman wrote. "Complaints on social media drew the attention of our editors in New York and we immediately took down the offending story and issued an apology."

Goodman went on, "That story does not represent journalism in any sense and it has no place on our site. IB Times is a fast-growing global operation and we have substantially changed our culture in the last year, elevating our standards. This is a process, and there will inevitably be problems, but we are fully committed to eliminating stories that no pass muster and replacing them with quality work."

Below see a screenshot of the article.

Boko Haram, the extremist Islamic group that wants to enforce Sharia Law across Nigeria, has inflicted mass casualties in northeast Nigeria. Some reports put the number of fatalities as high as 2,000.

Amnesty International, communicating with experts on the ground in Nigeria, has said the assault on the town of Baga could be the deadliest attack by Boko Haram since the extremist group surfaced in 2009.

"The attack on Baga and surrounding towns looks as if it could be Boko Haram's deadliest act in a catalogue of increasingly heinous attacks carried out by the group," said Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty International.

Amnesty International has quoted some sources that say the town has been razed, with as many as 2,000 people killed. If true, that would mark a "disturbing and bloody escalation of Boko Haram's ongoing onslaught against the civilian population," Eyre added.

#Nigeria: Massacre possibly deadliest in Boko Haram's history #humanrights http://t.co/lBTIE71ZAR

- AmnestyInternational (@AmnestyOnline) January 9, 2015

Yanaye Grema, a 38-year-old fisherman, was part of a citizen's militia to defend the town but the extremist Islamic group overpowered them.

Corroborating claims by French security agencies, a bizarre interview conducted just before the death of terror suspect Chérif Kouachi reveals that he had been in Yemen and in direct contact with none other than Anwar Al Awaki - the notorious Al Qaeda leader allegedly killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

The UK Mirror in an article titled, "Paris shootings: Listen to terrorist Amedy Coulibaly's bizarre conversation with hostage during supermarket siege," quoted Kouachi as saying:

We are just telling you we are the defenders of the prophet and that I Chérif Kouachi have been sent by Al Qaida of Yemen and that I went over there and that Anwar Al Awaki financed me.

Not only was Anwar Al Awaki a senior leader in Al Qaeda, he also infamously spent dinner with top brass at the Pentagon shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks in Washington, New York, and over Pennsylvania.

The deadly events that unfolded in France over the last week may be the first in a wave of attacks to strike Europe, a German daily reports, citing NSA intercepts of communications between Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) leaders.

Paris was marked as the first in a series of European cities to be attacked, including Rome, the report in the German tabloid Bild read. However, the article didn't furnish details of a concrete plan to launch an attack.

The US National Intelligence Agency (NSA) also reportedly had information that Cherif and Said Kouachi, the brothers who carried out the mass shooting at the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, had contacts in the Netherlands.