Over 13,000 civilians have been rescued from militant-held parts of eastern Aleppo with the help of the Russian Center for Reconciliation in the past 24 hours, while more than 700 militants have laid down their arms and surrendered to the Syrian army.

"Within the past 24 hours, 13,346 civilians have been evacuated from the Aleppo districts that remain under the control of militants with the assistance of the Russian Center for Reconciliation of warring parties, including 5,831 children. 728 militants have laid down their arms and crossed into the Western part of the city," Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said in a statement on Monday morning.

This is the way the Obama administration ends; not with a bang, but a pathetic whimper.

Queen of War Hillary "We Came, We Saw, He Died" Clinton's campaign - fully supported by President Obama — spent a whopping $1.2 billion and floundered ignominiously at the US presidential election. So Obama decided that the consolation "prize" is to order the "intelligence community" - a contradiction in terms - to conduct a "full review" of how the evil Russians handed out the Big Prize to Donald Trump.

Queen of War famously insisted throughout the campaign that "17 US intelligence agencies" confirmed Russian hacking of the Podesta emails, then slow-dripped - Chinese torture-style - day after day by WikiLeaks, revealing the slimy inner workings of the DNC. In fact there was no damning 17 intel agencies verdict, just a dodgy comment by further disgraced Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper offering no evidence whatsoever.

Now Amazon's Jeff Bezos' two-bit neocon-infested rag The Washington Post - once upon a time a decent newspaper - piles up, mouthing a sensationalist CIA spin according to which Langley has proof the Russians did maneuver to install their Manchurian, Trumpian candidate.

And this right after the same rag went the full McCarthy, promoting a long black list remix of websites/news agencies, Sputnik included, denounced as fifth columnists and/or propaganda ops. Further enhancing its already negative credibility - constantly boosted by the neocon/neoliberalcon ravings of its editorial pages — the Post to this day has not retracted its infantile, bogus "report".

The intersection of The New McCarthyism and the CIA at the Post couldn't be more predictable; after all Bezos' Amazon is a major contractor with the CIA, thus configuring the Post as a key US deep state asset. So welcome to Washington's alleged newspaper of record regurgitating a US government (USG) blacklist of American and foreign journalists.

President-elect Donald Trump shrugged off reports citing anonymous CIA officials accusing Russia of hacking the US presidential election, a day after calling the story "ridiculous" on TV.

"Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card. It would be called conspiracy theory!" Trump tweeted on Monday morning.

On December 9, The Washington Post reported on a secret assessment by the CIA, which concluded that Russian intelligence hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's chief of staff specifically to help Trump win the presidency.

"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," Trump's transition team replied, before adding, "It's now time to move on and Make America Great Again."

The president-elect has dismissed the allegations as "ridiculous," accusing the Democrats of cooking up the claim to explain their stunning electoral defeat.

"I don't believe it," he told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace. "I think it's just another excuse."

Here's what's left of democracy in America.

We had an election, and the candidate favored by Washington, media, and many business elites did not win. Here's what happened next.

The Israeli PM says that he has at least five ideas in mind for Donald Trump, whose "support for Israel is clear," to help the US president-elect undermine the nuclear deal with Iran, which, according to Netanyahu, removed the last obstacles in front of Tehran in its "rush for the bomb."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the US President-elect would be a good friend to Israel, despite all the accusations of bigotry and anti-Semitism surrounding Donald Trump and his team.

"I know Donald Trump," Netanyahu told CBS' 60 Minutes. "And I think his attitude, his support for Israel is clear. He feels very warmly about the Jewish state, about the Jewish people. There's no question about that."

Netanyahu's main difference of opinion with President Obama was on the matter of Iran and its nuclear program. It wasn't personal though, since they had "had the greatest of personal chemistry," Netanyahu told CBS.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has pledged that Moscow will do its best to make sure terrorists will not return to the Syrian city of Palmyra, which was reportedly recaptured by Daesh late last week.

"We consider the liberation of Palmyra to be a very important result of our joint actions. Obviously, we will do everything to prevent terrorists from returning to these areas," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Titov said on Monday.

The statement came after the media reported that Daesh (ISIL/ISIS) had managed to retake Palmyra, hours after they were driven back by Russia's Aerospace Forces.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes told Business Insider's Henry Blodget on Tuesday that the "real threat" to the First Amendment did not come from President-elect Donald Trump during the campaign, but rather from the Democratic Party.

Bewkes was speaking at Business Insider's annual IGNITION conference, during which he was asked about Trump's frequent campaign threats to open up libel laws.

Trump has also set his sights on Bewkes' own media property, CNN, which he consistently ridiculed along the campaign trail and even after Election Day.

"Do you worry about that at all?" Blodget asked.

Bewkes said he didn't "think that's a serious thing," adding that "we should all worry" if someone were seeking to change the First Amendment. He suggested that came from the Democratic Party, which "had a campaign plank to change the First Amendment, and they were doing it in the guise of campaign finance reform."

Terrorist Yousef Fahd Deeb admitted that terrorists executed scores of civilians in the public squares and streets of Aleppo's eastern neighborhoods under flimsy pretexts in order to terrorize and pressure locals.

Deeb, who was arrested by the Syrian Arab Army as he was trying to blend in among civilians exiting the eastern neighborhoods of Aleppo, said that he was the head of the "sharia tribunal" office of al-Jabha al-Chamiya terrorist organization, and that many of the terrorists who came to the tribunal were foreigners from Turkey, Chechnya, Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia.

The terrorist acknowledges that Turkey is the main source of funding and arming for terrorist organization, as they received enormous sums of money in US Dollars, and that the heavy weapons used by the terrorists - including the tanks, vehicles, and heavy machine guns - were used by militants from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

Israel was one of the first countries to set up communications with Russia in an effort to prevent accidents and dangerous incidents throughout Russia's counter-terrorist aerial campaign in Syria.

"We coordinated between our militaries because no one wants an inadvertent Israeli-Russian clash," Netanyahu said in an interview the CBS News television channel on Sunday.

Netanyahu noted that he was not going to intervene in the Syrian conflict but at the same time he would not allow Iran "to use Syria" to attack Israel.

... Could Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell get booted from office due to his alleged involvement with corruption related to the current Russia election scandal involving Donald Trump? Adding to the list of suspicious circumstances, Mitch McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, was named as a Trump cabinet pick soon after McConnell allegedly dismissed the Russian hacker investigation. - Inquistr.com

As predicted, supposed involvement of Russia in US elections is rapidly devolving into accusations of criminality. It is certainly possible, in one way or another, that these could be turned on the alternative media itself (see excerpt above).

What is striking about this is the rapidity with which accusations are being promulgated and applied. The idea basically is that if you deny Russia's involvement in influencing US elections, you are likely an ally of this process or an unwitting dupe. See our article here.


But these denunciations will not matter if they are not accompanied by further investigations bringing the power of the US government to bear. In this case, we can see the rhetoric escalating when it comes to McConnell.