President Obama gave an interview to German media outlets Spiegel and ARD during his visit to Berlin, in which he discussed divisions in the US, his darkest moments as president, and whether Edward Snowden would be pardoned.

Reflecting on Trump's victory, Obama pointed to an "underlying division" in the US that has to do with economic growth, stagnation, and cultural and demographic issues - anxieties that Trump tapped into.

"I mean, there were probably millions of voters who voted for me and supported me and this time also voted for Donald Trump, and it just indicates that some of this is less ideological and more just an impulse towards some sort of change," he told Spiegel.

President Putin convenes top-level military and defence industry chiefs to address threats and assess preparedness for war.

Whilst the attention remains focused on the US and the aftermath of Donald Trump's election, President Putin of Russia has been having a round of meetings in the Russian resort town of Sochi with his military chiefs.

On 16th November 2016 President Putin met with the high command of the Russian Defence Ministry. On 17th November he met with the heads of Russia's defence industries - ie. the companies, research institutions and factories which make Russia's weapons. On 18th August 2016 he held a further meeting to discuss development of future weapons systems.

Sandwiched between these meetings President Putin also met with Russia's Security Council - Russia's highest executive body - where the main discussion seems to have been Russia's ongoing military campaign in Syria

This is an intensive round of meetings by any measure. A sign of their importance is the persons who attended them. Defence Minister Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff General Gerasimov attended all the meetings - including the National Security Council meeting yesterday. The meetings with the defence industry leaders additionally brought in Prime Minister Medvedev and Deputy Minister Rogozin - the latter is the minister in overall charge of Russia's defence industry complex.

In his last days as President of the United States, Barack Obama has decided to join the chorus of mainstream voices taking a stand against "fake news."

In recent weeks a growing number of pundits within the deadstream (formerly known as the mainstream) media have begun to discuss "fake news" and satire websites and what effect they have on the American public. Some of these pundits are worried that bad information on the Internet paved the way for President-Elect Trump. In fact, a study published Wednesday shows that fake stories related to the election generated more traffic on Facebook than leading stories from "more than a dozen major news sites."

Now, President Obama has decided to throw his hat into the ring by sharing his thoughts on how illegitimate news could affect the political process. The Hill reports that during a press conference in Germany on Thursday, Obama said that if Americans can not "discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems."

Obama went on to argue that because websites containing misinformation are often packaged "very well" it may inappropriately affect voter attitudes towards political candidates.

"If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won't know what to protect," Obama said. "We won't know what to fight for."

From calling the Russian strongman to meeting with Japan's prime minister, the president-elect is talking to a host of foreign leaders—without consulting the Obama administration.

It seems Russian President Vladimir Putin and Shinzō Abe, prime minister of Japan, know more about the future of U.S. national security priorities under President-elect Donald Trump than the troops and diplomats who would carry it out.

Trump talked to Putin on Monday. And he reportedly met with Abe on Thursday in New York. But his transition team reached out to the Pentagon and several other agencies for the first time only on Thursday afternoon, a defense official told The Daily Beast. Throughout his first week as president-elect, Trump has forged ahead with crafting U.S. foreign policy apparently without the input of the relevant departments.

The decision to talk to foreign leaders about policy without even notifying the U.S. government officials is the latest unorthodox move by a president-elect defined by firsts. Most presidents-elect do not have extensive talks with foreign leaders without at least consulting the U.S. government for background information, a summary of the current policy, or advice on how to proceed.

To some currently serving U.S. officials, the decision to reach out to foreign leaders is an extension of how Trump ran his campaign: improvised, and more than a little chaotic. If any concrete foreign policy proposals are coming together now, they're happening, in part, through meetings and calls with U.S. allies and foes alike.

Or as one U.S. defense official explained: "We can't take every statement literally, even of a president-elect. We just wait and see."

North Carolina's gubernatorial race was undecided 10 days after the Nov. 8 vote and new allegations by the Republican incumbent's campaign about felons and dead people casting ballots could leave the outcome in limbo for weeks.

Republican Governor Pat McCrory, trailing Democratic challenger Roy Cooper by about 6,300 votes according to the state elections website Friday afternoon, has not conceded. Under state law, Friday was the deadline for counties to certify their results.

But challenges over the validity of hundreds of votes and reviews of provisional ballots were expected to delay the reports from many, if not all, of the state's 100 counties, elections officials said.

An official Russian passenger aircraft carrying journalists to cover the APEC summit in Peru was chased by three military jets while flying through Swiss airspace.

Amid growing anti-Russian propaganda, several countries in Europe have now taken what they apparently consider to be necessary safety measures. On Friday, three Swiss fighter planes flew close to an aircraft carrying Russian journalists heading to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economic summit, held in Lima, Peru. Russian President Vladimir Putin will take part in the South American-based event, though the Russian president was not aboard the aircraft in question.

Andrey Kolesnikov, editor-in-chief of the Russian Pioneer magazine, wrote on Facebook, "We are flying to Peru, to APEC CEO summit [...] Flying through Switzerland. At some point, the plane with the delegation and the journalists is blocked from three sides by three fighter jets. [...] These are fighter jets of the Swiss Air Force."

In an unannounced phone call with NATO's secretary general, Donald Trump acknowledged that the military alliance still has "enduring importance." While the comment may come as a relieve to some European leaders, it runs contrary to his previous remarks.

A brief NATO statement released on Friday announced that US President-elect Donald Trump and Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had both underlined the military alliance's "enduring importance and discussed how NATO is adapting to the new security environment, including to counter the threat of terrorism" in what appears to have been an impromptu telephone conversation.

The statement added that "progress has been made on fairer burden-sharing," while acknowledging that the United States spends far more on defense than its European allies. In addition, it said that the bloc's leaders are looking forward to meeting with Trump during the NATO Summit in Brussels next year.

Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election means the UK must seriously rethink its technological relationship with the world's preeminent military power and consider whether its interests remain in step, a top defense scholar has warned.

Malcolm Chambers, who is deputy head of Britain's centuries old think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told Defense News that the UK's reliance on American military equipment must be urgently rethought. "Questions must now be asked about the strategic dependency that reliance on US military systems, including US black-box software, is creating, and whether the consequent risks remain acceptable in the new circumstances in which we find ourselves," he said. The UK is currently pressing ahead with the purchase of P-8 Poseidon maritime surveillance and is heavily reliant on US technology for its Trident nuclear missile systems.

Chalmers also said that nothing should be sacred in broadly reassessing the two countries' post-1945 'special relationship.' It is "already incumbent upon the British government to begin some serious thinking on the basis of what he might do," he said, pointing to what he termed Trump's "evident sympathy" for Russian President Vladimir Putin. "There should be no taboos about discussing the possibility of a fundamental divergence of outlook with the US," he stressed.

The issue of the Poseidon spy planes may be further complicated by concerns over the integrity of their equipment. A US Navy commander who was working with a top-secret spy plane being purchased by the UK in May went on trial for espionage on Tuesday.

Lieutenant Commander Lin, a naturalized Taiwanese, had served as a trusted senior officer and departmental head in a top secret US Navy surveillance unit based in Hawaii. The unit, known as Special Projects Patrol Squadron Two, uses both the P-3C Orion and P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance planes. The details of Lin's case are obscure given the secret nature of his work, and the allegations only came to light in a partially redacted court document. He is thought to have been detained over eight months ago.

Units of the Ukrainian military over the past 24 hours, 1,510 times opened fire on the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), one militia was injured, representative of the defense authority Eduard Basurin told the Donetsk News Agency on Saturday.

"The situation in the republic remains tense," he said. "Over the past day, the Ukrainian military 1,510 times violated the ceasefire regime, and one serviceman was injured."

The military launched 132 artillery shells of 152 and 122mm calibers, 526 mines of 120 and 82mm calibers. They used grenade launchers, weapons of infantry fighting vehicles and small arms.

Now that Jeff Sessions is Donald Trump's pick for attorney general, you're going to hear a lot of people dig up old accusations that Sessions is a racist. In fact, CNN did so last night. However, between the nature of the accusations and Sessions's actual record of desegregating schools and taking on the Klan in Alabama, it strains credulity to believe that he is a racist.

These accusations all center around the bruising judicial nomination process Sessions went through in 1986. Ronald Reagan had tapped Sessions to serve on the federal bench and the Senate judiciary committee ultimately rejected him after they heard testimony that he had supposedly called the ACLU and NAACP "un-American" and "communist-inspired," as well as made racist remarks. The accusations came from Thomas Figures, a black assistant U.S. attorney who worked for Sessions who said Sessions called him "boy" and had made a joke about how he thought the KKK was "O.K. until [he] found out they smoked pot." Another prosecutor, J. Gerald Hebert, said Sessions had called a white lawyer "a disgrace to his race" for representing black clients.

There is no concrete reason to doubt Figures or Herbert. Sessions vehemently denied calling Figures "boy," but he didn't rebut the substance of some of the claims—though he asserted they were taken out of context. It's not exactly inaccurate to point out that the NAACP and ACLU were "communist-inspired." He said he thought it absurd to think he would make a pro-KKK joke considering he was prosecuting the Klan at the time he made the remark. And for what it's worth, Figures also directed accusations at a another assistant U.S. Attorney who worked with Figures. That assistant U.S. Attorney also said Figures wasn't telling the truth and defended Sessions's integrity. Ultimately, the charges were no more than hearsay.

However, it's worth noting that Senator Ted Kennedy, on the Senate judiciary committee at the time, seemed heavily invested in tanking Sessions nomination. The next year, Kennedy's crusade was to sink Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court, which has generally been regarded as a shameful smear campaign ever since. The episode upended the comity that had previously existed between the Senate and the White House on Supreme Court nominations—Antonin Scalia was approved to the court 98-0 the year before, the same year that Sessions was filleted by Kennedy and Democrats on the judiciary committee. Perhaps Sessions was a trial run for "Borking."