Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a decree refusing to ratify the Rome Statute, the treaty which established the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Foreign Ministry said the ICC has not "lived up to expectations and failed to become a genuinely independent judicial body."

The presidential decree, published on the official Russian legal information portal, orders the authorities "to accept the proposal of the Justice Ministry of Russia, coordinated with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other federal bodies of executive power, with the Russian Supreme Court, the General Prosecutor of the Russian Federation and the Russian Investigative Committee, [to send] the Secretary General of the United Nations a notice of the Russian Federation's intention not to become party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court."

The decree will come into force as soon as it is signed.

The Democratic Party has been the Establishment for eight years, and the Clintons have arguably been the Establishment for 24 years. Since the late 1990s, members of the white working class with high school or less have seen their life-chances radically decline, even to the point where they are dying at much higher rates than they have a right to expect.

A year ago Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton University economists, published a study with the startling finding that since 1999 death rates have been going up for white Americans aged 45-54. It is even worse than it sounds, since death rates were declining for the general population.

One of the big reasons for this increased death rate has been increased use of opiods and other drugs, leading to overdoses, along with liver disease from drinking too much alcohol and increased suicide rates. The problems were especially acute among working class and rural whites with only high school or less, and later studies found that they extended to younger members of this social class in their 20s and 30s. Loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs was clearly a primary reason for this despair.

Compared to 1999, white workers, according to another recent study in the Commonwealth Foundation: "have lower incomes, fewer are employed, and fewer are married." This study found other causes for the increased death rates than just the ones mentioned above, but didn't deny the Princeton findings. Here is their chart:

North Korea "doesn't care" who the next US president is, a senior Pyongyang diplomat said during a visit to the UN, following Donald Trump's election victory.

"We do not care about whoever becomes the president of the United States," Kim Yong Ho, director of human rights and humanitarian issues, told reporters after a UN General Assembly committee backed a draft resolution condemning "widespread and gross violations of human rights" in North Korea.

"The fundamental issue here is whether or not the United States has the political will to withdraw its hostile policy toward the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea]," he said, according to Reuters.

Let's not dance around it - Reince Priebus is part of The Establishment, and Trump just picked him to be his Chief of Staff for the incoming administration. This selection has already caused some people to question whether or not Trump was ever serious about fulfilling his campaign promise to "Drain The Swamp", but such concerns this early in the game are totally unfounded and more alarmist than anything. In his first post-election interview with CBS, Trump directly addressed these criticisms head-on, saying that:

"Everybody's a lobbyist down there, that's the problem with the system -- the system. Right now, we're going to clean it up. We're having restrictions on foreign money coming in, we're going to put on term limits, which a lot of people aren't happy about, but we're putting on term limits. We're doing a lot of things to clean up the system. But everybody that works for government, they then leave government and they become a lobbyist, essentially. I mean, the whole place is one big lobbyist. I'm saying that they know the system right now, but we're going to phase that out. You have to phase it out."

Paying attention to the President-elect's words, it's plain to see that he's resorting to his characteristic businessman pragmatism in accepting the reality that he must work with some elements of the Old System as part of his historic quest to replace The Establishment. Supporters and detractors alike should temper their enthusiasm and criticisms of Trump and realize that he was never going to instantly transform the US with the snap of a finger. His election was revolutionary because it's the first time that an American President was elected who is fully dedicated to changing the entire status quo and upending it to the betterment of the average American, and Trump's "political incorrectness" and unceasing attacks on "liberalism" during the campaign testify to his commitment to see this happen.

Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorists were brainwashing thousands of children for the past two years in the occupied city of Mosul, their stronghold in Iraq, according to a report by Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights.

The jihadists are said to have been modifying school curricula for two years to "brainwash student children, force hatred onto them and oblige them to join [IS ranks]," according to the Commission's media director, Jawad al-Shamri, as cited by Iraqi News.

He also said that IS had managed to meddle with the education of as many as 400,000 children in this manner.

"ISIS syllabuses taught children how to make explosive belts, take female hostages and prepare booby-traps," al-Shamri detailed. Warning that such practices would "become entrenched in children's minds" if they are not taken care of immediately, al-Shamri said he had approached the UN with a call to provide rehabilitation for the youngsters.

Russia's defense ministry made the statement on Tuesday, adding that the US State Department has never backed its empty claims against Russia's actions in Syria with concrete actions.Washington earlier raised its concerns over Russia's recent strikes in Syria, US Department of State spokesperson Elizabeth Trudeau said in a briefing.

On Tuesday, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu told President Vladimir Putin that a frigate had fired Kalibr cruise missiles on terrorist targets in the Syrian provinces of Idlib and Homs.

"We continue to have these discussions in Geneva... We have raised the issue of bombardment," Trudeau said when asked whether Washington has raised the issue of airstrikes with Moscow.

"We do not know where Elizabeth Trudeau gets her information on the situation in Syria," Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said in a statement. "Her recounting of rumors about alleged destruction of five hospitals and a mobile clinic by Russian airstrikes only confirms that all public rhetoric by the US State Department regarding th situation in Syria is based on flagrant lies."

"No matter how often we urged them to present concrete facts, they provided nothing but empty accusations," Konashenkov added.

The stock market's post-election bifurcation sharpened Monday as technology shares extended their worst performance since the start of the bull market on speculation Donald Trump's trade and immigration policies will translate into lower earnings.

Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc. led the S&P 500 Information Technology Index down 1.7 percent for the biggest retreat since September. The group stands out as the only industry that normally benefits from a rising economy not to rally on speculation Trump's policies will stoke domestic growth. Tech stocks in the benchmark equity gauge have slumped 3.1 percent over four days, trailing the S&P 500 Index by 4.2 percentage points, the most since May 2009. Small caps in the Russell 2000 Index surged 1.2 percent to an all-time high.

No single fact explains the tech rout though everything from trade and immigration policy to industry rotation to flat-out campaign retaliation have been cited. Technology is the biggest group in the S&P 500 by far and one of the only ones to consistently post earnings growth over the last 18 months.

"Technology provides the productivity gains for the global economy and many of the large-cap names like Apple and Amazon were carrying the torch for the market," Channing Smith, a managing director at Capital Advisors Inc. in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said by phone. The firm oversees about $1.8 billion. "Without their participating, that's definitely going to create a headwind for the market."

The S&P 500 slipped less than one point for a second day of losses, with tech giants bearing the worst of the rout. The FANG block of Facebook, Amazon.com Inc., Netflix Inc. and Google parent Alphabet each fell more than 2.4 percent. The group has dropped every day since Trump's victory, sinking 8 percent for the worst retreat since February amid concern about the impact of Trump's policies on trade overseas, where U.S. technology companies thrive.

A leaked report prepared for the Cabinet Office reveals how Prime Minister Theresa May's government has no plan for delivering on its Brexit pledge, or any understanding of its implications for British industry.

The Times obtained a memo prepared by financial services company Deloitte dated November 7 called "Brexit update," which blames Cabinet squabbles for the delay in negotiations that are supposed to begin in April of 2017, when the government hopes to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.

The document also sets out how 500 Brexit related projects would require recruiting an extra 30,000 civil servants.

"Major players," the leaked memo reads, "will point a gun at the government's head" following promises made to Nissan carmakers about post-Brexit trading conditions.

On Sunday night, November 13^th, the foreign ministers of all the EU nations except Britain and France, met together at an emergency dinner in Brussels, to come up with some way to deal with America's next President, Donald Trump, whom most of them fear and loathe. Euronews reporter Efi Koutsokosta stated regarding the ministers' privately expressed view, that "Some had described it as 'a dinner born out of the horror at a Trump victory,'" but no one present would say any such thing for attribution.

The meeting had been called together in an announcement made to the foreign ministers less than three days before, on November 11^th.

Among the matters they discussed with the press after the dinner, were their severe concern that the US might pull out of the anti-Russian military alliance, NATO, which had been created at the start of the Cold War against the communist Soviet Union, and which US military alliance against Russia never actually ended even after both communism and the Soviet Union ended in 1991. Though that was supposed to be the end of the Cold War, it ended actually only on the Russian side, not at all on the US side, where the hostility and desire for conquest on the part of America's aristocracy continued.

Thus, the former member-states of the Soviet Union other than Russia were invited (with payment-offers) into and joined the anti-Russian military club, NATO, and the former Soviet-affiliated nations that had joined the Soviets' mirror-organization to counter the NATO threat, the Warsaw Pact, also were invited into and joined NATO. Russia was left isolated; and, with US President Barack Obama's second term, which started in 2013, Russians became startled when on 20 February 2014 Obama's State Department and CIA ran in Ukraine a coup, which hired local Ukrainian fascist mercenaries dressed as if they were state-security forces, and those mercenaries shot down both at police and at anti-government protesters who had been organized by the State Department and Google, and the freely and democratically elected Moscow-friendly President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was forced out in a very bloody US-organized coup-operation hiding behind anti-corruption demonstrators. That event sparked the new Hot War against Russia, which now continues also with US support of jihadists to remove from power in Russia's ally Syria, that country's President, Bashar al-Assad. Russia responded to that danger by sending in its own planes and advisors, and most EU parliamentarians were looking forward eagerly to joining President Hillary Clinton's conquest of Russia — not to the election of President Trump.

Syria's Bashar al-Assad said in an interview aired on Tuesday that Donald Trump will be a "natural ally" if the US president-elect fulfills his pledge to fight "terrorists". In his first reaction to Trump's election victory last week, the Syrian president struck a note of caution and said he was unsure the American billionaire would be able to keep his word and step up the fight against jihadists. "We cannot tell anything about what he's going to do, but if... he is going to fight the terrorists, of course we are going to be ally, natural ally in that regard with the Russian, with the Iranian, with many other countries," he told Portugal's RTP state television.

Asked about Trump's campaign comments suggesting the United States should focus more on fighting the Islamic State (IS) group, Assad said he would welcome such a move but was cautious. "I would say this is promising, but can he deliver?" said Assad, who was speaking in English. "Can he go in that regard? What about the countervailing forces within the administration, the mainstream media that were against him? How can he deal with it?" he said. "That's why for us it's still dubious whether he can do or live up to his promises or not. "That's why we are very cautious in judging him, especially as he wasn't in a political position before," said Assad.

The United States leads an international coalition that is conducting air strikes against IS jihadists in Syria and neighbouring Iraq, and also backs rebels fighting the Assad regime. In an interview with The New York Times on March 26, Trump said he thought "the approach of fighting Assad and ISIS (IS) simultaneously was madness, and idiocy. You can't be fighting two people that are fighting each other, and fighting them together. You have to pick one or the other," said Trump. And during campaigning, Trump also pledged to improve America's ties with Assad's main backer, Russia.

After his election victory, Trump told The Wall Street Journal: "I've had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria". He also said that if the United States attacks Assad "we end up fighting Russia".