Russia provided generous support to Syrian citizens at a time when they needed it most, Elizabeth Hoff, the World Health Organization representative in Damascus said on Monday.

"I was impressed with the generosity and support provided by Russia at a time when [Syrian citizens] needed it most," Hoff told RIA Novosti.

The representative noted that several thousand people in East Aleppo still need to be evacuated which could take a few days.

Quivering with quiet rage, Shirin holds a photo of his teenage brother-in-law, who now lives as the plaything of policemen, just one victim of a hidden epidemic of kidnappings of young boys for institutionalized sexual slavery in Afghanistan.

Shirin is among 13 families AFP traced and interviewed across three Afghan provinces who said their children were taken for the pervasive practice of "bacha bazi", or pedophilic exploitation, in Western-backed security forces.

Their testimonies shine a rare spotlight on the anguished, solitary struggles to free sons, nephews and cousins from a tradition of culturally-sanctioned enslavement and rape.

"Jesus is too much for us. The church's later treatment of the gospels is one long effort to rescue Jesus from 'extremism.'"—author Gary Wills, What Jesus Meant

Jesus was good. He was caring. He had powerful, profound things to say—things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. He went around helping the poor. And when confronted by those in authority, he did not shy away from speaking truth to power.

Jesus was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state.

But what if Jesus, the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet, had been born 2,000 years later? How would Jesus' life have been different had he be born and raised in the American police state?

Consider the following if you will.

The Christmas narrative of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable, where Mary gave birth to a baby boy. That boy, Jesus, would grow up to undermine the political and religious establishment of his day and was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

However, had Jesus been born in the year 2016...

Rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus' parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby's parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents' knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Then again, had his parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they would have been turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria's Secret. There's quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

Two weeks since the liberation of the Alshaar neighborhood in eastern Aleppo by the Syrian army, life is gradually resuming its course. More locals are returning to breathe life into devastated streets as heavy machinery clears the rubble.

While ramshackle buildings with crumbling facades and piles of rubble still serve as a vivid reminder of the heavy fighting that forced scores of civilians to flee their homes, now more and more are coming back to the neighborhood. Small stalls selling bread and cigarettes have already popped up on squares as cars began filling narrow roads.

"The situation is good. People are coming back. It's safe and stable and God bless our Syrian Army and our government and President Bashar Assad," one vendor, who himself returned just a week ago, told RT's Ruptly video agency.

"We are exhausted with refugee life. I am happy that Allepo has been liberated from these nasty terrorists. It is the best gift from the Syrian army," Abu Muhammed from Eastern Aleppo told Sputnik Arabic.

"We have always believed that our army together with its allies will cleanse our city of terrorists, despite all the efforts of international coalition forces who wanted to drive all the inhabitants from this city and make it a base for terrorists, as they did in Idlib," he added.

According to Muhammed, his family has packed their belongings and have been waiting for an official announcement that the city is liberated before returning home, where they can't wait to meet up with their son who is in the Syrian army.

This report tells the history of the process of fragmentation imposed on Palestinian rural land in the West Bank through a case study of three villages in the Nablus District - 'Azmut, Deir al-Hatab and Salem. What these communities have experienced since 1980, when Israel established the Elon Moreh nearby, is but one illustration of broader developments taking place throughout the West Bank. Their story is similar to that of hundreds of Palestinian communities on whose lands Israeli settlements were established.

Like many Palestinian villages, 'Azmut, Deir al-Hatab and Salem developed in keeping with the geographical features of the area. Farmland, pasture and natural water sources serves as the mainstays of the local economy and as the basis for the formation of an entire culture that ties the residents deeply to their surroundings. The villagers employed mostly traditional dryland farming, cultivating olives and fruit trees, legumes and grains. They also raised livestock, relying on natural pasture stretching across the hilly expanses of al-Jabal al-Kbir (literally: The Big Mountain) and the surrounding valleys. For hundreds of years, the villagers largely subsisted off farming and shepherding.

Since the 1967 occupation, Israel has employed various measures - official and otherwise - to cut off the villagers from their land and hand it over to settlers. The first step was the 1980 establishment of the Elon Moreh settlement on 127.8 hectares (1,278 dunams) of village land already registered as government property under the pre-1967 Jordanian rule. Just two years later, the Commander of Judea and Samaria declared a nature reserve on some of the remaining land west of the settlement. This resulted in the creation of an area, far exceeding that of the settlement's jurisdiction, where Palestinians must receive Israeli permission for carrying out any development, construction, new cultivation, or pasturing livestock. In 1987, 170 hectares of the nature reserve were declared "state land", and an illegal settlement outpost erected there in 1998.

This year the Left's annual War on Christmas has taken a bizarre turn with a Washington Post op-ed claiming that the Virgin Mary's purity is offensive to victims of rape.

In an article titled, "Our culture of purity celebrates the Virgin Mary. As a rape victim, that hurts me," Ruth Everhart explains that especially in the Advent lead-up to Christmas, Mary becomes a problem for many Christians because of her pristine purity.

Mary "set an impossibly high bar," Everhart writes. "Now the rest of us are stuck trying to be both a virgin and a mother at the same time."

As a rape victim, this has been especially difficult for the author, she says, which led to her becoming a pastor, in order "to come to terms with Mary's story."

Everhart writes that she doesn't blame her sense of ruin "entirely" on the Virgin Mary. In fact, it isn't really Mary's fault, she states; it's the Church's for manipulating Mary into a model of purity.

New Jersey police officer Jason R. Miller was arrested in 2014 after he was caught on video exposing himself to motorists at traffic stops. Because of his police officer status, Miller was let off with a slap on the wrist and now he's struck again. This time, he stands accused of sexually assaulting a child in a Burger King bathroom.

The original charges in 2014 were backed up by the police department's own dash-cam footage, which clearly showed officer Miller exposing himself to people at traffic stops.

In 2014, Miller received multiple charges, including two counts of second-degree official misconduct, one count of third-degree pattern of official misconduct and the disorderly persons offense of lewdness.

However, this obvious sexual predator was allowed to continue to prey because his police officer status granted him special privileges during his prosecution.

According to NJ.com, Miller was allowed to resign from the force in 2015 after pleading guilty to tampering with records, and was sentenced to probation. As part of the agreement, charges of official misconduct and lewdness stemming from the motor vehicle stops were dismissed.

At least 48 people have died from poisoning after consuming a bath lotion containing alcohol in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, according to a local prosecutor.

A total of 57 people have been hospitalized, with 48 dead, prosecutor for Leninsky District in Irkutsk Stanislav Zubovsky told TASS.

A sticker on the bath lotion said that it contains some 93 percent of ethyl alcohol, hawthorn extract, lemon oil, diethyl phthalate and glycerol. A chemical probe of the bath lotion has shown that in reality, Boyaryshnik (Hawthorn) contains methyl alcohol and antifreeze, Russia's Investigative Committee said.

The lotion bottles were marked with warnings that they are not for internal use.

Experienced sailors, Barbara McVeigh and her husband exposed their children to the natural beauty near their home in Marin County, Calif. — boating, camping and adventuring in the great outdoors. None of this stopped her 9-year-old son from falling down the digital rabbit hole.

His first exposure to screens occurred in first grade at a highly regarded public school — named one of California's "Distinguished Schools" — when he was encouraged to play edu-games after class. His contact with screens only increased during play dates where the majority of his friends played violent games on huge monitors in their suburban homes.

The results for Barbara's son were horrific: Her sweet boy, who had a "big spirit" and loved animals, now only wanted to play inside on a device.