The US has been voted as the most significant threat to world peace in a survey across 68 different countries. Anti-American sentiment was not only recorded in antagonistic countries, but also in many allied NATO partners like Turkey and Greece. ● The End of Year survey conducted by Worldwide Independent Network/Gallup found that while US topped the list for being the biggest threat to world peace, around 4 percent of people believed India to be a threat. According to the Express Tribune, arch rival Pakistan was voted as the second biggest threat to world peace after the US. The poll found that 24 percent people considered US as the biggest threat, while 8 percent of people voted for Pakistan as a threat to world peace. The threat from the US was rated most highly in the Middle East and North Africa, those areas most recently affected by American military intervention. Moreover, the survey showed that even Americans regard their country as a potential threat with 13 percent of them voting the US could disrupt global status quo.

Happy Xmas Ukraine! Openly pro-Nazi rioters ripping up paving stones for weapons and driving bulldozers at people get sweets from America's Asst. Secretary of State, the surprisingly long list of countries where the US attempts regime change under cover of 'human rights'; and George Clooney becomes the Pentagon's sexy new weapon. Seek truth from facts with Humanitarian Imperialism author Jean Bricmont, UN Human Rights Rapporteur Richard Falk, political analyst Richard Becker, Asia Times' Pepe Escobar, On Immoral Interventionism author Gilad Atzmon, and 'worth 500,000 dead kids' Madeleine Albright.

Reported rise in soldiers using Palestinian homes for mock raids in West Bank, as Kerry prepares to resume peace talks. ● Human rights groups have reported a rise in Israeli military training exercises being held in Palestinian towns and villages. Israel was condemned by the groups on Thursday, after reports of soldiers taking up positions in Palestinians homes during mock raids in the occupied West Bank and Palestinians being detained for hours without explanation. The criticism came as US Secretary of State John Kerry was due to arrive in the Middle East on Thursday, hoping to seal a long-elusive peace deal between Israel and Palestinians. Kerry left on Wednesday for his 10th tour to Israel and the West Bank aiming to hammer out a framework to guide the talks. After getting the two sides back to the negotiating table in 2013 following a three-year hiatus, Kerry was starting the new year with a special effort to try to move the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations forward,a senior State Department official said. The peace guide would provide a basis to negotiate the final peace treaty.

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Former Israeli PM – who has been in a coma since 2006 – in critical condition as vital organs suffer 'critical malfunction' ● Dr Zeev Rotstein, director of Tel Hashomer hospital, said Sharon's condition had deteriorated over the past two days and that a number of vital organs, including his kidneys, were suffering from "critical malfunction". "He is in critical condition and his life is definitely in danger," Rotstein told reporters. "The feeling of the doctors treating him and also that of the family with him is that there is a turn for the worse." He said Sharon's family is at his bedside. Sharon, 85, suffered a devastating stroke on 4 January 2006, five years after being elected prime minister. He spent months in hospital in Jerusalem before being transferred to a long-term care facility at Sheba medical centre near Tel Aviv.

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All 52 passengers have been airlifted on Thursday from a Russian research vessel icebound in Antarctica and are safely aboard an Australian supply ship, rescuers said. ● "Aurora Australis has advised AMSA that the 52 passengers from the Akademik Shokalskiy are now on board," the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said. Passengers were flown to the Australian ship in groups of 12 by a helicopter from a Chinese icebreaker. The Akademik Shokalsky has been stuck in ice since December 24 100 nautical miles east of the French base Dumont d'Urville, with several icebreaking attempts failing to reach it. After a number of false starts a helicopter evacuation of the research vessel's passengers began on Thursday evening, with official confirmation that it was underway reaching AMSA at 6.15 pm Australian time (0715 GMT). The Australian agency, which is coordinating the rescue mission, reported all passengers were safey on board the Aurora Australis, an Australian government supply ship, at 10.15pm, some four hours later. Passengers were airlifted from a makeshift landing pad on the ice beside the Russian ship to an ice floe near the Australis.

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Tony Cartalucci: The Center for the Administration of Peace and Order (CAPO) also confirmed to have lied about "police dressed as protesters," in yet another egregious episode exposing Shinawatra regime as illegitimate and intolerable. ■ It is now confirmed that black-clad gunmen seen atop the Labour Ministry building on December 26, 2013 during deadly violence last month that left two dead were in fact police. Thai PBS reported in an article titled, "National police chief admits men in black are police," that: National Police Office commissioner Pol Gen Adul Saengsingkaew this morning admitted that the men in black” on the roof-top of the Labor Ministry’s building near the Thai-Japan youth centre in Din Daeng are police. Now that it is confirmed that these gunmen were in fact deployed by the regime, as all evidence had suggested, the blame for deaths caused by these gunmen must be appropriately shifted to the regime itself.

Figures compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists show that 29 journalists were killed in Syria, 10 in Iraq and six in Egypt. ● At least 70 journalists were killed around the world in 2013, including 29 who died covering the civil war in Syria and 10 in Iraq, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. ● The dead in Syria included a number of citizen journalists working to document combat in their home cities, broadcasters who worked with media outlets affiliated with either the government or the opposition, and a handful of correspondents for the foreign press, including an al-Jazeera reporter, Mohamed al-Mesalma, who was shot by a sniper. Six journalists died in Egypt. Half of those reporters were killed while reporting a 14 August crackdown by Egyptian security forces on demonstrators protesting the ousting of Mohamed Morsi. ● "The Middle East has become a killing field for journalists. While the number of journalists killed for their work has declined in some places, the civil war in Syria and a renewal of sectarian attacks in Iraq have taken an agonising toll," the committee's deputy director, Robert Mahoney, said in a statement. "The international community must prevail on all governments and armed groups to respect the civilian status of reporters and to prosecute the killers of journalists." The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has been tracking deaths among reporters and broadcasters since 1992.

An NGO has accused Israel of locking up children in cages during the worst of the recent snow storm. Kids that police suspected of minor crimes were regularly placed in cages as a form of public humiliation and threatened with sexual violence, among other acts designed to terrify them. The torture was halted only after Justice Minister Tzipi Livni interfered following the discovery and a candid phone talk with Israel’s Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch.

The past year was in many ways pivotal for Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant after it was struck in 2011 by the second biggest nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl. The NPP is to be phased out and eventually dismantled, despite the previous plans to restart the reactors that survived the meltdown. The Fukushima tragedy made the world reconsider its attitude towards nuclear plants and it has been on the lookout for new energy sources ever since.