📹The Pentagon's Aerospace Defense Command has shown how it will track the movement of Santa Claus's reindeer team on Christmas Eve: control of the "aerial object" will be carried out with the full force of the US armed services - helicopters, submarines, fighters, radar.

American children can sleep peacefully - Santa will not pass unnoticed, the Pentagon guarantees.

But will this 'holiday stalking' operation get anyone suspended from Twitter?

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🦠Almost 200,000 chickens will be culled in Japan's prefecture of Saitama, neighboring Tokyo, due to an outbreak of bird flu, Japanese TV reported on Saturday.

▪️On Friday, 76 dead birds were found at one of the poultry farms in the prefecture. In nine of them, genetic analysis confirmed the presence of a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza.

▪️This is the third bird flu outbreak in the prefecture. Since Saturday morning, work has begun on the culling of birds, which will last until December 23.

▪️ In addition, quarantine was introduced for the transportation of chickens and eggs within a radius of three kilometers (1.9 miles) around the farm, where foci of the disease were found, and the export of chickens and eggs outside the 10-kilometer zone was prohibited.

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🌍 ⚽️ FIFA President Gianni Infantino has praised the performance of African teams in the FIFA World Cup 2022 tournament in Qatar

🇲🇦 Infantino congratulated Morocco, the surprise team of the tournament, who made history and qualified to the semi-finals of the championship as the first team ever from the African continent to make it past the quarter-finals.

🗣 “I want to congratulate Morocco; (I tip my) hat. And also I want to congratulate the other African teams. Senegal made it through the group stage. They played against a very strong England. And also Cameroon, Ghana and Tunisia. Fighting until the last minute to qualify,” Infantino said. “I'm delighted because for many decades, we've been talking about the development of African football and when their time will come - their time has come.”

He added that he would be looking forward to “some more excellent performances” from Africa in the FIFA World Cup 2026, where “double the number of African teams” is going to be qualifying.

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🤔Traces of a white powder suspected to be cocaine were found at a government “grace-and-favor” home after a party attended by political allies of former Prime Minister Liz Truss, according to sources who spoke exclusively to a UK media outlet

▪️The powder was discovered in the Chevening estate last summer, just days before Truss was elected the leader of the Tory Party and tapped as prime minister. At the time, Truss served as UK foreign secretary.

▪️Members of the estate staff say they tested the white powder and it came back positive for containing cocaine. Under UK laws, cocaine possession can result in seven years in prison and a fine.

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🌎Earth might lose more than tenth of its species by the end of the 21st century, according to new research presented during the UN Biodiversity Conference. Roughly 3,000 scientists have called for action from governments in order to reverse the worrying trend.

🔬Researchers have built a simulation model of an artificial Earth on a supercomputer, populating the virtual world with synthetic species and modeling the effect of global warming and land use.

As simulation showed, in the worst case scenario 27% of species will die out. In a moderate scenario roughly 13% of animals and plants will go extinct.

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⚡️An air alert has been declared in all parts of Ukraine

🇿🇦 Employees at a South African butcher shop encountered an unusual visitor

🗣 "The warthog went into the kitchen behind the building, but could not seem to find his way out," the shop’s owner Stephen Nel said.

▪️ Store employees called the local fire brigade to help the unusual guest find its way out. The warthog was then transported to the Forever Resorts nature reserve, from where it is thought to have escaped

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🇨🇫 The Head of the Russian House in the Central African Republic has been hospitalized following an assassination attempt; he will be discharged soon and is now conscious, the Russian Embassy stated

🔹Previously, an explosion was reported in the office of Dmitry Sytyi, the head of the Russian House in the CAR, where a note with a threat "from all the French" and a call for Russians to leave Africa was found

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Five Louisiana Police Officers Charged Over Fatal 2019 Arrest of Motorist Ronald Greene

Five Louisiana law enforcement officers have been charged by a state grand jury for their actions during the 2019 arrest of Ronald Greene, who died while being taken into police custody.

Greene was killed while being arrested during a traffic stop; however police originally claimed he died due to a car crash.

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❗️The new package of EU sanctions against Russia will aggravate socio-economic problems in the European Union itself - Russian Foreign Ministry

Current Strikes in UK 'Last Resort' After Over Decade of No Pay Rises

The United Kingdom has seen a series of strikes by civil servants over the past months as people express their dissatisfaction with the worsening economic situation caused by soaring inflation. Employees of railroad companies, post offices, airports, and lawyers, among others, are taking part in the strikes. The country's largest nursing union, the Royal College of Nursing, launched its first-ever strike in its 106-year history.

The current worker strikes across the UK differ from similar events in the 1970s in that trade union power has been vastly curtailed and current actions are less about aggressive demands for improvement and more of a last-ditch effort after over a decade of low or no pay hikes, experts told Sputnik.

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📹 The Russian Defense Ministry has published footage showing how the second regiment with the Avangard silo-based missile system going on combat duty in Russia’s Orenburg region.

📌The Avangard is a missile system with a hypersonic block, which will effectively expand the combat capabilities of a missile force group.

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✈️The Russian government announced Saturday that an extra 6 billion rubles ($94 million) in national reserve funds would be allocated to the civil aviation industry to ensure safety and regularity of flights.

💬"The government has allocated an additional 6 billion rubles to support the air traffic management system in the face of external restrictions. The money will be disbursed from a reserve fund to support aeronautical servicing of at least a million flights," the official statement read.

▪️The money will go to the State Air Traffic Management Corporation, which is tasked with creating an economic system for air traffic management and ensuring the safety of civil aviation flights.

▪️It comes on top of 15 billion rubles allocated by the government in September, bringing the total funding in 2022 up to 21 billion rubles.

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❗️Russian MoD’s briefing on the progress of the special military operation in Ukraine:

▪️Russian Forces performed massive missile strikes on the military control systems, military-industrial complex and the energy facilities of Ukraine that provide them with high-precision, long-range air and sea-based weapons. The aim of the strikes was achieved and all assigned targets were hit;

▪️Russian troops destroyed the radar stations of four Ukrainian S-300 missile system in the Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye regions;

▪️The Russian Army eliminated up to 40 Ukrainian troops, as well as destroyed a Ukrainian armored combat vehicle and four other vehicles near Kupyansk;

▪️Russian troops eliminated and wounded up to 30 Ukrainian servicemen, as well as destroyed two armored combat vehicles and two pick-up trucks near Krasny Liman;

▪️Russian Forces eliminated more than 30 Ukrainian troops, as well as destroyed seven vehicles near Donetsk;

▪️The Russian Army eliminated up to 35 Ukrainian troops, as well as destroyed two armor carriers in the DPR;

▪️Russian troops eliminated two Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups in the DPR;

▪️Russian troops hit 53 Ukrainian artillery units at their firing positions;

▪️The Russian Army hit a temporary deployment point of foreign mercenaries near Krasny Liman;

▪️Russian air defense destroyed two Ukrainian UAVs, as well as intercepted three Uragan rockets and four HIMARS rockets.

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UK Sounds the Alarm Over NHS' 'Biggest Crisis in History'

More than 70% of the British public support current industrial action by NHS nurses, an Ipsos poll has concluded.

The strikes come as more than 40,000 NHS employees left their job in the UK over the past 12 months to the end of June 2022 following a seven-year public sector pay freeze introduced under PM David Cameron.

Newly-qualified nurses earn $33,300, meaning that they are unable to pay their bills, especially amidst soaring inflation. Some reports even suggest that nurses have no other choice but to eat patients` leftover food.

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Polish Police Chief Says Ukrainians Presented Him With Combat Grenade Launchers Instead of Used Ones

Polish Police Chief Jaroslaw Szymczyk, who was recently injured after one of two grenade launchers presented to him by Ukrainian officials exploded at his headquarters, has told a Polish media outlet that the hand mortars were most likely military-grade weapons rather than used ones.

Szymczyk said that the incident took place when he attempted to move the gifts to the back of his office. He added that the moment he started to rearrange one of the grenade launchers vertically on the floor, an explosion occurred.

“The powerful blast ripped through the floor and damaged the ceiling,” the police chief pointed out.

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Iranian General Claims No Enemy Would Dare Threaten Tehran

The Islamic Republic of Iran has significantly increased its military forces, claiming that an attack on the country today is almost impossible, says a senior Iranian military official.

Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali added that it was Iran's enemies' reluctance to recognize its role in the region that made them try to harm the country.

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Lethal Injection: Chemical Execution Method Turns 40

Despite being proposed as early as the late 19th century and used by the Nazis to kill people during the first half of the 20th century, lethal injection became a legal execution method only in 1982.

Forty years ago the United States introduced a method of execution that has since become a primary method for carrying out capital punishment in the country – lethal injection. First used in Texas in 1982, lethal injection has since been used to end the lives of over 1,300 death row inmates.

What complicates the use of injections and how humane is this type of execution? Read about the history of lethal injections in our article.

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📹 “He got scared, and cried, but calmed down”: A three-year-old boy from Donetsk has almost got used to life under constant shelling.

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