EU governments have failed to deliver on the promises they made to tackle Europe’s refugee crisis, the head of the European Commission Jean Claude Juncker said on Friday (January 15) conference in Brussels.

The prisoner exchange in the "all for all" format is hardly possible before the end of the year, an ombudswoman of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic Darya Morozova said in a statement on Thursday, TASS reported.

A court in Australia has ordered drug giant Reckitt Benckiser to stop selling some of its popular Nurofen painkiller brands after finding tablets marketed for specific complaints such as back pain or migraines contained exactly the same active ingredient, The Guardian reports.

On January 13 and 14, Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov held several meetings with the leaders of influential Syrian opposition groups, including Saleh Muslim, the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party; Haytham Manna, the co-president of the Syrian Democratic Council; and Samir Aita, the leader of the Syrian Democratic platform.

Russian president Vladimir Putin is the eighth in the rating of popularity of world leaders, compiled by Gallup International in the global survey. 33% of respondents said that belong to Putin positively, 43% - negatively. Putin’s popularity is growing rapidly in Asia, particularly in China and India.

With the seven days of negotiations left before the conference closes on Dec. 11, there are two alternative draft texts in circulation, which all nations agreed on Friday to accept as the basis for talks, Reuters says.

«A suicide bomber thought to have crossed recently from Syria killed at least 10 people, most of them German tourists, in Istanbul's historic heart on Tuesday, in an attack Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu blamed on Islamic State», Reuters reports.

The European Union’s executive backed Ukraine and Georgia’s bid for visa-free access to the bloc on Friday, opening the way to more than 40 million people to potentially travel visa-free to the bloc, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Britain started to carry out first air raids in Syria hitting oil fields that Prime Minister David Cameron says are being used to fund attacks on the West, soon after British Parliament said "yes" to launching military actions against Isil.

The Russian Foreign Ministry is urging those Russian holiday-makers who are going to Vienna for New Year Holidays to stay on guard in view of the risk of terrorist attacks in the Austrian capital, TASS reports.

The journalist of the UNIAN agency Roman Tsimbalyuk (Ukrain), who asked Vladimir Putin a thorny question about Russian soldiers in Ukraine at tenth press conference in year 2014, also successed to adress his question today.

Turkey's downing of Russian warplane is the most discussable news on November 25.