• U.S. President Barack Obama said yesterday that there is "a possibility that there was a bomb on board," echoing comments from British Prime Minister David Cameron that a terrorist bomb is the most likely explanation for the crash that killed all 224 people on board. Meanwhile, Russian and Egypt leaders are still being cautious in their comments, saying it's too early to draw conclusions.

• The sometimes confusing and conflicting reports about last Saturday's plane crash could be explained by geopolitics, Bloomberg contributor Leonid Bershidsky writes: "No party is credible, because their self-interest is plain to see."

• Both ordinary Russians and Kremlin officials are outraged about two cartoons published in the latest issue of Charlie Hebdo. "In our country we have a very loud word for this — blasphemy," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists. "This has nothing to do with democracy, self-expression, nothing to do with anything — this is an abomination."

CHEMICAL WEAPONS EVIDENCE IN SYRIA

There is evidence that anti-Assad groups fighting in Syria have used chemical weapons against one another, according to a report from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Reuters reports. The attack is believed to have taken place in August in the town of Marea, north of Aleppo, an area that ISIS controlled at the time. The report doesn't specify which group is responsible for the use of sulfur mustard, although ISIS has faced such accusations from Kurdish fighters in the past.

VERBATIM

"Bush 41 is getting up in years," former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in response to comments the senior George Bush made in his soon-to-be-published biography, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey Of George Herbert Walker Bush. In the book, he describes Rumsfeld as "an arrogant fellow" who served his son badly during his leadership. "I don't like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything," he says in the book. He also had harsh words for Dick Cheney, his son's vice president, whom he described as "very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with." Read more from The New York Times.

GERMANY TO SPEED THE ASYLUM PROCESS

The three parties in Germany's coalition government agreed yesterday on plans to speed up the asylum process and to build three to five reception centers where refugees will be required to wait until a decision has been made on their applications, Der Spiegel reports. But opposition parties said the move wouldn't guarantee a fair procedure, and questioned the feasibility of processing requests in a matter of weeks when it can take up to a year in other countries, according to Deutsche Welle.

• Germany is expecting between 800,000 and one million refugees this year alone, despite growing worries about the influx and the potential lack of accommodations and resources. Official Interior Ministry figures published yesterday say that as many as 758,000 migrants have been registered so far this year.

• Sweden, another primary destination for migrants, announced yesterday that it could no longer guarantee accommodation for new arrivals.

ON THIS DAY

Ready your clicking finger because we've got Tchaikovsky, Aussie royalty and Emma Stone in today's shot of history.

IRAN BANS AMERICAN PRODUCTS

In a bid to boost the purchase of domestic products ahead of economic sanctions being lifted, Iran has decided to "stop entry of American consumer goods and to prohibit products that symbolize the presence of the United States in the country," AFP reports.

MY GRAND-PÈRE'S WORLD

DID EXXONMOBIL LIE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE?

The state of New York is investigating ExxonMobil to determine whether the oil and gas giant lied to the public and its investors about the risks and financial costs of climate change, The Washington Post reports. Investigators believe that public statements the company made may have contradicted its own scientific research into climate change and how it would affect the company. "We unequivocally reject the allegations that ExxonMobil has suppressed climate change research," the group's vice president for public affairs said.

THE SUN KILLED LIFE ON MARS

NASA scientists believe that both a much hotter sun billions of years ago and solar storms could explain why an Earth-like Mars lost 99% of its atmosphere and water.

WORLDCRUNCH-TO-GO

In our dreams, it's a world of joyful sharing. In reality, Internet commenters often offer little more than cheap shots and manipulation. As Nic Ulmi writes for Le Temps, researcher Joseph Reagle explores the history and degeneration of online invective in a new book. "In October 2000, two Silicon Valley engineers, James Hong and Jim Young, launched a website called ‘Hot or Not.' The idea was to get Internet users to post pictures of themselves so other users could judge their attractiveness on a scale from 1 to 10. The pair didn't really invent anything," Ulmi writes. "The websites RateMyFace and AmIHot had both launched shortly before, with the very same idea. But Hong and Young hit the jackpot on the click market: A week after their website launched, it was getting two million visits per day. But the commenting culture has been facing a fundamental crisis for the last few years. In 2012, New York software developer Dave Winer, often cited as the first to have made comments possible on a blog, deactivated the function on his own website, though has recently looked for a new way to bring them back."

Read the full article, The Dark, Decaying Underbelly Of Online Commenting.

SNAPSHOT

Photo: Agencia Estado/Xinhua/ZUMA

A dam burst yesterday at an iron ore mine near Mariana, Brazil, causing mudslides that killed at least 15 people. Forty-five people are still missing in the disaster, whose cause is still unknown.