The outgoing Obama administration has given 35 Russian diplomats and their families 72 hours to leave the US in retaliation over alleged interference in last months presidential elections and “harassment” of American diplomats in Moscow. Sanctions have also been announced against Russian intelligence agencies. The US alleges that Russian hackers stole sensitive information and released it during in the campaign in order to damage Hillary Clinton’s chances of getting elected. The Kremlin have denied the claims and said they would consider taking retaliatory measures. 

Russia and Turkey have brokered a nationwide ceasefire across Syria between Syrian government forces and rebel fighters, although it does not include ISIL or the Kurdish YPG. The ceasefire came into force at midnight local time and is seen as not just strategically important in Syria but also signals a shift in international power relations in the region as the US were conspicuously sidelined in the negotiations, according to several US media outlets such as CNN. Further peace talks are scheduled to be held in Kazakhstan in January if the ceasefire holds.

China and South Korea have both condemned Japan’s defense minister, Tomomi Inada, for visiting the controversial Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo with Beijing labelling it as “greatly ironic” as the visit follows Inada’s trip with Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Hawaii where prayers were offered to the US victims of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The Yasukuni shrine honors the 2.5 million Japanese that died during World War Two but controversially also includes 14 Class-A war criminals convicted of plotting and carrying out the war. 

The People’s Bank of China has said that the so-called psychological threshold of 7 yuan to the US dollar is not so important for the Chinese economy. The announcement comes after the yuan traded between 6.95 and 6.97 on Wednesday. Possibly more importantly China also changed the basket of currencies by which the yuan is measured by. The weighting of the dollar in the basket will fall from 26.4 percent to 22.4 percent on January 1 and the importance of the euro and Japanese yen will also be decreased. Eleven new currencies will also be added to the basket including the South Korean won, the South African rand and the United Arab Emirates’ dirham.

The National Football League (NFL) announced a new deal to livestream games in China with Sina Weibo, often seen as China’s equivalent of Twitter. The social media platform will live-stream three playoff games as well as the Super Bowl, and six games have already been streamed over the past couple of weekends. The move is seen as an attempt by the NFL to tap into China’s huge potential audience with the NFL reporting that on average 1.5 million on viewers already watch their games in China.

China will invest 3.5 trillion yuan (503 billion US dollars) to accelerate railway construction, including expansion of the country's high-speed rail network to 30,000 kilometers over the next five years according to Yang Yudong, vice-minister of transportation. The ambition is to link more than 80 percent of China’s major cities by high-speed railways by 2020. The ministry of transport also said that they are hopeful that the new railways will eventually be profitable. 

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has rolled back on earlier claims that he personally thrown a man out of a helicopter. Earlier in the week, Duterte made a speech saying corrupt government officials should be thrown out of flying helicopters claiming he had personally done it before. “I have done this before. Why would I not do it again?" However since the video clip of the speech went viral, he has denied the claim in an interview to CNN saying, "we had no helicopter. We don't use that," blaming the controversy on a “creative imagination.”

Wimbledon champion Serena Williams has announced her engagement to Internet billionaire Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of social media platform Reddit. There was really only one obvious place for the engagement to be announced with Williams posting the news on Reddit, although Ohanian also later posted the engagement news on his Facebook page. The two have been dating for just over a year and Ohanian popped the question while the two were on vacation in Rome.