While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, Dec 20 edition

The Russian ambassador to Turkey was shot in the back and killed as he gave a speech at an Ankara art gallery on Monday (Dec 19) by an off-duty police officer who shouted "Don't forget Aleppo" and "Allahu Akbar" as he opened fire.

The Russian foreign ministry confirmed the death of envoy Andrei Karlov, calling it a "terrorist act".

Relations between Moscow and Ankara have long been strained over the conflict in Syria, with the two support opposing sides in the war.

Russia is an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and its air strikes helped Syrian forces end rebel resistance last week in the northern city of Aleppo. Turkey, which has long sought Assad's ouster, has been repairing ties with Moscow after shooting down a Russian warplane over Syria last year.

At least nine people died after a truck mounted the pavement and rammed into crowds at a Berlin Christmas market.

The German capital's police department said that the truck crashed into the market on Monday (Dec 19) evening at Breitscheidplatz, near the Kurfuerstendamm in the west of the city centre. Emergency services were attending in force, with nine dead confirmed and "multiple" injuries sustained.

Police have detained the driver of the truck while the co-driver died after the crash. "We are investigating whether it was a terror attack but do not yet know what was behind it," a police spokesman told AFP. "One person was detained. The cab of the truck was found empty."

Three people were wounded in a shooting near an Islamic centre in central Zurich on Monday (Dec 19), police said.

Swiss media said a suspect was on the run after the incident near the main train station in Switzerland's financial capital.

It was not immediately clear whether the Islamic centre or any of the other businesses registered buildings nearby, were the target of the attack, or what any motive might have been.

A Russian city declared a state of emergency Monday (Dec 19) after 49 people seeking cheap alcohol died after drinking bath essence containing methanol, a toxic substance used in anti-freeze.

The country's Investigative Committee, a powerful panel of inquiry, has launched a probe into the deaths in the Siberian city of Irkutsk caused by drinking the liquid, labelled as hawthorn-scented bath essence, and has detained several people.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the deaths a "tragedy" that required "very close attention."

Pregnancy causes "long-lasting" physical changes to a woman's brain, with significant, but seemingly beneficial, grey matter loss in parts of the crucial organ, a study said Monday (Dec 19).

Some alterations lasted at least two years, they reported, but did not appear to erode memory or other mental processes.

The changes "concern brain areas associated with functions necessary to manage the challenges of motherhood," study co-author Erika Barba-Muller of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) said in a statement.