Winchester Ammunition was recently awarded a contract by the Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security to supply a maximum of 200 million, 40 cal. rounds over the next five years.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Latin American countries on Friday not to get too close to Iran, calling it "a really bad idea" that could have consequences.

I have serious concerns, however, about the president’s decision to add some 30,000 troops and an as yet undisclosed number of civilian personnel to escalate our Afghan operation. This "surge" will bring US troop levels to approximately those of the Soviets when they occupied Afghanistan with disastrous result back in the 1980s. I fear the US military occupation of Afghanistan may end up similarly unsuccessful.

Tony Blair has said he would have invaded Iraq even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction and would have found a way to justify the war to parliament and the public.

The former prime minister made the confession during an interview with Fern Britton, to be broadcast on Sunday on BBC1, in which he said he would still have thought it right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

"If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?" Blair was asked. He replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]".

A loophole in the Senate health care bill would let insurers place annual dollar limits on medical care for people struggling with costly illnesses such as cancer, prompting a rebuke from patient advocates.

I have just received confirmation from a very credible Congressional source that the bill to audit the Federal Reserve is included in the House financial reform legislation which passed today.

"At the heart of the scheme is a false representation that consumers can participate in a Google-sponsored program that will allow them to make hundreds of dollars a day working at home performing a simple task that requires no particular experience or qualifications," the search engine giant wrote in a 26-page claim filed in U.S. District Court in Utah.

The lawsuit names Nevada-based Pacific WebWorks and 50 other defendants referred to only as "Does 1 through 50."

Pacific WebWorks did not immediately return calls for comment from ABCNews.com. According to the Google claim, Pacific WebWorks operates a credit card processing site.

Insider selling has been massively outpacing insider buying, by 82x, according to FInviz data via Zero Hedge.

A major controversy about the efficacy of the antiviral agent Tamiflu in treating influenza has erupted in the online version of BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal. A team from the prestigious Cochrane Review says that its analysis of published data about clinical trials of the drug, known generically as oseltamivir, shows that the drug is able to reduce the course of an influenza infection by a day but that they are unable to conclude that the drug is effective at reducing complications and hospitalizations caused by flu because they do not have access to key data from eight clinical trials sponsored by the drug's manufacturer, Roche Laboratories Inc.

Records at Arlington National Cemetery suggest that workers found an urn of cremated remains that had been dumped -- presumably accidentally -- in a dirt landfill, reburied those remains as an unknown soldier, and kept the whole thing quiet.

With the publication of this article, Salon has now disclosed four separate cases in which the cemetery discovered unmarked remains due to burial glitches, mostly poor record-keeping. In a fifth case, the cemetery accidentally buried the remains of one service member on top of another in the same grave. Salon's reporting has led the Army to launch an investigation of record-keeping problems at the cemetery.

Every appointee to the American government must endure a thorough background check by the American Jewish community.

In the case of Obama's government in particular, every criticism against Israel made by a potential government appointee has become a catalyst for debate about whether appointing "another leftist" offers proof that Obama does not truly support Israel.

A heavy police presence could be seen at a number of the potential targets, and police helicopters could be seen moving across various parts of the city.

One particular event cast a sickening pall over the entire year, and in doing so reminded us that our world became ever more violent and perverse in 2009. Although this event itself ended in January, its fallout continued and will be felt for years to come. I am referring, of course, to “Operation Cast Lead,” Israel’s attempted liquidation of the Gaza ghetto. The event is significant not only because it was premeditated slaughter, but also because it did incalculable damage did to Israel’s propaganda industry.

As soon as the financial top had opted for a lingering crisis, global managers were instructed to work in two major ways: first, to invent a myth about the danger of swine flu pandemic (in order to take control of the national healthcare systems and reorganize the World Health Organization (WHO) into a global healthcare ministry) and impose a threat of global warming to gain control of world natural resources and introduce a unified 'green' tax (alongside with creation of a new sub-national managing body- an international ministry of ecology).

The House has rejected an effort to expand a Wall Street regulation bill with mortgage relief that would let debt-ridden homeowners reduce their payments in bankruptcy court. The vote was 241-188 to reject.

The provision would have revived a previous bill that passed the House but later failed in the Senate.

Democrats hoped that by inserting the provision in the regulatory legislation they would have had another opportunity to make it law. Aiding homeowners through bankruptcy had been a key feature of President Barack Obama's foreclosure fighting proposal, but the president did not push for it.

Banks and credit unions have lobbied against the bankruptcy measure. They say it would force a flood of bankruptcy filings and ultimately drive up mortgage rates.

In a separate vote Friday, Democratic leaders failed to revive legislation that would let bankruptcy judges rewrite mortgages to lower homeowners' monthly payments. The measure was rejected by a 241-188 .

The House previously passed bankruptcy-mortgage legislation, but it failed in the Senate.

Democrats hoped that by inserting the provision in the regulatory legislation they would have had another opportunity to make it law. Aiding homeowners through bankruptcy had been a key feature of President Barack Obama's foreclosure fighting proposal, but the president did not push for it.

The findings suggest that being male or female is not a permanently fixed state but something that has to be continually maintained in the adult body by the constant interaction of genes to keep the status quo – and the gender war – from slipping in favour of the opposite sex.

The Daily Beast has since learned that Headley’s connections to the Drug Enforcement Administration's murky intelligence unit - which I confirmed yesterday - might have played a role in his alleged conversion to terrorism. Additionally, sources at a foreign intelligence agency tell me that he might have been a double agent who turned on the U.S. [...] Indian intelligence believes that Headley was an undercover U.S. agent who went rogue. This theory goes that Headley was used by U.S. intelligence to infiltrate the Lashkar terrorists

The U.S. military’s AFRICOM forces pretend their mission on the continent is humanitarian. In reality, AFRICOM is the sharp edge of U.S. imperialism, a killing force eager to impose American dominance. The military command "locks Africa into a state of dependency and maintains favorable political and social conditions for U.S.-based corporations that exploit Africa’s natural resources." This is not a bug in the system. It's a defining feature of it.

In March, 2009 the United States provided the government of Egypt with $32 million in March, 2009 for electronic surveillance and other security devices to prevent the movement of food, merchandise and weapons into Gaza. Now details are emerging about an underground steel wall that wil be 6-7 miles long and extend 55 feet straight down into the desert sand.

The steel wall will be made of super-strength steel put together in a jigsaw puzzle fashion. It will be bomb proof and can not be cut or melted. It will be "impenetrable," and reportedly will take 18 months to construct. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8405020.stm)

Israeli forces decided on to close all goods crossing points into the Gaza Strip on Friday, a Palestinian official said.

The number you won’t hear mentioned anywhere in the Mainstream Media: 327,729. That is how many people shifted to Emergency Unemployment Compensation programs in the last week alone, hitting an all time record high of 4.2 million!

The Met Office, Britain's national weather service, "has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science" in the wake of a whistle-blower's revelation of widespread misconduct by climate scientists.

A record 37.2 million people, or about one out of every eight Americans, received food stamps in September, as the recession drove a surging jobless rate, according to a government report.

Recipients of the subsidy for retail-food purchases climbed 18 percent from a year earlier, according to a statement posted today on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Web site. Participation has set records for 10 straight months.

Britain and America are seeking to cancel next year's parliamentary election in Afghanistan amid fears that it will distract from President Barack Obama's new strategy to bring security to the country.

The two allies are in dispute with European states over whether to fund and secure the elections in the spring or press for postponement until 2011, The Daily Telegraph has learned.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the government is unlikely to recoup its investments in insurer American International Group Inc. or the automakers General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC.

Still, U.S. financial and economic conditions have improved, Geithner told the panel in Washington. The Treasury now expects to make money on its banking investments, if not on its efforts to stabilize the automobile and insurance industries.

The Obama administration has asked the Department of Justice to dismiss a lawsuit brought by convicted terrorist Jose Padilla against torture memo author John Yoo, asserting that Yoo cannot be sued for legal opinions he offered in the course of advising then-President Bush on national security matters.

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley finds ths decision inexplicable. "The president literally has gotten onto a plane this evening to go to Norway," he told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday, "to accept the Nobel Prize, while his Justice Department is effectively gutting a major part of Nuremberg."

The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

Those of us concerned with combating Climate Hate should take inspiration from the likes of the ADL and their vast experience in combating Holocaust denial. We must blacklist any scientist, educator, journalist and politician mentioning the slightest doubt in climate change or even suggesting that people should be free to doubt. We must make them unpublishable and unemployable. We must make them social lepers, to an extent that even their closest friends and family will not be associated with them. We must drag them through the courts wherever possible and make them rot in prison together with murderers and pedophiles. We must make anyone harboring Climate Change doubts be afraid of his own thoughts.

Congress has given new momentum to a bill imposing unilateral sanctions on Iran — a move seen by many as an ineffective form of sanctions and potentially antagonistic against valuable U.S. allies on the U.N. Security Council. This comes ahead of the end of the year deadline set by U.S. President Barack Obama for Tehran to respond to a proposed agreement to export most of its enriched uranium for processing in Russia and France.

The nation's pre-eminent civil rights organization ACLU on Thursday slammed President Obama for shielding the Bush administration from accountability for its "dangerous torture policy," and insisted that this "lack of transparency" severely threatens the future of constitutional liberty in the United States.

"The Bush administration constructed a legal framework for torture," Jameel Jaffer, Director of ACLU's National Security Project, said in a conference call with reporters. "Now the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for impunity."

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States? Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further? What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population? Can anything be done to turn this around?

An article featured in Canada’s Financial Post newspaper calling for China’s draconian one child policy, where woman are kidnapped off the streets, drugged, and forced to undergo compulsory abortions, to be imposed worldwide has been met with widespread hostile reaction, yet such measures are being debated at the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen.

But this is, or soon will be, 2010, and President Obama’s promises of transparency aside, the new way of doing things in the perpetual wartime economy is to pass bulky spending bills filled with anything and everything Congressmen want on an accelerated schedule, every few months.

President Hugo Chavez says Venezuela must be ready to defend itself against what he called the US and Colombia's gearing up for initiating a military conflict.

Chavez who accused Washington and Bogota of planning to stage war against his country announced that thousands of Russian missiles and rocket launchers were being received by Venezuela as the country is preparing for a possible military conflict.

1. When was the country of Palestine founded and by whom?

The Land of Palestine was given its name by the Roman Empire. The Arabs were already there, and the Empire named it Paleshtin (Palestine) after the Biblical Pelishtim (Philistines). Paleshtin = Pelishtim

The EU’s policy statement on a future Palestinian state now needs to be acted on, writes Khalid Amayreh from occupied Jerusalem

On October I met Sabia, his wife and children in Buritis, during my trip to countryside Rondonia. He can be seen in this photo, holding a Palestinian flag.

The US House of Representatives has adopted a bill asking the country's president to report agitation resulting to anti-American violence on media outlets.

It also calls for punitive measures for networks deemed to be fueling terror.

U.S. troops could be in Afghanistan for as many as 10 years at a cost of up to $300 billion and “thousands more American casualties,” according to the retired Army general who has penned a new independent report on challenges the military will face in the war.

But retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey concludes that the U.S. can, in the next five years, achieve three primary objectives: Create a viable Afghan security force that will allow for the reduction of an active U.S. combat role; create governance from the district level up that the population can support; and reduce official corruption by establishing a “parallel chain of financial custody and approval of resources” until the Afghan government is “operating unlike an active criminal enterprise.”

Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin stirred the pot Wednesday with a Washington Post op-ed calling on President Barack Obama to boycott the Copenhagen talks over climategate and the “agenda-driven science” it exposed.

Obama will surely ignore the call. And the Environmental Defense Fund’s Peter Goldmark told POLITICO Wednesday that climategate isn’t coming up in private meetings among nongovernmental organizations in Copenhagen and is not an issue for negotiators.

The Israel Defense Forces carried out two extensive drills this week, simulating war and national emergency situation.

Both drills were two-day affairs for which dozens of reserve officers were mobilized and included scenarios in which ballistic missiles with conventional and nonconventional warheads landed in Israeli cities.

It didn’t take long for half of the United States to get slammed with snow (December 11, 2009), last year on December 11, 2008 the U.S. was only covered in 29% of snow. Next week will be even more snow-packed and temperatures even more miserable then last year.

The EU has warned that it will accompany the UN Security Council in punitive action should Iran fail to provide a 'clear response' over its nuclear work.

A Western drive to impose a new set of tougher sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program may prove to lose momentum due to strong opposition from Russia and China.

The tense UN Security Council meeting began on Thursday with a salvo of warnings from UN representatives of France, Britain, and the US -- all of whom stood united in their demands that Iran should comply with their demands over its nuclear activities.

These next clips would be funny if it wasn’t so creepy that the internationalist criminal-scum elite are attempting to convert kids into this new “doomsday cult” and to fear the most unimaginable like huge floods, massive hurricanes and suicidal polar bears.

On the heels of a similar proposal being pushed in Copenhagen in the name of fighting global warming, the European Union has asked the IMF to introduce a global tax on financial transactions in order to fund more bailouts – in other words, the globalists are devising yet more ways to plunder the taxpayer into servitude to the private banks that they own.

Poland and the United States on Friday signed an agreement on the status of US troops in the eastern European country ahead of the deployment of US Patriot missiles.

"This agreement allows the stationing of US soldiers and materiel in Poland," Polish Defence Minister Bogdan Klich told the press. "For Poland it means that its security will be strengthened."

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said the United States wants to deploy SM-3 missiles in Poland and the neighbouring Czech Republic in 2015.

"We are facing a pattern of violations by the Islamic Republic of Iran," Araud told reporters. "We are now convinced that there is a deliberate attempt by Iran to violate the UN resolutions."

And he also pointed out that, in parallel, all efforts by six major powers -- Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States -- to coax Tehran into abandoning its nuclear enrichment program -- had failed.

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place.

Criminologists have long noted a correlation between violent crimes and recession, but the phenomenon of business leaders being targeted -- potentially for their roles in a financial loss of some kind -- appears to be unique to this recession.

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved, according to the Telegraph's Christopher Booker. Sceptics have long argued that there are other explanations for climate change other than man-made CO2 and here we look at some of the arguments put forward by those who believe that global warming is all a hoax.

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

A story emerging out of Britain suggests "follow the money" may explain the enthusiasm of the United Nations to pursue caps on carbon emissions, despite doubts surfacing in the scientific community about the validity of the underlying global warming hypothesis.

A Mumbai-based Indian multinational conglomerate with business ties to Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman since 2002 of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, stands to make several hundred million dollars in European Union carbon credits simply by closing a steel production facility in Britain with the loss of 1,700 jobs.

Webmaster's Commentary: 

IPCC Chairman	Rasputin

Coincidence? I think not! :)

When Renee Penny of Columbia, Tenn., heard about the federal government's "Making Home Affordable" loan modification program last spring, she thought she had found welcome relief.

But a few weeks ago, Bank of America mailed a response to the laid-off auto parts worker's request for mortgage help: The bank told her it would reduce her mortgage by $6 a month, to about $1,176 per payment.

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.