Link: http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/jobs-j09.shtml

The US economy lost 85,000 jobs in December, the Labor Department reported Friday, the same day new major layoffs were announced by UPS and Lockheed Martin. The ongoing destruction of jobs in what the Obama administration has touted as an economic “recovery,” is indicative of a social disaster affecting ever wider layers of the population. Friday’s report comes on top of a whole battery of recent reports showing the widespread growth of hunger, homelessness, and poverty.

Link: http://rawstory.com/2010/01/moyers-wall-street-riding-surging-ocean-greed/

Banks, bailouts and billions of dollars were center stage in the most recent episode of Bill Moyers Journal, in which the host interviewed two journalists to find out how things got so bad for Americans and so good for the country's biggest banks.

Link: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/09-6

German prosecutors have launched a preliminary investigation into allegations that the CIA deployed a team of Blackwater operatives on a clandestine operation in Hamburg, Germany, after 9/11 ultimately aimed at assassinating a German citizen with suspected ties to Al Qaeda. The alleged assassination operation was revealed last month in a Vanity Fair profile of Blackwater's owner Erik Prince.

Link: http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/01/09/afghans-losing-hope-after-8-years-of-war/

The man on the motorcycle was going the wrong way down a one-way street, gesturing indignantly for the phalanx of traffic-clogged cars in front of him to move. "Brother, why are you angry with us?" said a passenger leaning out of one of the vehicles blocking his path. "It's you who are going the wrong way!" "I'm not angry at you, I'm angry at Afghanistan," the man cried back, waving his arm dismissively as he negotiated his bike onto a crowded sidewalk and drove off in a trail of exhaust fumes. "These are sad days."

Link: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=115691&sectionid=351020704

Chavez accuses the US of violating Venezuelan airspace. Venezuela has scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to ward off a US 'military plane' amid reports of “US trespassing the country's airspace.” President Hugo Chavez has ordered the fighters to confront a US P-3 maritime patrol aircraft that had purportedly violated Venezuela's airspace, Reuters quoted the Venezuelan president as saying on Friday. "They are provoking us ... these are warplanes," Chavez noted, showing a picture of the plane, which he said, had taken off from US military bases on the Netherlands' Caribbean islands and from neighboring Colombia on two separate occasions.

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126299974705922495.html

South Carolina officials called an early end to the shrimping season and Florida citrus growers remained on edge Friday as a cold snap persisted across much of the U.S. Heavy snowfall and icy temperatures prompted dozens of Minnesota schools to close and delayed the opening of some state offices Friday, while wind-chill levels in the Dakotas hovered around 25-degrees below zero.

Link: http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m62006&hd=&size=1&l=e

Egyptian authorities have announced that all aid convoys travelling to Gaza will be banned from travelling across Egypt after a riot broke out at the Rafah border crossing earlier in the week. Ahmed Abul Gheit, Egypt's foreign minister, said in remarks published on Saturday that members of Viva Palestina, the last convoy allowed through, had "committed hostile acts, even criminal ones" on Egyptian soil

Link: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/145044/cerberus_capital%3A_literally_blood-sucking_the_poor_to_make_their_billions

How one company made $1.8 billion by paying peanuts to human plasma donors, and then manipulated the market by restricting supply to the desperately ill.

Link: http://www.paltelegraph.com/palestine/west-bank/3568-charges-of-palestinian-child-torture-in-israeli-prisons

Defence for Children International/Palestine Section (DCI/PS) on Wednesday submitted 13 cases to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture for investigation. The cases relate to the ill-treatment, and in some cases torture, of Palestinian children being held at the notorious Al Jalame Interrogation and Detention Centre near Haifa, in Israel, between February 2008 and March 2009.

Link: http://www.truthout.org/topstories/10910vh3

The chicken and pork industries have wrought unprecedented changes in bird and swine flu. Billions could die in a deadly flu pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen.

Link: http://www.sandiego6.com/news/local/story/Strong-6-5-earthquake-shakes-northern-California/ZcT2hTi9DE2ckYrQfMjj2A.cspx

A strong earthquake, magnitude, 6.5, has struck northern California, causing significant damage. It struck 20 miles west northwest off the coast of Ferndale in northern California Saturday afternoon at 4:28, Pacific Time. The earthquake's depth is estimated at 14 miles.

Link: http://www.henrymakow.com/brazil_--_marxist_dictatorship.html

During the holidays, when Brazilians are resting and expecting a happy new year, President Lula and his gang of former leftist terrorists and bank robbers, now ministers of state, crafted and signed a law project that can very well turn Brazil into a Soviet Republic.

Link: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/514394/the_2010_political_timebomb_is_unemployment

American employers eliminated 4.2 million jobs in 2009 and sent unemployment soaring into double digits for the first time in more than a quarter century. Since the fall of last year, the official jobless rate has been over ten percent, while the unofficial rate (taking in the severely underemployed and those who have given up looking) has been over 17 percent.

Link: http://desertpeace.wordpress.com:80/2010/01/09/what-are-israels-and-americas-plans-for-gaza/

Something is cooking…. and smelling rather foul! Israel is ‘reaching out’ to the Palestinian Authority to renew ‘Peace Talks’ on one phone, while on the other is giving orders to bomb Gaza.

Link: http://www.naturalnews.com/027905_TSA_airport_security.html

At the Bakersfield airport in California, TSA authorities recently shut down the entire airport after finding what they thought was a container of liquid explosives. Luggage screeners discovered five Gatorade bottles full of an "amber" liquid. TSA agents then opened the bottles and complained they smelled "a strong chemical odor." They then complained of nausea and were taken to the local hospital for treatment. According to Reuters, "Kern County Sheriffs deputies, fire crews, FBI agents and members of a joint terrorism task force responded to the scene and spent the day questioning Ramirez before further tests showed that the liquid was honey."

Link: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/US-Pakistan-bickering-get-ugly-as-ISI-fingers-American-diplomats/articleshow/5425688.cms

US-Pakistan bickering gets ugly as ISI fingers American diplomats: The US ambassador to Pakistan publicly complained about harassment of American diplomatic personnel by Pakistani authorities and obliquely hinted that Islamabad risked losing US aid and projects if they continued to deny visas to US officials and space for the US mission to fulfill its multi-billion assistance program. Two US diplomats arrested in Gwadar

Link: http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/70371

"If the Quiet American, in his usual mixture of idealism and ignorance, decides to bring democracy and all the other goodies there, that will be the end of this happiness. The Americans will sink into another quagmire, tens of thousands of people will be killed, and it will all end in disaster."

Link: http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/yemen-a-closer-look-at-the-%e2%80%9cnew-frontier%e2%80%9d/

Remember, the Al Qaeda that was in a very few countries — and most specifically in Afghanistan in September of 2001 — is now an Al Qaeda that is in about 58, 59 — who knows precisely, but we sort of peg it around 60 countries. It is a global network, which it wasn’t. If recent experience is anything to go by, the mere mention of any ‘Al Qaeda threat’ is enough to signal the swift exit of rational thought and/or due regard to definition in Washington. The superior military outfit in history whose sheer …

Link: http://www.legitgov.org/comment/rec_report_090110.html

As the betrayals by President Barack Obama and the Democrats mount, the Obamapologetics grow more desperate and contradictory by the day. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Harold Meyerson pointed to the lack of "left pressure from below" to account for Obama's failure to push his supposedly "progressive reforms." As if a majority of tens of millions weren't enough, Obama still needs more "aid" from his constituency to find the courage to deliver his promised "change."