Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24508.htm

So said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein of the financial crisis of 2008. He likened its probability to four hurricanes hitting the East Coast in a single season. Blankfein was reminded by the chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee, Phil Angelides, that hurricanes are “acts of God.” Financial crises are manmade. Yet Blankfein was backed up by Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, who said, “Somehow, we just missed … that home prices don’t go up forever.” The Wall Street titans thus conceded they did not foresee the housing bubble ever bursting and they did not consider the possibility of a collapse in value of the sub-prime mortgage securities piled up on their books.

Link: http://www.truthout.org/amateur-filmmaker-accused-entrapping-acorn-employees-arrested-by-federal-agents56415

Federal law enforcement officials on Monday arrested conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe and three other men for allegedly trying to wiretap the phone system in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office. Also arrested was Robert Flanagan, 24, son of the acting US Attorney in western Louisiana, William Flanagan.

Link: http://news.antiwar.com/2010/01/26/price-of-us-wars-1-trillion-and-rising/

The Congressional Budget Office’s newly released budget outlook notes that Congress has approved over $1 trillion in direct spending on wars and war-related activities since 2001, and that price tag is only getting higher as the wars drag on.

Link: http://www.paltelegraph.com/palestine/gaza-strip/3830-israel-uses-depleted-uranium-against-palestinians-in-gaza

A London-based Palestinian activist announced that the buildings damaged in the Gaza Strip after the Israeli onslaught last year all showed signs of contamination with depleted uranium. "The ruined buildings and debris left of the Israeli attack on Gaza are contaminated with depleted uranium and similar types of weapons," Sameh Habeeb, spokesperson of the Palestinian Return Center in London, told FNA.

Link: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gXlzTQaiB-PiwHtYxlprhknJMW2g

A UN report on Israel's 22-day offensive against Hamas-controlled Gaza is anti-Semitic, an Israeli government minister said, as the Jewish state prepares to formally respond to its allegations of war crimes. "The Goldstone Report ... and similar reports, are simply a type of anti-Semitism," Diaspora and Information Minister Yuli Edelstein told the YNet news agency ahead of a trip to New York, where he will present Israel's rebuttal on Thursday.

Link: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50104

While the BASIC bloc countries - Brazil, South Africa, India and China - will submit their plans for voluntary mitigation actions by the Jan. 31 deadline stipulated by the Copenhagen Accord, they have taken care to emphasise that the agreement, reached at the end of the December climate change summit in the Danish capital, has no legal basis.

Link: http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson01262010.html

The State of the Union address is in danger of purveying the usual euphemisms. I expect Obama to brag that he has overseen a recovery. But can there be any such thing as a jobless recovery? What has recovered are stock market averages and Wall Street bonuses, not disposable personal income or discretionary spending after paying debt service. There is a dream that what can be “recovered” is something so idyllic as to be mythical: a Bubble Economy enabling people to make money without actually working, by borrowing and riding the tide of asset-price inflation to make capital gains.

Link: http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/25/obama.spending.freeze/?hpt=T1

President Obama will announce in Wednesday's State of the Union address that he's proposing to save $250 billion by freezing all nonsecurity federal discretionary spending for three years, according to two senior administration officials.