Link: http://www.alternet.org/food/145369/shrimp%27s_dirty_secrets%3A_why_america%27s_favorite_seafood_is_a_health_and_environmental_nightmare

Americans love their shrimp. It's the most popular seafood in the country, but unfortunately much of the shrimp we eat are a cocktail of chemicals, harvested at the expense of one of the world's productive ecosystems. Worse, guidelines for finding some kind of "sustainable shrimp" are so far nonexistent.

Link: http://djapollo2k.livejournal.com/33616.html

"Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, armies of corporate lobbyists grease the palms of our elected officials, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia, and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, this product is duping us into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest."

Link: http://www.paltelegraph.com/diaries/featured-articles/3807-gazan-women-search-for-gravel-to-feed-their-children

The four-year-old Israeli siege on Gaza has caused unemployment to soar and basic supplies to be expensive and scarce. Seeking a little income any way they can, Gaza women are being forced to dig for gravel, a basic construction material that can then be sold.

Link: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50090

A staff member "would use the cable to beat people. On each whip, the person’s skin would come off and stick on the cable," said M’noh*, 16, of his detention in Choam Chao Youth Rehabilitation Centre, a government-run facility for drug dependents in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.

Link: http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson01252010.html

At stake now is President Obama’s credibility as an agent for change. Voters see his main “change” thus far to have been favoritism to Wall Street. Jay Leno jokes that Obama has done the impossible: resurrected the seemingly dying Republican Party and given it the coveted label of the “Party of Change,” running against Wall Street.

Link: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/01/201012514645847464.html

Al-Majid was involved in a campaign in which 182,000 Iraqi Kurds were killed. Ali Hassan al-Majid, the cousin of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, has been executed in Iraq for crimes against humanity, a government spokesman said.

Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2312679920100125

In President Barack Obama's first year in office, fellow Democrats and Republicans traded pot-shots over who was to blame for the record U.S. deficit. In 2010, an election year, these are set to become broadsides.

Link: http://www.paltelegraph.com/columnists/peter-eyre/3809-why-are-the-us-and-uk-governments-creating-mass-hysteria-part-1

Why in a period of only two days has the security level been upgraded from Substantial (an attack is a strong possibility) to Severe (an attack is highly likely) even though our Home Secretary stressed that there was no intelligence suggesting an attack is imminent. It's all down to the four P's Pursue, Prevent, Protect, and Prepare or should that read Panic People and Prevent Privacy?

Link: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/01/20101250950705108.html

More than 150,000 people have been confirmed dead in the Port-au-Prince area alone following Haiti's devastating earthquake, the country's communications minister says.

Link: http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/26328

Defense Secretary Robert Gates hosted a meeting with the nation’s top defense company executives Wednesday, stressing the need for a closer partnership with them and pledging to work with the White House to secure steady growth in the Pentagon’s budgets over time, according to his spokesman.

Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35046668/ns/business-retail/

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will cut about 11,200 jobs at Sam's Club warehouses as it turns over the task of in-store product demonstrations to an outside marketing company.

Link: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50086

The World Social Forum (WSF) is only "a tool" and must not be confused with the global movement for another world, says Chico Whitaker, one of the founders of this meeting which is celebrating its tenth year with a seminar to assess its track record Jan. 25-29, in its southern Brazilian place of origin, Porto Alegre.

Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1245620/Aid-piling-UNs-cold-beer-compound-red-tape-keeps-aid-desperate-Haitians--UN-staff-wi-fi-bar.html?ITO=1490

It is a tale of two cities. One has ice-cold beers, internet access, thousands of men and billions of dollars’ worth of gleaming machinery, together with piles of food, blankets, generators and other aid relief from around the globe. This is the heavily fortified US-controlled Port-au-Prince airport and neighbouring United Nations compound. The other is the devastated city of Port-au-Prince, where the stench of death fills the air and starving people are in utter despair, still in need of the basic necessities of food, water, shelter and medical care.

Link: http://www.paltelegraph.com/world/world-news/3754-viva-palestina-malaysia-in-boycott-israel-walkabout

More than 100 members of Viva Palestina Malaysia (VPM), a coalition of NGOs, on Sunday participated in a walkabout for about five kilometers here in support of the efforts towards creating a free and independent state of Palestine.

Link: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50084

As environment ministers from Brazil, South Africa, India and China (BASIC) prepared to meet in the Indian capital on Sunday to draw up a post-Copenhagen strategy, there were great expectations on the role they could play in pushing a consensus on how the world should go about dealing with climate change.

Link: http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article19528

Holocaust denial is repugnant but is entrenched in the mainstream academics, media and political Establishments of the Western Murdochracies. In WW2 Churchill deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death, continued to foster Muslim-Hindu antipathy that led to the horrors of Indian Partition and persuaded his War Cabinet on racist Partition of Palestine. Yet the holocaust-complicit Anglo media, academic and politician Establishment is still in denial.

Link: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/01/201012342618718176.html

Haitian officials have confirmed that the death toll from the January 12 earthquake now stands at over 110,000, with 193,000 more people wounded and another 609,000 forced into temporary shelters. Following the toll revision, the US Geographical Survey said on Saturday that the 7.0 magnitude quake that devastated the Caribbean nation was possibly the most destructive on record in the region.

Link: http://rawstory.com/2010/01/usgs-claims-venezuela-holds-earths-largest-oil-reserves/

Venezuela may have just become the center of an energy-starved world. The Orinoco Belt, situated squarely underneath the South American nation, may hold some 513 billion barrels of crude oil, according to a new report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). That's twice the size of Saudi Arabia's oil reserves, placing Venezuela firmly atop the list of oil-rich nations. The timing of the USGS announcement is striking. On Jan. 28, international firms will take part in an auction for contracts to drill in the Orinoco Belt. The deadline for auction registration was Jan 18, according to industry publication Petroleum World. Results will be announced on Feb. 10.

Link: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2010/01/201012333947758520.html

An estimated 300 people have died in violence between Muslims and Christians in northern Nigeria. Reports on Saturday said that about 150 bodies had been recovered from wells in Kuru Jantar, near the city of Jos, where clashes began last week before spreading to nearby villages. Locals in Kuru Jantar, also known as Kuru Karama, told Andrew Simmons, Al Jazeera's Africa editor, that a massacre had taken place in the village.

Link: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ROZ20100123&articleId=17169

Nuclear and Conventional Arms Pacts Stalled. Associated Press reported that the White House will submit its Quadrennial Defense Review to Congress on February 1 and request a record-high $708 billion for the Pentagon. That figure is the highest in absolute and in inflation-adjusted, constant (for any year) dollars since 1946, the year after the Second World War ended. Adding non-Pentagon defense-related spending, the total may exceed $1 trillion.

Link: http://www.ogaden.com/hornnews/106-ogaden/621-ethiopian-forces-burned-the-town-of-budle-shabele-province

Reports reaching the Ogaden Online News Desk confirm the burning down of the town of Budle, Shabelle province by the Woyane army. Eyewitnesses indicate that the Woyane militias first looted all valuables in the town. Prior to torching the town, the marauding Woyane militias also took two young girls with them. We couldn't confirm the names of the two young girls.

Link: http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/econ-j23.shtml

New claims for unemployment benefits in the US jumped unexpectedly last week, showing that, despite record bank profits, economic conditions for ordinary people continue to worsen.

Link: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/23-6

In Wisconsin, conservative and pro-business groups said Friday that they were considering a lawsuit to block a proposed law that would ban corporate spending during political campaigns.

Link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24480.htm

One of the most intense controversies of the Bush years was the administration's indefinite imprisoning of "War on Terror" detainees without charges of any kind. So absolute was the consensus among progressives and Democrats against this policy that a well-worn slogan was invented to object: a "legal black hole."

Link: http://rawstory.com/2010/01/blogger-the-corporate-globalization-electoral-system/

The Supreme Court may have ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission days ago, but the decision's shockwaves are still rippling across American democracy. Key among them is a concern first raised by Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote in his dissent that the court, by removing all prohibitions against corporate or union money in U.S. elections, "would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans."

Link: http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/just-walk-away-from-the-democrats/

The left needs to organize the unorganized. The working people, the unemployed, the young, and the restless. The right wing has their core group of supporters who organize around fear of the other. The liberals have those who believe in the myth of American equality because they have no class analysis. The Left needs to organize the rest and they need to do so without the Democratic Party. It should be quite clear to almost every left-leaning American by now that the Democrats are nothing more than another wing of the party that works for Wall Street and the Pentagon.

Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245171/David-Cameron-charges-Brown-social-recession.html#ixzz0dVsCFb06

'On each occasion, are we just going to say this is an individual case? That there aren't any links to what is going wrong in our wider society, in terms of family breakdown, in terms of drug and alcohol abuse, in terms of violent videos, in terms of many of the things that were going wrong in that particular family?'

Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-google-war-china-calls-us-an-information-imperialist-1876409.html

Speech by Hillary Clinton on internet freedom provokes angry response. Hillary Clinton denounced censorship after Google threatened to quit China. China responded with a fierce broadside yesterday after Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, attacked its record on internet freedom. The country labelled Washington an "information imperialist" and said accusations that China was manipulating the internet for its own ends were false.

Link: http://www.thetreeofliberty.com/vb/showthread.php?p=882660

The minority-millions of us that have been slaving away trying to point out the impending doom that has surrounded the end of this nation, for the last decade-or-so have finally been forcibly retired. Thanks to the US Supreme Court there is no longer anything that can be done, by ordinary people, in our new corporate state that can now rule absolutely over all of us that actually thought we should have a right to have a voice in what's going on.

Link: http://mantiqaltayr.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/the-world-is-insane/

Zionist Jew and Chief Rabbi of the Sanhedrin, John Hagee, needs your help and only you can do it – you meaning “stupid dumb shit Americans” (SDSAs). And we here an Mantiq al-Tayr are always on the lookout for ways to help SDSAs do what they do best – support Israel. For the only way to really serve Rabbi Hagee is to serve Israel. Not only that, but the only way to give to the poor, to aid the needy, to help the helpless, is to do so through Israel. And today, not only can you give to Israel so it can kill Palestinians, Hagee informs us that the only way to help the suffering masses of Haiti is to do so by giving money to Israel so Israel can save Haiti from the recent American invasion of that country.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/23/cctv-sky-police-plan-drones

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ­"routine" monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

Link: http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn01222010.html

It’s actually some 30 years ago, but to me seems only yesterday that we were howling for Paul Volcker’s blood. As Fed chairman back in Carter-Reagan time he was the great deflator, ratcheting up interest rates and hurling widows and orphans out into the snow. And here he is now, the shining knight of the left, for months languishing in obscurity as head of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, now mustered to Obama’s side to preside over the White House’s Great Leap Sideways into economic populism. He’s been tasked with promoting legislation that will haul the banks back into the Glass-Steagall era when the paltry sums in your checking account weren’t immediately securitized and packaged into a CDO squared. We await the dispatchof Larry Summers, off on a secret mission to study the economy of the Aleutians and report back in a year, as the White House stokes the fire under Treasury Secretary Geithner for his secret bailout of AIG when he was chairman of the New York Fed.

Link: http://wire.antiwar.com/2010/01/23/saudi-bodies-of-20-soldiers-found-on-yemen-border/

Saudi Arabia's assistant defense minister said Saturday that the bodies of 20 of the 26 soldiers reported missing were found on the border, raising the toll for the fight against Yemen's Shiite rebels to 133.

Link: http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1144516.html

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that Israel will not sit idly by while Iran continues work on its nuclear program, Israel Radio reported Saturday quoting London-based newspaper Al-Hayat. According to the report, Sarkozy, who recently met with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, reportedly told him that France has proof Iran is working to develop an atomic bomb. "Israel might take action to prevent the Iranian regime, which wants to wipe it off the map, from obtaining a nuclear bomb," Sarkozy reportedly said.

Link: http://www.wpxi.com/news/22311848/detail.html

Pittsburgh police Chief Nate Harper said three plainclothes officers have been reassigned during an internal investigation into the beating of an 18-year-old student violinist from the city's Creative and Performing Arts High School. VIDEO: CAPA Student Says Cops Used Branch To Beat Him Police charged Jordan Miles, 18, with assault and resisting arrest Jan. 11 because, they said, he fought with the officers who thought a "heavy object" in his coat was a gun. It turned out to be a bottle of Mountain Dew. Miles said he resisted because he thought the men were trying to abduct him and didn't identify themselves as police. Miles' family and attorney said he was hit with a stun gun and hospitalized after the violent Homewood struggle during which a chunk of his hair was yanked out and a tree branch went through his gums.

Link: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/economic-black-hole-20-reasons-why-the-u-s-economy-is-dying-and-is-simply-not-going-to-recover

Even though the U.S. financial system nearly experienced a total meltdown in late 2008, the truth is that most Americans simply have no idea what is happening to the U.S. economy. Most people seem to think that the nasty little recession that we have just been through is almost over and that we will be experiencing another time of economic growth and prosperity very shortly. But this time around that is not the case. The reality is that we are being sucked into an economic black hole from which the U.S. economy will never fully recover. The problem is debt. Collectively, the U.S. government, the state governments, corporate America and American consumers have accumulated the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world.

Link: http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/cour-j22.shtml

In a profoundly anti-democratic decision with far-reaching implications, the US Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a law limiting the ability of corporations to spend money in support of political campaigns. The five-to-four ruling, in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, declared that corporations have a “right” to unfettered campaign spending. The extreme right-wing four-justice bloc on the court was joined by the “centrist” Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority decision.

Link: http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m62443&hd=&size=1&l=e

As thousands of well-equipped US soldiers pour into Haiti, there is an increasing concern about the militarization of the country, supporting the soldiers and not the people. Or, as one doctor put it, "people need gauze, not guns." We take a look at aid distribution in Haiti and the effect on Haitians fighting to survive in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Link: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/22-1

The Supreme Court has handed a new weapon to lobbyists. If you vote wrong, a lobbyist can now tell any elected official that my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election. “We have got a million we can spend advertising for you or against you — whichever one you want,’ ” a lobbyist can tell lawmakers, said Lawrence M. Noble, a lawyer at Skadden Arps in Washington and former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jan/22/white-working-class-minority-ethnic-communities

working-class communities are struggling to deal with the recession because of a lack of civil society, a leading charity claims. According to a new report by the Barrow Cadbury Trust, an absence of the community groups commonly found in areas with high minority ethnic populations is giving white communities "nothing but a shared sense of victimhood".