Members of the Obama Administration are confirming tonight that the National Security Council has been instructed to begin seeking options for US intervention in Syria, including what they call the “unlikely” option of setting up a no-fly zone. - The process is being led by NSC Director Steve Simon, and is said to involve top members of the State, Defense and Treasury Departments. The focus is on ways to “aid” the Syrian opposition. Unspoken in all of this, of course, is exactly which segments of the Syrian opposition the administration are looking to aid, though it seems likely that the administration will use the time-honored tactic of principally aiding groups in favor of a large, long-term US presence in the nation.

Wayne Madsen: World War III Has Begun – It`s the First Asymmetric War Long Awaited by Pentagon Think Tanks

"At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."

Over the years I've met my fair share of monsters – rogue individuals, for the most part. But as regulation in the UK and the US has loosened its restraints, the monsters have proliferated. In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R Boddy identifies these people as psychopaths. "They are," he says, "simply the 1 per cent of people who have no conscience or empathy." And he argues: "Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations, where they are able to influence the moral climate of the whole organisation and yield considerable power, have largely caused the [banking] crisis'. And Mr Boddy is not alone. In Jon Ronson's widely acclaimed book The Psychopath Test, Professor Robert Hare told the author: "I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well. Serial killer psychopaths ruin families. Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies."

Israel has threatened to launch another all-out war on the Gaza Strip, saying attacking the Palestinian territory is not a matter of choice, but a "war of necessity" for Tel Aviv.

Marking the third anniversary of Israel's deadly attack on Gaza, the chief of staff of the Israeli military, Lt. General Benny Gantz, said on Tuesday that Tel Aviv will ''sooner or later'' need to launch a large-scale operation against Hamas, the democratically-elected ruler of Gaza because Tel Aviv is losing its grip on the coastal strip. Gantz said Operation Cast Lead, which Israel launched against Gaza on December 27, 2008 and lasted for three week, had a deterrent effect on Israeli security, in which cracks were starting to show over time, forcing Israel to launch another war. Gantz also said that Tel Aviv is looking for the right time to launch a military offensive against the Gaza Strip and that the new war ''must be initiated by Israel and must be swift and painful".

Haaretz: IDF confirms preparations for extensive future Gaza military action
AWIP: THE CHANUKAH MASSACRE OF GAZA ~~ THREE YEARS LATER
Stephen Lendman: Gaza: Remembering Cast Lead

OWS Protester 'banned' from flight home for Christmas after he was found carrying anarchist literature. - A member of the Occupy London protests was stopped from boarding his flight home for Christmas after he was found carrying anarchist literature, it has been claimed. The demonstrator, who is part of the group occupying the empty UBS building dubbed the "Bank of Ideas", said he was told he would not be allowed on the Ryanair flight to Malaga because the pilot feared he might distribute leaflets and "upset other passengers".

The sale of surveillance software from Western companies to authoritarian regimes has been criticized at the annual conference of Germany's Chaos Computer Club. The software has been used to track political opponents. - The US government may have imposed sanctions against Syria, yet software used by the regime for tracking dissidents is provided by an American company. In the intelligence headquarters of the overthrown Mubarak and Gadhafi regimes, supply contracts with European electronics companies could be found providing devices which monitor the Internet. It's deals like these between Western companies and authoritarian regimes looking to censor and track Internet use that attracted hackers' attention at the beginning of the annual meeting of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) on Wednesday in Berlin. Evgeny Morozov, a lecturer at Stanford University in the United States, called this collaboration between Western software companies and authoritarian regimes in the persecution of dissenters as a "marriage from hell."

Tensions between the US and Iran have all but reached a breaking point with a naval standoff moments away from occurring in the Strait of Hormuz. - Following rumors of a budding nuclear program in the works from Tehran, American authorities attempted to infiltrate Iran, most notable with a filed stealth surveillance mission that ended with a US spy drone being downed, recovered and decoded by overseas authorities. After Iran mocked America for the country’s inability to manage and command their own aircraft, the European Union fired back in recent days by threatening sanctions against Iran. In response, overseas authorities say that they would respond by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, a notable channel in the Persian Gulf that serves as a key component in Iran’s oil export exhibitions.

EuroNews: US warns Iran over threat to close vital oil route
Russia Today: Conflict between Iran and West ‘the greatest danger’ of 2012 – Russia’s UN envoy

The US has resorted to “any possible means”, ranging from implicit to explicit acts of enmity, to undermine the Iranian nation and break its resistance to subjugation, a political analyst tells Press TV. - In consonance with its animus-charged measures against the Islamic Republic, “a US court in Manhattan made a mockery of justice, issued a default judgment against Iran, and accused Tehran of being involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” Ismail Salami, a Middle East expert, said, citing one such anti-Iran push in an article published on Press TV on Tuesday. Such an allegation “stands in stark contrast to reason in view of the plethora of evidence pointing with force and logic to the joint role of the CIA and the Mossad in the tragic incident,” he added. On December 22, a US federal judge in Manhattan alleged that Iran, together with Taliban and al-Qaeda, had been involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. The court, meanwhile, withdrew Saudi Arabia's name from the 10-year-old case, even though 15 of the 19 attackers were of Saudi nationality. The Iranian author went on to say that the association of the Islamic Republic of Iran with Taliban and al-Qaeda was a move aimed to “further drag Iran into the margins of isolation.” The US government's effort to incriminate Iran in the 9/11 case followed another attempt in early October, when the US Justice Department accused Tehran of involvement in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

Jason Ditz: Report: Israel, US Discuss Excuses for Attacking Iran - Officially, of course, both sides would insist such an attack was about Iran’s nuclear program. But since both nations have been claiming Iran is within striking distance of acquiring nuclear weapons since the mid-1980s, the excuse isn’t going to really fly internationally, so both nations are hoping to settle on something which could be the “trigger” for the attack.

A Jewish man, who arrived in Israel in 2009 to join his mother and brother who were already living here, has been denied immigrant status, apparently because of his psychiatric history. - The Interior Ministry's Population and Immigration Administration has rejected the application of the man, although it did not provide any formal explanation for the decision, which is now being challenged in the High Court of Justice. The man, who suffers from psychiatric problems, applied for immigrant status and citizenship under the Law of Return which, subject to narrow exceptions, allows any Jew as well as members of the extended family of Jews to acquire Israeli citizenship and immigrate to the country. His application was rejected despite a psychiatric opinion that he did not pose a danger to those around him and that he was capable of working and would not pose a burden on society.

The following were the top 10 news events around the world in 2011 as selected by Xinhua (in chronological order):