I don’t know any of the participants in this trailer - they all seem to me pretty ordinary people. Yet, it is clear that each of them posses more wisdom than our entire political system. I guess that the meaning of it is simple. The revolution is here. "War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself."

With tensions around the Strait of Hormuz sky-high, Iranian plans to conduct the country's "greatest naval war games” could coincide with joint US-Israeli exercises in the Persian Gulf. With both sides taking positions, could a real battle be looming? - ­Hopefully the massive exercises will remain just that. But with three armies on the playing board, one spark could be enough to ignite an all-out war. Iran, which recently held a 10-day naval exercise near the Strait of Hormuz to demonstrate its military prowess, is now planning new, ‘massive’ naval drills codenamed The Great Prophet. The drills will be carried out by the country’s elite Revolutionary Guard, which has its own air, naval and ground forces separate from those of the regular military. On Thursday, the semiofficial Fars news agency quoted the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's naval commander, Admiral Ali Fadavi, as saying the next round of war games would be "different" from previous ones, AP reports.

BusinessInsider: Iran Is Now Gearing Up For Its 'Greatest War Games Ever' In The Strait Of Hormuz
Fars News Agency: Senior MP Warns US against Continued Military Presence in Region
Russia Today: Iran ‘recommends’ US stay out of Persian Gulf - Video
AWIP: Israel and US to stage major defense drill
AWIP: Thousands of US soldiers to be deployed in Israel for drill

Fallujah, Iraq - While the US military has formally withdrawn from Iraq, doctors and residents of Fallujah are blaming weapons like depleted uranium and white phosphorous used during two devastating US attacks on Fallujah in 2004 for what are being described as "catastrophic" levels of birth defects and abnormalities. - Dr Samira Alani, a paediatric specialist at Fallujah General Hospital, has taken a personal interest in investigating an explosion of congenital abnormalities that have mushroomed in the wake of the US sieges since 2005. "We have all kinds of defects now, ranging from congenital heart disease to severe physical abnormalities, both in numbers you cannot imagine," Alani told Al Jazeera at her office in the hospital, while showing countless photos of shocking birth defects. As of December 21, Alani, who has worked at the hospital since 1997, told Al Jazeera she had personally logged 677 cases of birth defects since October 2009. Just eight days later when Al Jazeera visited the city on December 29, that number had already risen to 699. "There are not even medical terms to describe some of these conditions because we've never seen them until now," she said. "So when I describe it all I can do is describe the physical defects, but I'm unable to provide a medical term."

AWIP: Huge Rise in Birth Defects in Falluja
Abel Bult-Ito: Nothing depleted about 'depleted uranium'
Gerry Georgatos: Victims of war - Iraqi children and families - Depleted uranium and trauma

Turkey has arrested and imprisoned its former army chief, in one of the most dramatic moves in the decade-long struggle between the country’s Islamist-rooted government and the once unassailable military. - Prosecutors allege that Ilker Basbug, who retired as chief of staff in August 2010, led a terrorist organisation and plotted to overthrow the government. High quality global journalism requires investment. At the heart of the accusations are claims that Mr Basbug ordered the army to operate a series of websites issuing anti-government and anti-Islamist propaganda as part of a self-styled “Action Plan Against Reactionary Forces”. Mr Basbug dismissed the allegations as “tragicomic”. In a court appearance before his overnight incarceration, he added: “Accusing a Chief of the General Staff of setting up an armed terrorist organisation is the greatest punishment that could be given to me.”His detention pending trial is perhaps the most striking indication to date of the decline of the army’s power since the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister, came to power in 2002. Until now no former chief of the country’s military had been arrested.

Indonesians have found a new symbol for their growing frustration at uneven justice in this young, democratic nation: cheap, worn-out flip-flops. - They have been dropping them off at police stations throughout the country to express outrage over the arrest and trial of a 15-year-old boy for lifting an old pair of white sandals outside a boarding house used by police in northern Indonesia. The teen -- who was later interrogated and badly beaten by three of the officers in the Central Sulawesi provincial capial of Palu -- faces up to five years in prison. Thousands of people have dropped off their old shoes at police stations in recent days as a form of protest.

The horse race is really underway here, but what real options do the American people have? What choice can they make that will have a positive effect on their financial future, not to mention their constitutional rights and civil liberties? It doesn’t look to us like there is any leader who can unify the country. Obama had the political currency and the skill to do that 3 years ago, but he squandered it. So where does that put the rest of us now exactly? Feels kind of like the Twilight Zone, and we will bring in former assistant treasury secretary Paul Craig Roberts to tell us what he thinks. And speaking of the twilight zone, let’s talk a bit about Iran. After all, it is center stage once again as the candidates look to out gun each other. Iran has threatened to act if the US navy moves an aircraft carrier into the gulf. This as New US and EU sanctions target the Islamic Republic. What doe this mean for Oil prices for you and I and is the US sabre rattling worth the cost? Well, again, we will speak to Paul Craig Roberts, an assistant treasury secretary under the Reagan Administration for answers to that questions. And lastly, with millions of dollars being spent by the GOP candidates and other groups in Iowa on TV ads, maybe we should all just fund one big ad, like the famous “daisy ad” which …

The following report is based on the work of statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com. - Today’s (Friday, January 6) payroll jobs report of 200,000 new jobs in December is overstated by at least 82,000 jobs. As approximately 130,000 new jobs are needed each month to stay even with population growth, the December job figures actually indicate that the US economy fell another 12,000 jobs behind. Forty-two thousand of the reported jobs are the result of a glitch in the BLS seasonal adjustment model that produces a false jump in December “couriers and messengers”jobs. Forty thousand of the jobs result from the “birth/death” model that BLS uses to estimate the net effect of unreported jobs lost from business closures and jobs gained from new start-ups. The model is structured to represent normal times. During the bottom bouncing of this protracted downturn, the model over-estimates new jobs from start-ups and under-estimates job losses from business failures. The official unemployment rates (U3 and U6) no longer measure all of the unemployed.

PressTV: 'US job crisis to linger for years to come'
Barry Grey: Obama hails tepid job growth in December
Paul Craig Roberts: The Dismal Economic Outlook For The New Year

The International Criminal Court has been dependent on a vast support network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from the get-go. Long before the United Nations 1998 Rome conference which established the ICC, the UN’s army of NGO activists provided boots on the ground for aggressive lobbying of national governments to support creation of the tribunal. At the Rome conference, the UN brought the raucus NGO rent-a-mob inside the convention site to turn up the pressure on the official national delegates. This correspondent sat in strategy meetings in Rome during which UN officials and NGO leaders coordinated their pressure cooker plans and conspired to neutralize opposition. The NGOs have been absolutely essential to the ICC — every step of the way. It is not an exaggeration to say that without the controlled NGO lobby there would not be an ICC. And the radical “human rights” NGOs are playing an indispensible role in the current campaign to boost the ICC to the next power level.