President Barack Obama has made a move towards stronger gun control in the U.S. The proposal comes after the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook elementary school that took the lives of 26 people, including 20 children.
Paul Craig Roberts: Connecticut Tragedy Used To Disarm Americans Faced With A Police State

The most powerful company on the Internet just got a whole lot creepier: a new service from Google merges offline consumer info with online intelligence, allowing advertisers to target users based on what they do at the keyboard and at the mall. - Without much fanfare, Google announced news this week of a new advertising project, Conversions API, that will let businesses build all-encompassing user profiles based off of not just what users search for on the Web, but what they purchase outside of the home. [...] The blog goes on to explain that in-store transactions, call-tracking and other online activities can be inputted into Google to be combined with other information “to optimize your campaigns based on even more of your business data.” Google is all but certain to ensure that all user data collected off- and online will be cloaked through safeguards that will allow for complete and total anonymity for customers. When on-the-Web interactions start mirroring real life activity, though, even a certain degree of privacy doesn’t make Conversions API any less creepy. As Jim Edwards writes for Business Insider, “If you bought a T shirt at The Gap in the mall with your credit card, you could start seeing a lot more Gap ads online later, suggesting jeans that go with that shirt.”

The founder of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks has announced that the site will release “over one million documents” in 2013. “Next year will be equally busy. WikiLeaks has already over one million documents being prepared to be released, documents that affect every country in the world -- every country in this world,” Julian Assange said in a speech from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London on Thursday. He was granted asylum by Ecuador on August 16.

“True democracy is not the White House, true democracy is not cameras, true democracy is the resistance of people armed with the truth against lies…,” Assange said.

Unable to get enough support for a small tax raise on Americans earning more than $1 million, the GOP has canceled a House vote on legislation meant to avoid the "fiscal cliff." House Speaker John Boehner said it is now up to President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to figure out "legislation to avert the fiscal cliff." "The Senate must now act," he said. Coming out of a last-minute meeting of GOP Republicans, Ohio Rep. Steve LaTourette said Boehner had told lawmakers, "He's going to call the president and he's going to go down and talk to him and maybe they can hammer something out." Neither the White House nor Reid's office have commented.

Anthony Migchels: The ‘Fiscal Cliff’: where do they get all these non-issues?

NYSE-Euronext is a 220-year-old icon of global finance, but its 12 year-old Atlanta-based rival, IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) will buy it for $8.2 billion, according to a deal that has just been announced. This revelation surprised a lot of people on the Street who thought all the exchange horse trading of 2010-2011 was over. In 2011, for example, the Justice Department blocked ICE and NASDAQ's attempt to buy the NYSE. NYSE was also stopped from merging with Germany's Deutsche Börse. Since 2010, $32 billion worth of attempted exchange merger/purchase deals have failed.

Housing crisis in the "remote" First Nations com-
munity of Attawapiskat, Northern Ontario

Chronic underfunding of essential services and fears over land losses prompt Attawapiskat chief to go on hunger strike.

When images of Canada's First Nations people living in mouldy shacks and frosty tents, without toilets or running water, emerged last year, Canadians were shocked. It was Canada's "Katrina moment" says Charlie Angus, New Democratic party member for Timmins-James Bay in north Ontario.

Fast forward a year, and progress has been excruciatingly slow. The indigenous community only received 22 trailer homes to deal with the housing crisis. A construction trailer with three bathrooms and a kitchen still caters for around 50 people, according to Angus. As a result, the chief of the Attawapiskat, Theresa Spence, has been on a hunger strike living in a teepee across from parliament since 11 December as winter descends on Canada's capital, Ottawa. She says she is willing to die for her people if the Queen and the prime minister, Stephen Harper, don't meet Canada's indigenous chiefs to discuss the treaty rights they signed with the crown. Many of Canada's aborigines live in what can only be described as developing world conditions.

VIDEO: The Current State of Attawapiskat, ON - This is the current state of the dire straits of Attawapiskat. Look to the end to find information on how you can help...Pictures from 2008-2011 featuring pics of inside conditions of homes, high costs of foods, gas at $2.14/litre (as December 3, 2011), de Beer's Winter Road Blockade, the demolition of J.R. Nakogee School, etc. Christopher Kataquapit Photos (except where noted) Used by Permission, may request original photo files.

Arctic Compass: Canada - First Nations are Victims of the Government! (Part 1)(Part 2)

Moscow has developed a plan of evacuating Russians from Syria. Russian power ministries with the Foreign Ministry’s support are prepared to evacuate about 30,000 Russian citizens from the country engulfed in a civil war. - These Russians are employees of Russian institutions abroad, experts working on private and state contracts, people who are in Syria on private trips and also those who are married to Syrians.

Benefit claimants will have their online job applications remotely monitored by the Government to see whether they are making serious attempts to find work. - From the beginning of next year, the unemployed will have to look for work through the Coalition's new Universal Jobmatch website or potentially risk losing their benefits. The website will scan the CVs of benefit claimants and automatically match them up with job openings that suit their skills. It will also allow employers to search for new workers among the unemployed and send messages inviting them to interviews. However, the activities of benefit claimants can also be tracked using devices known as "cookies", so their Job Centre advisers can know how many searches they have been doing, suggest potential jobs and see whether they are turning down viable opportunities. Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said the scheme would "revolutionise" the process of looking for work.

Israel plans to occupy or come in control of the lands in Northern Iraq in a move to materialize its 'Greater Israel' dream, a US columnist disclosed.

Wayne Madsen, in an article wrote that Israel has plans to relocate thousands of Kurdish Jews from Israel to the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Nineveh under the guise of religious pilgrimage to ancient Jewish religious shrines. Israelis are expansionists and their intentions to take full control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and permanently keep the Golan Heights of Syria and expand into Southern Lebanon have already been well known, and now they also have their eyes on parts of Iraq as part of the Zionist regime's dream for "Greater Israel", it added. Kurdish Israelis began to buy land in Iraqi Kurdistan, after the US invasion in 2003, and the Zionist regime claims the lands are part of its historical property, the article wrote.

Kurdish and Iraqi sources report that Israel's Mossad mercenaries and Kurdish militias have staged terrorist attacks against Chaldean Christians in Iraq, particularly in Nineveh, Irbil, al-Hamdaniya, Bartalah, Talasqaf, Batnayah, Bashiqah, Elkosheven, Uqrah, and Mosul. These attacks by the Israelis and their allies are usually reported as being the responsibility of "al-Qaeda", the article added.