The military hardware deal comes at a time when Washington is working to counter the influence of the Saudis' bitter regional rival, Iran. The sale was formally announced on Thursday from Hawaii, where President Barack Obama is on holiday. In Honolulu, White House deputy spokesman Josh Earnest said the deal would support more than 50,000 American jobs at a time of high unemployment.

Paul Adams, BBC News, Washington, writes: The US and Saudi Arabia have long been close military partners, and this is part of a much larger, multi-year package first announced more than a year ago. But the timing of this "pre-announcement" is hardly accidental, and represents a robust reminder of American support for a key regional ally, just as Iran is warning that it could disrupt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz if Washington imposes sanctions on Tehran's oil exports.

America's principal allies in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Israel, all view Iran as the principal threat to regional stability. In addition to selling Riyadh as much as $60 billion of military equipment, Washington is also moving ahead with plans to supply Iraq with nearly $11 billion of arms and training. Iran's western flank, already bristling with weaponry, is being steadily bolstered.

Few in Washington, including Israel's supporters, seriously object to arming Saudi Arabia, but the Iraq deal has its critics. There are doubts about the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's commitment to democracy, and fears that Washington may in fact be arming, rather than creating a bulwark against, Iran.

"We declare solemnly and confidently that the foolish politicians around the world, including the puppet group in South Korea, should not expect any change from us," it said. Kim Jong-il died on 17 December of a heart attack, state media said. He had ruled North Korea since the death of his father Kim Il-sung in 1994. Under him funds were channelled to the military and North Korea conducted two nuclear tests. His son, Kim Jong-un, has been named "supreme leader of the party, state and army".

North Korea's neighbours are watching to see whether the leadership change will affect Pyongyang's ties with the international community. The impoverished communist state remains technically at war with South Korea and is isolated on the international stage because of its dire human rights record and pursuit of nuclear weapons. Six-nation talks aimed at ending Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions - involving the two Koreas, China, the US, Russia and Japan - have been stalled for months.

The statement from the NDC - which is thought to be the country's top decision-making body - said North Korea would "never deal" with South Korean leader Lee Myung-bak. Mr Lee has angered Pyongyang by linking the provision of aid to progress on denuclearisation. The NDC also criticised Seoul's "unforgivable" decision to allow only two non-official delegations to cross the border to pay their respects to Mr Kim.

Almost 230,480 new cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed this year in the United States, and about 40,000 women will die of the disease, roughly one out of every 3,875 women. The new Institute of Medicine report probably doesn't sit well with the industry, hospitals and clinics that make so many millions of dollars selling and over-using CT machines. The authors suggest that women avoid "unnecessary" or "inappropriate" medical radiation, a thinly veiled criticism of the industry that will give you a CT scan for a tooth ache if you don't object to it.

In 1980, there were 3 million CT scans performed in this country. The number rose to 62 million in 2006, to about 70 million by 2007, and, according to NBC, to 72 million this year. It's a growth industry that doesn't care if it promotes tumor growth. The IOM committee made several suggestions for preventive actions that women can take, and the very first one is to "avoid inappropriate medical radiation exposure." In the "Question & Answer" section of the IOM analysis online, the authors recommend "Avoiding medical radiation and hormone therapy, unless they are medically necessary, is a good idea."

CT Scans may cause 29,000 cancers and 15,000 cancer deaths every year. NBC News said in 2009 that each whole-body CT scan can deliver as much radiation in 10 minutes as 440 chest X-rays. This suggestion has a vexing corollary since so-called mammography is just a lower dose of X-radiation given directly to breast tissue. Yet the new IOM study's authors say in a footnote, "While recognizing the risks of ionizing radiation exposure, particularly for certain higher-dose methods (such as CT scans), it is not the committee's intent to dissuade women from routine mammography screening."

Yet the advisability of mammography has been under attack ever since the British medical journal The Lancet in October 2006 reported on a study by Dr Peter Gotzsche that found they produced no health benefits. The late Dr John Gofman argued for his entire career that X-rays caused more breast cancer then they detect, a position defended at length by Dr Samuel Epstein in his book "The Politics of Cancer."

Many members of Congress also use their positions of power and the information they learn during the course of their duties to become fabulously wealthy. At a time when incomes nationally are actually declining, our Congress critters are becoming stinking rich at a staggering pace. Yes, politics in America has always been a game that is funded and played by wealthy individuals, but things have gotten so extreme that it is hard to argue that average Americans have any control over Congress at all at this point. Instead of a government "of the people, by the people and for the people", we now have a government "of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy". If you doubt this, just keep on reading.

So how wealthy have members of Congress become? Many of you won't believe the statistics posted below. The truth is that Congress has become all about money. It takes huge piles of money to get elected to Congress, it takes huge piles of money to stay in Congress, and most members of Congress seem to be able to accumulate gigantic piles of money while "serving" their country....

-Today, there are 250 members of Congress that are millionaires.

-According to the Wall Street Journal, the median net worth of members of Congress is now $913,000.

-The collective net worth of all of the members of Congress increased by 25 percent between 2008 and 2010. Meanwhile, the standard of living in the United States has fallen farther over the past three years than at any other time that has ever been recorded in US history.

-After adjusting for inflation, between 1984 and 2009 the median net worth of members of Congress rose from $280,000 to $725,000 while the median net worth of all Americans actually declined slightly over that same time period.

Our system is fundamentally broken. It is time to quit pretending. But of course the mainstream media will never admit this, because mainstream media outlets are owned by many of the same corporations and wealthy individuals that fund political campaigns. For the establishment, the current system is working just fine. So until the American people wake up and start demanding fundamental reforms, our Congress critters are going to continue to live the high life and we are going to keep on getting the same pathetic results out of Washington.

(Read full article at - http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/you-wont-believe-these-statistics-which-show-how-corrupt-lazy-and-stinking-rich-our-congress-critters-have-become)

In a nation as proud as Greece, where family always comes first, the plight of the Gasparinatoses quickly hit a nerve. Soon shocked reporters were knocking at their door. But testimony from charities, doctors and unions would attest that they are not alone. As Greece prepares to endure a fifth consecutive year of recession, as the crisis extends its reach, as cuts take their toll, as poverty deepens and unemployment climbs, evidence is mounting that society is tearing at the seams.

Like the middle class, society's great connector, families are beginning to unravel under the weight of a crisis that, with no end in sight, is as much human as it is financial.Tell-tale signs abound that in its quest to beat off bankruptcy, Greece is being hollowed out, a little more, with each passing day. "People are going hungry, families are breaking up, instances are mounting of mothers and fathers no longer being able to bring up their own kids," said Ilias Ilioupolis, general secretary of the civil servants' union ADEDY. "Until now there has been a conspiracy of silence around the tragic effects of the austerity measures the IMF and EU are asking us to take."

From cases of newborn babies wrapped in swaddling and dumped on the doorsteps of clinics, to children being offloaded on charities and put in foster care, the nation's struggle to pay off its debts is assuming dramatic proportions, even if officials insist that the belt-tightening and structural reforms will eventually change the EU's most uncompetitive economy for the better.

Propelled by poverty, 500 families had recently asked to place children in homes run by the charity SOS Children's Villages, according to the Greek daily Kathimerini. One toddler was left at the nursery she attended with a note that read: "I will not return to get Anna. I don't have any money, I can't bring her up. Sorry. Her mother."

(Last week Dimitris Gasparinatos got good news. After learning of his family's circumstances, the wife of a wealthy Athenian businessman donated money for him to move to a new home with his wife and 10 children. "This good woman has changed our lives. She has allowed us to hope again," he said.)

The flare is part of a larger increase in activity in the Sun, which runs in 11-year cycles. It is expected to peak around 2013. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center wrote: 'Category G1 (Minor) geomagnetic storms are expected 28 and 29 December due to multiple coronal mass ejection arrivals. R1 (Minor) radio blackouts are expected until 31 December.' Devices that depend on radio waves include GPS systems, radios and mobile phones.

A coronal mass ejection contains billions of tons of gases bursting with X-rays and ultraviolet radiation that are flung into space at around 5 million mph. They are mind-bogglingly hot - around 100,000,000 degrees Celsius. The Earth is occasionally hosed by these ejections, leading to amazing shimmering light shows. They are caused by the ionised solar particles becoming imprisoned by Earth's magnetic field, exciting the gases in the atmosphere and emitting bursts of energy in the form of light.

However, these particles can also cause magnetic storms, which in extreme cases have been known to disrupt satellites and electricity grids. In 1989, a CME was held responsible for leaving six million people in Quebec, Canada, without power. Last month one of the largest storms our star can produce was detected. Known as an X1.9 flare, it was one of the biggest seen in years. The flare was so powerful that it disrupted communications systems on earth a short time later. Another gigantic flare occurred in August - shown in the video below - but because it took place on the side of the Sun not facing Earth, there was no disruption to communications or power.

And while the number of married families in the UK is among the lowest in Europe, stable cohabiting relationships are also less common here than in other countries. The figures, produced by the EU's statistical arm, come at a time of increased efforts to downplay the importance of marriage by politicians and campaigners who oppose tax breaks for married couples.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has declared that 'strong relationships between parents are important' but the state should not use the tax system to favour a particular family set-up. The figures from Luxembourg-based Eurostat suggest that strong relationships outside marriage are uncommon in Britain but that the decline of marriage has meant life with a single parent for millions of youngsters.

These children are more likely than others to suffer poor health, do badly at school, and go on to less successful adult lives. According to the breakdown, 20.8 per cent of children in the UK were living in single parent families in 2008. In just three countries were children more likely to live with one parent: Estonia and Latvia in Eastern Europe, and Ireland, where the number was 23.2 per cent. It is believed the surge in Ireland is a result of generous benefits to single parent families and high immigration. The proportion of children in single-parent families in the UK is roughly 50 per cent higher than in France and 35 per cent higher than in Germany.

According to the analysis, just 12.8 per cent of children in Britain are with cohabiting parents, compared with 27.3 in Sweden and 21 per cent in France. Critics of cohabitation maintain that most such relationships are short-lived and many end by leaving behind single-parent families. Those who want the Government to support married couples said yesterday that the figures proved the impact of tax breaks and the benefit system.

Most of those affected are elderly, meaning their chances of recovering from the surgery or serious illness they were being treated for in the first place are drastically reduced. The average age of patients battling hospital bugs is 76. The figures, from the NHS Information Centre, cover all hospital infections including superbugs MRSA and C.difficile and other dangerous illnesses such as norovirus and E.coli.

Experts say that while efforts to eradicate the superbugs have had some success, the other avoidable bugs are on the rise. Only today the Health Protection Agency announced there have been 46 outbreaks of suspected norovirus in hospitals over the past two weeks, with more than half leading to ward closures or restrictions. Since the beginning of October, there have been 244 confirmed outbreaks.

Infection experts warned that some of the diseases are becoming 'hyper-resistant' to antibiotics. Critics say that while trusts are getting to grips with familiar superbugs, other infections are slipping under the radar because figures on their prevalence do not need to be submitted to the Department of Health for scrutiny. The sharp rise in the numbers suffering from hospital infections is mirrored by a similar spike in the compensation the NHS is paying to such patients which reached a record 6 million pounds last year.

Hospital-acquired infections lead to extended stays in hospital of around one month. Last year patients battling these conditions took up almost 800,000 NHS bed nights and equated to 2,200 beds on a daily basis. Joyce Robins, co-director of Patient Concern said: 'This is a terrifying prospect for vulnerable elderly people who think they are going into hospital to get better.' Earlier this month it emerged that 38 trusts had been affected by outbreaks of norovirus, with many having to close wards. Almost 800 patients were affected.

The US Navy has responded by saying the threat is unacceptable. "Anyone who threatens to disrupt the freedom of navigation in an international strait is clearly outside the community of nations; any disruption will not be tolerated," said Amy Derrick Frost, spokesperson for the US Navy 5th Fleet in Bahrain.

Earlier this week Iran announced it will block the Strait of Hormuz, which sees the transport of over one sixth of the world's oil trade, if the West sanctions the country's oil exports. Political analyst Chris Bambery thinks that as American control in the Middle East is weakening and Iranian is growing, "We are witnessing quite a dangerous escalation. We now see that American control of the Middle East is weakest in decades... it is not in control of Iraq, Iran has considerable influence in Iraq, is extending its influence in Afghanistan."

Commenting on the possible Iranian blockade of the strait, Bambery said that if the US tries to force open the passage, "that would mean war with Iran, and that would be a huge escalation and would threaten world peace." He believes that for the US it is not simply a military conflict, but something that could spill into a regional conflict in which the US has a much weaker hand than it had a decade ago.

According to Bambery, Iran is in much stronger position now and, as he sees it, "Iranians are really challenging Americans sensing the American weakness." He also said that the Western nations are making a big mistake because the "Iranian economy is doing well and Iran is in the position to exert more influence in the regional basis as we saw this week with these new agreements in Afghanistan. It is the West who has racked up that situation," he concluded.

'The situation in the United States is a far cry from the ideals that Washington proclaims,' says the newly-released report. Moscow has previously reacted angrily to the accusations of human rights breaches that the US State Department has leveled at Russia in its annual reports.

The State Department has expressed concern about the violent attacks on rights activists and journalists in Russia, most of which go unpunished and has also criticised abuses in Russia's Caucasus, including extrajudicial killings, kidnappings and torture. And last week thousands of protesters took to the streets of Moscow to demonstrate against elections believed to have been rigged in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's favour.

The Putin regime has come under fire recently for a series of high-profile abuse cases. In October, the widow of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko won the right for a public inquest into the death of her husband, suspected of having been fatally poisoned after defecting to the UK. Before his death, Litvinenko had accused Russia's secret services of staging terrorist acts. He also accused Putin of ordering the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

The 90-page Russian report slams EU nations, Canada and Georgia, but reserves its longest section of 20 pages for what it says are violations by the US. The report does not cover Asia, Africa or the Middle East, other than a five-page section criticising the Nato operation in Libya. Moscow laments the ongoing operation of the 'notorious' prison in Guantanamo Bay, where terrorism suspects have been held since the September 11, 2001 attacks, and criticises President Barack Obama for 'legalising indefinite and extrajudicial custody and the return of court martials'.

The report accuses the US of prying into citizens' personal lives and violating the rights of Muslim Americans in the fight against terrorism. It also points to errors made by American courts.

It would have been more in keeping with Nicholas' mission to mention hundreds of Christians losing their lives to Islamic terrorism and oppressed by Palestinian Muslim dictatorship. Nichols' sermon has an historical value, because now the entire Christian hierarchy in the UK, Catholic and Protestant as well, is part of the global battle against Israel. There is a virulent animosity towards the Jewish state in the established churches in Britain, which promulgate inflammatory libels against it. Recently Barry Morgan, the Archbishop of Wales, compared Israel to apartheid in South Africa. "The situation resembles the apartheid system in South Africa because Gaza is next to one of the most sophisticated and modern countries in the world - Israel", said Morgan.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, joined the Church of England's General Synod, which voted to disinvest Church funds from "companies that make profits from Israel's occupation". Archbishop Morgan said in a lecture on the relationship between religion and violence: "Messianic Zionism began a policy of cleansing the Promised Land of all Arabs and non-Jews rather than co-existing with them". But there has been no such "cleansing" at all in the disputed territories. The only attempt at "cleansing" has been the Palestinian attempt to kill as many Jews as possible. According to Canon Andrew White, replacement theology is dominant and present in almost every church, fueling the venom against Israel.

The revised version of "Whose Promised Land?", a highly influential book by the Anglican thinker Colin Chapman, recycles the worst Christian anti-Jewish theology. "When seen in the context of the whole Bible, however, both Old and New Testaments, the promise of the land to Abraham and his descendants does not give anyone a divine right to possess or to live in the land for all time because the coming of the kingdom of God through Jesus the messiah has transformed and reinterpreted all the promises and prophecies in the Old Testament", writes Chapman camouflaging anti-Jewish replacement theology, which helped fuel burnings at stake and pogroms during the Middle Ages, as a dispassionate analysis of the conflict of Israel and the Palestinians.

According to Bishop John Gladwin, a separate Palestinian state would be merely a "first step". "Ultimately, one shared land is the vision one would want to pursue". At the beginning of the XIX [nineteenth] century, the UK Christian clergy was a driving force behind the Zionist enterprise, inspired by a brave interpretation of the Bible. A century later, British Christianity is one of the major producers of blood libels against the Jews.

The $5.25-billion project will make the canal wider and deeper, allowing huge freighters from Asia to bypass West Coast ports and head straight to terminals on the Gulf Coast and East Coast. The neighboring ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which together handle about 40% of the nation's imported Asian goods, could lose as much as a quarter of their cargo business by some estimates after the Panama expansion is completed in 2014.

The ports, neighboring towns and railroads have launched improvement projects aimed at keeping them competitive. One proposed project, for instance, would speed the loading of cargo onto trains; others eliminate bottlenecks or increase capacity so that the ports remain alluring to importers. But a coalition of business, labor and government contends that these efforts are jeopardized by opposition from some residents, environmental groups and others. Two members of the Long Beach City Council, for example, sought to block the construction of a new railroad freight complex near the ports, saying it would increase pollution and force small businesses to relocate.

The biggest ships that can squeeze through the Panama Canal now carry 4,400 to 5,000 containers. But modern cargo vessels routinely hold three times as many of the big metal boxes. So importers often use West Coast ports to land their products from Asia. Then the containers crammed with apparel, toys and other goods move from ships to trucks or trains and on to warehouses and retailer shelves throughout the US. A wider Panama Canal would accommodate some of the biggest ships afloat - 12,600-container vessels - which will present a vastly improved "all water" cargo movement option for Asian goods bound for the southern and eastern US.

Police armed with batons and shields stormed the church to restore order, after Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests and monks came to blows during preparations for Orthodox Christmas celebrations.

View video - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16346002

The president of Greece's SEV business federation, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, recently invited journalists to his imposing neoclassical headquarters in Athens. He straightened his tie, leaned forward and with a grim expression spoke into half a dozen microphones arrayed in front of him. "Now the issue is simply whether we remain in Europe or not. The governing parties have an obligation to work together honestly to finally banish the nightmare of a return to the drachma. If this government doesn't get it right, Greece will go hungry."

His dramatic appeal was ignored, once again. The Socialist PASOK party, the conservative-liberal New Democracy party and the far-right LAOS party formed a transitional government six weeks ago under non-partisan former central banker Lucas Papademos. They vowed to avert a looming state bankruptcy. But they remain as divided as ever.

Instead of getting down to business, they are absorbed in policy wrangling that seems absurdly trivial given the scale of the tasks they face. At a cabinet meeting last Thursday, Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos and Transport Minister Makis Voridis of LAOS fell out over a draft law to accelerate amicable divorces. Marriage, Voridis argued, was "a central component of our value system" - therefore LAOS could not agree to the law. Papademos remained silent. This isn't the first time the LAOS minister has blocked a decision. Recently he resisted the complete liberalization of the issue of taxi licenses, and publicly threatened to resign.

To its credit, the Papademos government mastered two important challenges early on: it secured the payout of the sixth international loan tranche of more than 8 billion euros ($10.45 billion) from the 110 billion euros European Union and International Monetary Fund bailout package agreed in May 2010. And the parliament has passed the state budget for 2012.

But since then, Athens has failed to deliver on the binding reforms and spending cuts it had pledged in return for the cash. The top priority is the exchange of Greek government debt agreed at the EU summit on October 27. Under the deal, private creditors will voluntarily write down 50 percent of their loans. But under the terms of the summit agreement, the Greek government must reach an agreement with creditors before the end of 2011 so that the bonds can be swapped for new securities at the start of 2012. It is clear that Greece won't make that deadline. "The negotiations have run into major difficulties, we are working day and night to find a solution," Venizelos admitted.

The sticking points appear to be the levels of interest rates that Greece will have to pay for new bonds and the size of the voluntary debt cut. Even if an agreement is reached, there is doubt about whether all private creditors will stick to it. Spanish hedge fund Vega, for example, has already pulled out of the talks and threatened legal action if the losses amount to more than 50 percent. If the debt swap fails, the entire 2012 budget will be null and void because it depends on drastically reduced interest payments on Greece's government debt.

"The concept that G-d created a human being who is unable to find happiness in a loving relationship unless he violates a biblical prohibition is neither plausible nor acceptable," says the document, titled "Declaration on the Torah Approach to Homosexuality." It states that same-sex attractions can be modified and "healed," and condemns the "propaganda blitz" that has been launched "to persuade the public about the legitimacy of homosexuality."

"The media is rife with negative labels implying that one is 'hateful' or 'homophobic' if they do not accept the homosexual lifestyle as legitimate. This political coercion has silenced many into acquiescence. Unfortunately this attitude has seeped into the Torah community and many have become confused or have accepted the media's portrayal of this issue," the statement says. In fact, Obama, shortly after he took office in 2009, signed into law a "hate crimes" proposal that enhances penalties for crimes attributed to "hate" of homosexuality, providing special protections for "gays" that other victims of crime are not given.

"The Torah makes a clear statement that homosexuality is not an acceptable lifestyle or a genuine identity by severely prohibiting its conduct. Furthermore, the Torah, ever prescient about negative secular influences, warns us in Vayikra (Leviticus) 20:23 'Do not follow the traditions of the nations that I expel from before you...' Particularly the Torah writes this in regards to homosexuality and other forbidden sexual liaisons," the statement says.

The document has been signed by a coalition of more than 100 rabbis, community organizers, leaders and mental-health professionals. Among the signers who have chosen to go public with their endorsement of the position are psychologist and author Dr Miriam Adaham of Jerusalem; Rabbi Simcha Feuerman, president of the International Network of Orthodox Mental Health Professions; Los Angeles psychiatrist and author Dr Miriam Grossman; Dr Joseph Gelbfish of Brooklyn, New York; Rabbi Yaakov Salomon, psychotherapist and author; Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, a vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America and dozens more.

But while other ministries are critical of Obama's pro-homosexual drive - he's put more homosexuals in positions of power than any other president, opened the US military to open homosexuality and signed into law a "hate crimes" plan that provides special protections for homosexuals - Boynes goes one step further. "The Bible says that the enemy comes to steal, kill and destroy (John 10:10)," she said. "It is his main objective to bring confusion and cause division within the church and he does this by altering God's truth in such a way that many Christians are deceived if they are not rooted and grounded in God's word."

WND recently reported on the policy of the Obama administration to be the new global sex cop and a recently signed executive order that some say is sure to promote "quotas" of LGBT hires for federal government jobs. WND also reported on the push by various administration officials to normalize LGBT behavior, including the designation of "gender identity" as a protected status for federal jobs. WND columnist Matt Barber wrote that liberals are "desperate" in their efforts "to dredge up some natural, biological rationalization - of which science has found none - to validate demonstrably unnatural behavior."