USA - Treasury increased the net debt of the United States $24,327,048,384.38 on the day after Thanksgiving, which equals approximately $211.69 for each of the nation’s 114,916,000 households. Friday was also the first time in the history of the United States that the debt has topped $16.3 trillion. When President Barack Obama first took office on January 20, 2009, the national debt stood at $10,626,877,048,913.08. Since then, it has increased by $5,680,611,894,651.15. That means that since Obama has been president, the national debt has increased by about $49,432.73 per household.

USA - Under a deal reached last year between President Obama and the Republican-controlled Congress, existing stimulus measures - mostly tax cuts - will expire on 1 January 2013. Cuts to defence, education and other government spending will then automatically come into force - the "fiscal cliff" - unless Congress acts. The economy does not have the momentum to absorb the shock from going over the fiscal cliff without going into recession.

USA - The White House has increased pressure on Republicans to allow a rise in tax rates on the wealthy in a deal to avoid the forthcoming "fiscal cliff". Limiting tax loopholes and deductions, as some Republicans have suggested, would not yield a "balanced approach", spokesman Jay Carney said on Monday. Tax cuts passed under George Bush are set to expire on 1 January. Without action, tax rises and spending cuts on 1 January could send the fragile US economy back into recession.

USA - "If you took every single penny that Warren Buffett has, it'd pay for 4-1/2 days of the US government. This tax-the-rich won't work. The problem here is the government is way bigger than even the capacity of the rich to sustain it. The Buffett Rule would raise $3.2 billion a year, and take 514 years just to pay off Obama's 2011 budget deficit. If you think only the wealthy are going to be hit by what's coming, think again. The fiscal cliff is going to drag everyone else down with it. It's just the warm-up for the total societal collapse of the United States" - Mark Steyn [best selling author, political commentator and cultural critic].

USA - Putting a hole in someone’s head could soon be as easy as pressing Ctrl-P. A Texas-based group of Second Amendment advocates say they are ready with the world’s first firearm made entirely from a 3-D printer. Defense Distributed spokesman Cody Wilson tells the UK’s Guardian that his company has the “logistics, time, resources and money” to start freely distributing blueprints that will let any hobbyist with a 3-D home printer make their own gun, and now it’s just up to Uncle Sam to sign off on a federal firearms license. Wilson doesn’t think there will be any problem, though, and says his company plans to be approved and begin building prototypes in the coming weeks.

RUSSIA - The Communists have won in America with [President] Obama but failed miserably in Russia with Zyuganov who only received 17% of the vote. Vladimir Putin was re-elected as President keeping the NWO order out of Russia while America continues to repeat the Soviet mistake.

CINCINNATI, OHIO, USA - One of Cincinnati’s largest employers fired approximately 150 employees Wednesday for failing to get a required flu shot. TriHealth offered all of its 10,800 employees free flu shots. Employees had a month to get the flu shot. The deadline was November 16. Employees who did not get the shot were terminated Wednesday, a company spokesperson said. Employees who were terminated can appeal to be reinstated after receiving the shot.

USA - Palm-scanning technology is popping up nationwide as a bona fide biometric tracker of identities, and it appears poised to make the jump from schools and hospitals to other sectors of the economy including ATM usage and retail. It also has applications as a secure identifier for cloud computing. Palm scanners are installed in more than 50 school systems and more than 160 hospital systems in 15 states and the District of Columbia, Yanak says. HT Systems president David Wiener won't reveal revenue but says that since 2007, they've got more than 160 hospitals for clients and have scanned more than 5 million patients.

SAN ANTONIO, USA - A San Antonio school district’s website was hacked over the weekend to protest its policy requiring students to wear microchip-embedded cards tracking their every move on campus. A teenager purportedly working with the hacker group Anonymous said in an online statement that he took the site down because the Northside school district “is stripping away the privacy of students in your school.” Starting this fall, all students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School are required to carry identification cards embedded with a microchip. They are tracked by the dozens of electronic readers installed in the schools’ ceiling panels.

USA - Black Friday retail sales online this year topped $1 billion for the first time ever as more consumers used the Internet do their early holiday shopping, comScore Inc said on Sunday. Online sales jumped 26 percent on Black Friday to $1.04 billion from sales of $816 million on the corresponding day last year, according to comScore data.

UK - Around 300 flood alerts have been issued in England and Wales and two are in place in Scotland. Over the weekend, two people died and more than 800 homes were damaged as parts of Britain were hit by the worst flooding in half a century. Richard Benyon, the Environment Minister said: “We are going to get more of these events – this time last year we were dealing with the worst drought in living memory and we have got to be able to deal with these extremes of weather in the future.”

USA - Two news anchors in Bangor, Maine quit their jobs on the air this week, after becoming frustrated with management over the course of many years. The reporters also complained of being forced to put forward “unbalanced” political information.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA - Fulfilling orders, the convoy of warships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet arrived in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea for a possible evacuation of Russian citizens from the Gaza Strip in case of escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli armed conflict, a source in the High Command of the Russian Navy told Itar-Tass on Friday.

UK - Britain has called on the European Union to intervene after hard-line nationalists in Argentina ransacked a shipping office that handles cruises to the Falkland Islands, pelting it with stones and paintballs. Foreign Office mandarins accused the Argentinian government of seeking to “strangle” the Falklands’ economy by failing to prevent last Monday’s raid in Buenos Aires, which saw terrified staff flee for their safety. The raiders told the shipping agents that they would prevent cruise ships from berthing at Buenos Aires, Ushuaia and Puerto Madryn unless the Falklands leg was cancelled. No police were on hand to intervene and no subsequent arrests have followed.

VATICAN - Pope Benedict XVI has appointed six priests from non-European countries to be cardinals, at a service in the Vatican's St Peter's Basilica.