By Michael R. Gordon, Mark Landler and Anne Barnard, New York Times, Dec. 11/12, 2013

[....] The administration acted after warehouses of American-supplied equipment were seized Friday by the Islamic Front, a coalition of Islamist fighters who have broken with the moderate, American-backed opposition, but who also battle Al Qaeda.

Administration officials said that the suspension, confirmed on Wednesday, was temporary and that the nonlethal aid, which is supplied by the State Department, could flow again.

But with rebels feuding with one another instead of concentrating on fighting Mr. Assad, and with the United States still groping for a reliable partner in Syria, the odds of any peace conference breaking the cycle of bloodshed appeared to have dimmed. For the White House, which has pinned its hopes on a political solution, the fracturing of the opposition raises a number of thorny questions [....]

United Nations News Centre, Dec. 11, 2013

Nearly 230 million children under the age of five have not had their births officially recorded, excluding them from education, health care and social security, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) today reported.

That is approximately one in three of all children under five who are unregistered or lack proof of registration, the agency said in a report released to coincide with its 67th birthday.

“Birth registration is more than just a right. It’s how societies first recognize and acknowledge a child’s identity and existence,” said Geeta Rao Gupta, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director. She added that registration is also key “to guaranteeing that children are not forgotten, denied their rights or hidden from the progress of their nations.”

Only around 60 per cent of births last year were recorded, with the lowest levels of registration in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to ‘Every Child’s Birth Right: Inequities and trends in birth registration.’ Even when children are recorded, one in seven do not have a physical birth certificate as proof of registration [....]

By By David M. Herszenhorn and Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times, Dec. 11, 2013

KIEV, Ukraine — The Ukrainian authorities’ surprise decision to storm the central square occupied by antigovernment protesters here early Wednesday sharply escalated tensions with Western leaders, while an equally abrupt pullout by the police after a nine-hour siege created a growing sense of unpredictability about President Viktor F. Yanukovich’s handling of the crisis.

The strange enforcement action, which antagonized and energized demonstrators but did not clear them from the square, added to the problems of Ukraine’s economy. The country was already facing a severe cash shortage but in recent days has seen its borrowing costs rise to record highs, with the central bank forced to intervene to support the currency.

Mobilizing after midnight, thousands of riot police officers and Interior Ministry troops broke through barricades around Independence Square, pushed demonstrators back and formed tight cordons around them. They then called in bulldozers and other heavy equipment to raze some of the protesters’ tents and barricades. The security forces clashed with protesters and briefly tried to regain control of City Hall. Then at 10:30 a.m., they abruptly withdrew, raising new questions about Mr. Yanukovich’s handling of the crisis, which has seemed increasingly erratic [....]

Also see:

Ukraine protests: outrage as police attack Kiev barricades
Unexpected scenes only a few hours after President Viktor Yanukovych pledged restraint to EU foreign policy chief
By Shaun Walker in Kiev, theguardian.com, 11 Dec. 2013

[....] A priest brandishing a cross walked towards the lines of police but was pushed back as protest leaders announced from the main stage that it was a peaceful protest and called for a stop to the crackdown. As the mobilisation continued a religious service was held on the stage with hundreds of protesters chanting: "Tomorrow there will be a million of us." [.....]

Over the past six months, The New York Times reviewed thousands of pages of documents related to shale gas, including hundreds of industry e-mails, internal agency documents and reports by analysts. A selection of these documents is included here; names and identifying information have been redacted to protect the confidentiality of sources, many of whom were not authorized by their employers to communicate with The Times. ...

Below are two e-mails from a Texas-based oil and gas company [employee] who previously was a senior official at Enron. He says that the economics of the Haynesville shale in Louisiana and Texas do not make sense. The first e-mail is from the official and was sent Nov. 7, 2009. The second e-mail is from Aug. 18, 2009. He says that, based on parallels he sees between Enron and shale gas companies, he will not be investing in shale gas.

Huffpo might have just taken a piece from The Onion but...

There might be a budget; a formal budget taking us through next year and beyond?

This looks like a big deal to me!

We must take heed and see how this comes out.

Everybody is going to bitch; but it looks pretty good for me.

Of course I have not read the three thousand page bill yet...but still!

It wasn't just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.

 

And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win. ...

 

Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar. ...

 

And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.

By Choe Sang-Hun, New York Times, Dec. 9, 2013

[.....] Mr. Jang’s purge was highly unusual for North Korea not only because its victim was a man long considered a core member of Mr. Kim’s inner circle but also because of the way the regime abandoned its customary secrecy about internal politics and publicized the purge — through front-page coverage in the North’s state-run newspapers and through the televised spectacle of party secretaries, some tearfully, attacking a man who was until recently the North’s second most powerful figure.

In an unusual and extended Sunday meeting of the Political Bureau of the Party Central Committee presided over by his nephew, Mr. Jang was condemned for womanizing, drug abuse, “wining and dining at back parlors of deluxe restaurants,” gambling in foreign casinos at the party’s expense, and above all, nurturing his “politically motivated ambition” by building up a “faction” to challenge against Mr. Kim as the “unitary center” of the ruling party, state media reported. [.....]

“The agency, from top to bottom, leadership to rank and file, feels that it is had no support from the White House even though it’s been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions,” said Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general from 2002 to 2006. “They feel they’ve been hung out to dry, and they’re right.” ...

 

A second former official said NSA workers are polishing up their résumés and asking that they be cleared — removing any material linked to classified programs — so they can be sent out to potential employers. He noted that one employee who processes the résumés said, “I’ve never seen so many résumés that people want to have cleared in my life.”

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari warns of a "Islamic emirate" in Syria, former US diplomat Ryan Crocker suggests a channel to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Israeli President Shimon Peres says he would be willing to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

A month ago Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, wrote about CIA analysts who threatened to resign over the Obama administration allegations about the use of chemical weapons in Syria by the Syrian government:

With all evidence considered, the intelligence community found itself with numerous skeptics in the ranks, leading to sharp exchanges with the Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. A number of analysts threatened to resign as a group if their strong dissent was not noted in any report released to the public, forcing both Brennan and Clapper to back down.

Ok, ok, who among us has not driven past a front-loader waiting empty overnight and thought, "I wonder if they left the keys in that?"  The same impulse to collect heavy equipment perhaps motivated the thieves who got an extra bonus when they van-jacked what looked like a nicely tricked out vehicle with a heavy lift platform....Pendajos!