The same day as the tragic Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting, a Chinese man stabbed 22 children in the central Chinese province of Henan. The attack yielded almost no news coverage in the United States.

The California Federation of Teachers has pulled a controversial class warfare “educational” video for children from YouTube after encountering stiff criticism from Fox News and the conservative blogosphere.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency is gearing up for an unprecedented growth in the number of its field agents, according to a December 2 story in the Washington Post. The growth follows a pattern of similar surges for other major U.S. intelligence agencies, the NSA and the CIA, since 2001.

President Obama has hardened his views on “fiscal cliff” negotiations with congressional Republicans, with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner telling a closed-door session of congressional leaders that Obama is now demanding $50 billion in more “stimulus” spending, $1.6 trillion in higher taxes over 10 years, and presidential control over the national debt limit. Any other deal, Geithner counseled, would be vetoed and make inevitable the fiscal cliff's the automatic tax increases and spending cuts on January 1.

The Thanksgiving Day decrees by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi sent Egypt back into street protests and turmoil, prompting dissident Mohamed ElBaradei to charge Morsi had become a “new pharaoh.” But is Egypt's elected President seizing dictatorial powers, or is he instead protecting elected government from the onslaught of a runaway judiciary appointed by the former dictator Hosni Mubarak?

All of official Washington and their media lapdogs are shaking in fear of the so-called “fiscal cliff” that is looming January 1, counseling that the economy needs to continue its wild trillion-dollar deficit spending habits into the indefinite future.

President Obama's Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has embraced the “Buzz Lightyear” debt strategy to overcome the fiscal crisis known as the “fiscal cliff”: to infinity and beyond. Geithner told host Al Hunt on Bloomberg TV's Political Capital on November 16 that he favors elimination of the statutory debt limit.

The party numbers are pretty much the same, but the congressional Democrats are far more liberal, and the Republicans are much closer to traditional constitutionalism.

U.S. Navy Veteran Donald Vance and fellow FBI informant Nathan Ertel are not entitled to sue their U.S. government torturers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh District ruled November 9. Both Vance and Ertel are native-born U.S. citizens.

As private contractors in Iraq in 2006, Vance and Ertel witnessed U.S. soldiers trading bullets for alcohol, and volunteered to become FBI undercover informants to stop the leak of weapons to the Taliban. But while in Iraq, the two men found that their cover had been blown, and were “rescued” by the U.S. military. But the U.S. military then arrested them, and threw them in Camp Cropper in Iraq, where they were tortured.

Libertarian-leaning Republican Congressman Ron Paul lost his bid for the Republican presidential nomination earlier this year, but a number of his acolytes ran for Congress as Republicans and won November 6. Is Congress the real location of the growing “Ron Paul revolution”?