Newt Gingrich today wiped away tears and was handed a tissue by an audience member in Des Moines when he became emotional onstage while talking about his mother.

"I get teary eyed every time we sing Christmas carols," Gingrich said before his speech was overcome with emotion at an event hosted at Java Joe's Coffee in Des Moines by CafeMom.com, a secular, bipartisan organization.

The crowd - roughly 100 people in a jam packed room - expressed a compassionate sigh of emotion.

He explained that his mother loved singing in the choir and when he was very young she made him sing in the choir.

He then told the crowd that he remembers his mother as happy, enjoying life and her friends but noted that late in her life she was in a long-term care facility and battled with a bipolar disorder.

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes" (attributed to Mark Twain)

Meet another of Israel's undesirables, Yuli Edelstein.

He is the regime's Propaganda Minister (or to be more precise, Minister for Disinformation and Diaspora) and he runs the biggest lie machine in the world.

His task is to make the Israel "brand" smell sweeter. The reason it stinks, of course, is the regime's putrid morals and murderous conduct, which the lie machine works overtime to try to justify and excuse. It will always fail. You cannot build a decent brand image on lies, obnoxious behaviour and a massive attitude problem.

The racist squatter minister

Edelstein hit the headlines over Christmas when he told everybody that the Arabs are "a deplorable nation". He was speaking at a public diplomacy event (incredible as it may seem!) at Yor Yehuda, which I'm told means "light of Juda".

He said that "as long as the Arab nation continues to be a deplorable nation, which continues investing in infrastructure for terrorism, education to hate and welfare for the families of shaheeds [martyrs], there will be no peace."

The reporter asked Edelstein's office if the minister was aware that there are some 80 [sic - in fact, the population of the Arab world is about 280 million, excluding the diaspora] ] million Arabs in the world, from Sudan to Syria. A spokesman replied: "Yes, there are - and the minister meant them all."

It comes as no surprise that the fake food safety bill passed here in the US in what was clearly a staged event that required the complicity of the other 99 Senators who voluntarily vacated the US Senate chamber to allow "Dirty Harry" to cast the only vote as "unanimous" is being mirrored, replicated and implemented in many other countries. Canada passed its C-36 bill shortly after "Dirty Harry" completed his task here in the US, and now it appears New Zealand food rights are on the chopping block too.

What are the chances that New Zealand Retailers Association would come up with what appears to be a line of propaganda nearly identical to the crap foisted on the American public as their rights to produce and consume foods of their choice were attacked relentlessly by Big AG and the bio-pirates along with other corporate interests who stand to profit immensely at the expense of the public? These are the same interested party's and stakeholders who rammed C-36 through Canada's parliament.

And here we see the same limp arguments coming out of New Zealand, promoted by yet another retailers association intent on convincing New Zealanders that their food supply and production, needs "modernization". Modernization with regards to food can be easily defined as centralization of food production and supply to provide market monopolies to multi-national corporations. The greatest threat to food supply chains around the world is industrialized food which provides neither safe food, nor nutritious food. Progress on the food bill:

• Fake profiles used by Department of Homeland Security, says privacy group
• List of keywords flags 'danger' signal
• DHS may attempt to identify users from their accounts
• Keywords include 'virus', 'drill' and 'illegal immigrant'

The Department of Homeland Security makes fake Twitter and Facebook profiles for the specific purpose of scanning the networks for 'sensitive' words - and tracking people who use them.

Simply using a word or phrase from the DHS's 'watch' list could mean that spies from the government read your posts, investigate your account, and attempt to identify you from it, according to an online privacy group.

The words which attract attention range from ones seemingly related to diseases or bioweapons such as 'human to animal' and 'outbreak' to other, more obscure words such as 'drill' and 'strain'.

The chief of Mossad has reportedly hinted that a nuclear-armed Iran does not necessarily pose an existential threat to the Jewish state, Hareetz said Thursday.

The newspaper quoted Israeli ambassadors at a briefing by Mossad's director Tamir Pardo Tuesday as suggesting that should the Islamic Republic attain nuclear-weapons capability, this would not necessarily pose an existential threat to Israel.

"What is the significance of the term existential threat? Does Iran pose a threat to Israel? Absolutely. But if one said a nuclear bomb in Iranian hands was an existential threat, that would mean that we would have to close up shop and go home. That's not the situation. The term existential threat is used too freely," one of the ambassadors, who spoke to the Israeli newspapers, quoted Pardo as saying.

Over the years I've met my fair share of monsters - rogue individuals, for the most part. But as regulation in the UK and the US has loosened its restraints, the monsters have proliferated.

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R Boddy identifies these people as psychopaths.

"They are," he says, "simply the 1 per cent of people who have no conscience or empathy." And he argues: "Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations, where they are able to influence the moral climate of the whole organisation and yield considerable power, have largely caused the [banking] crisis'.

Mark Twain is credited with saying that "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." Today's United States is often compared to other historic nations, whether at their prime or about to decline and fall depending on one's own political perspective. Neoconservatives frequently eulogize Washington as a new Rome, promising a worldwide empire without end carried on the back of a Pentagon bristling with advanced weaponry. Other observers also cite Rome but are rather more sanguine, recalling how in the 5th century the empire failed dramatically and fell to barbarian hordes. Still others note the fate of the British Empire, which came apart in the wake of the Second World War, or the Soviets, whose collapse was brought about by 50 years of unsustainable military spending.

But the historical analogy that appears to be most apposite for post-9/11 Washington is that of the Weimar Republic. To be sure, any suggestion that the United States might be following the same course as Germany in the years that led to Nazism must be pursued with caution because few Americans want to believe that the descent into such extremism is even possible in the world's most venerable constitutional republic. But consider the following: both the United States and Weimar Germany had constitutions in which checks and balances were integrated to maintain a multi-party system, the rule of law, and individual liberties. Both countries were on the receiving end of acts of terrorism that produced a dramatic and violent reaction against the presumed perpetrators of the crimes, so both quickly adopted legislation that abridged many constitutional rights and empowered the head of state to react decisively to further threats. The media fell in line, concerned that criticism would be unpatriotic.

Both the U.S. and Germany possessed politically powerful military-industrial complexes that had a vested interest in encouraging a militarized response to the threats and highly polarized internal politics that enabled politicians to obtain advantage by exploiting national security concerns. Both countries experienced severe financial crises and printed fiat currency to pay the bills, and both had jurists and political supporters who argued that in time of crisis the head of state must be granted special executive authority that transcends the limits placed by the constitution.

The Texas governor says that God will decide his post-Iowa fate.

Washington, Iowa: If Rick Perry drops out of the Republican presidential race after the Iowa caucuses, blame it on God.

"That's God's will," Perry told a reporter when asked if there was any outcome on Tuesday that would cause him to end his presidential bid. "There might be an outcome that he decides that I wouldn't go on." But he's hoping that the big man will be there for him on Jan. 3. When asked by the same reporter if God was caucusing, Perry responded, "Pretty sure He will be."

The Texas governor wasn't leaving everything to God, though. Moments before, at a coffee shop in Washington, he took rival Rick Santorum to task for supporting earmarks while he was in Congress.

Israeli Defense Forces have confirmed they are preparing a possible large-scale attack on Gaza. The development has parallels with the Israeli Operation Cast Lead, which claimed about 1,400 Palestinian lives back in 2008, named a massacre by Gazans.


"We are preparing and in fact are ready for another campaign, which will be varied and different, to renew our deterrence, if we are called on to restore full quiet to the communities [in the south]," one of the IDF's military commanders Brigade General Tal Hermoni was quoted by Haaretz newspaper as saying.

The head of the division's South Brigade added, however, that he would not equate the possible campaign to Operation Cast Lead just yet. "The mild response [to Tuesday's targeted killings] is evidence that they do not want to feel the IDF's fists," Tal Hermoni added.

According to Haaretz, the next Gaza operation will be shorter than in 2008, but will employ much more firepower. The IDF explained that Hamas and other groups it considers terrorists now have more weapons than they had back in 2008. Since then the groups are said to be extensively using the Kornet anti-tank missiles against the Israeli tanks and rockets fired directly at IDF troops.

The situation on the Israeli-Gaza border has been gradually worsening since August this year. In the latest development which occurred on Thursday morning, Palestinians fired a rocket into southern Israel in reply to the Israeli aerial attacks on Gaza, Al Arabiya television reports. The rocket reportedly caused neither casualties nor damage.

The development follows the exchange of violence which has marked the week. At least four Palestinian rockets hit Israel on Wednesday. On Tuesday, Israel's targeted offensive at Gaza killed three and wounded at least nine people.

Gideon Levy, a columnist with the Haaretz newspaper, told RT that the current Israeli government has no serious intention of continuing dialogue with the Palestinians.

"The Palestinian Authority has just launched another proposal to get back to the negotiation table. They even gave up the precondition of freezing the settlements, which is a minimum condition, and they had suggested just a symbolic release of 100 Palestinian prisoners to get back to the negotiation table. And what did Israel say? 'No!'" Gideon Levy explained.

The Obama administration has erected a vast apparatus of global assassination involving unmanned aerial drones operated by the CIA and the military. This network of "targeted killing" machines is run in secrecy, behind the backs of the American people and with virtually no congressional oversight.

The US drone program is the subject of an exposé published in the Washington Post on Wednesday, headlined "Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus of drone killing." While restrained in its presentation, the Post article is a chilling account of a government that has asserted for itself the right to kill anyone, anywhere in the world, without even a pretense of legal proceedings. The lives of thousands of people have been wiped out in this manner.

The US drone program, according to the Post, "involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in six countries on two continents."

A study by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the US had 775 Predator and other drone aircraft, plus an unknown number operated by the CIA as part of covert operations. Not including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, assassinations have been carried out in at least three countries. The recent downing of a drone over Iran, however, points to much broader operations.