The most powerful company on the Internet just got a whole lot creepier: a new service from Google merges offline consumer info with online intelligence, allowing advertisers to target users based on what they do at the keyboard and at the mall.

Without much fanfare, Google announced news this week of a new advertising project, Conversions API, that will let businesses build all-encompassing user profiles based off of not just what users search for on the Web, but what they purchase outside of the home.

In a blog post this week on Google's DoubleClick Search site, the Silicon Valley giant says that targeting consumers based off online information only allows advertisers to learn so much. "Conversions," tech-speak for the digital metric made by every action a user makes online, are incomplete until coupled with real life data, Google says.

"We understand that online advertising also fuels offline conversions," the blog post reads. Thus, Google says, "To capture these lost conversions and bring offline into your online world, we're announcing the open beta of our Conversions API for uploading offline conversion automatically."

President Barack Obama has nominated Senator John Kerry to be the next secretary of state on Friday.

Kerry is noted for his experience and relationship-building skills that could help him succeed outgoing Sec. Hilary Clinton. Sec. Clinton recently announced she would step down after Obama's inauguration in January.

"In a sense, John's entire life has prepared him for this role," Pres. Obama said Friday afternoon when he made the announcement official in Washington.

"He's not going to need a lot of on the job training," Obama said of Sen. Kerry.

Citing his nominee's military experience during the Vietnam War as well as his efforts to resolve the conflict after serving, Pres. Obama said the senator is "a perfect choice to guide American diplomacy in the years ahead."

President Obama also celebrated Sen. Kerry's tenure as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, a position he will have to resign from before moving to his new cabinet role.

"It won't be easy to leave the Senate that you love," the president said.

Mario Monti has resigned as Prime Minster of Italy, saying he no longer has the support he needs to govern. Monti replaced Silvio Berlusconi a little over a year ago after the previous govt proved unable to cope with the financial problems facing it.

Giorgio Napolitano, the Italian President, has accepted his resignation but has asked Monti to stay on as a head of a caretaker government until new elections in a couple of months.

His resignation comes as MPs passed the 2013 budget drawn up by his government with 309 votes in favor and 55 against.

Monti is widely credited with overseeing a recovery in Italy's bonds and repairing the country's tattered image abroad. His leadership has also been praised by Angela Merkel and other European leaders such as Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the group of euro area finance ministers.

When Monti took over, Italy's borrowing was approaching unaffordable levels. He introduced pension reform and raised the retirement age to 66 for men and 62 for women. He also did away with a system of seniority pensions, which allowed many civil servants to retire at 58.

Most importantly though was under Monti yields on Italian 10-year bonds fell to under 7%, now they are between 4 and 5%. Bonds are a key indicator of how much a country has to pay to borrow money and at over 7%, which they were before Berlusconi stepped down, they are unaffordable. However, Monti is unpopular with many Italians dealing with soaring unemployment, a shrinking economy and higher taxes. A poll conducted on November 17th showed that 62% of Italians had a negative view of Monti's government while 82% said they had little confidence in the economy improving.

Hamid Karzai condemned the actions of Staff Sergeant Joseph Chamblin as inhuman, which came to light in a YouTube video.

Washington - A US marine staff sergeant who urinated on dead Taliban insurgents and posed for photographs with the bodies has pleaded guilty to two charges in a military court.

His sentence was a reduction in rank and forfeiture of $500 (£307) in pay.

Staff Sergeant Joseph Chamblin pleaded guilty on Thursday at a special court martial at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to dereliction of duty for failing to properly supervise junior marines. He also pleaded guilty to wrongfully urinating on a deceased enemy combatant.

The incident occurred during a counter-insurgency operation in Helmand province in Afghanistan in July 2011. It came to light in January this year when a videotape of the incident was posted on YouTube and other websites.

The video showed four men in camouflage marine combat uniforms urinating on three corpses. One of them joked, "Have a nice day, buddy," while another made a lewd joke.

The video was one of a series of offensive incidents involving US service members that roused Afghan ire and led to heightened tensions between Washington and Kabul earlier this year.

RT pretty much spells it out for you.

Newtown - In the frantic moments after a gunman stormed into Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday and gunned down 26 people, most of them children, authorities expected to encounter a second shooter as they converged on the building, according to a recording of a 911 tape that was independently verified by Hearst Connecticut Newspapers on Tuesday.

"I have reports of two shooters running past the building, past the gym, which would be rear," a dispatcher said on the tape, before trailing off. Shortly afterward, the operator told a State Police trooper who was racing to the scene from the nearby Troop A barracks in Southbury to "make sure you have your vest on."

A review of the recording suggests that authorities were unaware of the grisly scene they were walking into.

In the following passage of my previous article on the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, I made the following reference to Ryan Lanza being the named second suspect caught armed in the adjacent woods:

Perhaps most astonishingly, this suspect arrested in the woods was named in an Associated Press report as 24-year-old Ryan Lanza. The original report has long since vanished of course, but you can see it referenced here. This was despite the fact that Ryan had already been named as the deceased suspect inside the school, lying next to two handguns.

I have since found the original Associated Press report, which in fact states that it was "Ryan's younger brother", Adam Lanza, who was arrested in the woods. So let's take a closer look at this revealing report.

Barack Obama has signed into law a bill that establishes normal trade relations with Russia for the first time in decades, including the repeal of the 1974 Jackson-Vanick Amendment that denied "most favored nation" status to countries restricting human rights.

But the bill also included the so-called "Magnitsky" Act, which calls for sanctions against any Russian who was involved in the 2009 death of lawyer and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. Russia is incensed by what it considers interference with an internal matter.

The editor-in-chief of a well known pro-government newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, was the first high-profile individual to be affected. He received a fax on Friday Dec. 14, the same day the law was enacted, informing him that his visa to the United States had been revoked due to the provisions of the Magnitsky Act. It is not clear what his connection to the Magnitsky case is.

What happened to Sergei Magnitsky?

Sergei Magnitsky, the auditor of the Hermitage Capital fund, was accused of tax evasion. He was held in prison for nearly a year, during which time he told doctors on several occasions that he was feeling ill. In spite of his complaints, he never received medical treatment, and his health got worse. He died on Nov. 16, 2009 after having finally been transferred to a medical facility and treated for chronic hepatitis and diabetes.

This Intel report is the Rosetta Stone for everything that Israel has done since before its so called birth, but which was more like letting a Frankenstein monster loose on the land. We had loyal Americans who saw the trap back then, yet we walked right into it. Why have we done it, and for whom?

The history of America's involvement with Israel has been an ongoing tragedy. The Palestinians have of course suffered the most, having been invaded by legions of atheist and communist Jews, primarily from Eastern Europe. And yes, they claim 'God gave us the land'.

They teamed up with the 5th column Zionists already there who had been carefully and methodically laying plans for taking over the land and doing to the Palestinians what they claimed the Nazis had done to them--killing and kicking the Palestinians out to make more lebensraum (growing space) for more Jews.

Generations of Israeli Lobby fellow travelers have worn the sordid mantle of 'Palestinian holocaust Deniers', to coin a phrase, with no shame whatsoever. Golda Meir was their Hebrew Klan Grand Dragon. She produced a low cost and instant holocaust hat trick. "There are no Palestinian people," she said.

One of the main tasks of Israeli espionage has always been to protect Israel from judgment day for their crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people. To them this is a war, and they take no prisoners. When are we going to figure this out, when it comes to dealing with them?

Today I begin a series of articles to pin the holocaust tails on their correct donkey. I am going to use sources with which the general public is unfamiliar, the declassified American Intel files on Israel. And yes, these have been open since the early 1980's, but might as well have been in a library on the moon.

Israeli penetration into not only our media and publishing, but also our political arena has virtually banished these documents from the historical narrative. The fear is that they could be used to deprogram pro-Israeli zombies and expose all the treasonous Americans who have aided and abetted the Israelis in hiding their crimes.

Let us start at the beginning. A crime against an entire people, to holocaust them from their own land, has to have a plan. Here it is

'You come from a culture where it is okay to kill children,' the Iraqi woman said. We were sheltering against the wall of a building in Fallujah in April 2004 while the city was under attack by US forces.

I began to protest, but she continued, in broken English: 'Let me say it another way. You come from a culture where your people think it is okay to kill our children.'

What could I say? There were several little bodies at my feet, bloodied remains laid out on the footpath and covered with thin sheets. The children had been shot by US snipers that day, among at least 1000 civilians killed in that ferocious attack.

This Iraqi woman knew there would be no collective outrage at the killing of Fallujah's children. No front-page headlines. We would not know their names, see their faces or hear their stories. Their killers would not be pursued, labelled 'mad' or 'evil', or made to face a court. There would be no calls for 'change.'

Some commentators have compared the response to deaths of the children in the small American community of Newtown with the young victims of US wars. The point is valid. A life is a life, and all life is precious; a fact that has enough weight of its own without the need to draw comparisons.