Michael Moore, on CNN: Well, The Washington post three weeks ago had this investigation and they said that President Obama has now raised more money from Wall Street and the banks for this election cycle than all -- than all eight Republicans combined. I don't want to say that, because if that's the truth, that Wall Street already has their man and his name is Barack Obama, then we've got a much bigger problem.

But I think President Obama, if he were here in the room, the question I would ask him is why are they your number one contributors? Why are you taking this money?

The military-grade pepper-spray that's been all the rage with law enforcement agencies is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to an advanced arsenal of weaponry made available to police departments across the country.

It has become clear now that local PDs are stockpiling some seriously dangerous doodads free of cost as part of a little-known program from the Pentagon. You can thank Uncle Sam, the Department of Defense and your own American tax dollars for the 1033 Program, an initiative that is giving hundreds of millions of bucks' worth of military hardware from the DoD and putting it in the hands of your favorite neighborhood cop.

In 2011 alone, the Department of Defense forked over roughly $500 million worth of military machinery to law enforcement agencies coast-to-coast that would have been left otherwise unused. In many instances, however, the goods are grabbed by sheriffs in smaller jurisdictions that don't have much need for the weaponry, other than to install fear within the community. The Daily reports that, according to documents made available by the Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency, among those items offered up to officers at no cost at all last year were grenade launchers, helicopters, military robots, M-16 assault rifles and armored vehicles.

The year before, the 1033 Program aided local departments with $212 million in weaponry. So far for Fiscal Year 2012, orders are up more than 400 percent compared with figures from the same time an year earlier.

A U.S.-based research institute will soon publish what it says is "indisputable" evidence that Israel stole weapons-grade uranium for its still-undeclared atomic weapons program from a nuclear reprocessing plant in western Pennsylvania.

The Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) will release this month a 300-page report detailing the initial findings of a multi-year research project investigating the disappearance of highly enriched uranium from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec) in Apollo, Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 1960s.

Foreign Minister meets with Putin in Moscow, discusses Mideast security matters and urges him not to support unilateral steps by Palestinians at UN.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman met with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday, and said that he believes the recent elections in Russia were fair and democratic, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported.

According to the report, Lieberman said that he shares the view of the Israeli observers who oversaw the election in Russia, who said they were fair and democratic.

Aliaksei Yafimau shudders at the memory of the burly thug who threatened to kill his relatives. Yafimau, who installs satellite television systems in Babrujsk, Belarus, answered an advertisement in 2010 offering easy money to anyone willing to sell a kidney.

He saw it as a step toward getting out of poverty. Instead, Yafimau, 30, was thrust into a dark journey around the globe that had him, at one point, locked in a hotel room for a month in Quito, Ecuador, waiting for surgeons to cut out an organ, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its December issue.

The man holding Yafimau against his will was Roini Shimshilashvili, a former kickboxer who was an enforcer for an international organ-trafficking ring, according to evidence gathered by police in Kiev. Yafimau says that when he pleaded with Shimshilashvili to let him get out of the deal and go home, the big man sliced the air with Thai-boxing moves and threatened him.

"He said if I didn't go through with it, he would leave me in Ecuador and kill my family," Yafimau says.

A notice sent out to businesses in the City of London has listed the protest movement among groups such as al-Qaida and Farc

Police have angered Occupy London activists after listing the movement among terrorist groups in an advisory notice sent to the business community in the City.

The document issued by City of London police, headed "Terrorism/extremism update for the City of London business community", included a detailed account of recent and upcoming Occupy London activities and was sent to "trusted partners" in the area.

The document, dated 2 December, which was passed on to Occupy London's Finsbury square encampment over the weekend by a local business owner, gave an update on foreign terrorist activities including that of Farc in Columbia, al-Qaida in Pakistan and the outcome of a trial into the Minsk bombing in Belarus.

Below that, a section headed "Domestic" was dedicated wholly to the activities of the Occupy encampments and singled out anti-capitalists as a cause for concern.

Barack Obama portrays himself as champion of middle class in Kansas address harking back 100 years to Theodore Roosevelt


Barack Obama blasted his Republican foes and Wall Street as he portrayed himself as a champion of the middle class and laid out in the starkest terms yet the populist themes of his 2012 re-election bid.

In a speech meant to echo a historic address given by the former US president Theodore Roosevelt in the same Kansas town more than 100 years ago, Obama railed against "gaping" economic inequality and pressed the case for policies he insisted would help ordinary Americans get through hard times.

He seized the opportunity to step up pressure on congressional Republicans to extend payroll tax cuts that independent economists say are vital to economic recovery, and vowed new legislation to punish Wall Street fraud.

But Obama's broader message was a sweeping call for the working class to get a "fair shot" and a "fair share" as he pushed for wealthier Americans to pay higher taxes and demanded that big corporate interests play by the rules.

Two of the Democratic Party's core institutions are challenging a bipartisan consensus on Israel and Palestine that has dominated American foreign policy for more than a decade.

The Center for American Progress, the party's key hub of ideas and strategy, and Media Matters, a central messaging organization, have emerged as vocal critics of their party's staunchly pro-Israel congressional leadership and have been at odds, at times, with Barack Obama's White House, which has acted as a reluctant ally to Benjamin Netanyahu's Israeli government.

The differences are ones of tone - but also of bright lines of principle - and while they have haven't yet made any visible impact on Democratic policy, they've shaken up the Washington foreign policy conversation and broadened the space for discussing a heretical and often critical stance on Israel heretofore confined to the political margins.

The daily battle is waged in Media Matters' emails, on CAP's blogs, Middle East Progress and ThinkProgress and most of all on Twitter, where a Media Mattters official, MJ Rosenberg, regularly heaps vitriol on those who disagree as "Iraq war neocon liar" (the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg) or having "dual loyalties" to the U.S. and Israel (the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin). And while the Center for American Progress tends to walk a more careful line, warm words for Israel can be hard to find on its blogs.

If you ever happen to come across a Republican on television these days, chances are that you will hear the name Ronald Reagan. Recent Republican debates are the perfect example of the love fest that the current Republican party has for Reagan as each candidate name drops the former president at every turn. If you only listened to conservatives you would think that Jesus Christ was the only person above Reagan on the totem pole of conservative love. They talk about his love of low taxes, less government and conservative family values. The problem is that when you step out of the conservative dream and come back to reality, you find that not only was Ronald Reagan a bad president, but he was one of the worst presidents we've seen in modern times. Reagan's policies have destroyed the United States for three decades, and for the eight years he was in office, here are eight reasons why Ronald Reagan was the worst president of our lifetime.

The protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement took to the streets to draw attention to corporate greed and the uneven distribution of wealth in the United States. In the end most media attention they got wasn't for their economic messages, but for the extreme treatment that they suffered at the hands and boots of the police. If the protesters can't expose corruption in the highest echelons of the banking system, perhaps they can expose the much more pressing and perhaps frightening development in the United States: The extreme militarization and illegal tactics of the police in the United States.

Over the years, the escalation of the "War on Drugs" has lead to increasing number of police stations across the country to begin training their officers in the use of more sophisticated weaponry and tactics. Due to fear mongering on all levels of government, the United States citizenry has sat silent over the years, believing that the increasing military style presence of the police all around them was for their own protection.

So when I show up to a peaceful protest in my hometown of Atlanta only to have it broken up by what I could only describe as black-clad, club wielding storm troopers, I begin to worry. So in this, our beautiful "land of the free", what are the freedoms that we hold so dear? Our freedom of speech is threatened. The government is voting on things like SOPA and Net Neutrality in order to limit our access to information online. Our freedom of press is limited. Media conglomerates control our media, and use their influence to seek private gains. Our freedom of religion is suppressed. Muslims in our nation are treated as outsiders and terrorists. And now we finally know that our greatest strength, our freedom to peaceful assembly is being slowly chipped away.