Globe and Mail | Oil product tankers idling in quiet waters of the world's oceans are unlikely to move on until well into 2010 when more refinery shutdowns could curb production and force vessels to unload.    Floating oil product volumes, comprising mostly distillates such as diesel and the heating fuel gas oil, have surged to unprecedented levels of about 100 million barrels, but refiners are still pumping out more than the world can consume.

Salon | Ronald Reagan, May 20, 1988, transmitting the Convention Against Torture to the Senate for ratification: "...clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today."

Video | 30,000 additional troops will be sent to Afghanistan totaling the number of US soldiers to around 100,000 for 100 Al Qaeda terrorists. Many of these 30,000 troops will not return home. The blood of these soldiers and the pain of their family and friends will be on Obama's hands.

BBC | A 66-year-old church elder convicted of indecently assaulting a child will not be sent to jail because his obesity means his health is "precarious".  John William McConaghy, from Urbal Road, Dervock, County Antrim, was found guilty of indecent assault.

Surveillance Self-Defense | The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.

NPR | Mexico City police on Thursday freed 107 people who were forced to work under slave-like conditions in a clandestine factory making shopping bags and clothing clasps, authorities said.  Police raided the factory, which was hidden inside an alcohol and drug rehabilitation center, after a worker escaped and informed authorities, Mexico City Attorney General Miguel Angel Mancera said. Twenty three people were arrested for human trafficking.

Chromoscope | The title says it all

NPR | It seems like something from an earlier century in which native American children were forced to give up their Indian ways and for the culture of whites. A five-year old native American boy in Texas was punished for wearing his hair in two lengthy braids.

New Scientist | "This is the kind of snooping you'd expect in China, not a modern western democracy. It raises huge questions over privacy invasion and freedom of expression." So says Andrew Heaney - who is not, as you might imagine, a civil liberties campaigner, but a senior executive at TalkTalk, one of the UK's largest internet service providers. Along with other ISPs, his company faces the prospect of being forced to spy on its customers' downloads for signs of potential copyright infringement.

Colbert Nation | Joseph Cirincione plays "Sanction, Bomb, Marry?" with Iran, Pakistan and North Korea. (06:27)

ORGANIC HEALTH | Current H1N1 swine flu vaccine production primarily relies on growing the H1N1 swine flu inside of chicken eggs. However, that process has proven to be too slow to please vaccine manufacturers, so new "cutting edge" processes are being developed to make the vaccine production process quicker and more efficient.

Sydney Morning News | It's unfortunate that politics & business seem to think they need to make science "agree" with their view. Policy doesn't have to agree with science. You might have to explain why the policy would differ to common expectations, however there's no reason we should be pressuring scientists in this way.

Story of Stuff Project | The Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill. If you’ve heard about Cap & Trade, but aren’t sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film is for you.

New York Times | This is the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, an epic mess that started one night when a pesticide plant owned by the American chemical giant Union Carbide leaked a cloud of poisonous gas. Before the sun rose, almost 4,000 human beings capable of love and anguish sank to their knees and did not get up. Half a million more fell ill, many with severely damaged lungs and eyes.

Bloomberg | “Because of the platform you can get a lot of information out relatively easily,” said Sergeant Aliza Landes, who heads the unit. “The Internet, and especially social networks, Web 2.0 and bloggers, are an increasingly important and powerful way to disseminate information.”

Video | Rolling Stone Magazine's Matt Taibbi exposes the role of Michael Froman in establishing the Obama-GoldmanSachs connection. And how that led to the hiring of Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary

The Guardian | The scientist who convinced the world to take notice of the looming danger of global warming says it would be better for the planet and for future generations if next week's Copenhagen climate change summit ended in collapse.  In an interview with the Guardian, James Hansen, the world's pre-eminent climate scientist, said any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would be so deeply flawed that it would be better to start again from scratch.

Washington's Blog | The basic assumption that jobs will eventually return when the economy recovers is probably wrong. Some jobs will come back, of course. But the reality that no one wants to talk about is a structural change in the economy that's been going on for years but which the Great Recession has dramatically accelerated.

Anti War Activist Anouncement | Over 100 leading peace activists have announced an ‘Emergency Anti-Escalation Rally’ at the White House on December 12, from 11a.m. to 4 p.m., to reject President Obama’s planned military escalation in Afghanistan. The rally is organized by End US Wars, a newly formed coalition of national and grass-roots antiwar organizations, with endorsements from leading peace leaders.

The Nation | Let us say, hypothetically, that American forces kill or capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, enabling President Obama to declare victory and bring our troops home. Would he? Not according to the Pentagon's plan for a fifty-year "Long War" of counterinsurgency spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines and beyond.

CNN | Video of CNN International doing a story that is receiving a lot of criticism.

Restore the Republic | Sherry was one of the stars of Aaron Russo's America: Freedom to Fascism. She was the former IRS agent who cried out, "SHOW ME THE LAW!". Right now she deserves the support of the entire Freedom Movement.

US Patent and Trademark Office | A pulsed gravitational wave wormhole generator system that teleports a human being through hyperspace from one location to another.

Henry Makow | The Illuminati and their minions enjoy the certain knowledge that the spiritual realm not only exists and at all times interpenetrates our phenomenal world; they also know how to manipulate elements of these spiritual dimensions to make things occur at a given place and time according to their wishes.

Infowars | By now, most readers are familiar with the story of how a Virginia couple, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, crashed the White House State Dinner last Tuesday evening. President and Mrs. Obama were entertaining Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the first official State Dinner of the new administration.

Daily Reckoning | The division of the New York Mercantile Exchange commonly known as the Comex provides a commodities market for gold, as well as aluminum, copper, and silver. Without going so far as suggesting it’s impossible to get physical gold when exercising your Comex futures contracts, Jesse’s Cafe Americain explains that these days it just doesn’t seem very likely

National Security Archive | The Guatemalan army, under the direction of military ruler Efraín Ríos Montt, carried out a deliberate counterinsurgency campaign in the summer of 1982 aimed at massacring thousands of indigenous peasants, according to a comprehensive set of internal records presented as evidence to the Spanish National Court and posted today by the National Security Archive on its Web site.

CBS | Police say three men stole a watch from Joaquin Rivera as he passed away inside a Philadelphia hospital.  An educator and community leader became a victim of crime as he lapsed into unconsciousness in the waiting room of a Philadelphia hospital Saturday. Police say as the victim was dying, instead of seeking help, three people saw it as an opportunity to rob him.

The Atlantic | The way our politics of fear is now constructed, there is no limit to the costs involved in nation-building in every conceivable failed state that could be a safe harbor for Jihadists. We cannot have the adult conversation about how much terrorist damage the US should tolerate compared with the costs of trying to control this phenomenon at its source. We are not mature enough as a country to have that conversation. And Obama has decided it isn't worth confronting that question now.

Reddit | This Canadian police officer was responsible for two deaths. One he killed by a taser and the other he killed while drunk driving. He is not being charged with either death.

CNBC | CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino tells the desk that Bank of America is going to repay $45 billion and get out of the TARP program.  And they will raise capital over the next few days, he adds. That suggests to host Melissa Lee that there will be an offering - although Karen Finerman says she would be surprised if it's entirely done with common equity.

Vanity Fair | Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month. Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he’s been playing in America’s war on terror.

Democracy Now | As President Obama unveils his plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan, we speak with Ohio Congressmember Dennis Kucinich. “The United States is going deeper and deeper into debt,” says Kucinich. “We have money for Wall Street and money for war but we don’t have money for work…for healthcare. We have to start asking ourselves, ‘Why is it that war is a priority but the basic needs of people in this country are not?’”

Boston.com | Peru's police chief dismissed the head of his criminal investigations unit Tuesday amid suggestions that officers may have invented a story about a murderous gang of human fat thieves, perhaps to distract from allegations of police killings.

Associated Press | Investigators are still trying to determine whether his death last month was a suicide or murder, Tehran's public prosecutor Abbas Dowlatabadi said, according to the state news agency IRNA.  The revelations of torture against prisoners in Iran's postelection turmoil angered even government supporters and deeply embarrassed the country's clerical leadership and security forces.

Huffington Post | On the Daily Show Tuesday night, Jon Stewart dug into ClimateGate -- a series of leaked emails between climate scientists which global warming skeptics have latched onto to prove climate change doesn't exist. "Poor Al Gore," Stewart proclaimed, "global warming completely debunked via the very internet you invented."

Torrent Freak | As many as 25,000 BT and 5,000 customers of other ISPs will be receiving shock letters demanding big payments during the coming weeks. Lawyers in the UK have been granted more court orders which force ISPs to hand over the details of individuals who they say have been monitored sharing hardcore pornography.

Torrent Freak | Most other sites would have thrown in the towel by now, but despite unprecedented pressure, somehow The Pirate Bay remains alive and in pretty good health today. As one door closes, the site morphs and adapts to find ways to stay open and possibly even stay legal. Is the site becoming more and more difficult to shut down?

The Register | News of the outage emerged when keen amateur LHC-watchers (at independent site the LHC Portal) noticed that most of CERN's web presence related to the Collider had disappeared. Presently much of it returned, and with it came an official account of events released by control-room staff.

Mail.com | The experiment lasted a month, and the scientists say it was the first time a patient has been able to make complex movements using his mind to control a biomechanic hand connected to his nervous system.

Ma'an News | The UN has sent an official request to Israel to admit the existence of secret prison camp 1391, dubbed in the press “Israel’s Guantanamo Bay,” according to the Palestinian Authority minister of prisoners affairs.  Minister Issa Qaraqe told a news conference in Ramallah on Saturday that the UN had asked the Israeli government in a letter to officially acknowledge that the facility.

FOX News | The trustworthiness of the scientific community's global warming data pool is being called into question as the scandal over climate data continues to unfold.  The latest revelation came on Sunday with the publication of a report by The Sunday Times of London that scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom confessed to throwing out most of the raw temperature data on which the theory of global warming is founded.

Star Tribune | Conspiracy theorists awaiting Wednesday night's premiere of "Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura" might take interest in a curious comment Ventura made in the Los Angeles Times this weekend.

Personal Security | If it wasn't bad enough that our politicians and news media constantly bombard us with messages that we need to give up all of our liberty and freedom so that we can be safe, now toy manufacturers are producing toys that prepare our children for life in the futuristic Big Brother technocracy that our society is quickly becoming.

The Register | Perhaps the real scandal is the dependence of media and politicians on their academics' work - an ask-no-questions approach that saw them surrender much of their power, and ultimately authority. This doesn't absolve the CRU crew of the charges, but might put it into a better context.  After a week of scrutiny of the emails, attention is now turning to the programming source code. Three quarters of the material released is the work of the academics, much of which they had jealously guarded.

Border Watch | Construction work on Mount Gambier’s fluoridation plant at the Blue Lake pumping station began on Monday.  The soil is currently being excavated in preparation for the construction of a 60 square metre stone building above the pumping station which will house the plant.

Online Journal | WMR has learned from informed U.S. military intelligence sources that after a single-engine Cessna was stolen from an airfield north of Baltimore by student pilot Frank Corder on September 12, 1994, and flown onto the South Lawn of the White House, slamming into the west side of the presidential mansion, the Department of Defense took measures to counter any future incident involving suicide aircraft missions. In the 1994 incident, Corder was killed in the crash of the Cessna on the White House lawn.

Times Online | Alistair Darling has delivered a blunt warning to the EU’s new French finance chief against meddling with the City of London.  As Nicolas Sarkozy gloated over impending curbs on the City, the Chancellor said that such moves would drive financial services out of Europe.

Infowars | Shocking newly uncovered UN strategy documents reveal how elitists are recruiting members of academia from all over the globe in an effort to hide the “end-run” around national sovereignty that their agenda represents, emphasizing how the climategate crooks who were recently caught manipulating scientific data in order to “hide the decline” in global warming are working with the United Nations in the pursuit of a world government justified by the global warming fraud that they are helping to perpetrate.

Alternet | Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does -- and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that.