The latest headlines from The Most Important News....
It has been confirmed that a giant offshore gas field contains 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas—making it the world's biggest deepwater gas find in a decade, with enough reserves to supply Israel's gas needs for 100 years.
A senior officer of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said on Monday that the war in Afghanistan would escalate in 2011 as the coalition pursues militants.
Former US defense chief William Perry says that North Korea was capable of producing one nuclear bomb a year and that Washington should consider high-level talks to defuse tension, in an interview published Wednesday.
North Korea has added 20,000 soldiers to its feared special forces over the past two years and deployed an unspecified number of new battle tanks, South Korea’s defence ministry said Thursday.
China is preparing for conflict "in every direction", the defense minister said on Wednesday in remarks that threaten to overshadow a visit to Beijing by his U.S. counterpart next month.
Major advances in China's military prowess -- specifically with powerful anti-ship missiles known as aircraft "carrier killers" -- could threaten the U.S. Navy's ability to maintain strategic dominance in the western Pacific and safeguard the independence of Taiwan.
A bomb went off outside of a court building in Athens, Greece on Thursday after a warning phone call had allowed police to evacuate the area, a police source said.
The average rate on 30-year fixed mortgages rose this week to the highest level in seven months, reflecting higher yields on long-term Treasuries.
Copper has hit yet another record high.
In January 2011, the very first of the Baby Boomers is going to start turning 65.
In 1970, jobs in the goods producing industries made up 31.2% of all jobs in the United States. Today, they account for just 13.8% of all jobs.
It is estimated that one-third of the entire world's wealth is held offshore, with 80 percent of international banking transactions occurring offshore, in order to avoid taxes and regulations.
More banks failed in the United States this year than in any year since 1992, during the savings-and-loan crisis, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
U.S. home foreclosures jumped in the third quarter and banks’ efforts to keep borrowers in their homes dropped as the housing market continues to struggle, U.S. bank regulators said on Wednesday.
Many new surveys indicate that average Americans are feeling even more negative about the economy.
Is the "improvement" in the jobless numbers just an "illusion"?
According to one new study, thirty percent of the nation’s 372 labor markets are currently saddled with their worst unemployment rates in a decade.
Requests for government food assistance are skyrocketing all over the nation.
U.S. shoppers spent more on Christmas this year than at any time since the start of the recession, despite their misgivings about the economic outlook and gathering fears of a double dip in the American housing market.
Italy's borrowing costs have jumped to the highest level since the financial crisis over two years ago, raising concerns that Europe's biggest debtor may slip from the eurozone's stable core into the high-risk group on the periphery.
If the US and Chinese economies move at their present rates, the average Chinese citizen will be wealthier than the average American in less than three decades, Ed Lazear, a Stanford University economics professor, recently told CNBC.
Hundreds of herbal medicinal products will be banned from sale in Britain next year under what campaigners say is a "discriminatory and disproportionate" European law.
Now it only takes a "single tip" to get put on a terrorist watch list in America.
It turns out that FBI agents are earning career points every time they put another American on a watch list.
In a shocking, but not unprecedented, turn of events drivers in Florida will be mandated to allow police to jab a needle in their arm and extract blood at DUI checkpoints should they refuse to submit to breath tests.
A woman who hit headlines earlier this month for protesting the invasive new TSA airport security theatre by donning just a bra and panties has been targeted and prevented from flying by TSA officials who cited an “unusual contour” around her buttocks.
The State Attorney's Office in Florida is investigating an incident in which a person identified as a police lieutenant's son is shown on videotape punching a man described as homeless, authorities said.
A standout North Carolina high school student has been suspended for the remainder of her senior year and charged with a misdemeanor for having a small paring knife in her lunchbox.
A lawyer in Nigeria has reminded the country’s anti-corruption watchdog that the recent deal buying Dick Cheney’s freedom for $35 million is not legal.
A new poll shows that 61 percent of voters think the new health care changes signed into law by President Barack Obama will cause health care costs to go up.
Rand Paul says that he wants to attach spending cuts to every major piece of legislation that comes before the Senate next year.
Dennis Kucinich says that his congressional district may be eliminated by redistricting.
Washington Post staffer Ezra Klein suggests that the Constitution is irrelevant due to its age and politically-malleable language.
Katie Couric says that we need a Muslim version of "The Cosby Show".
Has the Republican establishment now fully embraced homosexuality?
Skype has been banned in China.
Although Hawaii's newly elected Democrat governor, Neil Abercrombie, has recently given a flurry of high-profile media interviews condemning "birthers" who question Barack Obama's constitutional eligibility to occupy the Oval Office, suddenly he is declining to answer a few hard questions.
A magnitude 3.8 earthquake that rattled north central Indiana early Thursday was unprecedented in its size and location, according to the state geologist.
Will this winter be Britain's coldest winter in 1000 years?
Is the world on the verge of a major food crisis?
The coming year will be an important one for space weather as the Sun pulls out of a trough of low activity and heads into a long-awaited and possibly destructive period of turbulence.
Nickelodeon’s new Illuminati-themed show House of Anubis, already airing in Belgium and Netherlands is due to air in the US for the first time in January 2011.
Canadian pro-life advocates are concerned a recent decision by the Supreme Court of Canada could pave the way for grisly research involving cloning and merging different species.
Delaying sex makes for a more satisfying and stable relationship later on, new research finds. Couples who had sex the earliest - such as after the first date or within the first month of dating - had the worst relationship outcomes.
Jewish historians are dismissing an apology by Henry Kissinger, offered over the weekend in response to a 1973 recording of him saying that sending Jews to a Soviet gas chamber "is not an American concern."
In the version of history being taught in some Virginia classrooms, New Orleans began the 1800s as a bustling U.S. harbor (instead of as a Spanish colonial one). The Confederacy included 12 states (instead of 11). And the United States entered World War I in 1916 (instead of in 1917).
There are 7,695,000 people currently residing in Israel, according to a study by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, released to mark the end of the first decade of the third millennium.
Over the past several years, Christians in the Middle East have endured bombings, murders, assassinations, torture, imprisonment and expulsions.
According to a new Gallup poll, seven in 10 Americans say religion as a whole is losing its influence on American life. This is a near-record high percentage since Gallup began asking the question more than 50 years ago.
Lastly, Ashton Kutcher has an interesting theory about why you should get as fit as possible in 2011. According to Kutcher, the apocalypse is coming.
The latest headlines from The Most Important News....
Sadly, Barack Obama is the most admired man in America and Hillary Clinton is the most admired woman in America.
Will Hillary Clinton soon be stepping down as Secretary of State?
Word on Capitol Hill is that Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee with a well-worn passport to the world's hot spots, is in the mix to replace Secretary of State Hillary Clinton if she steps down.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Monday asked residents not to dial 911 unless calling about a life-saving emergency, as edgy travelers faced difficult weather conditions stemming from the fifth-largest winter storm in New York City's history.
A package bomb has been found at the Greek Embassy in Rome, three days after mail bombs exploded at two other embassies injuring two people.
South Korea plans to hold a fresh round of naval firing drills at 23 locations around the Korean Peninsula, excluding areas near the disputed sea border with North Korea.
It is being reported that the U.S. will deploy another nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in Northeast Asia in response to North Korea's threat of a "sacred war" using nuclear weapons.
Two suspected U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal region killed 18 alleged militants on Monday.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman says that a peace agreement with the Palestinians under current conditions is not possible and any attempts to reach a deal in the coming year are "unrealistic".
A new Palestinian book that defies history and the Bible calls Jesus "the first Palestinian martyr".
Two thousand years after the birth of Christ, Christians are leaving the Holy Land in record numbers, and a new report suggests persecution against Palestinian believers is getting worse.
In Nigeria, dozens of radical Muslims attacked a church on Christmas Eve, dragging the pastor out of his home and shooting him to death. Two young men from the choir who were rehearsing for a late-night carol service also were slain.
Despite sanctions and trade embargoes, over the past decade the United States government has allowed American companies to do billions of dollars in business with Iran and other countries blacklisted as state sponsors of terrorism, an examination by The New York Times has found.
Defying Beltway expectations, both chambers of Congress have approved a $724.6 billion defense bill for the current fiscal year.
Iran's representative to the Organization of Petroleum Export Countries declared on Sunday that he expects the price of crude oil to hit $100 a barrel soon.
The former president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister, says Americans could be paying five dollars for a gallon of gas by 2012.
The U.S. government is sticking with an outlook that sees crude prices not hitting triple digits until 2015.
According to Bruce Bartlett, the U.S. government budget deficit for 2010 was really $2.1 trillion dollars.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) predicted "apocalyptic pain" if Congress does not enact major spending cuts.
America is storing up a second financial crisis by keeping interest rates at record low levels, according to David Einhorn, the hedge fund manager who first publicly warned about the financial catastrophe facing Lehman Brothers.
The University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Index for December reached its highest level in six months, and personal income edged upward in October and November, supporting the fifth straight monthly gain in U.S. consumer spending, according to data released on Thursday.
Other polls indicate that optimism about the economy is fading in America.
If the U.S. economy does not grow (0% GDP increase) in 2011, then we will have an official unemployment rate of about 11.2 percent by the end of next year.
China has surprised the rest of the world by raising interest rates yet again.
The Greek Parliament early Thursday approved the Socialist government’s 2010 austerity budget, which aims to slash Greece’s fiscal deficit through a mixture of spending cuts and higher taxes.
Ron Paul has introduced a bill which would permit alternative currencies to compete with Federal Reserve notes inside the United States.
Janet Napolitano says that the new full body scanners and "enhanced pat-downs" are here to stay.
The federal government's "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign to encourage citizen vigilance against terrorism threats doesn't amount to a Big Brother-style spying effort, Napolitano said in an interview that aired Sunday.
The United States is stepping up security at "soft targets" like hotels and shopping malls, as well as trains and ports, as it counters the evolving Al-Qaeda threat, a top official said Sunday.
The use of illegal steroids by cops all over the United States is becoming a "big problem".
This year security forces have arrested over 27,000 suspected drug gang members as part of Mexico's ongoing bloody military-led crackdown on cartel operations.
Authorities in Arizona are trying to determine who is responsible for a Christmas Day attack on an Arizona lawmaker who was found beaten and bound inside his own business.
Barack Obama is voicing support for a U.N. resolution that could accomplish something as radical as relinquishing some U.S. sovereignty and opening a path for the return of ancient tribal lands to American Indians, including even parts of Manhattan.
Does Pat Robertson now support the legalization of marijuana?
A federal appeals court struck a blow against the desire of the Federal Communications Commission to enforce net neutrality rules on the Internet, ruling the FCC must first get Congress to approve such a sweeping expansion of its regulatory power.
A swine flu pandemic is sweeping through Britain despite the fact that 70 percent of Britain’s over-65 population was vaccinated against swine flu last year.
In the UK, vital cancer operations are being canceled as hospitals struggle to cope with soaring numbers of flu victims.
Is the Gulf of Mexico being permanently altered?
A 7.3-magnitude earthquake recently struck close to Vanuatu in the western Pacific, generating a small tsunami.
More than 500 measurable earthquakes have occurred in central Arkansas since September, and it's unknown if they'll stop anytime soon, seismologists say.
It is absolutely frightening to learn what they are putting in our tap water.
New cold weather records are being set all over the northern hemisphere and yet environazis keep talking about how all of this is being caused by global warming.
NASA is making the following promise: "Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than four billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012."
One man is now making a living by suing email spammers.
Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie is vowing to end the "birther" controversy surrounding Barack Obama's nationality once and for all.
It turns out that Karl Rove believes that Barack Obama will be re-elected in 2012.
Fresh off of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” victory, Vice President Joe Biden said in a morning show interview that legislation approving gay marriage is inevitable.
Reviving an extremely unpopular bit of legislation, Medicare is moving forward with what they deem "end-of-life planning" even though it was struck from the final version of the Obamacare bill that was pushed through congress earlier this year.
It is estimated that approximately 50 million babies have been aborted in the United States since 1973.
Approximately 52 percent of all African-American pregnancies now end in abortion.
Some expectant parents in western Maryland are objecting to a new policy that bans birth photography at the Hagerstown hospital.
A Milwaukee man says that he thinks it's pretty darn ridiculous that he got fined $500 for swearing on a county bus.
Lastly, a Michigan man faces up to 5 years in prison for reading his wife's e-mail to find out if she was having an affair.
The latest headlines from The Most Important News....
A former Iranian diplomat says that Iran is working toward developing a nuclear bomb with the help of scientists from North Korea and other countries worldwide.
A senior Israeli army officer has told the BBC that as long as Hamas remains in control of the Gaza Strip, another war is "only a question of time".
North Korea says it is full prepared to launch a "sacred war", accusing South Korea of exacerbating tensions on the peninsula.
The South Korean navy began a three-day maritime exercise in the East Sea on Wednesday as part of efforts to prepare against unpredictable North Korean provocations, officials said.
North Korea's latest intermediate-range ballistic missile, which appeared in Pyongyang's military parade in October, is believed to be capable of delivering a nuclear weapon, a South Korean researcher said Thursday.
Package bombs exploded at the Swiss and Chilean embassies in Rome on Thursday, injuring the two people who opened them.
House Republicans introduced a draft set of House rules for the 112th Congress on Wednesday which seeks to offer a "sea change" in the way the House operates -- with greater openness, deliberation, efficiency and a closer adherence to the U.S. Constitution.
Despite President Barack Obama's signing of a law repealing the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent a memo to troops warning them that it remains in effect until 60 days after the government certifies that the military is ready for implementation.
Tens of millions of American families are deeply suffering this holiday season.
21.5 percent of the population of Washington D.C. is on food stamps.
Check out this list of 16 U.S. cities that are on the verge of bankruptcy as we enter 2011.
One Alabama town has decided to simply quit paying pension benefits.
Newark, New Jersey has seen a recent crime spike, coinciding with cuts made to its police force, thanks to the ugly state of the city's finances.
France wants all 16 euro zone governments and any other interested European Union members to coordinate their economic policy more closely in the future, Economy Minister Christine Lagarde told a German newspaper.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that his G20 agenda to reform the international monetary system would look at widening the role of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights and tackling international capital flows.
China has said it is willing to bail out debt-ridden countries in the euro zone using its $2.7 trillion overseas investment fund.
Taxpayers who itemize on their federal tax returns will have to wait until at least mid-February to file, the IRS said Thursday.
Oprah Winfrey says America may "fall in love" with Sarah Palin as a TV star, but is dismissing the idea that the country would vote for the former Alaska governor in the future.
It turns out that a top aide to Sarah Palin is on the payroll of George Soros.
A so-called spiritual conference at which Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., called for the U.S. border to become an "irrelevancy" was led by a slew of extremists, including a Marxist who reportedly compared the tea-party movement to Hitler.
A team of scientists who study pollution's role in global warming are outraged at a GOP Senator who, they say, has maligned their work as wasteful and petty by describing it as a study of "cow burps".
Former prime minister Brian Mulroney says he believes a new security perimeter arrangement with the U.S. represents no threat to sovereignty but does offer a necessary insurance policy for the Canadian economy.
In the Washington D.C. area, there is more fallout from Metro’s plan to randomly screen passenger’s bags for explosives. The ACLU is calling random screening ineffective and intrusive and is considering legal action if Metro ignores its request to stop.
Police in one town in Texas recently used pepper spray to control an unruly crowd of sneaker shoppers.
A U.S. soldier jailed for raping and killing a girl of 14 and murdering her parents and sister in Iraq has blamed trauma in the war zone for his actions.
It turns out that the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico is now covered by massive amounts of spilled oil.
An earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale occurred early Thursday near Japan's Ogasawara archipelago, following a series of over 70 tremors in the region in the past 30 hours, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.
Some absolutely massive sinkholes have started popping up in Romania.
A huge storm system has dumped record amounts of rain on southern California.
Exposure to fluoride may lower children’s intelligence says a study pre-published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a publication of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
In a January 2008 meeting, US and Spain trade officials strategized how to increase acceptance of genetically modified foods in Europe, including inflating food prices on the commodities market, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.
In just one year, Monsanto has moved from being Forbes' "Company of the Year" to the Worst Stock of the Year.
In China, promotions within the Communist Party are tied to enforcing birth control and sterilization policies.
Planned Parenthood received $363.2 million in government grants and contracts during its 2008-2009 fiscal year, according to the organization's annual report. That was up from $349.6 million in fiscal year 2007-08.
In the UK, a Christian metal health worker facing the sack for distributing an anti-abortion booklet among her colleagues has said she would do the same thing again even if it means losing her job.
A leading Islamic body says the use of the term "Christmas" is politically incorrect because it excludes too many people in multicultural Australia.
Victims of clerical sex abuse have reacted furiously to Pope Benedict’s claim yesterday that pedophilia wasn’t considered an “absolute evil” as recently as the 1970s.
The board of the American Conservative Union has approved a homosexual Republican group for a planning role in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a major annual event in Washington, D.C., that draws conservatives from across the country.
A very jubilant crowd witnessed Barack Obama sign the bill repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy barring openly gay and lesbian soldiers from the military.
Very religious Americans tend to exercise more, eat healthier and smoke less, according to a new Gallup report.
Thousands of secret reports on New Zealand UFO sightings have been released, detailing mysterious unexplained sightings from the public and military personnel.
Lastly, Japanese scientists have now produced a genetically-engineered mouse that actually tweets like a bird.
The latest headlines from The Most Important News....
The U.S. population has grown just 9.7% since 2000, the slowest rate since the Great Depression.
The U.S. Senate has approved a temporary spending bill that will keep the government open for business through March 4th.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak gathered his national security leaders for strategic talks as troops braced for possible North Korean retaliation a day after conducting artillery drills on an island the North bombed last month.
Jimmy Carter says that Brazil was right to recognize Palestinian statehood.
Syrian officials believe that Israel was behind the assassination of a top military official responsible for contacts with Hezbollah and for the country's nuclear program, according to a cable sent from the U.S. embassy to Washington just two days after the attack and released Tuesday by WikiLeaks.
In the event of war with Israel, Syria's regime under Bashar Assad would collapse, the Israeli Military Intelligence chief apparently told the U.S. ambassador to Israel in 2007.
China and Russia will hold their first joint naval exercise next year in the northern part of the East Sea.
U.S. stocks rose modestly Tuesday but managed to close at their highest levels in more than two years as investors set their sights on 2011.
California, which faces a $19 billion budget deficit next year, has a credit rating approaching junk status.
State and local borrowing as a percentage of U.S. GDP has risen to an all-time high of 22 percent in 2010.
Meredith Whitney, a financial analyst who runs her own consulting firm and correctly predicted the major debt fallout of Citigroup, warned in a little-reported on interview Sunday that as many as 100 U.S. cities face default on their municipal bonds.
In fact, Whitney is warning that the coming municipal bond crash could cause social unrest as governments are forced lay off workers and cut back on services.
It is now being projected that the state of Illinois has a 21% chance of defaulting.
The state of Connecticut is facing an absolutely horrific pension crisis.
Health insurance companies trying to bump up rates by more than 10 percent will have to answer to federal regulators, according to a new plan announced by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Tuesday.
Since 1982, the cost of medical care in the United States has gone up over 200%, which is horrific, but that is nothing compared to the cost of college tuition which has gone up by more than 400%.
In a bold statement underscoring the precarious state of the nation's mortgage market, 52 industry executives sent an "open letter" to the government's top six money managers.
Over the past year the number of Americans that are optimistic about the economy has declined dramatically.
Moody's is warning that it may have to downgrade Portugal's bonds.
It is being reported that France risks losing its top AAA grade as Europe’s debt crisis prompts a wave of downgrades that threatens to engulf the region’s highest-rated borrowers, with Belgium also facing a possible cut.
Will the EU begin issuing bonds soon?
$6.5 trillion in corporate bond issues are maturing in 2011 and 2012 globally.
U.S. and EU officials are hoping to construct an 800-million-citizen-strong market with converging regulatory regimes whose standards will set the benchmark for product rules the world over.
More than 90% of U.S. homeowners do not fight their foreclosures in court.
Is JPMorgan shifting their silver shorts to offshore banks?
Are the Chinese playing grandmaster chess against an amateur America that can’t see beyond the second move?
A U.S. Border Patrol agent was shot and killed along the Southwestern border last week.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder says that the new threat that we are facing is from American citizens.
In the Washington D.C. area, Metro Police started randomly inspecting bags at the Braddock Road and College Park Metro stations Tuesday.
The FBI is assembling a massive database on thousands of Americans, many of whom have not been accused of any crime, the Washington Post's Dana Priest and William Arkin report.
Will a new plan turn postal delivery vehicles into high-tech data collection gatherers?
Two people were killed and 41 injured in an explosion next to a Kampala-bound bus in downtown Nairobi on Monday night.
A divided Federal Communications Commission has approved new rules meant to prohibit broadband companies from interfering with Internet traffic flowing to their customers.
The Department of Homeland Security has seized more than 80 domain names since November – shutting down websites it alleges have been trafficking in counterfeit goods.
An environmental group that analyzed drinking water samples in 35 cities across the United States, including Bethesda and Washington, found that 31 of them contained hexavalent chromium, a probable carcinogen that was made famous by the film "Erin Brockovich".
Chinese officials have vowed to ramp-up efforts to control the weather, announcing on Thursday that they intend to try to use technology to reduce natural disasters and combat droughts.
The United States has been attempting to bully the EU into accepting genetically-modified crops.
A magnitude 7.4 earthquake off the coast of Japan early Wednesday triggered a tsunami warning for a group of remote islands and an advisory for the southern region of the country, the Japanese Meteorological Agency said.
A storm pounding California with record rain forced authorities in the San Joaquin Valley to order 2,000 residents to evacuate the farming community of McFarland due to major flooding.
In the UK, nearly 200 swine flu victims are currently fighting for their lives.
The Obama administration has declared that the field of synthetic biology poses only "limited risks" and should not be restricted.
More Islamic students than ever are enrolling at Catholic universities in the United States.
Ten members of an Iranian home fellowship who had gathered together to worship and study the Word of God were arrested by security officers who entered the house, seizing every member of the church.
Religious leaders across different faiths joined together with Open Doors, a ministry that serves persecuted Christians around the world, on Monday to call attention to the systematic "extermination" of Iraqi Christians.
A new survey has found that 54 percent of "evangelical Protestants" believe that people from religions other than Christianity can get into heaven.
Lastly, the BBC has angered Christians with a TV drama in which the Virgin Mary is portrayed as a prostitute and sex cheat.
