North America

Members of the hacking group Anonymous have claimed credit for hacking into the website of the global intelligence company Stratfor and then making donations to charities using credit card information found unsecured on the Stratfor website. The hacking group also released the information on 4,000 credit cards owned by subscribers of Stratfor’s products.

New York – The UN General Assembly approved a budget of $5.15 billion for all its activities, including mostly humanitarian aid and peace missions, over the period of 2012-2013. Meanwhile, nuclear powers spend more than 90 billion dollars a year on atomic weapons. The U.S. alone spends over 50 billion dollars annually on this weapon of mass destruction.

Accused whistle-blower Pvt. Bradley Manning turned 24 Saturday. He spent his birthday in a pretrial military hearing that could ultimately lead to a sentence of life … or death. Manning stands accused of causing the largest leak of government secrets in United States history. More on Manning shortly. First, a reminder of what he is accused of leaking.

Here we give diffusion to a great song by Mark Lesseraux that has become also a good video produced and directed by Matthew Dimakos:
[http://youtu.be/-b9Bj72qzjg](http://youtu.be/-b9Bj72qzjg)

It is a synthesis of the new spirit that was manifested during 2011 and surely will develop with strenght in the new year to come, since it reflects deep hopes shared by the 99%.

The documents were found among scores of other classified material at a junkyard outside Baghdad as an attendant used them as fuel to cook his dinner

See video: [http://www.nationofchange.org/us-military-discards-trove-documents-2005-haditha-massacre-iraqis-1324477793](http://www.nationofchange.org/us-military-discards-trove-documents-2005-haditha-massacre-iraqis-1324477793)

A survivor of the Hiroshima bombing urged a library full of students at Brooklyn International High School to work towards a world without war.

Setsuko Thurlowtold her tale of survival to a group of about fifty seniors on the 70 th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the U.S. into World War II.

We are all familiar with the proverb: **Not all that glitters is gold.** The Romans had a saying which ran as follows: **Aliud est theoria, aliud est practica** – **One thing is theory, another thing is practice.**

Everybody is entitled to have dreams and anyway every one has, maybe some people more than others. The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon appears to be very active in this field—he now pretends that big corporations, banks and eventually all the private sector everywhere, to be more active in combating modern forms of slavery!

New York –The world risks falling back into recession if developed countries embark prematurely on fiscal austerity measures, according to a UN report, which recommends additional stimulus measures as well as more forceful international coordination to stimulate job creation and investment.

Unlike Internet censorship in China or Iran – which the US denounces vociferously – the fact that the US is such a hub of servers for the whole world means that any censorship to its cyberspace has worldwide repercussions. We report here on a campaign by Avaaz to resist new censorship legislation at present being debated in the Senate.