US Politics and Tax Cuts: Sanders' Remarkable 8 1/2-Hour "BernieBuster" Challenges Republicans...and Obama

Despite some hostile immediate reactions from progressives, including a non-binding resolution by the House Democratic Caucus that they would not even consider voting on the deal unless it was amended, Obama appeared to have won the argument within his party by Sunday.

But a remarkable piece of political theatre that took place on the floor of the Senate on Friday has energised opposition within some circles to the compromise. At 10:24 a.m., Bernie Sanders, the 69-year old Independent senator form Vermont, began a speech criticising the compromise as a “bad deal” for Americans. Eight and a half hours later, without eating or even sitting, Sanders concluded what became instantly known as the #filibernie on Twitter, where the speech trended Number 1 worldwide on Friday afternoon. While he was speaking the filibernie.com and berniesandersisstilltalking.com websites sprung up, and at the former the whole speech is still available on video with the comment: "Because somewhere on the internet this deserves to be looping forever...."

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WikiLeaks CyberWar Update: Is Amazon UK Down?

UPDATE 13 DECEMBER: Amazon says a hardware failure, rather than an attack, took down its European sites for about 45 minutes on Sunday night.

A spokeswoman said, "The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European datacenter network and not the result of a DDOS attempt."

UPDATE 2145 GMT: All Amazon sites in Europe are back on-line.

UPDATE 2140 GMT: Amazon is now reporting "Performance Issues" with Amazon Simple Notification Service (Ireland) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Ireland).

UPDATE 2120 GMT: It is reported that the outage is because Amazon Data Services for Europe, based in Dublin, is down.

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Sunday Music Video Special: Vladmir Putin Finds His Thrills on "Blueberry Hill"

Last weekend's treat was North Korean Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things. This week it is Russian Dear Leader Vladimir Putin Playing Piano and Singing Fats Domino.

From a charity concert on Friday in St Petersburg for children suffering from eye diseases and cancer:

WikiLeaks War-on-Terror Special: How the US Pressured Germany To Drop the Khaled al-Masri "Rendition" Case

At the end of 2003 Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen,was abducted in Macedonia, flown to Afghanistan, and interrogated and allegedly tortured by the CIA for several months. He was released in May 2004 after high-level officials concluded he had been detained in error, probably because of the similarity of his name to that of an al-Qa'eda operative. 

In February 2007, amidst growing pressure for legal action against those responsible for the abduction and abuse of el-Masri, the Deputy Chief of the US Mission approached Germany's Deputy National Security Advisor: "Our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German Government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S."

Yesterday, almost four years after that meeting, a German court rejected el-Masri's lawsuit seeking to force the German government to prosecute the American operatives involved in his kidnap and interrogation.

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The Latest from Iran (12 December): Messages, "Confessions", and Those Behind Bars

2035 GMT: Economy (Oversight) Watch. Kalemeh reports that the Central Bank has not published data on economic growth for 28 months.

Economist Mohsen Renani, in comments published in the conservative Aftab, has alleged that academic studies on effects of subsidy cuts are censored and media are not allowed to publish data. He asserts that subsidy cuts will stop development for several generations and cause social crisis.

MP Hassan Ghafourifard chimes in, warning the Govt does not know how to implement subsidy cuts.

2030 GMT: The Battle Within. Meanwhile, even as Ayatollahs Mahdavi Kani and Mesbah Yazdi declare that unity will emerge amongst principlists, the feuding within the establishment continues. Tehran Prosecutor General Abbas Jafari Doulatabadi has lashed out at former Minister of Justice Gholam-Hossein Elham, who criticised the prosecutor for supporting sedition. Doulatabadi responded that "obviously a new fitna movement is taking shape" within the system.

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Iran Video: Sakineh's Latest "Confession" --- The Press TV "Documentary"

This week we have followed the confusing story in which Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the woman sentenced to death for adultery and complicity in the murder of her husband, had wrongly reported to have been freed from prison.

The reality was that Ashtiani and her son Sajad Ghaderzadeh, who has also been detained, were taken to the family home so they could not only film "confessions" but also carry out a reconstruction of the murder for a "documentary" on Iran's Press TV.

Part 1 of 3

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This week the Committee to Protect Journalists announced that 145 journalists were in prison in 2010. Iran and China led an ignominious list with each having 34 reporters behind bars. 

We suspected, however, that Tehran may actually have claimed the gold medal for detentions. So we turned to Arshama3's Blog, which has maintained a comprehensive list since autumn 2009.

We asked Arshama for an update and received this list. While further information is needed in some cases, it appears that more than 100 journalists are in prison today, with others facing a return to serve sentences that have been handed down:

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Israel-Palestine Video and Transcript: Hillary Clinton "The Parties Have a Long Way to Go"

On Friday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at the Saban Center in Washington DC. The video is in three parts throughout the transcript.

PART 1 OF 3

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Turkey-Israel Analysis: Ankara's "Win-Win" Strategy Does Not Bring Reconciliation...Yet

This is the pursuit of Turkey's "strategic depth", developed by Foreign Minister Davutoglu, through "strategic parts", in this case, a method to solve problems --- eventually --- while maintaining stature after the red alert in relations with West Jerusalem.

But tension cannot be sustained forever. So who gives first? Israel's Netanyahu government or the Erdogan camp in Turkey?

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Iran Document: Mousavi's Call for The Religious Month of Moharram

UPDATE 1650 GMT: Mir Hossein Mousavi has also made a number of interesting comments in an interview with Gholam Sabz. We have posted the highlights in our Sunday updates.

It is our responsibility to tell the truth and erode the mortar that holds the palace of lies together. It is our everlasting responsibility to keep alive the memory of high-statured martyrs of the Revolution, the war, and the events after the [2009] election with the noble women and men in the prisons, just like all the family of Imam Hossein. And it is our responsibility to help protect the traditional social centers by organising and attending the ceremonies for commemorating the epic of Ashura [on 16 December] in this memorable month.

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