Secession Petitions in Forty-Seven States

South Dakota, Wisconsin, Virginia, Rhode Island, Idaho, Illinois, New Hampshire, Minnesota, New Mexico,  Maine, Iowa, Washington, Massachusetts, Alaska and Hawaii all now have secession petitions, according to the White House.

This brings the total number of states to forty-seven.

Only Maryland, Vermont, and Connecticut are without petitions, at this point, with expectations that they won't be far behind.

One petition, asks that all the states that have asked to secede, be allowed to do so as one group, rather than individually.

Counter protests continue, with one asking that the city of Austin, Texas be allowed to leave the state, and remain in the US.

China Nears Next Government

In Beijing, more than twenty-two hundred delegates have been meeting for the last week as they discuss the selection of a new Central Committee.

That committee will then meet, on Thursday, to endorse China's top decision making body, the Politburo Standing Committee.

The Standing Committee will then announce one of their number as the next President.

Every ten years the Congress occurs, and the new selections are made.

All the decision making occurs behind closed doors.

Normally, it mostly means younger men come in to replace those who are now among the oldest.

That's especially true, as most of it's members are past the retirement age.

This time, rumors suggest that the Central Committee might be reduced from nine people down to seven.

Experts don't expect much policy change from the new Committee and President.

EU and Jordan Strikes Against Austerity

Austerity protests seem to be the theme of the day, as a dozen major protests have broken out across Europe and Jordan.

General strikes have been announced in Spain, Portugal, and Greece as workers try to coerce the government into cancelling new rounds of austerity measures.

Italy, Belgium, Austria, and France have all seen smaller strikes, with four cities in Italy seeing protests.

The European Trade Union Confederation is organizing the international strikes, and is hoping to get other countries to join them.

Supposedly forty unions, in twenty-three countries agreed to join them.

Violence in Spain saw over eighty people arrested, when they tried to keep buses from leaving a station. Eighteen police were amongst the dozens injured.

Transportation and electrical companies have been hardest hit by the strikes.

In Jordan people massed to protest an end to fuel subsidies.



View Protests around Europe, November 14 in a larger map

Israel Takes Out The Military Head of Hamas

Israel claims to have taken out the head of Hamas's military, Ahmed Jabari.

The Israeli Air Force also says they took out twenty long range launchers, that had been hidden underground.

With the strikes, Israel marked the beginning of Operation Pillar of Defense.

IDF spokesman Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai said, "The first aim of this operation is to bring back quiet to southern Israel, and the second target is to strike at terror organizations."

Operation Pillar of Defense follows several days of rocket attacks, from Gaza, against southern Israel.

The Israeli government states that it will do whatever it takes to end the terror.

The IDF posted this youtube video of the strike:

Obama to Announce His Desire For Tax Increases

President Obama is set to have a press conference at 1:30pm EST.

During the conference he is expected to focus on his $1.6 trillion in tax increases, that he desires, and his demands of what he expects from the country, for it.

Part of his plan is to raise most of it from those who make more than $250,000 a year, in order to cut at the national debt.

Economic experts point out the intelligence of that, by wondering who then will pay for new job creation, or maintain current payrolls.

If the business owners have less money, many of them will have to make job cuts, to stay in business.

Simple things like that are ignored by the administration, who refuses to focus on it's own unwillingness to cut costly, ineffective government programs, which caused the debt in the first place.

Congressional Republicans are pledging to block the tax hikes, who have offered to work on closing loopholes and deductions.

Either way, the nation looks to be headed straight for the "fiscal cliff", in January.

On January first, a combination of expiring pro growth tax policies from 2001 and 2003, the end of the once temporary payroll tax cut, and some of Obamacare's eighteen new tax hikes, will all hit.

Together they represent five hundred billion dollars over the course of just one year, making it the largest tax increase to ever hit the US.

Here's a per person breakdown of that $500 billion, according to The Heritage Foundation:

• Families with an average income of $70,662: tax increase of $4,138

• Baby boomers with an average income of $95,099: tax increase of $4,223

• Low-income workers with an average income of $24,757: tax increase of $1,207

• Millennials with an average income of $23,917: tax increase of $1,099

• Retirees with an average income of $42,553: tax increase of $857

Denmark Gives up on Fat Tax

Denmark has decided to abolish it's fat tax.

In October of 2011, the country began adding a tax to any food with saturated fat levels of more than 2.3%.

That included dairy produce, meat, and processed foods.

Their goal was to reduce obesity in the country, by making being fat, more expensive.

But the move backfired, as the cost of the tax caused food prices to go up, putting jobs at risk.

Danes were also avoiding the tax, by crossing over into Germany to buy foods.

Several supermarket chains have already said they will reduce the price of foods, as soon as the tax is gone.

It is not exactly clear when Denmark will be removing the tax, but the government has pledged to do so.

The country has also announced that it will give up on a planned sugar tax.

Shenzou 10 Scheduled For June 2013

Shenzou 9's liftoff

China is planning their next manned space mission.

Shenzou 10 is being scheduled for June of 2013, and like 9 will have three occupants, 2 males and a female.

They will dock with the Tiangong 1 module, which has been in orbit for over a year.

The astronauts are set to stay there for fifteen days, perform experiments as well as performing web chats with Chinese citizens.

Selection of the crew will not be taking place until the beginning of 2013, according to officials.

Pepsi Special Debuts in Japan

Pepsi is trying something new, and they're calling it Pepsi Special.

Sales of the new soda started Tuesday in Japan.

The company made Special with dextrin, a fiber which is supposed to help reduce fat levels.

Special is supposed to taste just like regular Pepsi.

A commercial for the soda shows a Japanese man torn between pizza and hamburger, but thanks to Pepsi Special he can have both.

Time will tell if it makes it's way over to other parts of the world.

Titan Supercomputer, Fastest in The World

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, now holds the fastest computer in the world.

The Titan can run up to 17.59 Petaflops a second.

A Petaflop is about a quadrillion (a thousand trillion) calculations.

Titan is made up of 560,640 processors and 261,632 accelerator cores.

The computer not only calculates so much so fast, but it uses less than twenty megawatts of electricity, for each Petaflop.

Don't be worrying about getting one for home, quite yet, the supercomputer takes up a rather large area.

Duke Researchers Claim to Perfect Invsibility Cloak

Researchers at Duke University claim to have perfected an invisibility cloak.

They used a diamond shaped area to keep there from being any reflections.

Unfortunately, it only works from one direction, making it not quite yet feasible for real world applications.

So researchers perfection is one dimensional, not the three of the world we live in.

However, it is an exciting step forward.