Ex-FBI agent pleads with US to meet kidnappers' demands in video

A screenshot of the video on the Levinson family website. Photograph: AP

Video footage has emerged of a former FBI agent who went missing in Iran in March 2007, showing him alive but held hostage by an unknown group.
The family of Robert Levinson, an American private detective who worked for the FBI in the past, have posted a video on the internet showing the 63-year-old looking lean and haggard, asking the US government to meet the demands of his kidnappers.
"I have been treated well, but I need the help of the United States government to answer the requests of the group that has held me for three and a half years," he said, without elaborating on what his captors were asking for.
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/09/fbi-agent-us-kidnappers-demands?newsfeed=true

Conservative pundits turn down Newt

Right-leaning commentators have been very critical of Gingrich. | NBC, AP, John Shinkle Close

By ALEXANDER BURNS | 12/9/11 10:42 AM EST Updated: 12/9/11 11:31 AM EST

The conservative opinion elite has reached a consensus on Newt Gingrich: He’s not the one they’ve been waiting for.
In the days since Gingrich leaped to the forefront of the Republican presidential race, the nation’s most prominent right-leaning commentators — many of whom have spent the last year pining for alternatives to Mitt Romney — have rendered a swift and caustic judgment on their party’s latest out-of-right-field challenger.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70178.html#ixzz1g3XFByuz

A Treaty to Save Euro May Split Europe

Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, left, and Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands spoke at E.U. headquarters on Friday.

BRUSSELS — European leaders, meeting until the early hours of Friday, agreed to sign an intergovernmental treaty that would require them to enforce stricter fiscal and financial discipline in their future budgets. But efforts to get unanimity among the 27 members of the European Union, as desired by Germany, failed as Britain refused to go along.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/business/global/european-leaders-agree-on-fiscal-treaty.html