Hillary hasn’t even been offered the job, nor accepted it, and Republicans are already planning to upset her appointment as Secretary of State. They are drawing up a list of awkward questions at her congressional confirmation hearings about Bill Clinton’s finances, his links to foreign contributors, including those from Gulf states, and consultancy work that involved him meeting Arab businessmen. “Republican strategists are dusting off plans to expose Mr. Clinton's financial ties, which they will argue represent a serious conflict of interest for his wife as the country's top diplomat,” suggests Philip Sherwell in the Telegraph. One Republican strategists is quoted anonymously: “How can Hillary represent our interests when Bill is said to have close financial ties with some oil sheikhs?” Seems the GOP strategists are getting a little ahead of themselves. The report also notes that Obama has chosen Greg Craig, a Washington lawyer who represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment, as White House chief counsel, quoting Democratic officials.

An 7.5-magnitude earthquake rattled parts of Indonesia early Monday, causing the country's meteorological agency to warn of a possible tsunami. While the warning was later lifted and there were no immediate reports of casualties, "It felt quite big and caused panic," a phone operator told Reuters. Just last week, officials debuted a new tsunami detection and alert system developed in the aftermath of the tsunami that left 170,000 people dead of missing in the Aceh province four years ago.

Rudy Giuliani hasn't put elected office behind him. The former mayor of New York City and onetime presidential hopeful did not rule out running for governor of the Empire State. "I don't know if I'd be interested in it, but I'll think about it when the right time comes along," he said during a Q&A following a speech in Dubai. As for whether he'd run for the presidency again, Giuliani remarked that he "can't evaluate" his chances right now.

George Soros made his fortune out of predicting violent swings in the market, so his take on the current financial mess in the New York Review of Books is particularly timely. He acknowledges that this is no time for unregulated markets. “Since money and credit do not move in lockstep and asset bubbles cannot be controlled purely by monetary means, additional tools must be employed, or more accurately reactivated, since they were in active use in the 1950s and 1960s,” he writes. But he adds a note of caution on the dangers of regulating markets. “In view of the tremendous losses suffered by the general public, there is a real danger that excessive deregulation will be succeeded by punitive reregulation. That would be unfortunate because regulations are liable to be even more deficient than the market mechanism,” he argues. “Regulators are not only human but also bureaucratic and susceptible to lobbying and corruption.”

The Iraqi Cabinet’s plan to have U.S. forces remain in the country through 2011 has been passed for a final decision to the Iraqi Parliament, where the deal faces fierce opposition from some lawmakers who consider it a sellout to the Americans, reports Tina Susman, the LA Times’s woman in Baghdad. But Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, who abandoned his resistance to the plan last week, is now set on a collision course with the militant Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, who has urged his supporters to rise up against the pact. A spokesman for Sadrist lawmakers called the decision "highly regrettable" and said Maliki "gave away Iraq on a gold platter to the occupier." The Bush administration is relieved at the deal because if it had not been approved by the end of the year, American troops would have had no legal standing to remain in Iraq unless the United Nations mandate were extended.

Obama’s online army of internet supporters have been given their first nod by the president elect. His first video address was posted on YouTube, the first of a regular communion with the online community. His message was almost Churchillian. “While the road will be long and the work will be hard, I know we can steer ourselves out of this crisis,” he said. The Observer describes how Obama intends to use the internet for his own ends. “Obama plans to bring his online backers, who shatter fundraising records, with him to Washington. They are more than 3.1 million-strong in terms of financial contributors and volunteers. In terms of an email database of supporters, they number about 10 million ... It is a massive lobby of activists across the nation, which Obama can directly access via email or social networking websites … He can deploy them in support of his plans, lobbying reluctant politicians or businesses.” In his day, FDR broadcast his weekly fireside chats to similarly appeal over the heads of Congress.

Seems it’s not too difficult to wind up Karl Rove. He submitted to the Q and A in the Times magazine and ended up getting what Al Gore would call “snippy” with the interviewer. He was his old bruising self along the way, describing Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel as “a tough, hard, take-no-prisoners, head-in-your-face, scream-and-shout, send-them-a-dead-fish partisan” and Joe Biden “an odd combination of longevity and long-windedness that passes for wisdom in Washington.” Then the questioning turned to his being booed in public. “You’ve been booed off stages lately,” said Deborah Solomon, clearly tweaking the dignity of the modern Machiavelli. “No, I haven’t,” he snapped. “I’ve been booed on stages. I’m a little bit tougher than to walk off a stage because someone says something ugly.” When asked what parting advice he would offer his boss and pupil George W. Bush he snipped, “With all due respect, I don’t need you to transmit what I want to say to my friend of 35 years.” Which is not exactly playing the game.

The Sixties baby boomers may have lost the White House, but a new generation is on the way at Fort Bragg, home to the 22,000 soldiers of the 82nd Airborne and 29,000 soldiers from other units. Since they began returning en masse from serving in Iraq, they have set off a tsunami of pregnancies among returning women soldiers and army wives. The base hospital is delivering 300 babies a month and on Saturday, 1,000 recent mothers and mothers-to-be gathered at the largest military baby shower ever assembled, the New York Times writes. Attendance at Dads 101, a class for new and soon-to-be fathers, has doubled. And there has been a run on maternity-size combat uniforms in the digitized, sand-patterned camouflage used in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I think it’s the nature of war to come back and to want to create something,” explained Wanda McCants, a nurse on the labor and delivery unit.

Conventional wisdom has been that Barack Obama will retain Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, but, buried in a Washington Post story about Gates' transition, is an "outside expert close to the Obama transition team" saying that "the shine is off" the idea of retaining Gates." According to the Post, "drawbacks are emerging over keeping Gates in place for any significant period"—namely, will Gates want to stay on even if Obama replaces much of his staff with Democrats? One scenario has Gates' staying on for a short initial period, while Richard J. Danzig, an Obama adviser and former Navy secretary, prepares to take over as Defense secretary.

The New York Post has some startling new details on how charity queen and socialite Brooke Astor's son took advantage of her before her death. In "Mrs. Astor Regrets" by Meryl Gordon, excerpted in the Post, her nurses placed a baby monitor in her room so they could track her movements, which gave her help an ear into her conversations with lawyers as they bullied her into rerouting her fortune from charities to her son's bank account. According to notes from her nurse, the day before Astor changed her will to bequeath $30 million to her son, Astor was suffering "Paranoia, undecipherable words, disoriented after lunch." In a later meeting, in which she left her son an additional $60 million, the Post reports she "was a frightened old woman being dragged down a hallway against her objections to a close-door meeting."

The plot to assassinate Obama before he was even elected gets the paperback thriller treatment from the London Independent. The Denver pair Shawn Adolf and his cousin Tharin Gartrell were so confused that the threat was never severe. “Adolf and Gartrell may have had some fearsome weaponry, and a vague affiliation with a white supremacist biker gang called the Sons of Silence,” writes Andrew Gumbell. “But they were also rank amateurs living in a crystal methamphetamine-induced haze of paranoia and race hatred.” When the cops stopped one in his truck they found “two high-powered rifles, a silencer, a bulletproof vest, camouflage clothing, and three fake identification cards. But it was also clear that Gartrell was high on meth as well as drunk. The truck contained enough drug-making equipment to be considered a mobile meth lab.” And the pair will not be charged for attempted murder, just illegal drugs and weapons possession. Even the prosecutor, Troy Eid, says “he is absolutely confident the ‘meth heads’, as he calls them, never posed a risk to Obama or anyone else.”

The campaign over, Sarah Palin returns to an Alaska feeling the chill of the sharp drop in the price of oil. As Terry Keenan writes in the New York Post, while much of the developed world is cheering cheaper gas at the pumps, oil exporters like Alaska and Russia are facing economic mayhem and a fiscal nightmare. “Remember Palin's boast on the campaign trail that she gave every Alaskan an extra $1,200 in pocket money this summer?” asks Keenan. “Well, that and her balanced budget all goes away when oil is priced where it is today. [It is currently $57 a barrel.] Not only does Alaska have less revenue to tax, its cut goes down, too. Right now, the state's cut on a barrel of crude coming out of Prudhoe Bay is only about 25 percent, compared with a 41 percent take when oil was at $120. Budget experts estimate that oil needs to be in the mid-$70s for the Alaska state budget to break even.” Not the most promising territory from which to launch a sound money presidential bid in 2012.

With all the speculation about a new Great Depression, The Boston Globe tries to imagine exactly what it might look and feel like. Starvation is unlikely, so cross off long soup-lines. Instead, Americans are likely to move towards cheap calories, so "lean times could have the odd effect of making the population fatter, as more Americans eat like today's poor." Writes the Globe, "In general, much of a modern depression would unfold in the domestic sphere: people driving less, shopping less, and eating in their houses more. They would watch television at home; unemployed parents would watch over their own kids instead of taking them to day care. With online banking, it would even be possible to have a bank run in which no one leaves the comfort of their home."

When Los Angeles Latinos wanted to draw attention to their importance to the community, during the anti-illegal immigration frenzy in 2006, they all took the same day off and the city ground to a halt. Now, in protest at the passing of Proposition 8 that forbids gay marriages in California, gays, too, are planning to simultaneously withdraw their labor. According to Joel Stein, who came up with the idea, “We worked out some kinks, like ‘pretending you are sick’ for people who aren't out of the closet at work. For economic impact, we picked a Friday -- one of the big shopping days before Christmas and the day People, Us Weekly and Star usually sell out at newsstands. We also decided that because this is a general strike, not a directed boycott, even gay-owned, gay-patronized businesses should shut down.” But co-organizer Amy Balliett, a Seattle lesbian who created the anti-Prop 8 protest group JoinTheImpact.com, has found a glitch. "I hate to say this, but we should even say, 'Don't even go out to the bars,' " she said. "I just don't know if the community can stick to that."

The conventional view of the division of labor in the Beatles is that Paul McCartney provided the melodic songs (“Yesterday”) and John Lennon the more adventurous (“Strawberry Fields Forever.”) Not always, it seems. The Observer reports that McCartney is planning to release “Carnival of Light,” a lost Beatles track he wrote 40 years ago inspired by the music of avant garde composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. It sounds as if the song went missing for a good reason. It features random drumming, a distorted guitar, a church organ, the sound of gargling, and Lennon and McCartney screaming ‘Are you all right?’ and ‘Barcelona!’” The experimental piece was commissioned for “a happening” at the Roundhouse in London. “It will help reaffirm McCartney's claim to have been the most musically adventurous of all the Beatles,” said John Wilson, the BBC reporter who first reported the story. Yeah, yeah.

Helen Mirren has been filming in her husband Taylor Hackford’s new movie Love Ranch, in which she plays a madam running a brothel in 1970s Nevada. Getting into the part for Dame Helen meant coming to discover some mundane insights into men who pay for sex. “Funnily enough,” said Ms. Mirren, “the older prostitutes are the most popular, because the guys think they’re user-friendly. They’re comfortable with them, so they don’t feel intimidated. And guys who go to brothels are not the most successful guys in the world sexually, so that’s what they need. It’s all about not being intimidated.” And she lets it be known that she has never had children after being traumatized by watching a film of childbirth shown to her at her convent school. “It was horrific and it gave me an absolute horror of childbirth,” she said.

As America’s most missed funny columnist Dave Barry put it in his blog, “Sorry about the lack of posting, but this is the Miami Book Fair weekend, and the World Famous But Not In A Good Way Rock Bottom Remainders are in town, so we have been doing a lot of [“drinking” deleted] rehearsing.” The Rock Bottom Remainders is an impromptu band that in the current incarnation is made up of Simpsons creator Matt Groening, comic writer Carl Hiaasen, “Angela’s Ashes” author Frank McCourt, thriller writer Ridley Pearson, “Joy Luck Club” author Amy Tan, and the serial legal thriller writer Scott Turow. Missing were sometime members Stephen King, Maya Angelou, and legendary rock star Al Kooper. Barry’s blog shows pictures of the band, including Turow in a multicolor wig, though there is wisely no audio attached of their set which included a memorable rendition of the Talking Heads hit “Then She Was.”

After five hours of meetings in Washington, the leaders on the world's top economies emerged from the Group of 20 financial summit with a predictable announcement: they will expand efforts to shore up the global economy and do more to improve regulation of financial markets. The leaders urged individual countries to act appropriately in order to support growth and stability and called for more resources for the International Monetary Fund to help developing countries. They also established "colleges of supervisors" that will monitor the world's largest financial institutions. "Against this background of deteriorating economic conditions worldwide, we agreed that a broader policy response is needed, based on closer macroeconomic cooperation, to restore growth, avoid negative spillovers and support emerging market economies and developing countries," a statement from the leaders read.