Summary: In a matter of weeks, with a new Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Congress will go from trying to put illegal aliens on a path to citizenship to debating whether children born to parents who are in the country illegally should continue to enjoy automatic U.S. citizenship. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on December 26, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that U.S. agencies were looking into whether al-Qaida extremists in Yemen directed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and provided him with the explosives used in the failed bombing of Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit.

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Summary: By a vote of 216-198, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the so-called Dream Act — legislation that would give hundreds of thousands of foreign-born youth brought into the country illegally a path to legal status. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on December 9, 2009, Aubrey Immelman provided his weekly report of U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Summary: The growing fear among some citizens of losing their rights and freedoms has created a political backlash toward the U.S. government and manifested itself in violent rhetoric and anti-government groups who want to “take their country back.” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews takes a hard look at the recent surge of anger on the political right in “Rise of the New Right: A Hardball Documentary with Chris Matthews.” In this blog entry, Aubrey Immelman chronicles the rise of rightwing extremism in America following the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States in November 2008. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on June 16, 2009 Aubrey Immelman reported that North Korea threatened a “fire shower of nuclear retaliation” if provoked by the U.S., but that U.S. officials were downplaying any imminent threat to the United States of a North Korean missile strike or confrontation between the two countries at sea.

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Summary: Conspiracy theories have long been a fixture on the political landscape, with political paranoia most virulent among politically marginalized sectors of the polity. So, with Democrats holding the reins of power, it stands to reason that the right-wing fringe has become the prime repository of collective craziness. … Conspiracy-theorist-in-chief Michele Bachmann. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on February 20, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi reporter who hurled his shoes at George W. Bush, said at his trial that President Bush’s smile as he talked about achievements in Iraq had made him think of “the killing of more than a million Iraqis, the disrespect for the sanctity of the mosques and houses, the rapes of women,” and enraged him. “After more than a million Iraqis killed, after all the economic and social destruction … I felt that this person is the killer of the people, the prime murderer. I was enraged and threw my shoes at him.”

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Summary: A car bomb exploded in a livestock market in Iraq’s southern Babil province, killing 12 people, wounding 40, and shattering a peace that had held in the area for some time. … Insurgents attacked a main U.S.-Iraqi base in the northern city of Mosul, killing one American soldier and striking directly at the Iraqi command center for an offensive against the militants.

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