President Obama said Thursday that the Occupy Wall Street protests show a "broad-based frustration" among Americans about how the U.S. financial system works.

Speaking at an East Room news conference, Obama said he has monitored the movement, which has spread to dozens of cities nationwide.

"I think it expresses the frustrations the American people feel, that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country ... and yet you're still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place," he said.

Holly Purkey, 28, is one of many Floridians trying to sell her pre-purchased burial plots for some quick cash. She is selling two burial plots in Forest Hills Memorial Park in Palm City. "This is new to me. Kind of a weird investment," said Purkey, of Port St. Lucie.

The side-by-side plots belonged to her grandparents, who had moved out of state. She bought them seven years ago. Now Purkey, a stay at home mother, wants this cemetery real estate off her hands. She would like $3,000 for the pair of plots in return. "The money would help. That's the reason why I should get these on Craigslist and do something about it," she said.

Sellers are posting online, using burial plot brokers, and also funeral homes to market the real estate. Some of those advertisements show single plots starting at about $1,000, while family plots can go for up to $50,000.

The jobless rate declined as 193,000 people left the labor force and the number of unemployed dropped by 156,000. The share of the eligible population holding a job declined to 58.1 percent, the lowest since July 1983.

“More and more individuals are giving up the job search,” said Patrick O’Keefe, a former deputy assistant secretary of labor and current director of economic research at J.H. Cohn LLP in Roseland, New Jersey.

Private hiring, which excludes government agencies, climbed 154,000 last month after an 80,000 gain. It was projected to rise by 113,000, the survey showed.

A new promotional video released by the Department of Homeland Security characterizes white middle class Americans as the most likely terrorists, as Big Sis continues its relentless drive to cement the myth that mad bombers are hiding around every corner, when in reality Americans are just as likely to be killed by lightning strikes or peanut allergies.

The video is part of Homeland Security’s $10 million dollar “See Something, Say Something” program that encourages Americans to report “suspicious activity,” which in every case throughout history has been a trait of oppressive, dictatorial regimes.

In the course of the 10 minute clip, a myriad of different behaviors are characterized as terrorism, including opposing surveillance, using a video camera, talking to police officers, wearing hoodies, driving vans, writing on a piece of paper, and using a cell phone recording application.

"You have 80% of the American people who support a balanced approach. 80% of the American people support an approach that includes revenues and includes cuts. So the notion that somehow the American people aren't sold is not the problem. The problem is members of Congress are dug in ideologically."

Iran's elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has transferred lethal new munitions to its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent months, according to senior U.S. officials, in a bid to accelerate the U.S. withdrawals from these countries.

The Revolutionary Guard has smuggled rocket-assisted exploding projectiles to its militia allies in Iraq, weapons that have already resulted in the deaths of American troops, defense officials said. They said Iranians have also given long-range rockets to the Taliban in Afghanistan, increasing the insurgents' ability to hit U.S. and other coalition positions from a safer distance.

Such arms shipments would escalate the shadow competition for influence playing out between Tehran and Washington across the Middle East and North Africa, fueled by U.S. preparations to draw down forces from two wars and the political rebellions that are sweeping the region.

U.S. donations to charity rose to $291 billion last year, a study found on Monday, but it was still more than 6 percent below a 2007 record as the nation struggles to recover from its worst recession in decades.

Americans gave nearly 4 percent more in 2010 compared to 2009, the Giving USA Foundation and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University said, perking up after the recession sparked the biggest giving slump in four decades.

Revised estimates by the study, which started in 1956, showed that during the financial crisis giving fell more than $10 billion in 2008 to $299.8 billion and then dropped more than 6 percent in 2009 to $280.3 billion.

Patrick Rooney, executive director of the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, said that giving in 2010 grew by 2.1 percent after adjusting for inflation.

An al-Qaida-linked website has posted a potential hit list of targets that include names and photos of several U.S. officials and business leaders, calling for terrorists to target these Americans in their own homes, NBC New York has learned.

The FBI has sent out a new intelligence bulletin to law enforcement agencies, warning that this new web-based threat, while not a specific plot, is very detailed. The bulletin said the list includes leaders "in government, industry and media."

The FBI has notified those individuals who are named.

NBC New York will not identify them or their companies. The list includes Wall Street firms, political leaders, leaders with think tanks and contractors who do business with the military.

As the recession gripped America, thousands more people in rural and suburban areas turned to homeless shelters for help.

The number of people using shelters or transitional housing in suburban and rural areas increased 57 percent from 2007 to 2010, with more than 500,000 people from smaller communities seeking help in 2010, according to a report by the Housing and Urban Development Department. During the same time there was a decrease in the use of shelters in urban areas.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan said Tuesday in a conference call with reporters that about 40 percent of those who served in the armed forces come from rural areas and homelessness among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans could be a contributing factor. He said the agency is stepping up efforts to combat homelessness near some military bases, and that legislation signed in 2009 by President Barack Obama contained a component that opens the door for more programs targeting homelessness in rural areas.

Four people in the U.S. who recently returned from Germany are suffering from the potentially deadly E. coli food poisoning that is sweeping across Europe. Three are hospitalized with a serious complication.

All four were in northern Germany in May. Though they didn't stay at the same hotel or eat at the same restaurants, officials are confident that they were infected with E. coli in that country.

The outbreak - which has to date killed at least 18 people and sickened more than 1,800 others - has been traced to contaminated fruit and vegetables in Germany and Spain.

Three of them - two women and a man - are hospitalized with kidney failure, a complication of E. coli that has become a hallmark of the outbreak. One of the four fell ill while on a plane to the U.S.

Two other cases are being investigated in U.S. service members in Germany, said Dr. Chris Braden, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 1901, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal launched a cartoon featuring two overly polite friends named Alphonse and Gaston. Each insisted with conspicuous courtesy that the other go first. Amid elaborate bowing, scraping, and apres-vous-ing, Alphonse and Gaston never managed to make it through an open doorway.

Now, 110 years later, economists have a name for the Alphonse and Gaston routine that’s hobbling the U.S. economy: “coordination failure,” Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its June 6 edition. Companies won’t hire because customers won’t spend. Customers won’t spend because companies won’t hire. This stare-down has been going on since approximately December 2007, when the worst slump since the Great Depression took hold. Many Americans would like someone to make a move so they can get back to prosperity. Yet they’ve lost confidence in the actions that were designed to build confidence and restore growth --namely, near-zero overnight interest rates, the bailout of

Americans are growing increasingly doubtful about direction of the US economy, according to the latest survey from business-advisory firm AlixPartners.

In fact, an increasing number, some 61 percent, say they don't expect to return to their respective pre-recession lifestyles until the spring of 2014, if ever.

What's worse, a full 10 percent said they expect they will never return to pre-recession spending.

That's a more pessimistic view than last year, when those surveyed expected that they could be back to pre-recession spending levels by the middle of 2013.

Nine NATO service members were killed Thursday in Afghanistan, including seven U.S. troops among eight who died when a powerful bomb exploded in a field where they were patrolling on foot, officials said.

Two Afghan policemen also died and two others were wounded in the explosion in the mountainous Shorabak district of Kandahar province, 12 miles from the Pakistan border, said Gen. Abdul Raziq, chief of the Afghan border police in the province.

"Two months ago, we cleared this area of terrorists, but still they are active there," Raziq said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast.

"A bomb was planted for them in a field," Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi told The Associated Press in a telephone call.

Americans are fed up with the Mexicanization of America! And finally, we are fed up with a president and members of Congress who consistently work on behalf of illegals and the state of Mexico and against the interests of the American people. The American

Police have arrested a man in Los Angeles after witnesses say they saw him lighting a fire on a hillside. Authorities say 41-year-old Catalino Pineda was seen starting a fire in the San Fernando Valley Wednesday and then walking away. Witnesses alerted au

Immigration hawks have been on a winning streak lately. An unprecedented surge of public outrage at the prospect of amnesty for illegal immigrants led to the defeat in June of the Senate immigration bill. And that was merely the latest in a series of vict