Bloomberg Reports: “Unfortunately we’re continuing to see unacceptable levels of violence inside that country,” Obama said today, thanking Abdullah, a U.S. ally, for being the first Arab leader to publicly call on Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad to relinquish power.

“We will continue to consult very closely with Jordan to create the kind of international pressure and environment that encourages the current Syrian regime to step aside,” he said after the two met at the White House.

The meeting comes as Abdullah is attempting to revive Mideast peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians that have been frozen for more than a year.

Capital Tonight Reports: Cuomo’s total cash on hand is $14,382,577.13 surely enough to scare away many potential Republican challengers.

NYPIRG’s Bill Mahoney (Zen master of campaign filings) points out that Cuomo’s campaign numbers far exceed Eliot Spitzer’s at this time, in both money raised and money spent. You will remember that Spitzer used campaign cash to run TV ads against the unions in order to defend his budget, where as Cuomo tempered the health industry by bringing them to the bargaining table, and had some help in defending his budget from the Committee to Save NY.

Contributions: $11,672,277.87 (Cuomo) $6,654,015.73 (Spitzer)

Expenditures $2,200,818.51 (Cuomo) $9,306,019.90 (Spitzer)

$ In Bank, end of year $2,914,522.06 (Spitzer) $14,382,577.13 (Cuomo)

We just started combing through the expenditures. His biggest expenses seem to be tied to his birthday fundraiser on the Intrepid where the campaign spent roughly about $95k.

Wah Post Reports: A homeless New York teen who’s a semifinalist in a prestigious national science contest has been invited to watch President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

Brentwood High School senior Samantha Garvey has been invited to the Jan. 24 speech as a guest of Long Island Congressman Steve Israel.

Garvey’s story of academic success despite financial hardships has gained nationwide attention.

Last week, she was named one of 300 semifinalists in the Intel science contest. She’s currently living in a homeless shelter, although Suffolk County officials are renovating a home for the Garvey family.

Forward Reports: The most recent figure of between 6.4 million and 6.6 million is about 20  percent higher than the previous estimate of 5.2 million proposed by the 2000  National Jewish Population Survey, which was sponsored by the Jewish Federations  of North America. That study has since been widely criticized as flawed, an  assessment now accepted by the survey’s sponsor.

The first new study places the golden number at 6,588,000. Ira Sheskin, a  human geographer at the University of Miami, and Arnold Dashefsky, a sociologist  at the University of Connecticut, reported that figure on December 18 in their  annual survey of the Jews in America for the North American Jewish Data Bank at  the University of Connecticut.

Leonard Saxe, a Brandeis University sociologist, put the number of U.S. Jews  at 6.4 million in the final version of his study, released on December 23. Saxe  first publicized his results in an interim report in December 2010, at which  point he said the American Jewish population was 6.5 million. The final study is “a slightly more conservative adjustment,” he said.

Wash Post Reports: The agreement among six political parties all but guarantees that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party will lead Egypt’s first elected parliament since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in February, with the Islamist party expected to control as many as half the seats.

Under the power-sharing agreement, the ultraconservative Salafist Nour party and the liberal al-Wafd party would also claim top positions, with their representatives serving as deputy speakers, the parties announced during a news conference Monday at the Freedom and Justice Party’s headquarters.

With a week left until the lower house of the parliament meets, the Freedom and Justice Party said its nominee for speaker would be Mohamed Saad Katatny, the party’s secretary general.

National Post Reports: In recent days, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver have complained that foreign-financed “radical” opponents of the plan have hijacked the Northern Gateway debate and threaten to slow down the hearings…

Just because certain people in the United States would like to see Canada be one giant national park for the northern half of North America, I don’t think that’s part of what our review process is all about. Our process is there to determine what the needs and desires of Canadians are,” Said Harper.

Harper said he is concerned that the review is now subject to “extraordinary delay, and they’re increasingly vulnerable to foreign money coming in for the sole purpose of delaying the process.

Harper added that he doesn’t object to foreigners expressing their opinion. “But I don’t want them to be able to hijack the process so that we don’t make a decision that’s timely or in the interests of Canadians.”

Late last year, the U.S. government delayed a regulatory decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would have shipped Alberta oil to the southern U.S.

This development has, in government circles, highlighted the need to diversify in other energy markets, such as Asia.

“I think what’s happened around the Keystone is a wakeup call, the degree to which we are dependent or possibly held hostage to decisions in the United States, and especially decisions that may be made for very bad political reasons,” said Harper. “What I think I’d make clear is that I believe selling our energy products to Asia is in the country’s national interest.”

Tripoli Post Reports: The power cuts in Libya are to end soon according to a well informed source. The maintenance work is being done at a very high speed all over the country and at the same time new power cables are being laid to guarantee continuous supply of power in all regions. It is worth mentioning here that 2 of the GE Company workers were killed lately when they were fired upon in a region west of Tripoli while repairing a faulty electricity transmission tower.