William Booth | Mexico City | Jan 8

WaPo - When news director Francisco Cobo heard the explosion outside his television studio, as his two on-air anchors were presenting the evening news, he thought it might be a story. Then, Cobo said, he realized: We are the story.

The Televisa network news offices in the northern city of Monterrey were attacked Tuesday night in a commando-style raid by hooded gunmen who fired on the front doors of the building and then lobbed a hand grenade into the parking lot near a reporter and her cameraman. No one was hurt in the attack, which occurred at 8:40 p.m. in the prosperous manufacturing metropolis, which many executives consider one of the safer cities in Mexico.

The assailants drove a red Pontiac with Texas plates. They left a threatening message, a now-common tactic used by the heavily armed enforcers for drug-trafficking cartels and organized crime. The message read: "Stop reporting only about us, also report about the narco-officials. This is a warning."

Copenhagen | Jan 8

DPA - Danish politicians Wednesday approved a new probe into the circumstances surrounding a US Air Force B-52 bomber, armed with nuclear bombs, that crashed in 1968 off northern Greenland.

One of the plane's four nuclear bombs reportedly went missing, and has never been found. Foreign Minister Per Stig Moller said the probe would be 'comprehensive', Danish news agency Ritzau reported.

Calls for a renewed probe were fuelled by a recent documentary aired by the BBC that unveiled previously classified documents, and new information about the clean-up after the crash.

The Thule Air Base in northern Greenland played a key role for the United States during the Cold War. US Air Force B-52s used the base and were at times airborne round the clock.

Mark Boster | Jan 8

LA Times - Barring a reprieve, regulations set to take effect next month could force thousands of clothing retailers and thrift stores to throw away trunkloads of children's clothing.

The law, aimed at keeping lead-filled merchandise away from children, mandates that all products sold for those age 12 and younger -- including clothing -- be tested for lead and phthalates, which are chemicals used to make plastics more pliable. Those that haven't been tested will be considered hazardous, regardless of whether they actually contain lead.

"They'll all have to go to the landfill," said Adele Meyer, executive director of the National Assn. of Resale and Thrift Shops.

Anna Tomforde | London | Jan 8

DPA - For many Londoners, queuing for a tardy red double- decker bus may on occasions have prompted the utterance of a swear word or raised doubts about the existence of a deity altogether.

From this week, those with lingering doubts will have their views confirmed in an atheist advertising campaign rolled out on 200 of London's iconic buses, the Underground (tube) network and transport systems in other major cities.

'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life,' is the principal slogan of the campaign.

It is the brainchild of a television comedy writer and is backed by the British Humanist Association (BHA), as well as prominent atheist Professor Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion.

This is an interactive chart of the yield curve over the last 30 years. Warning, it is a Java applet, and may not load for you.

The Living Yield Curve

After much thought, the applet is not embedded here.

If you are an Edward Tufte fan, this will also appeal.

David Usborne | New York | Jan 8

The Independent -

Photographs of Helen Keller, the world-renowned advocate for the deaf and the blind who suffered from both handicaps herself, are not hard to come by. After all, she only died in 1968, at the age of 87. However, an image of the pioneer which has surfaced this week is a little bit different. Above all, there is its age.

The image, released by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, was taken 120 years ago and shows an eight-year-old Keller holding the hand of Anne Sullivan, whose legacy is almost as important. She was the teacher who first taught Keller how to understand and articulate language. More important still for Keller scholars, the black and white photograph shows her holding in another hand a doll. The word "doll" was the first Keller ever spoke – the fruit of her lessons from Ms Sullivan, whose technique included spelling out words on the palm of the little girl's hand.

Jan 8

BBC - The Mexican government has unveiled emergency measures to protect its economy from the global financial crisis and US recession.

President Felipe Calderon said Mexico was facing a period of great difficulty and rising unemployment.

He promised nearly $150m (£100m) to struggling industries in a bid to save hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The measure is part of a 25-point plan that includes freezing petrol prices and increasing unemployment benefits.

The BBC's Stephen Gibbs in Mexico City says Mexico, like many countries in Latin America, used to think it would be largely immune from what began as the credit crisis in the US, but is now feeling the effects.

Jan 5

Jan 8

Rockets from Lebanon hit northern Israel - police

Three rockets fired from Lebanon exploded in northern Israel on Thursday, the first since the Jewish state launched an offensive in Gaza two weeks ago, Israeli police said.

** Haaretz ticker is reporting that the rockets were fired by Palestinian group and not Hezbollah
** Reuters reporting that Israel fired artillary back in a 'pinpoint response'

Please check comments for most recent articles. This is a continuation thread, Earlier threads can be read here- part II and here - part I.

Hannes asked a few days ago for thoughts on what 2009 might bring. Here are some of mine, in no particular order:

1. Franken and Burris will be seated in the next Senate.

2. Guantanamo and the other prisons will be closed.

3. Unemployment will reach double digits.

4. The stimulus package will include more tax cuts than are currently anticipated.

5. Said stimulus plan won't do much good. The infrastructure component will be too small and the build-out will take too long to help in 2009.

6. The word 'Depression' will become much more common in the media and we very well may flirt with an almost 10% retrenchment in GDP.

7. The Dow will trade below 6,000, and the S&P will trade in a similar range as the Dow as Wall Street earnings estimates finally catch up with reality.

8. Gold will not hit $1,000. The dollar will remain relatively strong in a weak overall currency environment. The Yen will remain strong as well, hurting Japanese exports even more.

9. There will be no inflation. There will be deflation.

10. Obama will govern from the center right and the left will be even more dismayed, including many of his supporters.

11. We will begin drawing down out of Iraq, but not nearly fast enough.

12. Obama will double down in Afghanistan. It will do no good.

13. Obama will not negotiate with Iran. He will be prevented/hamstrung from doing so by AIPAC and the neocons.

14. America will end the embargo against Cuba.

15. The market for treasuries will not blow up this year--we'll leave that for 2010. There is still too much debt destruction (i.e. deflation) going on, credit card defaults, among other items, are next. Domestic demand for treasuries will remain strong, even in the face of the Chinese, OPEC countries and Japan not buying.

Have I missed anything?

Pooja Thakur | Mumbai | January 8

Bloomberg - The accounting scandal that caused Satyam Computer Services Ltd. to collapse yesterday is shaking investor confidence in Indian stocks, putting an end to the market’s best start since 2000.

“How did they manage to conceal a fraud of such magnitude even from the auditors?” said Greg Kuhnert, a London-based fund manager at Investec Asset Management Ltd., which manages about $10 billion and sold its 0.15 percent stake in Satyam last month. “That to me is a huge concern and is making me very nervous about the situation in India now.”

India’s Sensex index tumbled 7.3 percent yesterday, led by a 78 percent plunge in Satyam, after Chairman Ramalinga Raju said profits at the company had been inflated for years and then resigned. Satyam American depositary receipts fell $8.42, or 90 percent, to 93 cents before the opening of the New York Stock Exchange, which then halted trading in the stock.

The Prostitute

To write about the prostitute is akin to engaging in a discussion about the psychological condition of a split personality. Except, in this case, the split is not in one person but rather, in the sexual nature of an entire gender as expressed by the different expectations of a wife and a prostitute. This unnatural duality is a measure of how female sexuality has been ripped apart, distorted and used to subjugate and denigrate women with the prostitute being the lesser of a lesser species. The principal function of the prostitute woman is to sexually please the male any time and in any shape or form without reciprocity; that is the raison d'être of her existence. Her soul and spirituality have been extracted from her sexual nature that is often equated with vileness. In other words, her sexuality is dead; she is a mere vesicle, a cavity, a hole for the male to masturbate into.

Conversely, the sexuality of a woman who is molded to become a wife is stunted and is insecure in its expression as it is required to follow society’s strict rules as to when and how it can manifest itself – at times therefore, her sexual nature is also forced to be dead. This creates great confusion, feelings of guilt, and extreme frustration within the female as her sex drive is constant and strong and is not attached to a dimmer switch that can adjust it and turn it on or off. Both culturally induced aspects of the sexual female have been used to divide women into good and bad and to pit them against each other - all in the name of paternity. Rather than giving equal responsibility to both genders to ensure paternity, patriarchy selfishly chose, through the use of brute force, to make women the sole gatekeepers. Thus, it created the prostitute.

Part 1 can be read here

Cenk and I discuss the Malaysia and Sumatran views on the conflict in Gaza:

Scott Carrier prepared a 3 part radio show for NPR's Day to Day show, concerning ongoing violence in the border city of Juarez, Mexico. The official number of deaths in Juarez attributed to murders for 2008 was 1,600. Who knows how many more went uncounted?

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

January 7, 2009

If you ask people in Juarez what is causing the terrible violence in their city, almost all of them will tell you it's a war between two rival cartels over control of the drug market, or plaza, as they say. This is the same explanation given by the Mexican government and by nearly every news agency. It's an easy explanation to accept and it implies a solution: eventually one cartel will defeat the other cartel, and the killing will stop.

The resource bubble bursting now has Russia and Ukraine in an escalating spiral of shoves.

Fall out now includes all Russian gas supplies through Ukraine to Europe. Anyone who doubts that the spectre of resource inflation waits for us when recovery begins is not paying attention. We have a short period of time when it will be cheap to shift the economy, after that, it gets much more expensive.

The auction of 10-year bonds failed to attract enough bids to reach the €6bn the government wanted to raise. It is an ominous sign of potential trouble ahead for governments around the world, with an estimated $3,000bn expected to be issued in sovereign debt this year – three times more than in 2008.

When I was young talk about millions of dollars impressed me. When I was older talk about billions of dollars dismayed me. Now, regular talk about trillions of dollars, especially government spending, nauseates me. People never seem to learn that they control the fate of the American economy.

It is far too easy to blame in bad times or thank in good times Wall Street, the government, or super-rich and powerful financial entities. In actual fact it is always the spending of money by the general population on consumer products and services, housing, cars, or investments that drives the economy. The core problem is that the public does not act in concert to serve its own interests but, instead, takes its cues from the external world and puts its trust in the wrong people and entities.

Jan 7

BBC - Tens of thousands of Cambodians have packed into a stadium in Phnom Penh to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the murderous Khmer Rouge.

Senate President Chea Sim lauded "those who sacrificed their lives to save us from genocide", when Vietnamese-led forces ousted the regime in 1979.

Up to two million people died over the four years of Khmer Rouge rule.

But none of its surviving leaders have yet faced justice, triggering criticism of foot-dragging by the government.

A UN-backed war crimes trial of five henchmen of late leader Pol Pot is expected to begin in the next few months.

Quito | Jan 7

AFP -

A team of Ecuadoran and Italian researchers have confirmed the discovery of a unique species of pink land iguanas living on the Galapagos Islands, the scientist who wrote the report told AFP.

"It is surprising to have made a find of this magnitude in the 21st century," said Washington Tapia, head of research at the Galapagos National Park.

Researchers at first thought that the iguanas, which are pink with black spots, simply had skin pigmentation problems, Tapia said.

The first pink iguanas were discovered in 1986, and after years of research scientists concluded that it was a unique species.

"We have not yet determined the size of the population, but we estimate that it is small because we have only captured 36 pink iguanas for research up to now," Tapia said in a telephone interview.

The pink species can be up to 1.8 metres long as measured from tip to tail, and unlike the other land iguanas, does not have a row of spines running up its back.

Geneva | Jan 7

AFP - At least 1,732 people have died in Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic and the number of cases diagnosed has risen to 34,306, the World Health Organisation said on Tuesday.

The organisation last Thursday reported 1,586 dead and 31,656 suspected cases of the water-borne disease.

United Nations aid agencies have been warning for weeks that the number of cases could top 60,000, with the impending rainy season likely to facilitate the spread of the disease.

Why does anyone take this guy seriously? The stupidity starts in the second paragraph and only grows and grows. He writes:

Who is going to be the regional superpower — Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Iran?

Two problems: a superpower, by its very definition, is not regional. It is global. This is one of Flathead's more egregious problems: degradation of the language. But this question also has another inherent flaw. Any guesses?

Yeah, that's it: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran aren't even 'great powers' which are defined as nation states with proven nuclear capabilities. And none of them are even close to having a deliverable weapon, not even Iran. But this is the kind of false equivalence that feeds American ignorance and caters to our conceits.

But here's an even stupider example, this time of Friedman's sheer ahistoricalism.

The struggle for hegemony over the modern Arab world is as old as Nasser’s Egypt.

Actually, the struggle isn't at all modern and it's much, much older than Nasser (another brickbat the likes of Friedmanians beat people over the head with: those evil dictators, never mind we support one in Egypt even now): the struggle for dominance in the Near East is as old as . . . wait for it . . . here it comes . . . civilization itself. Think about it. Do the names Babylon and Pharaoh and Hittites (Modern Turkey) and Persians and the 'Promised Land' getting squashed between them mean anything to Friedman?

How'd this man ever get a column for The New York Times?

Wait, don't answer that.

Nancy A. Youssef | Delaram, Afghanistan | Jan 7

McClatchy Newspapers - Around the barren military base, which sits at the crossroads of the Taliban's poppy trade route, news arrives slowly. However, the domestic economic meltdown has reached even here. The National Guardsmen who serve with the Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Corps Regiment, based here, say they fear that their jobs won't be there when they return. With uncertainty at home, some are doing what they once considered unthinkable: extending their tours.