Wild White House meeting sets back deal (DAVID ROGERS, 9/25/08, Politico)
A high-profile White House meeting on Treasury’s $700 billion Wall Street rescue plan ended on a sour, contentious note Thursday after animated exchanges among lawmakers laced with presidential politics just weeks before the November elections.“I can’t invent votes,” House Republican Leader John Boehner warned the administration about the lack of support in his conference for the massive government intervention. [...]
When Bush yielded early to Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D- Nev.) to speak, they yielded to Obama to speak for the assembled Democrats. And it was Obama who raised the subject of the conservative alternative and pressed Paulson on what he thought of the idea.
House Republicans felt trapped—squeezed by Treasury, House Democrats and a bipartisan coalition in the Senate. And while McCain spoke surprisingly little after asking for the meeting, he conceded that it appeared there not the votes for the core Paulson plan without major changes. [...]
Having called for the meeting, he will have to show if can deliver the votes of House Republicans, many of whom have been leery of him in the past. Mindful of this, the senator’s campaign issued a brief statement an hour after the breakup of the meeting.
“We're optimistic that Sen. McCain will bring House Republicans on board without driving other parties away, resulting in a successful deal for the American taxpayer.”
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Here's the opportunity House Republicans seem hellbent on botching:
Zogby Poll: McCain Recovers as Contest Takes Dramatic Turns; McCain 46% - Obama 44% (Zogby, 9/25/08)
Republican John McCain's poll numbers improved slightly as he suspended his campaign Wednesday to head back to Washington to focus on the looming national financial crisis, moving from more than three points behind Barack Obama last weekend to two points ahead in a Zogby Interactive survey just out of the field this morning.
All because the think they have leverage:
House GOP: We have leverage on bailout (Jackie Kucinich, 09/25/08, The Hill)
House Republicans say they have significant leverage on the revamped bailout package, claiming that Democrats will scramble for votes unless they make changes to it.Republicans in the lower chamber are balking at the bailout package, saying that Democrats will be solely responsible for the ramifications of what they see as a flawed compromise.
Senate Democrats Block Rollback of D.C. Gun Laws (Congressional Quarterly, 9/25/08)
Senate Democrats objected Thursday to an attempt by Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, to take up House-passed legislation that would roll back District of Columbia gun laws.Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin , D-Ill., objected, calling the bill an attempt “take away the authority” of the city to write its own gun laws.
Hutchinson said it is “the prerogative of Congress” to make laws affecting the District.
Gun-rights advocates say the District government is not abiding by a Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller that voided the city’s handgun ban in June
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Obama seeks to take down NRA ad Ben Smith, 9/25/08, Politico)
The Obama campaign has written radio stations in Pennsylvania and Ohio, pressing them to refuse to air an ad from the National Rifle Association."This advertisement knowingly misleads your viewing audience about Senator Obama's position on the Second Amendment," says the letter from Obama general counsel Bob Bauer. "For the sake of both FCC licensing requirements and the public interest, your station should refuse to continue to air this advertisement."
China Cuts Corporate Tax To Shore Up the Economy (ANDREW BATSON, 9/25/08, WSJ: Washington Wire)
China's government is moving closer to extending nationwide a tax change that would lower businesses' bills, as policy makers look to the country's flush finances for ways to offset an economic slowdown and the global financial turmoil.
Bailout Deal Could End Debate Standoff (AMY CHOZICK and ELIZABETH HOLMES. 9/25/08, WSJ: Washington Wire)
The debate over the first presidential debate appeared to be coming to an end Thursday as lawmakers neared an agreement on a federal financial bailout package.Sen. John McCain, addressing attendees Thursday at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, said he couldn't stay on the campaign trail while the U.S. was suffering an economic crisis.
Sen. John McCain said he won't wait for a final vote on the $700 billion plan to bail out U.S. financial markets. Rather, if the White House and members of Congress reach an agreement or make a deal to help the ailing financial sector, the Republican candidate will travel to Oxford, Miss., for the debate scheduled for Friday night. On Thursday afternoon, top House and Senate Democratic and Republican lawmakers reached a tentative agreement, with some predicting the measure would pass both chambers of Congress. Precise language was still being worked out.
"American families expect that bold leadership will prevail and that a bipartisan financial rescue package will be secured -- then the campaigns will resume," McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said.
Brazilian player brutally murdered (Anthony Sormani, 9/25/08, SI.com, Goal.com)
Brazil is in mourning after former Vasco de Gama player Thiago da Silva was brutally tortured and murdered, allegedly by hired assassins on the orders of his ex-girlfriend.Da Silva, 25, who had been playing for second-division team Estacio de Sa Soccer Club, died in a Rio de Janeiro hospital Wednesday night, six days after being mortally shot in an attack by three men on a soccer field.
Pollster Zogby says presidential election could end in landslide (Jill Terreri, September 25, 2008, Democrat and Chronicle)
The presidential election might be a tight race now, but one of the country’s top pollsters thinks the race will end in an electoral landslide.John Zogby, president of Zogby International, told a group of businesspeople today that it’s up to Democratic Sen. Barack Obama to convince voters to go with him. If he’s not successful, the country will likely vote for “a comfortable old shoe”, that being Republican Sen. John McCain.
WBBM-TV: Feds may indict Blagojevich (UPI, 9/25/08)
U.S. federal agents say they have enough evidence to indict Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich for fraud and conspiracy, WBBM-TV, Chicago, reported Thursday. [...]Prosecutors also mentioned Blagojevich in an indictment as the intended beneficiary of at least one extortion attempt by Blagojevich fundraiser and businessmen Antoin "Tony" Rezko.
Rezko was convicted June 4 on 16 of the 24 counts against him. He awaits sentencing in October on mail and wire fraud, aiding and abetting bribery and money laundering convictions. He still faces two more trials.
The Chicago Sun-Times has reported Rezko could cut his prison time significantly by cooperating in investigations of other public figures, including Blagojevich.
US markets bounce on news of bailout deal (Susan Thompson , 9/25/08, Times of London)
Stock market investors were immediately buoyed by the news that Republicans and Democrats had reached an agreement to rescue Wall Street, sending the US markets soaring.
GOP, Democratic Negotiators Reach Agreement in Principle (William Branigin, Dan Eggen and Paul Kane, 9/25/08, Washington Post)
House and Senate negotiators emerged from a closed-door meeting today and said they have reached basic agreement on a massive financial rescue plan that they hope to pass soon.
Hmong Heroes May Have Seen CIA Nod for Coup: Allegedly Planned Overthrow of Government of Laos (JOSH GERSTEIN, September 25, 2008, NY Sun)
Evidence is mounting that at least some of the 11 men indicted in California last year for allegedly planning the overthrow of the government of Laos may have believed their plan had the tacit approval or even the outright support of the CIA.Documents filed in federal court in Sacramento last week show that in 2004 a retired CIA employee held detailed discussions about a military intervention in Laos with one of the key defendants in the case, General Vang Pao, an aging Hmong leader who fought an American-backed secret war against the Laotian government in the 1960s and 1970s.
According to an FBI report, the former CIA operative, Michael Spak, told prosecutors and defense attorneys in the case last summer that he talked with the general for three to four hours about military tactics and provided him with written cost estimates and "talking points" for a military campaign.
Mr. Spak, who faces no charges, said the general wanted to work with the Lao government to ease the suffering of the Hmong people.
The One-State Solution: A two-state solution was a compromise. But talks have gone nowhere, so many Palestinians are giving up. (Sari Nusseibeh, 9/20/08, NEWSWEEK)
Israelis have long described their West Bank settlements—long fingers of territory that stretch along the north-south and east-west axes, serviced by highways, electrical networks, etc.—as organic extensions of the Israeli community. But Israeli construction has (again according to Peace Now) increased by 550 percent in the past year. This building, combined with that of the nearly complete separation wall or barrier, and reports that Israel wishes to maintain security control along the eastern edge of the Jordan Valley, sends another message: that Israel plans to hold onto the land for good. Combine this with the still unaddressed refugee problem, and it's no wonder many former two-staters are giving up hope.It is important to remember that the Palestinian national movement only began to endorse the idea of a two-state solution 20 or 30 years ago, as a practical compromise. Realizing that Israel wasn't going anywhere, moderates decided that their best hope for a state was one alongside Israel, not one that sought to replace it. Yet the 15 years of negotiations that have followed have produced little, and thus it's no surprise that faith in this supposedly pragmatic option is waning. The lack of progress, as well as the unmistakably expansionist reality on the ground and the growth in popularity of Hamas, have left little room for anyone seeking a positive future for Palestine. Except, that is, to rejuvenate the old idea of one binational, secular and democratic state where Jewish and Arab citizens live side by side in equality.
Sarah Palin Surprises World's Women Leaders (Tammy Haddad, 9/25/08, Newsweek)
The political press may continue to grumble about their lack of access to GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. But the 100 powerful women gathered Wednesday to support the White Ribbon Alliance, an international group of organizations to prevent the death of women in childbirth, got a rare audience with the rising political star.Wendi Deng Murdoch, wife of press baron Rupert Murdoch; Sarah Brown, wife of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown; and Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan hosted the gathering to lead a discussion on how to reach the goal of the United Nations Millennium Project: to reduce the worldwide maternal mortality rate 75 percent by the year 2015. [...]
When CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked Palin for an interview, she declined-but suggested that the vice-presidential candidates should step in for Friday’s scheduled presidential debate.
Iraq Reschedules Elections. Again. (Larry Kaplow, 9/24/08, Newsweek: Checkpoint Baghdad)
As he was installed in his new job as top commander in Iraq last week, Gen. Ray Odierno called the provincial elections "critical" for bringing stability and emphasized the expectation they would take place this year. The holding of provincial elections is one of the benchmarks Congress required the White House to use in measuring progress in Iraq.But to the major Iraqi parties in power, the prospect of elections probably looks more like a threat. They're loath to admit it but members of mainstream Shiite parties worry they will lose governorships to loyalists of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr. The Sunni minority leaders in the government fear they will lose seats in Sunni areas to upstart tribal factions who take credit for fighting off al Qaeda and barely participated in the vote the last time around.
In July, NEWSWEEK talked to Baha al-Araji, one of those disaffected Sadr followers in the parliament, and he accused the leading parties of seeking to keep pushing the date into next year. Then, he said, they will argue that it just makes sense to postpone the local vote and hold it along with national elections for parliament at the end of 2009. It seemed a little conspiratorial at the time but only elections by the new deadline will prove him wrong to suspicious Iraqis.
What Happens When We Die? M.J. Stephey, 9/19/08, TIME)
A fellow at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S. and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with Parnia about the project's origins, its skeptics and the difference between the mind and the brain.What sort of methods will this project use to try and verify people's claims of "near-death" experience?
When your heart stops beating, there is no blood getting to your brain. And so what happens is that within about 10 sec., brain activity ceases —as you would imagine. Yet paradoxically, 10% or 20% of people who are then brought back to life from that period, which may be a few minutes or over an hour, will report having consciousness. So the key thing here is, Are these real, or is it some sort of illusion? So the only way to tell is to have pictures only visible from the ceiling and nowhere else, because they claim they can see everything from the ceiling. So if we then get a series of 200 or 300 people who all were clinically dead, and yet they're able to come back and tell us what we were doing and were able see those pictures, that confirms consciousness really was continuing even though the brain wasn't functioning.
What was your first interview like with someone who had reported an out-of-body experience?
Eye-opening and very humbling. Because what you see is that, first of all, they are completely genuine people who are not looking for any kind of fame or attention. In many cases they haven't even told anybody else about it because they're afraid of what people will think of them. I have about 500 or so cases of people that I've interviewed since I first started out more than 10 years ago. It's the consistency of the experiences, the reality of what they were describing. I managed to speak to doctors and nurses who had been present who said these patients had told them exactly what had happened, and they couldn't explain it. I actually documented a few of those in my book What Happens When We Die because I wanted people to get both angles —not just the patients' side but also the doctors' side — and see how it feels for the doctors to have a patient come back and tell them what was going on. There was a cardiologist that I spoke with who said he hasn't told anyone else about it because he has no explanation for how this patient could have been able to describe in detail what he had said and done. He was so freaked out by it that he just decided not to think about it anymore.
The Spies Who Love Obama: Why some of Bush's intel professionals are now working for a Democrat—and how they'd reform the CIA. Part Two in a series on the candidates' national security policies. (Laura Rozen, September 25, 2008, Mother Jones)
As has become painfully clear since 9/11, intelligence is only as good as the worldview of the person receiving it. The team of former intelligence professionals who have come together to advise Barack Obama describe a candidate who they believe is open-minded and intellectually inclined to absorb information... [...]"Old man Bush was a great guy," says one veteran intelligence officer now supporting Obama, who requested anonymity. "He was truly interested and sensitive to intelligence. But this Bush administration has done terrible damage to the intelligence business. They have operated a perpetual campaign, treated intelligence as a political tool, and never fully appreciated why it must be non-partisan and objective and can't be tampered with."
Poll: Backing for Obama lags earlier Dems (Jewish Telegraph, 09/25/2008)
Obama leads 57 percent to 30 percent among those polled in the American Jewish Committee's 2008 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion, with 13 percent undecided, but he significantly trails the Jewish vote for recent Democratic presidential candidates.By contrast, John Kerry received 76 percent of the Jewish vote four years ago against George W. Bush, and in the three prior presidential elections, Democrats won 78 to 80 percent of Jewish votes.
Poll: Gregoire 50-48 (Seattle PI, 9/25/08)
A new SurveyUSA poll shows Gov. Chris Gregoire leading GOP opponent Dino Rossi 50 percent to 48 percent.
Deal said to be near on big financial bailout plan (Julie Hirschfeld Davis, 9/25/08, Associated Press)
President Bush is bringing presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain into negotiations on a $700 billion rescue of Wall Street as Democrats and Republicans near agreement on a bailout plan with more protections for taxpayers and new help for distressed homeowners.Senior lawmakers and Bush administration officials have cleared away key obstacles to a deal on the unprecedented rescue, agreeing to include widely supported limits on pay packages for executives whose companies benefit.
WOLVERINE STATE POLL: TIED (TIME: The Page, September 25th, 2008)
NBC News Michigan numbers:Obama 46, McCain 46
The Rasmussen Reports poll gives Udall a slim two-point lead over Schaffer, 46 percent to 44 percent. Rasmussen gave Udall a six-point lead in its survey a month ago, and the survey's authors said the latest numbers suggest the race is tightening. The telephone survey of 700 likely voters was conducted Tuesday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Barney Frank: White House "Photo Op" Designed to Help McCain (Jake Tapper, September 25, 2008, Political Punch)
WARNING: Do not be sipping your coffee while watching this, because we aren't buying you a new keyboard.
Buffett backs Treasury plan: Billionaire says market meltdown is 'an economic Pearl Harbor' (ERIK HOLM, 9/24/08, Bloomberg News)
Billionaire Warren Buffett, calling turmoil in the markets an "economic Pearl Harbor," said his $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs Group is an endorsement of the Treasury's $700 billion bank rescue plan."I am betting on the Congress doing the right thing for the American public and passing this bill," Buffett said on cable channel CNBC Wednesday. "I certainly have a vote of confidence in Goldman and vote of confidence in Congress."
The Exception That Proves The Rule: How a state oil company succeeds—by not acting like one. (Robert Bryce, September 25, 2008, The American)
[A]t a time when most national oil companies—and most OPEC members—are seeing their output stagnate or decline, Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company, is dramatically increasing its output.And without that new Brazilian production, today’s oil prices would likely be higher. Between 1997 and 2007, Petrobras’s oil production doubled to about 2 million barrels per day. By 2015, the company expects its production to double again. At that level, Petrobras would be the undisputed energy superpower in the Western Hemisphere, with output almost twice that of national oil companies PDVSA of Venezuela or Mexico’s Pemex. And given its surging output, Brazil is reportedly interested in joining OPEC.
So how did Petrobras evolve into such a successful company while its fellow national oil companies have stalled? There are a number of reasons for its remarkable success, and most of them have to do with Petrobras’s embrace of capitalism and transparency. Now the world’s tenth-largest producer of liquid hydrocarbons, Petrobras has become an elite global energy player by doing what most other national oil companies refuse to do, including selling shares of the company to the public. And while many other big oil exporters, particularly within OPEC, either refuse to disclose their production data or publish fictitious numbers, Petrobras issues frequent press releases that discuss the latest developments within the company, including production trends, financial conditions, and new discoveries. And there have been plenty of new discoveries.
Last November, the company announced the discovery of the offshore Tupi field, a deposit that may hold 8 billion barrels of oil equivalent—one of the largest oil finds in decades. Since then, it has announced numerous smaller, but still significant, fields containing huge quantities of oil and gas. The Tupi discovery alone could make Brazil the 12th largest holder of oil reserves. (It currently ranks 17th.)
Those discoveries are remarkable when compared with the dismal results being reported by PDVSA and Pemex. Art Smith, a Houston-based energy investor and founder of Triple Double Advisors, an energy-focused investment fund, says that “Pemex and PDVSA don’t lack for available resources; they lack the intelligent allocation of capital and technical skill.”
Aso has dragons to slay (Catherine Makino, 9/26/08, Asia Times)
An outspoken conservative, Aso does not hide his distaste for communism and supports a firm United States-Japan alliance. But what distinguishes him from other hawks in the LDP is his pragmatic approach and his disarming smile. [...]Just where Aso stands on foreign policy can be gauged from a suggestion he made two years ago that it was time Japan began a debate on whether or not to acquire nuclear weapons.
But the new prime minister's most daunting challenge will be to revive the flagging economy and address the effects of the global financial turmoil. Some attribute the worsening situation in the agro-centric rural areas to reforms under Koizumi, especially the draconian cutting of large-scale public works projects which had created job opportunities.
"The crux of the problem lies in the fact that you now have a declining input into the economy, as you have a declining population, and the growth in productivity has not caught up,'' Taniguchi said.
'Change' election turns out conventional (JOHN F. HARRIS & JIM VANDEHEI, 9/25/08, Politico)
Recall the early promise of 2008: There would be two candidates who spent the past several years expressing disdain for the stale partisanship of Washington and the stupid pet tricks that characterize presidential campaigns. There was an electorate supposedly hungering not for a change of leaders but a change in the fundamental ways in which politicians compete and debate ideas and solve problems.For the first time in over 30 years there would be a campaign with no one named Bush or Clinton on the ticket. New personalities would drive new coalitions, as some liberals embraced John McCain’s independent-mindedness and spontaneity and some conservatives responded to Obama's earnest appeals to transcend old ideological and cultural divides.
New personalities and new coalitions, in turn, would create a new map—as the whole nation would be in play rather than a targeted set of battleground states.
Well, forget it: Six weeks before Election Day, a day before the first scheduled debate, the forces of innovation and authenticity are being routed by the forces of conventionality and cliché.
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Nominees in Need of Ideas (Michael Gerson, September 24, 2008, Washington Post)
A sitting president normally must accept the boring constraints of real-world choices. Campaigns can inhabit the utopia of their own ambitions.But it is President Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, by proposing the massive government purchase of bad debt, who have assumed the mantle of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is John McCain and Barack Obama who are playing the role of Roosevelt's more timid, forgotten foils, "Martin, Barton and Fish." Having last week criticized the role of the Federal Reserve in bailouts -- demonstrating a tin ear of elephantine proportions -- McCain now calls for a bipartisan oversight board to review the government's rescue attempt.
Mankind perishes. The world grows dark. McCain calls for a review board.
Obama has been no better, responding with his usual mix of caution and blame. Having delayed the announcement of his own proposal to better gauge the political reception of Paulson's approach, Obama now helpfully adds that it "can't just be a plan for Wall Street, it has to be a plan for Main Street" -- stepping up to the crisis with his own emergency cliche plan.
The weakness of these reactions is disturbing in itself. It also symbolizes a larger reality. The 2008 presidential campaign has become notable for its vacuity and exceptional for lacking the exceptional.
What's the True Cost? (Robert J. Samuelson, September 25, 2008, Washington Post)
Love it or hate it, the true cost of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's proposed rescue of the financial system is not the sticker price of $700 billion. Conceivably, the government could make money; with glum assumptions, the losses would probably be less than $250 billion. No one knows the correct answer -- not Paulson, not Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke nor anyone else -- but here's how to think about the problem.Under Paulson's proposal, the Treasury could buy distressed mortgage-backed securities. Consider a batch of hypothetical securities originally worth $100 million and paying an interest rate of 6 percent. They're no longer worth $100 million because half of the homeowners have stopped making their monthly payments. Suppose, then, that the government buys the mortgages for $50 million. It earns 6 percent on its $50 million, and if it borrowed money at 4 percent to buy the securities, it would make a tidy profit. If the government holds the securities until maturity and all the remaining homeowners repay their mortgages, the government would come out ahead.
The modern Tory hero should be Jefferson: Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell unveil their plan for radical reform to decentralise power, make voting count and challenge apparats from Brussels to town halls (Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell, 24th September 2008, The Spectator)
In theory, Europeans find American elections vulgar and plutocratic. In practice, they find them utterly gripping. This is partly because the US is wealthy and powerful, but mainly because American campaigns, being more participatory than European ones, are more interesting.All organisations grow according to the DNA encoded at the time of their conception. The US was founded in a revolt against a distant and autocratic regime. In consequence, its polity developed according to what we might call Jeffersonian principles: the idea that power should be diffused and that government officials, wherever possible, should be elected.
Most European constitutions, by contrast, were drawn up after the second world war. Their authors believed that democracy had led to fascism, and that the ballot box needed to be tempered by a class of sober functionaries who were invulnerable to public opinion.
The difference between the American and European approaches can be inferred from their foundational charters. The US Constitution, including all 27 amendments, is 7,600 words long, and is mainly preoccupied with the rights of the individual. The Lisbon Treaty contains 76,000 words and is chiefly concerned with the powers of the state. The American Constitution begins, ‘We, the people...’; the Treaty of Rome begins, ‘His Majesty the King of the Belgians...’
Americans pride themselves on having got away from titles and deference. Their rugged egalitarianism, they believe, is what makes New World politics more optimistic and less cynical than Old World politics. And they have a point. American political culture produced The West Wing, predicated on the idea that even the politicians you disagree with are patriots. Britain’s produced Yes, Minister and The Thick of It, predicated on the idea that all MPs are petty, jobbing crooks.
But a political culture is not some numinous entity that exists outside a nation’s institutions; rather, it emanates from those institutions. Congressmen would be every bit as stuck up as MEPs if they were protected by party lists. It’s just that party lists are unthinkable in a system where everyone from the sanitation officer to the DA is elected, where power is localised, and where politicians are selected through open primaries.
Imagine how open primaries would change the culture of Westminster.
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Wall Street's Blow to US Prestige?: The surprising answer is no. Most business people still view the US as a beacon of free enterprise and praise its swift response to the crisis. (Jack Ewing, 9/25/08, Der Spiegel)
The boulevards of Paris are a pretty reliable place to troll for anti-American sentiment. And sure enough, self-described anarchist Bernard Barbry is happy to weigh in with his opinion of the U.S. financial system. "The banks have brought this on themselves, and they deserve what they get," says Barbry, out for a stroll on a busy street in southwestern Paris. Surprisingly, though, the retired journalist isn't predicting America's downfall. The U.S., he believes, will remain powerful, and the crisis on Wall Street won't affect Washington's influence on world affairs. "I like Americans," he says. [...]As the world grapples with the fallout from Wall Street's shenanigans, there's no shortage of consternation, and even anger. But so far the international image of the U.S. economic model has shown amazing resilience. Lehman Brothers may be in the morgue and AIG on government-funded life support, but most businesspeople think the U.S. is more about Silicon Valley and Hollywood than the erstwhile dynamos of Wall Street. Even in China -- where broadcaster CCTV-2 has been running two hours of special programming every night about the financial crisis -- the U.S. is still a land to be emulated. "I see two Americas: One is wealth-creating, innovative, with people like Bill Gates, and the other is made up of speculators," says Wang Jianmao, an economics professor at China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. "China should learn more from wealth-creating America."
Barack Obama, David Cameron and CERN adverts baffle commuters: Mystery adverts featuring images of Barack Obama, David Cameron and the CERN particle collider have sparked debate among baffled commuters and bloggers. (Matthew Moore, 25 Sep 2008, Daily Telegraph)
The adverts, which all have bold black backgrounds, started appearing at London Underground stations and on trains earlier this week, and were published in several national newspapers this morning.They contain no text, and there are few clues to what they are promoting.