from abcnews: An explosion rocked Moscow's busiest airport today in an apparent "terrorist attack", killing 35 and injuring dozens more, according to Russian officials. The blast erupted in the Domodedovo airport at 4:40 p.m. Moscow time. In addition to the 31 dead, another 120 were injured, Evgeny Khorishko of the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., told ABC News, citing Russia's Ministry of Health. The attack was carried out by two suicide bombers, witnesses said according to Russia's state news agency RIA. On Twitter, one purported eyewitness, Ilya Likhtenfeld, said the bomb "was not in the luggage," but on a man standing in a crowd near a cafe. Khorishko, said it was "too early to say" who may have been responsible.
US national debt now tops $12 trillion from afp: The US public debt topped 12 trillion dollars for the first time in history, Treasury officials disclosed Tuesday, moving past a key barrier that raised hackles in Congress. Treasury data showed Monday's outstanding debt at 12.031 trillion dollars, up from 11.999 trillion on Friday. The ballooning debt reflects the massive deficit spending by the government in an effort to revive an ailing economy over more than one year. The public debt topped 10 trillion dollars in September 2008. The debt is quickly approaching the statutory limit of 12.104 trillion dollars, meaning Congress would have to raise the ceiling to prevent a shutdown of government operations.
oregon's defazio says fire geithner & summers from raw story: President Barack Obama "is being failed by his economic team" and should replace Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and White House economic policy director Larry Summers, says US House Rep. Peter DeFazio... "I think there is a growing consensus in the [Democratic] caucus [that] we need a new economic team that cares more about jobs, Main Street and the American people than it does about Wall Street and huge bonuses ... reclaim the unspent funds ... reclaim some of the funds that are being paid back, which will not be paid back in full, and we use it to put people back to work rebuilding America's infrastructure... We may have to sacrifice just two more jobs to get millions back for Americans," DeFazio said.
merciless ikea memoir packs a punch from independent: The wholesome Scandinavian image of furniture and lifestyle giant Ikea has been rudely shaken by a new book which claims the company is hostile to foreign employees and uses Stasi-style secret police methods to spy on its thousands of staff worldwide. The explosive charges are made by a former senior Ikea executive Johan Stenebo, a Swede who started working for the company at one of its German outlets outside Hamburg over 20 years ago and rose to a senior management position. He resigned last year. His book, entitled Sanningen om Ikea (The Truth about Ikea), contains wide-ranging allegations about a company which has become a global household name. Justifying the book to Gemany's Der Spiegel magazine, he said: "I did not want to go along with it any more, but I could not stay silent."
senate health bill said to cost $849b over 10yrs from nytimes: The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, put forward his version of sweeping health care legislation on Wednesday, which a Senate aide said would cost $849 billion over 10 years. Mr. Reid promised that it would reduce the federal budget deficit while covering most of the uninsured and adding new benefits to Medicare. The senior Senate Democratic leadership aide said the bill’s costs would be more than offset by new taxes and reductions in government spending, particularly on Medicare, so that the legislation would reduce future federal deficits by $127 billion. The official cost analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was not immediately available, but if the cost projection holds up, it would meet President Obama’s requirement that the bill’s costs be held to about $900 billion. Mr. Reid presented the bill at a meeting with his fellow Democrats. The measure includes a so-called public option allowing people to buy into a new government health insurance plan, but states could opt out of that.
bush does 9/11 replay in ask for unprecedented powers & budget from the washington note: Just after the September 11th terrorist attacks occurred, George W. Bush went before the nation and made the case that he needed unprecedented authority - budgetary and military - to take on the threats poised at the well-being and safety of the country. Now with the current economic crisis in the United States, Bush is yet again asking for unprecedented powers and budget. What happened after 9/11? We saw no-bid contracts given to firms like Halliburton. We saw $9 billion of U.S. taxpayer money "go missing" through the Coalition Provisional Authority. We saw abuses of power, the expansion of secrecy, and the promulgation of norms that seemed to be the very antithesis of what America stands for. A nation's values and its deep DNA are really only knowable and observable during times of crisis - when it's tough to stand up for codes that seem a heavy burden during tough times. We are in a crisis again - and the Bush administration is again asking Americans to forgo fundamental values. Tonight, George Bush succeeded I think in scaring Americans that this crisis could be a systemic threat. Bush said "our entire economy is in danger." That's the fear button. He pushed it. And he said the clock was ticking. This seems like a bad episode of "24."
3 stooges meet at white house & act like the run something from raw replay: President Bush met with Congressional leaders, Barack Obama and John McCain at the White House. This video is from Fox’s Your World with Neil Cavuto, broadcast September 25, 2008.
1000s contact lawmakers about 'bailout' plan from wcco: As Congressional leaders have worked out an outline for a deal on the bailout, the proposal remains extremely unpopular with many Minnesotans. In a Minneapolis coffee shop, single mother Ann Pearson thinks the bailout is helping the wrong people. "It's the people like me that are having a hard time keeping up with the economy and paying their bills, and we're losing our houses and losing our cars. And we need the government to help us not the bigger people," she said. Congressional offices are getting bombarded with phone calls and e-mails from constituents with their opinions on the bailout deal. Minnesota Congressman Jim Ramstad said in 48 hours he has gotten 1,002 calls and e-mails against bailout; only 10 were in favor of it. "People are angry, people are angry at the administrations bailout plan, they are angry at rewarding incompetence and bad judgment," Ramstad said.
deal said to be near in financial 'bailout' from ap: 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.
bush & mccain blackmail america w/ economic terrorism from paul joseph watson: From shying away from even mentioning such terms as “recession,” “unemployment” or “bank failures,” Bush, Bernanke and Paulson are now vigorously invoking the fear of financial meltdown as part of a campaign of economic terror to blackmail the American people into accepting the power-grabbing “bailout,” while John McCain, who last week said the fundamentals of the economy are strong, is now all but threatening to cancel the election should the proposal not receive swift passage. Bush’s speech last night was a throwback to his March 2003 stump before the invasion of Iraq - replace words like “weapons of mass destruction” with “financial panic” and the tone of the two is not dissimilar. Bush rammed home the fear by appealing to people’s personal anxieties.
china banks told to stop lending to US banks from reuters: Chinese regulators have told domestic banks to stop interbank lending to U.S. financial institutions to prevent possible losses during the financial crisis, the South China Morning Post reported on Thursday. The Hong Kong newspaper cited unidentified industry sources as saying the instruction from the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) applied to interbank lending of all currencies to U.S. banks but not to banks from other countries. "The decree appears to be Beijing's first attempt to erect defences against the deepening U.S. financial meltdown after the mainland's major lenders reported billions of U.S. dollars in exposure to the credit crisis," the SCMP said. A spokesman for the CBRC had no immediate comment.
video: defazio on the 'bailout' from floating capital: Peter DeFazio takes 5 minutes today on the House floor to speak out against the outrageous Paulson intervention plan.
citizens dumping personal junk on wall st to protest bailout from alternet: An e-mail that began as a rallying cry from a lone journalist to an influential circle of friends to protest the U.S. government bailout of Wall Street has ignited a national day of street protests. Some demonstrators plan to dump their rubbish in front of the bronze bull sculpture near Wall Street in downtown Manhattan Thursday. "People are going to bring their own personal junk that they think is worth as much as the junk financial instruments that the government is proposing to buy from the Wall Street banks," says Andrew Boyd, an activist and freelance online-video artist for nonprofit groups in Manhattan. "We're hoping that people show up with their 8-track cassette collections, their old Spice Girl CDs, their surf boards that got bit by sharks and old Enron stock certificates."
meltdown perpetrators position themselves from scoop: Well, they finally did it. The Money Party exposed the nauseating underbelly of first world finance. It's a cross between a Ponzi scheme and a complex math puzzle, all geared to let those in charge rake off as much money as they can, whenever they can, while they leave us out in the cold. Unfortunately, this time their greed and lack of control has the world poised for a systemic economic meltdown. The collapse and subsequent government rescue of home mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, stock brokerage Merrill Lynch, investment bank Bear Stearns, and, an insurance company, AIG, are designed to show we're moving away from the brink of disaster to a safer place. "The system is working" to manage what Alan Greenspan is calling a once in a century event.
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from aclu.org: President Obama today issued an executive order that permits ongoing indefinite detention of Guantánamo detainees while establishing a periodic administrative review process for them. The administration also announced it will lift the ban on bringing new military commissions charges against detainees that don’t already have ongoing cases in the substandard system. The American Civil Liberties Union has long called for Guantánamo to be shut down and opposes the indefinite detention of prisoners there, some of whom have been imprisoned by the U.S. without charge or trial for nine years. The ACLU has also long called for an end to the illegitimate military commissions and for the government to prosecute terrorism suspects in the federal criminal courts.
