We haz a bailout.

At least, that's what they're saying. Looks like a go.

We'll see how this plays out when the market opens tomorrow.

Draft of Rescue Plan Makes It Into Writing

"The era of Wall Street recklessness is over,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said of the bill, which promises more regulation as well as future limits to be imposed upon executive compensation.

Pelosi, along with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), and Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) each spoke in support of the bill that will be presented to the House for a vote sometime Monday.

Now, even some of the more reluctant House Republicans are supporting the rescue plan. Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.), Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), House Republican Whip, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) gave their support of the revised plan in a press conference Sunday evening.

“When we stood up and blocked the ‘so-called’ deal last week we did so because we thought taxpayers weren’t being protected,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) Sunday evening. “It’s a bill that does entail risk; taxpayer risk. But I think what you see is we’ve reduced the amount of taxpayer risk in this bill considerably.”

If passed by the House, the bill will then move to the Senate, which will likely consider it Wednesday, after the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah ends.

TEXT OF THE DRAFT


***

Syrian car bomb attack kills 17

At least 17 people have been killed by a car bomb on the outskirts of Syria's capital Damascus, officials have said.

The blast happened near buildings used by security forces at an intersection leading to an important Shia shrine.

Such attacks are rare in Syria, but the country has seen two major assassinations in the past year.

Many killed in Baghdad bombings

At least 32 people have been killed and more than 100 injured in a string of bomb attacks in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, police have said.

Twelve died in a car-bomb attack in the south of the city, shortly before the Iftar meal, when Muslims break their fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

Two further bombings struck the Karrada district later in the evening, leaving at least 19 people dead and 70 wounded.

Another person died in a car bomb earlier in the day in western Baghdad.

Last week, the senior US military commander in the capital, Maj-Gen Jeffery Hammond, said it had so far witnessed the least violent Ramadan in three years. However, he cautioned that the past few days had seen a spike in attacks.

Europeans abducted on desert safari taken to Libya (Sept. 25)

CAIRO, Egypt: A group of kidnappers who abducted a 19-member European tour group during a desert safari moved their captives from Sudan to Libya on Thursday in a new complication to the week-old hostage ordeal, the Sudanese government said.

Sudanese troops "monitored" the kidnappers as they drove in three 4x4 vehicles from the Oweinat Mountain area in northwest Sudan and crossed the border into Libya, Sudanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ali Youssef told The Associated Press.

The kidnappers, believed to be desert tribesmen, are demanding a ransom, reportedly of up to $15 million, and Germany has been negotiating with them, but there has been no word on the progress of these contacts.

Well, it's working for the pirates, why not on land?

Sudan: Six Alleged Kidnappers Killed in Desert Chase; Hostages Still Captive (Sept. 28)

KHARTOUM, Sudan — The Sudanese army says that it killed six alleged kidnappers in a high speed chase across the northern Sudanese desert, but the missing Europeans themselves are still being held in Chad.

Sudanese military spokesman, Sawarmy Khaled, has told The Associated Press that the army came upon a vehicle filled with eight armed men not far from the Egyptian border and gave chase when they refused to stop.

In the ensuing gunbattle, he said, six were killed. The remaining two said the kidnapped Europeans were being held in Chad.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel stung in Bavarian polls

Bavaria's voters have ended over 50 years of conservative rule after regional elections on Sunday delivered a political blow to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose fragile ruling coalition relies on the Bavarian Christian Social Union.
...
The election result will trouble Miss Merkel in Berlin because it comes just one year before national elections and may signify growing popular discontent with the political establishment and Germany's Christian Democrats.

The vote also brought bad news for the Social Democrats, partners in Miss Merkel's "grand coalition" government, who scored a disappointing 19 per cent, a figure nearly unchanged from 19.6 per cent in 2003.

In line with national trends, minority parties, the environmentalist Greens, the pro-business Free Democrats and the independent Free Voters all made major gains.

There is an ugly trend forming in European politics...

Far Right storms election as Austrians back anti-EU rhetoric

The far Right has made a grand return in Austria, emerging from yesterday’s elections as the second biggest parliamentary block, according to preliminary results.

The two parties that campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti-European Union ticket have captured about 29 per cent of the vote, pushing the country’s traditional conservative party into third place.

Heinz-Christian Strache and his Freedom Party, who were accused of xenophobia and waging an antiMuslim campaign, won 18 per cent — a rise of 7 per cent compared with the last elections. Mr Strache’s former mentor, Jörg Haider, won 11 per cent of the vote with his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria.
...
— Heinz-Christian Strache was born on June 12, 1969, in Vienna
— He trained as a dental technician, began his political career in 1991 as a Vienna
district councillor for the Freedom Party, and became a protégé of its leader, Jörg Haider
— He fell out with Mr Haider after a series of election defeats and took over the Freedom Party in 2005 Mr Strache has cultivated a youthful image. His website has pictures of him wearing a Che Guevara-style beret, with a rap song, Viva HC!, downloadable as a mobile phone ringtone
— Old photos resurfaced in 2007 showing him in paramilitary uniform apparently giving a neo-Nazi salute (above). He said that he was merely ordering three beers
— The Freedom Party demands a halt to immigration, a ministry for repatriating
foreigners and the return of powers ceded to the EU

He's also had contact with Vlaams Belang. Ugh.




***

Cops: Teen hired pair to kill his mom for money
Son allegedly sought cash to pay for breast implants for his girlfriend

FOUNTAIN, Colo. - A Colorado teenager hired men to kill his mother so he could use her money to get breast implants for his girlfriend, police said.

Nikita Lee Weis, 18, was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, said Fountain Deputy Police Chief Mike Barnett.

His girlfriend, Sophia Nicole Alsept, and two men police said he hired, Juan Antonio Velez Gonzalez, 18, and Brandon Michael Soroka, 19, were arrested on the same charge.

Vale experiences delays in shipping iron ore

September 29, 2008

VALE do Rio Doce, the world's biggest iron ore producer, says it has almost no stockpiles of the steelmaking raw material at its ports, signalling possible delays in shipments.

While the company had made no decision to halt shipments to China, "we don't even have one tonne of stocks", chief executive officer Roger Agnelli said yesterday in Rio de Janeiro.

Negotiations with Chinese steelmakers over a possible price increase this year were proceeding "calmly", and any suggestion that the two sides had been arguing was "a lot of hot air", Mr Agnelli said.

Chinese steel makers, the world's biggest iron ore consumers, would not buy from Vale in the short term, the China Iron and Steel Association said on Saturday.

Where is U.S. agriculture headed?

I ran into a former colleague the other day, and he asked me an intriguing question: Where is U.S. agriculture headed. Flattered he would ask me, I was determined to not give him my true thoughts — I don’t know. I said something like, “Some of it will likely go offshore and some will struggle to cope with high input costs.”

In reality, I don’t have any evidence U.S. agriculture is moving to foreign countries. History leads us that way by looking at what happened to the steel industry and more recently the textile industry.

It seems every farmer I talk to these days is troubled by the huge amounts of money being handled, with little assurance these big dollars will ultimately mean any profit, much less big profit.

The one thing I can say with some assurance is that it costs a lot more money to farm these days — a lot more money. Handling more money generally equates with handling more risk. More risk is definitely something farmers don’t need.

I am fairly sure the commodity marketing system that has helped farmers cope with risk over the past half century or so is in big trouble. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in fact, recently acknowledged their wheat futures contracts are broken.

Big money found agriculture at a time when it needed cash the most, but the price of such a huge cash infusion may turn out to be more than most farmers can afford. Large investment portfolios pumped billions of dollars into the U.S. commodity market and took millions in profit away, and are still doing it.

Russian Oil Reserve Could Affect Prices

Russia will work to influence global oil prices, Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said Thursday.

Oil prices now depend on such conditions as production levels in the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, financial speculation and U.S. oil reserves, he said.

"We hold such a significant position in the high society of world oil that a Russian factor should appear and maybe not a single one," Shmatko told reporters in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, where he was accompanying President Dmitry Medvedev on a tour of the Far East. "We didn't work on this before. We want to formulate these approaches."

Russia currently accounts for 12.3 percent of the world's oil output, making it the biggest producer after Saudi Arabia.

The decision to seek leverage over prices, Shmatko said, was prompted by oil prices' "rollercoaster ride" in the past few months, when they reached an all-time record in July, lost one-third of their value in the following weeks and began climbing again recently.

As one tool, Russia could create a reserve of oil fields that can swiftly begin producing if necessary, Shmatko said. It could also change forecasts of its oil production as a way of affecting the price, he said.