This year’s housing bust is shaping up to be one of historic proportions. Sales and construction have sunk to levels not seen since the 1990 savings and loan crisis, while foreclosures and price drops are the largest since the Great Depression - and expected to get worse next year. Many parallels can be seen with earlier housing debacles. Each episode had some combination of easy money, loose lending, greed and fraud that turned a housing boom into a speculative bubble. But few housing bubbles have ended so badly as the one today, when the nation is confronting the prospect of mass foreclosures and family dislocations. John Stumpf, president of Wells Fargo & Co., the second-largest U.S. mortgage lender and a survivor of the housing busts of the 20th century, blames today’s crisis on unscrupulous lending practices, which joined in a toxic mix with outright greed and extraordinarily low interest rates to send house prices soaring 90 percent between 2000 and 2006. When the bubble burst, house prices collapsed by 5 percent to 20 percent in cities nationwide. ‘We have not seen a nationwide decline in housing like this since the Great Depression,’ Mr. Stumpf told investors in […]
WASHINGTON — Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, has suffered a setback in her effort to reduce the fall-out from Turkey’s recent airstrike in Iraq when a prominent Kurdish leader refused to meet her. On a brief trip to the country in the wake of the Turkish army’s biggest attack this year against the Kurdish separatist PKK in the north of Iraq, Ms Rice sought to provide reassurances to the Kurds that the Turkish attacks would not spiral out of control. on Tuesday, the Turkish army said several hundred of its troops had also crossed the border into Iraq, in what it said was pursuit of PKK forces preparing an attack. But later reports indicated the Turkish ground forces were withdrawing. The Kurdish regional government of northern Iraq is perhaps Washington’s strongest ally in the country, but Ankara accuses it of harbouring the PKK, which the US, Turkey and the European Union classify as a terrorist organisation. ‘No one should do anything that threatens to destabilise the north,’ Ms Rice said in Baghdad. But she added: ‘The US, Iraq and Turkey share a common interest in stopping the activities of the PKK, which threaten to undo […]
PRINCETON, NJ — This time of year provides an opportunity to answer frequently asked questions about exactly where America stands today in regard to religion, based on Gallup’s extensive archives. Christmas is obviously a Christian holiday. But what percentage of Americans today identify with a Christian religion? About 82% of Americans in 2007 told Gallup interviewers that they identified with a Christian religion. That includes 51% who said they were Protestant, 5% who were ‘other Christian,’ 23% Roman Catholic, and 3% who named another Christian faith, including 2% Mormon. Because 11% said they had no religious identity at all, and another 2% didn’t answer, these results suggest that well more than 9 out of 10 Americans who identify with a religion are Christian in one way or the other. Has this changed over time? Yes. The percentage of Americans who identify with a Christian religion is down some over the decades. This is not so much because Americans have shifted to other religions, but because a significantly higher percentage of Americans today say they don’t have a religious identity. In the late 1940s, when Gallup began summarizing these data, a very small percentage explicitly told […]
A British doctor is leading a drugs trial that could spell the end of the misery endured by thousands of migraine sufferers. John Chambers, a consultant cardiologist at Guy’s Hospital London, says that when, on a mere hunch, he tested clopidogrel, a simple clot-busting drug, on five patients plagued by migraines, it worked, in some cases, ‘spectacularly well’ . Now a wider trial on 280 patients is under way with the results expected next year. If the drug proves similarly effective, it could mean an end to the throbbing head, nausea and flashing lights that characterise a typical attack. Migraines affect at least one in 10 people in the UK and attacks can last as long as three days. Sufferers often feel drained of energy for a couple of days after an attack and, on average, experience 13 attacks a year. Currently, migraines are treated with beta blockers, to lower blood pressure and regulate the heart, as well as anti-depressants. Other treatments include aspirin, paracetamol and stronger pain killers, such as Migraleve, which contains paracetamol, codeine phosphate and buclizine hydrochloride. Dr Chambers’s treatment is based on the hypothesis that migraines can be caused by tiny blood […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
