Sunday, Dec 14th
Last update09:33:21 AM GMT
The price of property in the West Bank is rocketing beyond the reach of most local businesses and home buyers, pushed up by a weak dollar and Israeli control of large chunks of the territory, a World Bank report said Thursday.
Israel, citing the need to prevent Palestinian attacks inside Israel and on Jewish settlers in the West Bank, has kept large swaths of Palestinian land and roads off limits to Palestinians.
Having taken its rightful place alongside Popular Mechanics and The History Channel as one of the 21st century's most plentiful peddlers of yellow journalism with their first 9/11 hit piece last year, "Auntie Beeb" had another crack at the whip on July 6th when it aired a documentary about the collapse of WTC Building 7, the 47-storey skyscraper that imploded into its own footprint on 9/11 without being hit by a plane, called "The Third Tower".
The program claimed to offer the solution to the "final mystery of 9/11". Clearly the fact that the BBC has trotted out another version of this same documentary within four months is an admittance of a failure to do just that.
Wachovia posted a $23.9 billion quarterly loss, as its portfolio of loans deteriorated and deposits fled the bank, laying bare the serious financial straits the company was in before Wells Fargo announced it would buy it this month.
The loss is the largest ever for a bank and, coming on top of $10 billion of losses earlier this year, wipes out nearly all the profits the firm has earned since the merger of two banks formed modern Wachovia in 2001.
The high court yesterday condemned as "deeply disturbing" a refusal by the US government to disclose evidence that could prove a British resident in Guantánamo Bay was tortured before confessing to terrorist offences.
Food allergies in American children seem to be on the rise, now affecting about 3 million kids, according to the first federal study of the problem.
More families with children are becoming homeless as they face mounting economic pressures, including mortgage foreclosures, according to a USA TODAY survey of a dozen of the largest cities in the nation.
Local authorities say the number of families seeking help has risen in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle and Washington.
"Everywhere I go, I hear there is an increase" in the need for housing aid, especially for families, says Philip Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates federal programs. He says the main causes are job losses and foreclosures.
TVNL Comment: Another Bush legacy.
Security worries can erode freedoms even in democratic nations and undermine press freedom, media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says. The warning comes as the group publishes its annual 173-nation index of press freedom around the world.
RSF cited poor rankings by the US and Israel, and called for US political leaders to improve its situation
U.S. government agencies made at least $5 billion in mistakes in their recent reports of contracts awarded to small businesses, with many claiming credit for awards to companies that long ago outgrew the designation or never qualified in the first place, a Washington Post analysis shows.
The Post examined a sampling of the $89 billion in contracts the agencies classified as small-business awards, which help them satisfy a congressional mandate to award nearly a fourth of all government work to small firms.
In the data The Post analyzed, federal agencies counted Lockheed Martin and its subsidiaries as "small" on 207 contracts worth $143 million. Dell Computer, a Fortune 500 company, was listed as a small business on $89 million in contracts.
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