Frontierist News

Indian Express:

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has put an Indian American of Kashmiri origin in charge of the George Bush administration’s $700-billion rescue effort for distressed financial institutions.

Neel Kashkari, 35, has been an advisor to Paulson since 2006 and was promoted to the post of second assistant secretary of the Treasury for international affairs this July, on the personal nomination of Bush.

AP:

The top congressional budget analyst says pension plans have lost as much as $2 trillion in the past 15 months.

Peter Orszag told a House panel on Tuesday that the losses are likely to force many workers to hold off on major purchases and delay their retirements.

BBC News:

The first winner of Mr Gay UK stabbed a man to death before cutting a piece of flesh from his thigh, cooking it and trying to eat it, a court has heard.

Anthony Morley, 36, of Bexley Avenue, Leeds, then walked to a nearby takeaway and told staff he had killed someone, Leeds Crown Court was told.

Mr Morley, who worked as a chef, denies murdering 33-year-old Damian Oldfield.

The jury heard pieces of cooked human flesh were found in his kitchen and in a bin bag.

Opening the case for the prosecution, Andrew Stubbs QC told the jury that the two men had been involved in some kind of relationship in the past and that Mr Morley was troubled by his sexuality.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

According to the USDA, food required to sport a country of origin label includes most cuts of beef (including veal), lamb, chicken, goat, and pork; ground beef, ground lamb, ground chicken, ground goat, and ground pork; perishable agricultural commodities like fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables and macadamia nuts, pecans, ginseng and peanuts.

Food safety advocates and consumer groups pushed a hard for the labeling law to give shoppers the ability to avoid food from countries where use of excessive amounts of pesticides are legal, or safety and hygiene controls are poor.

But don’t begin shopping with a blindfold on. The mantra “Buyer beware” is still very much in play in the grocery aisles because the list of exemptions to the labeling laws that industry demanded and received is lengthy and complex.

For example, when a single commodity that requires labeling under the law is combined with at least one other covered commodity it is then considered a processed food item and is exempt from country of origin labeling requirements.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency:

Frank Lowy, an Australian Jew, for the first time was identified as the nation’s richest man.

Lowy, who survived the Holocaust as a teenager on the run and then fought in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, has amassed a fortune estimated at $4.5 billion from the Westfield Group, an empire of
shopping malls in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

He moved up to the top slot from No. 2 after the economic meltdown stripped billions from the former richest man, Andrew Forrest of Perth. Forrest saw his fortune plummet in recent weeks from $7.2 billion to $3.8 billion, according to the Australian newspaper, which extrapolated the figures from BRW magazine’s annual Rich 200 list.

Lowy is being audited by the Australian Tax Office after being named in a U.S. Senate report on tax evasion. The report alleged that Lowy hid $53 million in an account in Liechtenstein to evade paying taxes. Lowy claims the money was donated to charities in Israel.

JPost:

Two far-right parties, the Austrian Freedom Party and the Movement for Austria’s Future, managed to win 29 percent of the vote in the recent general elections in Austria. This is double what they got in the elections of 2006.
[...]
Yet to see the rise of the Austrian right as a revival of Nazism would be a mistake. For one thing, neither party is advocating violence, even if some of their rhetoric might inspire it. For another, it seems to me that voters backing these far-right parties may be motivated less by ideology than by anxieties and resentments that are felt in many European countries, including ones with no Nazi tradition, such as the Netherlands and Denmark.
[...]
And there’s certainly a case to be made that if people are anxious about their national identities, the sovereignty of their governments or the demographic and social complexion of their societies, such fears are best heard in the political arena. As long as people express their concerns, however distasteful to liberal ears, by votes rather than violence, democracy will not be seriously harmed.

The Guardian:

Iceland is on the brink of collapse. Inflation and interest rates are raging upwards. The krona, Iceland’s currency, is in freefall and is rated just above those of Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan. One of the country’s three independent banks has been nationalised, another is asking customers for money, and the discredited government and officials from the central bank have been huddled behind closed doors for three days with still no sign of a plan. International banks won’t send any more money and supplies of foreign currency are running out.

People talk about whether a new emergency unity government is needed and if the EU would fast-track the country to membership. On Friday the queues at the banks were huge, as people moved savings into the most secure accounts. Yesterday people were buying up supplies of olive oil and pasta after a supermarket spokesman announced on Friday night that they had no means of paying the foreign currency advances needed to import more foodstuffs.

NY Times:

The cost of determining a person’s complete genetic blueprint is about to plummet again — to $5,000.

That is the price that a start-up company called Complete Genomics says it will start charging next year for determining the sequence of the genetic code that makes up the DNA in one set of human chromosomes. The company is set to announce its plans on Monday.

Such a price would represent another step toward the long-sought goal of the “$1,000 genome.” At that price point it might become commonplace for people to obtain their entire DNA sequences, giving them information on what diseases they might be predisposed to or what drugs would work best for them.

NY Times:

DIEPSLOOT, South Africa — A dusty maze of concrete, sheet metal and scrap wood, Diepsloot is like so many of the enormous settlements around Johannesburg, mile after mile of feebly assembled shacks, the impromptu patchwork of the poor, the extremely poor and the hopelessly poor.

Monica Xangathi, 40, lives here in a shanty she shares with her brother’s family. “This is not the way I thought my life would turn out,” she said.

Her disappointment is not only with herself; she is heartsick about her country. Fourteen years after the end of apartheid, South Africa — the global pariah that became a global inspiration — has lapsed into gloom and anxiety about its future, surely not the harmonious “rainbow nation” so celebrated by Nelson Mandela on his inauguration day.

[...]

The past year has been especially unnerving, with one bleak event after another, and it is more than acidic politics that have soured the national mood. Economic growth slowed; prices shot up. Xenophobic riots broke out in several cities, with mobs killing dozens of impoverished foreigners and chasing thousands more from their tumbledown homes.

The country’s power company unfathomably ran out of electricity and rationed supply. Gone was the conceit that South Africa was the one place on the continent immune to such incompetence. The rich purchased generators; the poor muddled through with kerosene and paraffin.

Other grievances were ruefully familiar. South Africa has one of the worst crime rates. But more alarming than the quantity of lawbreaking is the cruelty. Robberies are often accompanied by appalling violence, and people here one-up each other with tales of scalding and shooting and slicing and garroting.

The poor apply padlocks in defense. The rich surround their homes with concrete and barbed wire — and there are suggestions that more are simply fleeing the country.