| Mortgage brokers get surge of calls
Lerone Joyner stands in front of his Glasgow home. Joyner is refinancing his mortgage to a new fixed rate that will save him about $150 a month. Thirty-year, fixed rate mortgages last week fell to 5.57 percent., down from 5.75 the week before. (Buy photo) The News Journal/ROBERT CRAIG .
It’s All About the Money
As part of his campaign, President Mubarak was photographed and taped sitting down on the dekka [bench] of a simple falah, chatting with him over a cup of tea," Fahmy recalls. “We took this as an unspoken invitation to incorporate the President into our cartoon. How could we not have him sit and listen to the most famous falah in Egypt? By the way, we didn't seek specific permission for any of this." Since late September, it has been customary that the reader sees the President's face in the strip each Saturday. The Falah speaks, with all due respect to His Excellency, about current topics including wheat imports, subsidization and jobs. This is done in an honest and candid manner. Of course, the Falah babbles on and on, but will the President ever talk? .
Recession Fear Sends Wall St. Reeling...Again
NEW YORK (Reuters) Stocks fell on Thursday, with the benchmark S&P 500 plummeting to a 15-month low, as news of a plunge in regional factory activity and a hefty loss at Merrill Lynch further clouded an increasingly dire view of the economy. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke echoed the bleak assessment of the economy in comments to lawmakers, reiterating that the Fed was ready to act aggressively and throwing his support behind other efforts to counter the risk of recession. In one of the strongest signals yet that the economy is at high risk of contracting, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank said mid-Atlantic factory activity has slowed much more than expected to levels that typically signal recession. That extinguished Wall Street's early attempt at a rally, with shares of companies most sensitive to the economy's ups and downs suffering the most.
Dodging a bullet
At this year's gathering of the United States Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C., there's little to celebrate. Executives from hard-hit Eastern and Midwestern cities are calling on the federal government to assist them in dealing with the fallout from the subprime mortgage meltdown that has left thousands of homes vacant and undercut property tax revenues that fund municipal services. Houston Mayor Bill White, who passed on the conference this year, can sympathize with his colleagues' pain but is not feeling it locally. The city's economy, bolstered by a booming energy sector, has not experienced the nosedive in the housing market that has occurred elsewhere. Likewise, Texas leads the nation in job growth and single-family home starts and sales. Foreclosures in Harris County rose a moderate 24 percent in 2007, totaling less than a third of the record 30,742 that occurred in 1987.
Did Racist Voters Cost Obama The Primary?
It seems strange to be looking for the reasons for Barack Obama's shock defeat in the New Hampshire primary. Just a few weeks ago Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination to contest the presidential election but that was before the Illinois senator stormed to victory in the Iowa caucus.His campaign seemed to have built up an unstoppable momentum, which was reflected in opinion polls that had him comfortably ahead. So how did the pollsters get it so wrong? One possible, if unsavoury, explanation is the so-called Bradley effect. The phenomenon was named after Tom Bradley, the long time mayor of Los Angeles, and describes the difference between what members of the public will say in relation to a black candidate when asked by pollsters and the change in their behaviour when they actually vote.
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