A relative of Yasser Arafat insisted on Monday that the Palestinian leader who died four years ago this week was poisoned by Israel.

"Every day there are statements and clues about the elimination of Arafat and every day we draw closer to the poisoning theory," Nasser al-Qidwa, a nephew of the late Palestinian leader, told AFP.

Last week, Barack Obama was (we presume) elected president of the United States as the country fell deeper into recession. Nearly 300,000 jobs were lost in October in the United States as the official unemployment rate rose almost a half percent since September to 6.5%. The Dow fell 4% last week despite all the good feelings. When he takes office in January 2009 the new president will surely face an economic situation as dire as Franklin Roosevelt faced in 1933 Not only the United States, but the rest of the world, is looking to him to find a way out of economic disaster. Will he deliver?

On both sides of the Atlantic there is incredulity at the gall of bankers. Goldman Sachs is reported to have set aside $7 billion for bonuses having received $6 billion from the federal government in bailout funds; while The Royal Bank of Scotland is scheduled to pay out a much more modest $2.9 billion equivalent.

The age old argument that bonuses have to be paid to keep people from walking has of course been trotted out. In the current atmosphere, it might be said that bankers are lucky not to be walking the plank let alone getting a bonus. Indeed, in any just society many of them would be in jail already.

Syria's foreign minister on Sunday said his country may resort to more "painful" measures if the United States does not give an official explanation for last Sunday's deadly cross-border raid. Syria retaliated to the attack that it says killed eight people by ordering the closure of an American school and cultural center in Damascus.

But Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem conveyed those measures were "introductory." He warned Syria could escalate its response in the future.

Al-Moallem spoke Sunday in a TV interview with the Lebanese ANB satellite station.

The video clip is from 2005, and Sarah Palin, who is running for governor, stands on the dais of a small church; three pastors surround her in a huddle. They are touching her shoulders, her forehead, her back. The would-be governor is stone still, eyes cast down, palms up toward heaven. The man on her left, the one touching her forehead, bends occasionally to whisper in her ear.

This is Ed Kalnins, senior pastor of Wasilla Assembly of God, the church Palin attended from the time she was 4-years-old until 2002. The man behind her is praying loudly, relentlessly and with an intensity rarely seen in America's mainstream churches. This is the Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee, a Pentecostal powerhouse who has a reputation for being able to cast out demons and witches through prayer.

This week Alan Greenspan saw the error of his ways amid dire, and no doubt accurate, predictions that hundreds if not thousands of hedge funds will collapse in the next few months, unleashing a global financial firestorm.

Just one week after bailing out the banking sector to the tune of $4 trillion, leaders in the U.S., Europe and Japan sought to assuage their citizens anger by announcing a raft of proposals to 'stimulate the economy', cut income and business taxes and fund schools. Sarkozy even announced a sovereign wealth fund that will hold stakes in French companies to prevent them being taken over by foreigners.

Brasil has stumped up $50 billion to defend the Real. Imagine what that sort of money could do inside Brasil for schools, infrastructure, medical facilities or policing. The Venezuelan Bolivar is also under pressure.

In a sign that the real economy is being hit very hard, shipping rates for commodities have dropped 90% since May, exposing the very real fact that as Thomas Kositgen put it:-

The emerging markets rely on the strength of the bigger economic powers to grow, [...]

And here is the sad end game of the ripple effect: it takes food out of the mouths of children, it shuts the water taps and it sends hordes of people into lives of despair.....a matter of life and death.

It is already taking the food out of the mouths of people in the West, although the Western media is strangely silent about that aspect. We can expect the situation to get much worse.

Damascus, Syria - U.S. military helicopters launched an extremely rare attack Sunday on Syrian territory close to the border with Iraq, killing eight people in a strike the government in Damascus condemned as "serious aggression."

A U.S. military official said the raid by special forces targeted the network of al-Qaida-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria into Iraq. The Americans have been unable to shut the network down in the area struck because Syria was out of the military's reach.

"We are taking matters into our own hands," the official told The Associated Press in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of cross-border raids.

Nine Afghan soldiers have been killed and four others hurt in an air strike by international forces in the eastern part of the country, officials say.

Helicopter gunships reportedly fired on an Afghan army post in Khost province.

The US said Afghan soldiers had been killed and injured in a possible case of "mistaken identity".

Summary: A battle for global economic hegemony is under way. The banking bailouts have moved from the original US proposal of simply buying bad assets to substantial recapitalisation and even nationalisation of banks that just months ago were considered strong and healthy. Bank deposits are rapidly being guaranteed around the world and government guarantees for short and medium term bank debt are freely available. Just who is running these bailouts, and for who's benefit?

Behind much of the apparent debacle lie derivatives and structured assets so, as Tuesday October 21st saw the settlement of many of these instruments effected by the Lehman bankruptcy, we take a look at Credit Default Swaps and some of the myths behind them.

Fundamental changes are being affected to the way banks are required to account for their assets with the hasty dropping or limiting of "mark-to-market" or fair value accounting - what is behind these changes and who benefits?

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"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." Thomas Jefferson 3rd president of the US (1743-1826), Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)

Thomas Jefferson was right; he was right when in 1863/64 US agricultural loans were called in at the behest of the Rothschild bankers in London, he was right in the panic of 1906, he was right in the agricultural crisis of 1920/21, he was right in the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the early 1930's and he's right today. However, not even he could foresee that it is not just the people of the US that are slaves to private banking interests but all the peoples of the world.

China has begun a multi-billion-pound scheme in the far-Western province of Xinjiang to build roads and railways that will open up Central Asia. By the end of this year, nine railway lines will be under construction, including a railway from China to Pakistan and a rail link through Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, at a total cost of over £50 billion.