The big story last week was the fall in stock markets across the world on Tuesday. In the United States the Dow had its biggest one-day drop since September 2001, while the housing market continued its slide and signs of recession mounted.
As for the continuing problems in housing, these will have more effects on stock prices than some might think, due to the massive amounts of bad paper being held (usually as funds holding securitized debt and derivatives connected to those markets) as assets by most all of the top financial institutions.
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| Israeli army forces a Palestinian civilian to strip naked in an attack on the town of Nablus. Shades of Nazi Germany |
ROME - Joy turned to horror in Italy on Friday when an Italian journalist who had been held hostage in Iraq was released, only to be shot by U.S. military forces at a checkpoint in Baghdad.
Journalist Giuliana Sgrena underwent shoulder surgery in Baghdad Friday.
Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena suffered a shrapnel wound to her shoulder when an American armoured car fired on her vehicle, while an Italian intelligence officer who had negotiated her release was killed.
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| Ivan Safronov |
"In certain contexts, memory can be subversive; in others, memory can shield the status quo. When individuals and communities become vested with memory as a form of identity and specialness, then other suffering threatens to displace the centrality of our experience. Instead of a bridge of solidarity to others who are suffering in the present, suffering in the past can become a badge of honour, protecting us from the challenges that are before us. Then our witness, originally powerful, opening questions about God and power, becomes diluted, can be seen as fake, contrived, even wilfully so. An industry grows up around you, honours you, and at the same time uses your witness for other reasons. In the end a confusion results, externally and internally, until the witness himself can no longer differentiate between the world of interpretation he helped articulate and the world that now speaks in his name. Is this what happened to Wiesel, or is Finkelstein's more acerbic analysis accurate?"[1]
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