Home prices drop 8.9 percent in 3 months

NEW YORK (AP) -- U.S. home prices lost 8.9 percent in the final quarter of 2007, Standard & Poor's said Tuesday, marking a full year of declining values and the steepest drop in the 20-year history of its housing index.

"We reached a somber year-end for the housing market in 2007," said one of the index's creators Robert Shiller. "Home prices across the nation and in most metro areas are significantly lower than where they were a year ago. Wherever you look things look bleak."

The S&P/Case-Shiller home price indices, which include a quarterly index, a 20-city index and a 10-city index, reflect year-over-year declines in 17 metropolitan areas with double-digit declines in eight of them.

The 10-city index also set a record annual decline of 9.8 percent in December, while the 20-city index dropped 9.1 percent.

Home prices also plunged 5.4 percent from the previous three-month period, by far the largest quarter-to-quarter decline in the index's history. The previous record was the revised 1.8 percent drop in the third quarter of 2007.

The quarterly index tracks prices of existing-family homes nationwide compared with a year earlier.

Miami continues to lead the weakest markets, posting a 17.5 percent annual decline. Las Vegas and Phoenix followed with a 15.3 percent drop each. Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Detroit and Washington, D.C. all recorded double-digit annual declines.

Only three metro areas - Charlotte, N.C., Portland, Ore., and Seattle - showed year-over-year increases in prices, but Seattle's growth was up a slim 0.5 percent.

Who will end the American Empire and its neocon crazies before they end the world?

Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal
February 26, 2008

Is the new state of Kosovo, as rumors would have it, Richard Perle’s payoff to the Turks, or is the explanation that Serbia, like Palestine, Iraq, and Iran, lacking any international media reach, was easy for Empire Neocons to demonize in order to establish the precedent that Washington decides what territory belongs to whom and who rules it.

The hypocrisy of US government officials is boundless. On February 18, the US government inflamed Serbians by recognizing Muslim separatists in Kosovo, a historic province of Serbia, as an independent country. Two hundred thousand Serbs marched in protest and the US embassy in Belgrade was damaged. Is this surprising? No, not unless you are an official in the American Empire. The notorious Empire Neocon Counsel, Azlmay Khalilzad, Bush’s representative to the UN, declared, "I’m outraged by the mob attack."

What’s an embassy building compared to a province of Serbia, a province that stirs nationalist sentiments associated with the Serbs’ long military struggles with the Turks? Had it not been for the Serbs, Europeans would probably be Turks.

To neocon Khalilzad a province of Serbia is nothing. It is merely real estate to be given away by US recognition bestowed on a breakaway movement led by what some consider to be a gang of Muslim drug runners.

Secretary of State Condi Rice also found the Serbian response to the US giving away part of their country to be "intolerable."

Former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke also sees no reason for the Serbs to be upset that America gave away part of their country. He explained away the Serbian protests by declaring, "The Russians are behind this."

We can understand why US diplomacy is a failure when we see our diplomats explaining that, had it not been for the Russians stirring them up, Serbians wouldn’t have noticed the loss of a historic part of their country.

Perhaps Kosovo should have its independence. However, the US government could not have handled the issue in a more provocative way.

Washington has been interfering in Serbian internal affairs since the Clinton administration. Told that Americans had to prevent genocide, few paid enough attention to Washington’s facilitation of the breakup of the Yugoslav state during the 1990s and to the Clinton administration’s bombing and murder of Serbian civilians in order to support Muslim separatists in Kosovo in 1999. Clinton used NATO as cover, but the bombing campaign was not backed by the UN Security Council. Bombs fell on Serbia for 78 days, taking out public infrastructure, bridges, factories, power stations, petrochemical plants, telecommunications facilities, markets, refugees, the Chinese Embassy and a passenger train. "Sorry, honey, tell the kids I won’t be home tonight. President Clinton decided to bomb my train." Cluster bombs and depleted uranium were used. Clearly, the US government and its NATO puppets were guilty of war crimes under the Nuremberg standard.

Americans were told by an obedient media that the bombings were necessary in order to prevent Yugoslav leader, Slobodan Milosevic, from committing war crimes against the separatists who were stealing part of his country. After Clinton’s bombings intimidated the Serbian political establishment, Milosevic was turned out of office and handed over to the Americans for a payment of several hundred million dollars and delivered to the Hague for trial as a war criminal.

Milosevic represented himself at his trial and was more than a match for the trumped up charges. Unfortunately, he died in prison. Many believe he was helped on his way by an embarrassed American Empire unable to convict him.

What is the US government’s secret agenda in the Balkans? Why is the US government on the side of Muslims intent on severing Kosovo from Serbia? What is being served by creating a new Muslim state closer to Europe?

Whose interests are being served by Washington? Clearly, not our own. Or Europe’s.

And, please, none of that BS about "building freedom and democracy." As one of England’s most famous conservatives, Peregrine Worsthorne, wrote on February 20, America’s reputation as the West’s conscience is fatally weakened."

Supposedly our time is the era of globalism and one worldism. Ancient European nationalities are dissolving into the European Union, a new super state. US corporations now have transnational interests devoid of any national loyalties. Yet, the US is hard at work dissolving a small Balkan state into even smaller constituent parts. Why is this happening? Why did Bush order US puppets in Britain, France and Germany to instantly recognize the historic Serbian province as a new Muslim state?

Is the new state of Kosovo, as rumors would have it, Richard Perle’s payoff to the Turks, or is the explanation that Serbia, like Palestine, Iraq, and Iran, lacking any international media reach, was easy for Empire Neocons to demonize in order to establish the precedent that Washington decides what territory belongs to whom and who rules it. Clinton’s bombing of Serbia was a precedent for Bush’s bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq and now Africa and tomorrow Iran and Syria.

The day the Empire Crazies bomb Russia or China, we are all fried.

Be a macho super patriot, believe your government, help to fry the world. It’s the American way.

Traitor Greenspan Urges Gulf States To Abandon Dollar

Former Fed chief's insistence that Arab nations dump greenback peg could lead to economic chaos in America

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Alan Greenspan has again exposed himself as a traitor working against the interests of the American people by urging Gulf states to abandon the dollar peg, a move that could result in financial chaos and an economic depression in America.

The dollar peg mandates Gulf nations to price their assets in U.S. dollars and follow U.S. monetary policy at a time when the Fed is cutting interest rates, a system that has produced a boom in oil revenues but led to high inflation as the dollar weakens.

"It [de-pegging] is probably the most useful thing that can be done to stop the increasing influence of foreign assets on the monetary system and therefore the monetary base which is basically the major force in inflationary pressures," Greenspan told the Abu Dhabi Corporate Leadership Forum yesterday.

"In the short term free floating ... will not fully dissipate inflationary pressure, although it would significantly do so," added Greenspan, giving a green light for Gulf states to drop the dollar peg.

According to Economist editor Pam Woodall, Greenspan's comments heralded the beginning of the end for the US dollar as the currency of choice for foreign exchange reserves.

"If Asian central banks hold today more than 80 per cent of the global foreign exchange reserves, which indicates the shift of the global economy domination towards Asia, it seems quite awkward that the UAE still maintains the peg of its currency to the US dollar," she told Gulf News.

Greenspan's zeal to destroy the dollar is evident in numerous public statements he has made predicting the replacement of the dollar with the Euro as the world reserve currency.

The former Fed chairman has repeatedly badmouthed the dollar and hyped the inevitability of economic chaos at a time when market confidence is in the toilet. Greenspan's rhetoric matches that of the IMF, who in October of last year bizarrely slammed the dollar as "overvalued" at the same time the greenback hit its all time low against the Euro.

A decision on behalf of the Gulf states to abandon the dollar peg would have disastrous consequences for the greenback and the American economy.

Such a move could lead the likes of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to diversify their foreign exchange holdings out of dollars. This would amount to a vote of "no confidence" in the dollar and may cause other countries with large dollar reserves, such as China and Japan, to follow suit and begin dumping the greenback en masse.

China has threatened repeatedly to use the "nuclear option" and liquidate its vast holding of US treasuries in response to continued pressure on the Communist state to force a yuan revaluation. According to a widely-read London Telegraph report, such an event "could trigger a dollar crash" and also "cause a spike in US bond yields, hammering the US housing market and perhaps tipping the economy into recession."

Runaway inflation would also ensue, making the cost of living unaffordable to even middle class Americans as food prices skyrocket and international aid organizations like the World Food Programme predict rationing and food riots.

The dollar has held firm against the Euro and recovered some losses against Sterling over the past two months, but it has still lost 12 per cent of its value against the trade-weighted index over the last two years and has plunged by a whopping 60 per cent against the Euro since Bush entered the White House.

Video: McCain says war in Iraq 'will be over soon'

David Edwards and Mike Sheehan
Raw Story
Tuesday, February 26, 2008

White House hopeful Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is accusing Democrats of "misrepresenting" remarks he's previously made about U.S. troops being in Iraq for a century or more. McCain clarified Monday that the war in Iraq would be over in the near future.

"My friends, the war will be over soon," McCain said at a townhall-style meeting, "...although the insurgency will go on for years and years and years, but it will be handled by the Iraqis and not by us."

In early January, McCain told a crowd that U.S. troops could remain in Iraq for "maybe 100" years to ensure that Americans aren't being harmed. He later told a journalist that a thousand, and even a million, years in Iraq were fine with him.

McCain's assessment Monday that the Iraq war would soon end harkened back to a speech by President Bush on May 1, 2003 aboard an aircraft carrier in which the president declared major military operations in Iraq to be over with an enormous "Mission Accomplished" banner behind him. Thousands of Americans soldiers, as well as countless Iraqis, have been killed or wounded in the time since.

Earlier Monday, McCain told reporters on his campaign bus that to win the White House in November he had to convince Americans that U.S. policy in Iraq is succeeding. If he can't, continued McCain, "then I lose. I lose." He quickly retracted the remark.

San Jose Police to Use Sound Weapon

NBC 11
February 25, 2008

San Jose police have a new crime fighting tool.

You might want to hear about it, but you won’t want to hear it being used.

They’ll be using a dish-shaped, sonic weapon called a Long Range Acoustic Device — or L-RAD.

Police say it will be used mostly as a high-grade sound system to amplify a police officer’s order at great distances.

Police say it will be used mostly as a high-grade sound system to amplify a police officer’s order at great distances.

But it can also be used as another of the department’s “less-lethal” weapons.

The ear-splitting device is growing in popularity around the globe and has been used by soldiers to flush suspected terrorists out of caves in Afghanistan.

Public Housing Could Soon Be Under Surveillance

Marisa Yamane
KHON2
Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The Hawaii Public Housing Authority wants to install security cameras at all public housing projects throughout the state.

The money would come from tax payers.

It would cost several million dollars for the security cameras, money which the Hawaii Public Housing Authority is requesting from the legislature.

Advocates say the cameras would help deter vandalism and other crime, which would save the state money in the long run.

There are 68 public housing projects throughout Hawaii.

The largest is Kuhio Park Terrace, also known as KPT.

"Now we're putting in major modernization for our elevators so when we spend millions of dollars to do this we don't want these facilities to be damaged," said Chad Taniguchi, Hawaii Public Housing Authority Executive Director.

In the past, vandals have damaged the elevators and fire alarms at KPT.

As part of an overall solution to curb crime, Taniguchi wants to install security cameras at all of the state's public housing projects.

"This is something other public housing authorities have done quite well on the mainland, it's also something the private sector has done for many years now," said Taniguchi.

"It would be a good thing to monitor things because there's so much people here at KPT," said Tasha Esteron, Kuhio Park Terrace resident.

The Hawaii Public Housing Authority has requested $6.4 million dollars from the legislature for capitol improvement projects, part of which would be used to fix and modernize the elevators at KPT.

The rest would be used for security cameras.

Full article here.

Every home to get mobile phone number to summon dedicated neighbourhood police team

Al Jazeera.net
Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Every household in England and Wales will be given a mobile phone number to call new neighbourhood police teams, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced today.

Each home will also get an email address for the officer responsible for their street and neighbourhood police chiefs will have to hold regular public meetings under the plans, to be rolled out by April.

The £325million-a-year plan, one of the UK's biggest shifts from centralised policing, has been drawn up by Mr Brown and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

Under the system, trialled in Lambeth, south London, each council ward will have its own neighbourhood policing team, made up of police and community support officers.

Mr Brown and Mrs Smith met one of the teams in Clapham, south London today to hear how people would be able to contact and hold their local policing team to account.

Announcing the measures, Mr Brown said: "We know people want more say about their community and a visible and accessible police service that deals with local problems and anti-social behaviour.

"Whilst crime is falling, too many people have a real fear about their communities and feel detached from their police service.

"That is why we've been working with the police on a new style of policing to address local priorities, improve public confidence and make neighbourhoods safer.

"Neighbourhood policing is about giving local people power over how their streets are policed.

"It is a major step towards a new kind of policing, one in which the citizen has real influence.

"The excellent progress made by established teams such as the one in Lambeth are now starting to be rolled out across the country so by April everyone will be able to get involved."

Mrs Smith said: "April will mark the start of a new kind of relationship between the police service and the public.

Full article here.