The Bush Lying Tour Continues
Maybe Your City Is Next?
35 Iraq Officials Held in Raids on Key Ministry
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and TARIQ MAHER
Published: December 17, 2008
BAGHDAD – Up to 35 officials in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior ranking as high as general have been arrested over the past three days with some of them accused of quietly working to reconstitute Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, according to senior security officials in Baghdad.
The arrests, confirmed by officials from the Ministries of the Interior and National Security as well as the prime minister’s office, included four generals, one of whom, Gen. Ahmed Abu Raqeef, is the ministry’s director of internal affairs. The officials also said that the arrests had come at the hand of an elite counterterrorism force that reports directly to the office of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
The involvement of the counterterrorism unit speaks to the seriousness of the accusations, and several officials from the Ministries of the Interior and National Security said that some of those arrested were in the early stages of planning a coup.
Spinning Quirky Yarns
Film Industry in Small Indian Textile Town Makes Low-Budget Parodies Of Bollywood Smash Hits With a Lot of Heart, Local Flavor and Ingenuity
By Rama Lakshmi
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 18, 2008; Page A19
MALEGAON, India — Past a narrow alleyway filled with sleeping goats, water tanks and women washing clothes, Shaikh Nasir’s modest home is a landmark. This is where he thinks up new ways to make the people of this grim textile town laugh.
Nasir is the father of a homegrown film industry that is famous for its parodies of blockbuster movies from Bollywood, India’s Hindi film capital.
USA
Dollar’s Slump Erases Months Of Solid Gains
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 18, 2008; Page A01
The dollar yesterday staged one of its biggest one-day drops against the euro and fell to a 13-year low against the Japanese yen as near-zero interest rates and the Federal Reserve’s plan to print vast sums of cash dilute the value of the greenback.
The drops dramatically accelerated the dollar’s reversal of fortune over the past three weeks after months of solid gains. The slide underscores the risks the Federal Reserve is taking to jump-start the U.S. economy through aggressive monetary policy.
On Monday, the Fed cut its target for the federal funds rate, at which banks lend to each other, from 1 percent to a target range of 0 percent to 0.25 percent, and effectively vowed to print as much money as it needs to try to pull the United States from a worsening recession.