A series of deadly bombs

Algeria's reconciliation policy is threatened by a spate of bombings

Some 60 people have been killed in a series of car bomb explosions over two days in a region to the south-east of Algiers, marking a major escalation in the activity of Islamist underground groups that have acquired new purpose since affiliating with al-Qaida in 2006. The upsurge in violence appears to reflect the concern of al-Qaida's leadership to open up new fronts in the Middle East and North Africa after the serious setbacks that the movement has suffered in Iraq. Some Algerian commentators have also blamed the escalation on the government's reconciliation policy, thereby raising questions over whether the president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, should be allowed to stay on for a third term.

The heaviest casualties from the latest attacks occurred when a suicide bomber exploded his vehicle outside a gendarmerie training college in Issers on August 19th where a large number of prospective new recruits were waiting for the gates to open. The government said that 43 people were killed and 45 injured. The next day there were two car bomb explosions in the nearby town of Bouira. The first, outside a military building, left four soldiers lightly wounded, according to the official Algerian Press Service. The second exploded outside a hotel, and killed 11 people. It was reported that the hotel was being used to house contractors working on the nearby Koudiet Acerdoune dam project. Companies from Canada, Turkey and Italy have been involved in this project, but it was not immediately clear whether any foreign nationals were among the casualties. ...

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[Source: The Economist: News analysis - Posted by King Of Videos and Blogs]

The coming days: The week ahead

In search of a resolution to the war in Georgia, and other news

• RUSSIA and Georgia have agreed to form humanitarian corridors to arrange for the evacuation of civilians caught up in fighting in South Ossetia. Amid ongoing uncertainty, Georiga now says that it has withdrawn troops from South Ossetia, where they had been battling Russian soldiers. The coming days will see whether the conflict is snuffed out quickly, or whether further escalation is likely.

• PARTIES that make up Pakistan's ruling coalition are set to launch impeachment proceedings against President Pervez Musharraf when parliament convenes on Monday August 11th. Mr Musharraf, who has presided over an economic meltdown and a growing Taliban insurgency in the north-west of the country, faces a vote of no confidence. The ruling coalition says that Mr Musharraf acted unconstitutionally by declaring a state of emergency last November and dismissing nearly 60 judges. But it is far from clear if his opponents can muster the two-thirds majority in the upper and lower houses needed to remove Mr Musharraf from office. ...

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Bolivia: Divided we rule

A boost for Bolivia's president as he wins a referendum on his rule, but divisions persist

CRIES of "Evo, brother, the people are with you!" resounded on Sunday August 10th in front of Bolivia's presidential palace. The revellers were celebrating victory by the country's socialist president, Evo Morales, in a referendum on whether he should remain in office. He not only survived but appears to have emerged with a stronger mandate, according to unofficial results (official ones are due at the end of the week). These suggest that Mr Morales secured over 60% support, more than the 54% he won in a presidential election in December 2005.

But his chief opponents, the governors of four eastern regions, also appear to have had their mandates confirmed by the recall referendum, with thumping majorities. The referendum has thus confirmed Bolivia's political divide between the impoverished, Amerindian, high plains in the west, which remains strongly loyal to Mr Morales, and the more prosperous, capitalist and gas-rich eastern lowlands, which backs the opposition. ...

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On the up

Interest rates go up in South Korea

South Korea's central bank, the Bank of Korea (BOK), raised its policy interest rate by 25 basis points on August 7th, following the lead of other Asian central banks that have begun tightening monetary policy in an effort to tame soaring inflation. The bank's decision is likely to have been a difficult one, however, given simultaneous fears of an economic slowdown.

The BOK raised its benchmark base rate from 5% to 5.25%. This was the bank's first rate hike in a year, and the accompanying monetary-policy statement indicated that the need to subdue inflation expectations was one of the main reasons for the hike. The bank's statement also acknowledged that the domestic economy was weakening. The fact that it went ahead with the rate hike anyway suggests that South Korean policymakers are very much in the same quasi-stagflationary boat as those in many other Asian economies, which have been forced to raise borrowing costs even as concerns about slower economic growth--and the impact of the US's economic and financial-sector woes on other countries--have intensified. ...

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Keep it tight

No need for a shift in monetary policy in China

There are few countries in the world where double-digit rates of GDP growth would qualify as a cause for concern. However, China has become so used to supercharged rates of expansion that, despite GDP growth of 10.1% in the second quarter, panic is spreading over the state of the economy. Amid press reports of slowing sales of cars and other key consumer goods, of soaring costs for labour, materials and power, and of problems in the export sector, the lobby pressing the government to relax monetary policy has gathered strength. When top officials conducted a tour of China's coastal regions in person to assess the state of events on the ground in July, there was a widespread expectation that this was a prelude to a formal change in government priorities.

On the face of it, expectations were justified when pronouncements at the end of July, following a key government economic policy meeting, appeared to shift the priority from controlling inflation back to maintaining steady and fast development. This was accompanied by an adjustment in the export VAT rebate regime, which reversed some of the steps taken last year by increasing the rebates available to garment and apparel producers from 11% to 13%. The People's Bank of China (the central bank) is also reported to have increased the annual loan quota for 2008 by around 5%, instructing banks that the new funds should be channelled towards small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and areas affected by the May earthquake in Sichuan. Some observers have also made much of the fact that the renminbi has actually fallen against the US dollar for much of the past month--weakening from around Rmb6.81:US$1 in mid-July to Rmb6.86:US$1 in early August. ...

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Ceding control

Nigeria hands territory to Cameroon

Nigeria has handed control of the Bakassi peninsula to Cameroon, theoretically ending a 15-year territorial dispute. However, Cameroon may struggle to assert its control over the region.

The handover of the potentially oil-rich Bakassi peninsula was completed on August 14th, in theory resolving a long-running territorial dispute. Nigeria and Cameroon nearly went to war over the area in 1994--when Cameroon first took its case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)--and in 1996. In 2002 the ICJ ruled in Cameroon's favour, and while Nigeria initially rejected the court ruling, it agreed in 2006 to hand over the territory. Nigerian security forces have subsequently been ceding control of parts of Bakassi, and the handover of remaining areas completes the process. ...

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You Belong to Us

In late 2007, Richard Stengel wrote a cover story for Time magazine calling for a massive national service program to be imposed on American young people. If you’d like to read it, knock yourself out. Someone probably needs to smash it, but the avalanche of propaganda and nationalism you’ll find there was too demoralizing for me to attempt it. The very idea that helping someone in your neighborhood should be called “service to the nation” should be spooky and Orwellian enough, but for many people I guess it isn’t.

One thing I couldn’t get out of my head, even though it’s not by any means the weirdest aspect of the program, is Stengel’s proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of National Service. I think it was this piece of advice that struck me the most: “And don’t appoint a gray bureaucrat to this job; make it someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mike Bloomberg, who would capture the imagination of the public.”

Translation: the American people, too stupid to engage in government-approved service projects without being prodded by their betters, need a crowd-pleasing Hollywood actor to rouse them to action. Bloomberg, possibly the dullest human being in public life, would be a better choice than Schwarzenegger from my point of view: the American people would barely be able to keep awake through one of his droning appeals.[...]

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Preparing to float

Ukraine moves towards a free exchange rate

Exchange-rate moves by Ukraine's central bank in the past month signal that the country is moving towards a floating exchange rate that unifies the official and interbank rates--and so helps to check inflation, which is running at over 30% year on year. Seemingly, the bank's management has fought off political pressure from exporters to make the change; and by acting now, it has a chance to hone its use of monetary levers before the country faces potentially serious economic and financial turbulence next year.

Ukraine's inflationary problems--growth in consumer prices averaged 22% year on year in the first quarter and is likely to exceed 30% in the second quarter--helped propel its central bank into action in late May, acceding finally to the recommendations of the IMF amongst others to change its exchange-rate policy. In the previous three years the country had maintained a de facto peg to the dollar, at HRN5.05:US$1. As the US currency declined against other major currencies, however, this helped to stoke import-price inflation in Ukraine and encouraged rapid growth in foreign-currency lending. On May 21st the board of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) announced a new official hryvnya exchange rate of HRN4.85:US$1. The NBU had already refrained for several weeks from interventions in the interbank market that had previously kept the rate there within a tight informal corridor of HRN5.0‑5.06:US$1. The NBU governor, Volodymyr Stelmakh, said that the appreciation could help reduce inflation by 3 percentage points in 2008. ...

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Upbeat in Syria

Why President Bashar Assad is feeling cock-a-hoop

Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, is reaping substantial benefits, both economic and political, from the Lebanese political deal agreed in Doha last month, for which he has modestly claimed much of the credit. The ruler of Qatar visited him in Damascus to thank him for his role in the Doha agreement, and Mr Assad followed this up with visits to the UAE and Kuwait, from which he obtained generous promises of aid, including 500,000 tonnes of wheat to be purchased on Syria's behalf by Abu Dhabi. The rehabilitation of his political reputation--which had been tarnished by association with brutal events in Lebanon and repression at home--is set to be completed by an appearance at the Mediterranean summit to be hosted by France's president Nicolas Sarkozy on July 13th.

What has Mr Assad done to deserve this unaccustomed adulation? By his own account, he has done no more than to remain consistent, waiting patiently for others to see sense. At a forum in Dubai Mr Assad said that when the Doha talks seemed to be on the brink of collapse, the ruler of Qatar called on Syria to provide some suggestions. "The ideas we provided were the exact same ideas we provided the French last year when they were mediating", Mr Assad said, according to a transcript provided on the Syria Comment blog. "However, the French then did not comprehend or did not implement the ideas correctly." He attributed this failing on the part of the French government to the mistaken assumption that Syria could speak and act on behalf of its allies in Lebanon, whereas in fact Syria was merely interested in furnishing practical solutions. ...

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South Africa's economy

Power cuts and lower consumer demand will mean less growth

South African growth is already being affected by electricity shortages and a slowdown in consumer demand. The annual figure may fall below 4% for the first time in five years.

Power shortages and continued interest rate rises are beginning to affect economic growth. According to the latest figures from Statistics South Africa the economy grew by just 2.1% in the first three months of 2008--less than half the rate of the previous quarter (5.3%) and the lowest quarterly rate in six years. Power cuts had a substantial impact, unsurprisingly given that they are estimated to have cost the economy some R50bn (US$6.5bn) between November 2007 and January 2008 alone. The mining industry has been particularly hard-hit: following late-January blackouts, state energy utility Eskom cut supplies to 90% of normal levels. However, this is insufficient to maintain output, as the bulk of power used by mines is to keep pits functioning (including ventilation and drainage) rather than producing. Although power supplies to mines were subsequently raised to 95% of normal levels, mining production fell by 22.1% in January-March, declining to its lowest level in 40 years. ...

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Boom to bust

China's property bubble is about to burst

The sizzle is off China's property markets, and that's potentially bad news for the country's social stability.

In the past two years China's property market has enjoyed a spectacular rise, with average prices in some cities doubling. But that raised a red flag with Chinese economic policymakers, and in late 2007 the central government made controlling the rise of asset prices a policy priority. Since then, the State Council has rolled out a series of regulations--from credit ceilings to a 40% down-payment requirement for second mortgages--in order to combat property speculation. ...

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Bashing business

Slovakia's strong economy may be hurt by anti-business policies

Slovakia continues to enjoy stellar economic growth, but local businesses are increasingly unhappy at the anti-enterprise policies of Prime Minister Robert Fico's populist administration. It has sought to unravel its predecessor's lauded health and pension reforms, and to put more restrictions on retailers. In an effort to cap inflation, it has leaned on utility companies to cap prices and is now considering legislation that would make "unjustified" price increases a criminal offence. It is an open question how long Slovakia's government can continue in this vein without damaging the economy.

The Slovak Business Alliance (PAS) announced on June 26th that the business environment had deteriorated over the two years that Mr Fico has been prime minister, pointing to a 6.5-point decline in its business environment index to 120. The PAS poll surveyed nearly 200 companies. ...

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The R3VOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED ! hosted by Alex Jones

Are your friends and family still asleep? Imagine being able to watch, on a dish network, at your friends house, all of the content found on InfoWars.com and other like-minded minded organizations. Imagine the conversations that will occur after they see and hear some of the news they havent been getting from the main stream [...]

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[Source: War On You

U.S. intelligence has been meeting and advising the group that has been blamed for bombings in Iran

In another sign of growing tensions with the United States, Pakistan is threatening to turn over to Iran six members of a tribal militant group Iran claims are “spies” for the CIA.The group, Jundullah, operates in Baluchistan on both sides of the border between Iran and Pakistan and has carried out a number of violent [...]

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[Source: War On You

The 9-11 Commission Charade

by Rep. Ron Paul, MD

The 9-11 Commission report, released late last month, has disrupted the normally quiet Washington August. Various congressional committees are holding hearings on the report this week, even though Congress is not in session, in an ...

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[Source: Ron Paul forum