Western companies are pushing to acquire vast stretches of African land to meet the world's biofuel needs. Local farmers and governments are being showered with promises. But is this just another form of economic colonialism?

Everything will turn out alright. Correction: everything is going to get better. There will be new roads, a new school, a pharmacy, even a proper water supply. Most of all, there will be jobs -- 5,000, at the very least. "If there are jobs for us, then it's a good thing," says Juma Njagu, 26, who hopes to be able to leave his meager existence as a planter and charburner behind soon.

Njagu lives in Mtamba, a village of about 1,100 souls in Tanzania's Kisarawe district, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) south-west of Dar es Salaam, the capital and largest city. Mtamba, accessible by dirt road, is a place where people scrape by on a bit of farming, a bit of fishing and the production of charcoal. There isn't much else in Mtamba.

That could change if the British firm Sun Biofuels goes ahead with plans to produce biodiesel fuel from "Jatropha curcas," an energy plant with a high oil content, which it hopes to plant on Kisarawe's farmland.

The United States has spied extensively on Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and other Iraqi government leaders, the American investigative journalist Bob Woodward has revealed.

"We know everything he says," the journalist quotes one source as saying, in his fourth book on George Bush's presidency. The US administration's decision to spy continually on Mr Maliki shows deep distrust of the Iraqi leadership by the US. The surveillance took place even while Mr Maliki was speaking to Mr Bush by video-phone once a week.

The Iraqi government reacted furiously today and said it would ask the United States for an explanation, although Mr Maliki and other Iraqi leaders are unlikely to be shocked or surprised that the US has been spying on them.. "If it is true...it reflects that there is no trust," government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement.

Stephen Harper, Canada's prime minister, is set to call an election for October 14, a government spokesman has said.

Harper will visit the nation's governor general on Sunday and ask her to dissolve the Canadian parliament so an election can be held, the spokesman said on Friday.

Harper's Conservative party beat the country's opposition Liberal party, which had held power for almost 13 years, in 2006.

Despite growing protests in Pakistan over a raid, many Pentagon officials favor a more aggressive approach to counter attacks in Afghanistan carried out by militants based in Pakistan. By Julian E. Barnes and Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
September 5, 2008 WASHINGTON -- Even as angry protests spread in Pakistan, Pentagon officials said Thursday that the number of cross-border commando missions may grow in coming months to counter increasing violence in Afghanistan.

The developments threatened to aggravate U.S.-Pakistani tensions just before the country's presidential election Saturday, in which attitudes toward the United States are likely to be a key issue. The U.S. raid Wednesday and its aftermath also fanned a long-standing debate within the Bush administration over how to deal with militants in Pakistan.

During last year's APEC summit, students and activists found themselves the most unlikely of targets. Edmund Tadros reports.

University activists and Greenpeace members made up a third of a secret list of 61 people NSW Police considered so dangerous they were banned from public areas near last year's Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum.

[...]

A former police officer who is now an academic at the University of Western Sydney, Michael Kennedy, branded the intelligence assessments "pure unadulterated bullshit".

Its a perfect example of how we can never, ever trust the police in a democracy, and why we need to watch them like hawks, be very careful with the powers we give them, and ensure that everythign they do can be challenged in a court with a legal duty to protect human rights.  Sadly, Australia has no binding human rights legislation, and so the police get to get away with destroying democracy for their own convenience.

The government has formulated a plan to put troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under federal control, dismiss their top executives, and use government funds to prop them up, government officials told the two companies yesterday, according to sources familiar with the conversations.

Under the plan, the federal government would place the firms in a legal state known as conservatorship, the sources said. The value of the company's common stock would be diluted but not wiped out while the holdings of other securities, including company debt and preferred shares, would be protected by the government.

Instead of giving each company a big capital infusion up front, the government plans to make quarterly infusions as the companies' losses warrant, the sources said. This would be an attempt to minimize the initial cost of the rescue.

The major problem with housing lately is that mortgage rates are moving up even as US Treasury rates move lower. All of the attempts to fix the mortgage market so far revolve around attempts to get mortgage rates down and thus increase affordability.

This move will unclog tens of billions of mortgage backed securities guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie.  Mortgage rates will fall sharply next week.  Banks will be able to lend again because investors will buy mortgage backed securities which when issued by Fannie and Freddie will now be guaranteed by the US Treasury.

Yes this is inflationary as the fact that the Treasury has a printing press which prints dollars is the reason they can guarantee hundreds of billions in new debt.  But the alternative was a massive deflation whose consequences are far worse.

Bank and financial stocks will rally huge on Monday providing relief on Wall Street.  The Dow shoul d be up several hundred points even as Fannie and Freddie shares go to zero.

This "fix" has been inevitable for over one year.  It would have been a lot cheaper one year ago if the Treasury had just sated back then that it would stand behind the implicit guarantee of Fannie and Freddie debt.  The Administration was determined to let market forces fix the problem.  The problem is way too big for the markets so now a total bailout is required and much more expensive for taxpayers.

But don't fool yourself.  This is good news for the economy.  It doesn't cover up the failures of the Administration which McCain also supported but Obama would have done the exact same thing almost as soon as he took office.

The risk of systemic failure of the financial system had risen significantly again in the past two weeks.  That is a bad thing.  Cyclical risks remain high but that is something that can be dealt with.  No one wants systemic failure.

Voting in Angola's parliamentary election resumed on Saturday for an unscheduled second day amid charges the poll had been chaotic and violated the African nation's electoral law.

The election, Angola's first for 16 years, is largely a race between the ruling MPLA and opposition UNITA party. It has been keenly watched by the international community because of controversy marring recent African polls and Angola's emergence as a major oil producer.

In 1925 Britain, confident in stabilization, attempted to return to the Gold Standard. The result was to prolong an economic recession. This, combined with the Dawes plan linking Europe's main economies to dollar loans, set the stage for the Crash of 1929 being a global event. The United States was the only place to put money, and a return to the global gold standard was impossible. The penultimate crisis taught people all the wrong lessons. It discredited the belief in fundamental economic reörganization, left the orthodoxy in place that loan agreements and budget cuts to make the poor pay would be enough to tide over any economic crisis, and created a single point of failure for the global economy. It also pushed aside people like John Maynard Keynes and Winston Churchill, one might almost say because the latter did not know to listen to the former.

This is why this is not the ultimate crisis: the wrong lessons have not been taught, there is not a complete marginalization of common sense, and the elites are serious. They recognize, like in 1923-1925, how serious. However, as soon as this crisis is past, they see a return to the previous order, just as soon as the banking mess is tided over. This means that as soon as there is a gasp of air, they will grab it. Electorates, for their part, are willing to be equally stupid. Having seen the failure of the present, they have swung to the right in Europe, with Cameron trying to make a trifecta of conservative governments in largest economies in Europe. At the very moment when Bushism is discredited globally, pro-Bush governments are in place in Canada, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

Having seen what the first round of liberal Reaganite doctrine has done for the US, we are now about to try a second round. Obviously if one dose of arsenic isn't enough, then two will be.

Or three.

In our case the same mistake of the Dawes plan is about to be repeated: prop up with loans those who cannot pay debts that should not have been incurred, with the belief that a reïmposition of the old rent system will be possible after they have been tided over.