Vacant-House
Fakery Reborn as Cleveland to Camden Fight Blight - (www.bloomberg.com) Camden, New Jersey, one of the poorest and most crime-ridden U.S.
cities, has awaited rebirth for a generation. For now, it has Christopher
Toepfer and his paintbrush. Ten feet up a ladder, Toepfer, a 51-year-old
artist, is turning a rotting factory’s plywood-covered windows from a mess of
gang graffiti into a railroad mural. The spruce-up, though it won’t cure the
neighborhood’s ills of poverty and violence, will make a bright spot of the
biggest blight on Federal Street. Thirty years after New York City Mayor Ed Koch drew scorn for
gussying up uninhabitable Bronx tenements with decals of curtained windows,
urban fakery is spreading in U.S. cities where the recession’s wave of
foreclosures added to decades-long decay.
Argentina
Seen Breaking Vows as Fernandez Legacy at Risk - (www.bloomberg.com) Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has less than a month to choose between
two unpalatable options: fulfilling a vow never to pay off creditor hedge
funds, or negotiating with them to avoid a rerun of the 2001 debt crisis that
forced a predecessor to flee the presidential palace in a helicopter. With the economy contracting
and foreign currency reserves near an eight-year low, she is likely to decide
that a deal to pay off the $1.5 billion the funds are demanding is the least
bad choice, said Claudio Loser, the head of research firm Centennial Group Latin
America.
“A catastrophic situation in the economy would be worse” for Fernandez than any
backtracking on her promises, Loser, a former International Monetary Fund
director, said by phone from Washington. The government “is very fearful that they
could be kicked out or the last year of their term is a disaster.”
Russia
Delivers 2nd Batch of Jets To Iraq As USA Unloads 4000 Hellfire Missiles - (www.zerohedge.com) The
battle for favoritism among the 'apparent' leaders in Iraq continues. Russia
just delivered the second batch of Sukhoi fighter jets (which will be flown by
Iraqi pilots and "are ready to provide air support to the armed
forces"), and the US unloaded 4,000 additional Hellfire missiles to
support Iraq's fight against the Islamist insurgents. While this morning the
intelligentsia of mainstream media proclaimed "the situation in Iraq
is calming down" predicated on the fact that oil prices were lower and
stocks at record highs, we suspect the additional war material to Iraq
will do nothing but increase the determination of the "Islamic State"
to increase its Caliphate.
Feud
Between Oligarchs Seen as Cause of Bank Run in Bulgaria - (www.nytimes.com) Even
in an Eastern European country with a history of financial panics and political
intrigue, it was an alarming picture. Thousands of fearful depositors lined up
outside one of Bulgaria’s three largest banks. In a matter of hours on Friday,
they withdrew the equivalent of nearly $550 million. The lines had dwindled by
Monday after European and Bulgarian authorities took emergency measures. But
questions remained about how a country could be plunged into crisis by what the
authorities described as nothing more than a digital rumormongering campaign
that may have been linked to animosity among rival business tycoons with
political ties. The banking crisis coincides with acute political instability
in Bulgaria, a country of 7.3 million. The Socialist-led government of Prime
Minister Plamen Oresharski is expected to resign soon, after an agreement among
the country’s main political parties to hold elections on Oct. 5.
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