NATIONAL & WORLD DIGEST - October 05, 2008

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New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
Go to the links for the following articles:

-Editorial: Meanwhile, in the Economy
After the Senate approved the $700 billion bank bailout, the majority leader, Harry Reid, tried to persuade his colleagues to address another economic calamity before they left town for the long election recess. He urged them to extend unemployment benefits for 800,000 jobless Americans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05sun1.html?ref=opinion

-Op-Ed Columnist
Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain
SARAH PALIN'S post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week's vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she "won," as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate. With a month to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race - about "the future," as Palin kept saying Thursday night - and the only person who doesn't seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05rich.html?ref=opinion

-Op-Ed Columnist
Racism Without Racists
One of the fallacies this election season is that if Barack Obama is paying an electoral price for his skin tone, it must be because of racists. On the contrary, the evidence is that Senator Obama is facing what scholars have dubbed "racism without racists."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05kristof.html?ref=opinion

-Despite Ruling, Detainee Cases Facing Delays
When the Supreme Court ruled in June that detainees at Guantánamo had the right to challenge their detention in federal court, the justices said that after more than six years of legal wrangling the prisoners should have their cases heard quickly because "the costs of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/us/05gitmo.html?hp

-Reports Link Karzai's Brother to Heroin Trade
When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the truck and notified his boss.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?hp

-Many Stark Contrasts as Simpson Is Convicted
By the time O. J. Simpson stood up in court late Friday to hear the spray of guilty verdicts on robbery and kidnapping charges that may send him to prison for the rest of his life, he was already so far removed from the heights of his fame and popularity that an entire generation of young Americans was barely aware that he had ever been a football star.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/us/05simpson.html?hp

-Justices Return to Work, With Less Meaty Docket
Come Election Day, there will almost certainly be cursing at the Supreme Court. The justices are scheduled to hear a case that day concerning dirty words on television, and it will be hard for the advocates in the case to describe its facts without using four-letter words. The appeals court argument, which involves swearing by Cher and Paris Hilton on a prime-time awards show, would have made a sailor blush.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/washington/05scotus.html?hp

-Three Weeks After Ike, a Grim Task of Recovery
Jerrith Baird last spoke to his grandmother by telephone the night Hurricane Ike swept away most of the houses on this narrow spit of land. The grandmother, Jennifer McLemore, 58, who worked at a local hospital, had holed up with her dog in a newly built beach house on stilts. She giggled with nervous fear, as she described to her grandson how three neighboring houses were being carried away in a flood, along with a trailer home she owned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/us/05missing.html

-New Jersey Grants Rights to Build a Wind Farm About 20 Miles Offshore
Regulators in New Jersey awarded the rights on Friday for construction of a $1 billion offshore wind farm in the southern part of the state to Garden State Offshore Energy. The rights, which include access to as much as $19 million in state grants, is part of New Jersey's Energy Master Plan, which calls for 20 percent of the state's energy to come from renewable sources by 2020. The decision comes on the heels of decisions by Delaware and Rhode Island to allow the installation of offshore wind farms.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/nyregion/04wind.html


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Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Go to the links for the following articles:

-DYING INSIDE
Behind the Bluster, Russia Is Collapsing
The bear is back. That's what all too many Russia-watchers have been saying since Russian troops steamrolled Georgia in August, warning that the country's strongman, Vladimir Putin, was clawing his way back toward superpower status. The new Russia's resurgence has been fueled -- quite literally -- by windfall profits from gas and oil, a big jump in defense spending and the cocky attitude on such display during the mauling of Georgia, its U.S.-backed neighbor to the south. Many now believe that the powerful Russian bear of the Cold War years is coming out of hibernation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/03/AR2008100301976.html

-GOING FOR BROKE
He Told Us to Go Shopping. Now the Bill Is Due.
It's widely thought that the biggest gamble President Bush ever took was deciding to invade Iraq in 2003. It wasn't. His riskiest move was actually one made right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when he chose not to mobilize the country or summon his fellow citizens to any wartime economic sacrifice. Bush tried to remake the world on the cheap, and as the bill grew larger, he still refused to ask Americans to pay up. During this past week, that gamble collapsed, leaving the rest of us to sort through the wreckage.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/03/AR2008100301977.html

-No Joint European Strategy On Banks
4 Top Economies Seek World Summit
PARIS, Oct. 4 -- The leaders of Europe's four largest economic powers vowed Saturday to protect their banks from the continuing reverberations of the increasingly global financial crisis but could not agree on a common Europe-wide strategy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/04/AR2008100402321.html?hpid=topnews

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