JimC Rast's Bookmarks

The ruble-denominated Micex Stock Exchange suspended trading
indefinitely at 12:10 p.m. after its index erased a 7.6 percent
gain and plunged as much as 10 percent within an hour. The
benchmark fell 17 percent yesterday, the biggest drop since
Bloomberg started tracking the gauge in May 2001. The dollar-
denominated RTS halted trading after similar declines.

The government yesterday injected $20 billion into the
interbank lending market via central bank and Finance Ministry
auctions in a bid to contain soaring borrowing rates as credit
dried up in the wake of the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
bankruptcy. The one-day MosPrime overnight rate, a gauge for
monitoring liquidity demand, leapt 25 basis points to a record
11.08 percent today.

In Berlin, Obama neared self-parody with a rhetoric of Leave No Metaphor Behind. "Walls"? Down with them. "Bridges"? Build new ones between this and that. "A new dawn"? The Middle East deserves one. And Berlin was the wrong place to vow to "remake the world once again." Modern Berlin rose from rubble that was the result of the last attempt at remaking "the world."

Of course, from Obama, such tropes, although silly, are not menacing, any more than they were from Ronald Reagan, who was incorrigibly fond of perhaps the least conservative, and therefore the most absurd, proposition ever penned by a political philosopher, Thomas Paine's "we have it in our power to begin the world over again." No. We. Don't.

He cited a "powerful force" of popular sentiment in Iraq that has underpinned the decline in violence.

"And it would probably take quite a bit to shift it back," he said, speaking in his office at the U.S. Embassy overlooking the Tigris. "You talk to people (Iraqis), and they just say, `Never again. We almost destroyed ourselves.' There is almost a kind of embarrassment over it: 'How could we, Iraqis, do that?' "

Members of the Maine Blackfly Breeder's Association in Machias are even taking credit for it. Organizers of the tongue-in-cheek organization, whose motto is "We breed 'em you feed 'em," say they are working to breed black flies with fireflies so the flies can be active at night. The group holds an annual convention and raises money for local charities.

"We are ecstatic," said Marilyn Dowling, who calls herself the director of research and development for the association. She and Holly Garner-Jackson, the marketing director, said people have a choice: polluted rivers and no black flies, or clean rivers and black flies. People "should roll up their sleeves to feed the little darlings," Dowling said. "They are defenders of the wilderness."