Brian Gongol
Electoral projection map
Fight breaks out between Iceland and UK over banks
Lots of local governments in Britain invested in Iceland's banking system -- which has just been taken over by the govenrment there after a huge systemic collapse. While the two countries will certainly find a peaceful way to work out a resolution, the situation does beg the question: What does the frailty of so many banking organizations tell terrorist groups about how they can do tremendous damage without firing a shot? After all, the US government is pumping nine banks with $250 billion in direct investment just to keep them stable. That's a huge amount of money, and it's all because confidence was shaken and needed shoring-up.
UK tries to figure out how 100-year-old houses can be made energy-efficient
52% of Chinese toy exporters go out of business
The industry is still very large, but the government there says that a drop of 5% in total exports to the US included lots of toys from small manufacturers who have been driven out of business. The Chinese Communist Party is banking on economic growth to outweigh its repression of personal rights and keep it in power, but if lots of Chinese find themselves suddenly unemployed, that could prove a difficult task. China's government is thought to be hanging on to $1.9 trillion in foreign cash, which could give it exceptional leverage to buy what it wants during the current asset fire sale, but those assets aren't necessarily going to put those toy-factory employees back to work. Economic growth is never perfectly uniform, and it occasionally involves setbacks; the accumulated effects of those setbacks and the inherent strain that must exist between an over-anxious central government and more than a billion people living in more than two dozen different regions. China as we know it today will almost certainly not exist in the same form ten years from now. A breakup or secession of some sort is virtually certain.
Nebraska legislature looks at water transfers
