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TransUnion LLC, which analyzed about 27 million consumer records in its database, predicted that the proportion of consumers with mortgages that are 60 days or more past-due will hit 7.17% in the fourth quarter of 2009.

“[T]he new administration is off to a good start.”
— Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell.

“[S]uperb … the best of the Washington insiders … this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes.”
— David Brooks, conservative New York Times columnist

“[V]irtually perfect … ”
— Senator Joe Lieberman, former Democrat and John McCain’s top surrogate in the 2008 campaign.

“[R]eassuring.”
— Karl Rove, “Bush’s brain.”

“I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain … this all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators, and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign … [Hillary] Clinton and [James] Steinberg at State should be powerful voices for ‘neo-liberalism’ which is not so different in many respects from ‘neo-conservativism.'”
— Max Boot, neoconservative activist, former McCain staffer.

“I see them as being sort of center-right of the Democratic party.”
— James Baker, former Secretary of State and the man who led the theft of the 2000 election.

“[S]urprising continuity on foreign policy between President Bush’s second term and the incoming administration … certainly nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush … ”
— Michael Goldfarb of the neoconservative Weekly Standard.

“I certainly applaud many of the appointments … ”
— Senator John McCain

“So far, so good.”
— Senator Lamar Alexander, senior Republican Congressional leader.

Hillary Clinton will be “outstanding” as Secretary of State
— Henry Kissinger, war criminal

Rahm Emanuel is “a wise choice” in the role of Chief of Staff
— Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, John McCain’s best friend.

Obama’s team shows “Our foreign policy is non-partisan.”
— Ed Rollins, top Republican strategist and Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager

The deal is the latest example of wealthy countries and companies trying to secure food supplies from the developing world.

Other Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have also been negotiating leases of large tracts of farmland in countries such as Sudan and Senegal since the global food shortages and price rises earlier this year.

The Kenyan president, Mwai Kibaki, returned from a visit to Qatar on Monday. His spokesman said the request for land in the Tana river delta, south of Lamu, in north-east Kenya was being seriously considered.

“Nothing comes for free,” said Isaiah Kabira. “If you want people to invest in your country then you have to make concessions.”

But the deal is likely to cause concern in Kenya where fertile land is unequally distributed. Several prominent political families own huge tracts of farmland, while millions of people live in densely packed slums.

The country is also experiencing a food crisis, with the government forced to introduce subsidies and price controls on maize this week after poor production and planning caused the price of the staple “ugali” flour to double in less than a year.

Kibaki said that Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani was keen to invest in a second port to complement Mombasa, which serves as a gateway for goods bound for Uganda and Rwanda and is struggling to cope with the large volumes of cargo.

By building docks in Lamu, Kenya hopes to open a new trade corridor that will give landlocked Ethiopia and the autonomous region of Southern Sudan access to the Indian Ocean. Kabira said that if the financing was agreed, construction of the port would begin in 2010.

Qatar, which has large oil and gas revenues, imports most of its food, as most of its land is barren desert and just 1% is suitable for arable farming. It has already reportedly struck deals this year to grow rice in Cambodia, maize and wheat in Sudan and vegetables in Vietnam.

Much of the produce will be exported to the Gulf. Qatar’s foreign ministry in Doha did not return calls today, but Kabira said that its intention was to grow “vegetables and fruit” in Kenya.

The area proposed for the farming project is near the Tana river delta where the Kenyan government owns nearly 500,000 hectares (1.3m acres) of uncultivated land.

But a separate agreement to allow a local company to grow sugarcane and build a factory in the area has attracted fierce opposition from environmentalists who say a pristine ecosystem of mangrove swamps, savannah and forests will be destroyed.

Pastoralists, who regard the land as communal and rear up to 60,000 cattle to graze in the delta each dry season, are also opposed to the plan.

“We will have to ensure that this new project is properly explained to the people before it can go ahead,” said Kabira.

The sudden rush by foreign governments and companies to secure food supplies in Africa has some experts worried. Jacques Diouf, director general of the UN’s food and agricultural organisation (FAO), recently spoke of the risk of a “neo-colonial” agricultural system emerging.

The FAO said some of the first overseas projects by Gulf companies in Sudan, where more than 5 million people receive international food aid, showed limited local benefits, with much of the specialist labour and farming inputs imported.

In one experiment, the team fitted the head of a mannequin with two cameras connected to two small screens placed in front of volunteers’ eyes, so that they had the same view as the mannequin.

When the mannequin’s camera eyes and a participant’s head were directed downwards, the participant saw the mannequin’s body where the person would normally have seen their own body.

The researchers created the illusion of body-swapping by touching the stomach of both the mannequin and the volunteer with sticks. The person saw the mannequin’s stomach being touched while feeling (but not seeing) a similar sensation on their own stomach. As a result, the person developed a strong belief that the mannequin’s body was actually their own.
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“This shows how easy it is to change the brain’s perception of the physical self. By manipulating sensory impressions, it’s possible to fool the self not only out of its body but into other bodies, too,” project leader Henrik Ehrsson, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said in a news release.

In another experiment, a camera was mounted on one person’s head and screens were mounted in front of another person’s eyes. When the person with the camera and the person with the screens turned towards each other to shake hands, the person with the screens perceived the camera-wearer’s body as his/her own.

“The subjects see themselves shaking hands from the outside, but experience it as another person. The sensory impression from the handshake is perceived as though coming from the new body, rather than the subject’s own,” study co-author Valeria Petkova said in the news release.

This illusion worked even when two people looked different or were of different sexes. It did not work when a non-humanoid object — such as a chair or large block — was used.

In their annual report on the world economy published on Monday, the economists said the dollar’s sharp rebound this autumn had been driven mainly by a flight to the safety of the international reserve currency as the financial crisis spread beyond the US.

The overall trend remained a downward one, however, reflecting perceptions that the US debt position was approaching unsustainable levels. An accelerated fall of the dollar could bring new turmoil to financial markets.

“Investors might renew their flight to safety, though this time away from dollar-denominated assets, thereby forcing the US economy into a hard landing and pulling the global economy into a deeper recession,” the report said.

Publication of the annual survey by the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, its trade organisation Unctad and UN regional bodies, was brought forward by a month in the light of the financial crisis. It was launched in Doha to coincide with the UN-sponsored development financing conference in the Qatari capital.

The UN team said that, as the financial crisis spread beyond the US, there had been a massive shift of global financial assets into US Treasury bills, driving their yields almost to zero and pushing the dollar sharply higher. At the same time, however, the US’s external debt had risen to new heights that could provoke a dollar collapse.

The report recommends reform of the international reserve system away from almost exclusive reliance on the dollar and towards a globally backed multi-currency system.

Rob Vos, a Dutch economist who heads the UN’s policy and analysis division and who is responsible for the annual economic review, said the global economic pain could be eased if governments co-ordinated a spate of stimulus packages that were already under way.

The dates for the program, Nov. 21 and 22, were strategically selected this year to coincide with Thanksgiving because it’s a time when thoughts traditionally turn to food, authorities said.

Last year, the event sponsored by the Summit County Crimestoppers, the Sheriff’s Office, the Akron Police Department and several private corporations and nonprofit agencies removed 950 guns from the streets. This year, Crimestoppers hopes to purchase enough gift cards to increase that number and buy 1,200 guns.

Pilgrim’s, which produces 25% of U.S. broilers, suffered a triple whammy of large debt, high feed prices and lower prices for chicken amid weakening demand in the U.S. and abroad.

“Pilgrim’s Pride stretched and got caught,” says Len Steiner, owner of meat and food consulting firm Steiner Consulting.com.

While other producers are in stronger financial shape, the hangover from high feed costs and weak demand is affecting all producers, he says.

Pilgrim’s Pride shares fell 46% Monday to 62 cents before trading was halted pending its announcement. Shares of No. 2 Tyson Foods (TSN) fell 10% to $6.03.

Steiner expects higher wholesale prices for chicken in the coming months as producers continue to cut production. It’s unclear whether those increases will get to consumers given the weak economy, he says.

Pilgrim’s Pride’s filing wasn’t a surprise, but there was hope last week that it could be avoided. It said in September it would post a significant loss in its fiscal fourth quarter. Pilgrim’s Pride, which employs 48,000, says it’ll operate as usual while it restructures.

It hasn’t said whether it will cut production. JPMorgan Securities analyst Ken Goldman said in a research note Monday that cuts were likely. A steep reduction would help the “downtrodden industry” lift prices, he wrote in a note last month.

The economics facing the industry have been brutal. Corn prices were more than triple their five-year average in June, Steiner says. Meanwhile, wholesale chicken prices were off their five-year average by 16.2%.

Corn prices have fallen 55% since then, and producers, except for Tyson, have cut production.