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The announcement that house sales had plunged has dashed government hopes for a “soft landing” in the sector that has driven the Spanish economy for more than a decade.

The buying and selling of homes fell by 27 per cent in January compared with the same period last year, Spain’s National Statistical Institute (INE) announced yesterday. The collapse coincided with a 25 per cent fall in the granting of mortgages, the biggest drop since 2004. The size of individual mortgages has also fallen, by nearly 4 per cent, as providers fear for the security of their loans.

The indicators published by the state organisation for the first time confirm the widespread fear that Spain’s property sector is not just cooling off, but falling sharply. “We have to accept this is not a gentle correction, but a full-blown crisis. We can only hope it will be sharp and short,” says Fernando Encinar, a director of Spain’s leading online estate agent, idealista.com.

The news will scare millions of Spaniards – and hundreds of thousands of Britons and other northern Europeans – who stretched themselves to get mortgages on homes they believed were a cast-iron investment.

Miguel Blesa, president of the Caja Madrid savings bank, Spain’s second leading mortgage provider, warned that things would get worse. “There will be more problems in the property sector in coming months, since the market in new homes is paralysed,” Mr Blesa predicted.

The Kennedys and King, the October Surprise and Mena, anthrax and Wellstone, Gore and Kerry, Florida and Ohio: you might think that would be enough to make most Democrats say You know what? This isn’t working out. But elections are paced like the Olympics, and in another four years the Jamaican bobsledders may really have a shot. Hey, anything’s possible. And so long as people believe that, and that anything means everything they want, the cycle repeats and self-perpetuates.

The great assassinations of the Sixties were decapitation strikes, never intended to kill the host or to extinguish hope. It’s only the hopeless who are dangerous. Hope must be encouraged, because you don’t need to do anything to have it, and it keeps the prey from becoming wise to its own nature and seeking extraction from the cycle. Hope makes it possible to write and believe such things as “Al Gore will save the planet but Barack Obama will save this country.” Hope that the system works, even if it is just a digestive system.

Restrained predation upon the Democratic Party may be at an advanced stage of domestication, but it also mimics molecular endosymbiosis with the injection of alien organelles in the form of the Trojan horse DLC to which, of all the contenders, both Clinton and Obama are closest in tactics and ideology. Funny how that happened.

And how did that happen? I think there’s an institutional instinct at work, in the Deep Context, that maintains the insectival social engine of power. Does Obama know his role? That may be irrelevant, because the volition and cognition of the individuals who form the living manifestation of the system may be grossly overstated. They have given themselves to the system, the system has groomed them and raised them above all others, and they instinctively know what the system requires.

The resulting blaze was quickly extinguished and officials said efforts were under way to get shipments back to normal from Iraq’s second city of Basra where fighting broke out on Tuesday.

It is the first time since 2004 that the vital southern supply route has been disrupted. Officials had different views about how long it would take to restore supplies and the seriousness of the incident.

“This morning saboteurs blew up the pipeline transporting crude from Zubair 1 by placing bombs beneath it. The pipeline was severely damaged,” the SOC official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Crude exports will be greatly affected because this is one of two main pipelines transporting crude to the southern terminals. We will lose about a third of crude exported through Basra,” he said.

U.S. crude rose by more than $1 to trade above $107 a barrel after news of the attack.

Officials in Baghdad by contrast were optimistic the damage could be contained.

–Statewide, median sales prices fell by a stunning 26% from year-ago levels in February, with home prices dropping at a rate of nearly $3,000 a week, the California Association of Realtors reports. Further, the CAR says the Fed’s interest rate-cutting campaign “will have little near-term direct effect on the housing market.”

–In the San Fernando Valley, losing a home to foreclosure is now almost as common for families as buying a home. The L.A. Daily News: “During January and February, there were 1,084 foreclosures and 1,335 sales of houses and condos in Valley communities from Glendale to Calabasas, according to the San Fernando Valley Economic Research Center at California State University, Northridge.”

“It’s bad. It’s really bad,” market analyst Nima Nattagh told the Daily News.

The California Association of Realtors reports median prices fell 27.2% from year-ago levels in the hard-hit Inland Empire east of Los Angeles, 30.9% in Sacramento, and 39.1% in Santa Barbara County.

Sheryl Sueppel, 42, and the children died of injuries to their upper torsos and heads, Iowa City police said. Two baseball bats found in the home appear to have been used, police said.

Police believe the woman’s husband, former bank executive Steven Sueppel, killed her and the children Sunday night or Monday. He had been charged with embezzlement, and his body was found in the wreckage of a car crash Monday.

Investigators say they believe he killed his wife, then tried to kill himself and the children by asphyxiating them with carbon monoxide in the garage. When that failed, he killed the children one by one.

Before he died, Steven Sueppel left a hand-written four-page note in which he detailed the killings. The note was left in the kitchen and apparently was written for surviving family members.

The note, clearly completed after he had killed the entire family, includes details that match evidence found at the scene and the medical examiner’s findings, Kelsay said.

“It becomes kind of a moot point whether it was actually a ball bat or some other item,” Sgt. Troy Kelsay said. “We’re confident we know what happened, and we’re not going to talk any more specifics.”

The note also reveals some detail about Sueppel’s frame of mind and what may have driven the former Hills Bank & Trust vice president and controller to the killings.

Sueppel mentioned in the note the embarrassment and other fallout from criminal charges he faced. A federal grand jury indicted him in February on charges that he stole nearly $560,000 between 2000 and 2007 from the bank.

Although he had pleaded not guilty, court documents indicate Sueppel had told investigators that he had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars and placed it in an account he held at another bank.

Sueppel was free on bond and awaiting trial next month.

In his note, Steve Sueppel discussed his life and the criminal charges, noting that his expected absence from home would leave his wife alone to raise and support Ethan, 10; Seth, 8; Mira, 5; and Eleanor, 3.

Many people are surprised to learn that there are still slaves. Many imagined that slavery died along with the 360,000 Union soldiers whose blood fertilized the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment. Many thought that slavery was brought to an end around the world when most countries outlawed it in the 19th century.

Josette Sheeran, the organisation’s executive director, told journalists yesterday that this was the first time in its history that the WFP had appealed for funds, not because of a crisis caused by famine or war but because of market conditions. And she warned that if extra resources were not received before the beginning of May, food rations would have to be cut.

In a report late Tuesday, Whitney said Citigroup Inc, the largest U.S. bank by assets, might lose $1.15 per share in the first quarter, four times her prior forecast for a 28 cents per share loss. She expects the bank to lose 15 cents per share in 2008, after earlier seeing profit of 75 cents per share.

Whitney in October correctly predicted that Citigroup would cut its dividend and raise $30 billion of capital.

The analyst on Tuesday also lowered her first-quarter profit per share forecasts for Bank of America Corp to 35 cents from 92 cents, for JPMorgan Chase & Co to 70 cents from 86 cents, and for Wachovia Corp to 55 cents from 78 cents.

She cut her 2008 profit per share forecasts to $3.25 from $3.65 for Bank of America, to $2.90 from $3.20 for JPMorgan, and to $2.70 from $3.05 for Wachovia. The new forecasts are below analysts’ average forecasts compiled by Reuters Estimates.

“Despite cutting estimates for financials by over 30 times since November, we are confident this will not be our last reduction in 2008,” Whitney wrote. “As key mark-to-market indices trend lower, the housing market worsens, and the U.S. consumer comes under increasing pressure, we anticipate further downside to both estimates and stock prices.”