Word: spates
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...booming housing markets in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties had barely felt the chill that hit Miami and Denver from rising inventories, declining prices and slowing sales. But this week's spate of gloomy housing data included ominous reports from the West Coast. Led by an astonishing 799% rise in Los Angeles County, foreclosures in southern California jumped 725% in the second quarter, to a record 9,504, from 1,152 a year ago. The spectacularly bad trend was coupled with news from mega-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial that homeowners with good credit are starting to fall behind...
Meantime, in a telling twist, the spate of suicide bombings in Pakistan seems to have cooled the immediate sense of crisis in Afghanistan. Word on the streets of Kabul is that the suicide bombers from Pakistan's tribal areas who until recently headed west into Afghanistan to train Afghan militants or carry out attacks themselves are now heading east into the cities of Pakistan, where they have new motives and better targets to attack. "Normally the Pakistanis come to Afghanistan, but now they are busier in Pakistan," says Waheed Muzhda, an Afghan political analyst who worked for the foreign ministry...
...Lebanese government is struggling to check a steadily worsening security climate. In the past month alone, Lebanon has witnessed fierce battles in the north between the Lebanese army and the al-Qaeda-inspired militants of Fatah al-Islam, the assassination of an anti-Syrian politician, and a spate of bomb attacks targeting tourist areas, ruining Lebanon's economically crucial summer tourist season before it had even begun. A week ago, militants fired two Katyusha rockets into Israel from south Lebanon, the first such incident since last summer...
...Taliban are there. But this is not the way, to bomb and kill 20 people for one Taliban. This is why people are losing hope and trust in the government and the internationals." Like many Afghans, Ahmadzai is starting to suspect a more sinister meaning behind the recent spate of civilian deaths."The Americans can make a mistake once, twice, maybe three times," he says. "But 20, 30 times? I am not convinced that they are doing this without intention...
...sinister characters the assassination-conspiracy theorists of the 1980s have fashioned the latest in a long-running series of explanations of what may forever remain unexplainable: why Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, exactly 25 years ago this week. In an anniversary spate of books and TV specials, the trendy theory is that the Mafia arranged the President's murder and the silencing of Oswald by Dallas strip-joint owner Jack Ruby. This, of course, clashes with the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone for his own twisted reasons and that...