The financial panic sweeping the globe is maddeningly complex, but the cause of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s Great Depression is clear.

Those Wall Street financial alchemists who turned garbage into gold must have helped John McCain prepare for his debate with Barack Obama last Friday. Senator McCain’s insistent claims that the US is winning the war in Iraq thanks to his `surge’ strategy are the military-political equivalent of the junk securities that Wall Street’s shady financiers have been selling around the globe.

An empire built on debt, is an empire built on sand.

As the presidential race goes down to the wire, many people are asking me which presidential candidate would have the most positive effect on America’s foreign policy and global image.

Americans did not `liberate’ Iraq, but they certainly liberated their own nation last week by sweeping the Republican Party from power. One prays America’s long nightmare of foreign aggressions, fear, religious extremism, and flirting with neo-fascism is finally at an end.

China’s little-known northeast, or Dongbei, is a vast area rich in natural resources and strategic importance.

The attack on Mumbai last week is being called `India’s 9/11,’ and rightly so. Like the bumbling Bush administration, India’s government ignored warnings of impending attack and reacted with confusion and ineptitude.

Before we discuss what’s left of the economy, a few words about one brave man. The shoes Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi threw at George Bush in Baghdad had more courage and truth in them than all the honeyed, sycophantic words of America’s fawning media.

2008, to borrow the pithy phrase of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, has been an `annus horibilis.’ A propos, 2009 might be a good time for the old lady to give up the throne and cede it to her poor, long-suffering, 60-year old son, Prince Charles. What is she waiting for? His 80th birthday?

Like so much about the Mideast, what the North American media and our politicians tell us about the current agony of Gaza leaves out more than it includes, and paints a badly distorted picture.