Swamp Gas, November 20, 2007

by Frank James

A quick guided tour of some of the morning's most important, most interesting, or both, Washington-related stories.

Freddie Mac, one of the major mortgage-financing companies, was hit hard by the mortgage crisis, saying its third quarter loss widened to $2 billion.

The sense of being under siege lessened for Baghdad residents as the improved security environment and reduced sectarian violence allowed Iraqis to venture outdoors in ways they haven't been able to do in more than a year.

U.S. military commanders are saying Iraqi insurgents are signing up to kill Americans less for ideology than for cash which makes it more possible that the U.S. can peel them away from the insurgency with the right inducements.

Africa's worst humanitarian crisis may be in war-torn Somalia, not Darfur as is commonly thought, according to United Nations officials.

There are millions fewer new AIDS cases than were previously estimated, according to UN officials who will say that 33.2 million are infected globally instead of the 39.5 million they had estimated.

The Homeland Security Department's $1.2 billion plan to roll out radiation detectors at the nation's border crossings has suffered another setback as the agency has decided that the devices don't yet work well enough to be deployed.

The top three Democratic presidential candidates remain in a tight race in Iowa, with Sen. Barack Obama appearing to do slightly better than Sen. Hillary Clinton, whose strength in national polls doesn't appear to be having an effect in Iowa, or John Edwards.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is visiting Saudi Arabia, an ally, where a former prime minister of the subcontinent nation, Nawaz Sharif, has been living in exile. Pakistan has also released 3,400 activists who were arrested following the protests that occurred after Musharraf summarily replaced members of his countries supreme court.

The oil rich Persian Gulf states have long pegged their economies to the U.S. dollar but are now considering whether to continue that relationship since the falling dollar is spurring inflation in their nations.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture told Tysons Food it could not market its poultry as "made without antibiotics," and that an earlier decision by the agency that the large poultry company could use that label was a mistake.