Summary: The economy has “fallen off a cliff,” says billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who predicts the U.S. likely will face higher unemployment and eventually inflation because of the current economic crisis.

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Summary: According to some economists, a Depression doesn’t have to be Great, with bread lines, rampant unemployment, and a wipeout in the stock market. The economy can sink into a milder depression — the kind spelled with a lowercase “d” — and it may be happening now.

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Summary: The Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual hate group report, titled “The Year in Hate.” The study found the number of hate groups has grown by 54 percent since 2000. The SPLC identified 926 hate groups — defined as groups with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people — active in 2008.

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Summary: The economic crisis has trumped bullets and bombs in the intelligence agencies’ latest assessment of threats to the United States. Sounding more like an economist than the war-fighting Navy commander he once was, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told a Senate panel that if the economic crisis lasts more than two years, it could cause some nations’ governments to collapse. “The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to U.S. strategic interests,” he told the Senate Intelligence Committee, as Congress prepares to vote on a $789 billion stimulus package.

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Summary: In his January 20, 2009 inaugural address, President Barack Obama promised to “begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people” and forge “a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan,” the two wars he inherited from President George W. Bush. President Obama’s promise to end the war in Iraq is on the agenda for the first full day of his presidency, January 21, 2009, when the new commander in chief meets with top national security aides and senior commanders.

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Summary: President George W. Bush presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, with economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly viewing his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation’s thorniest fiscal challenges. Specifically, the number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush’s tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans’ incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush’s father George H. W. Bush.

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Summary: Al-Qaida’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, said in an Internet video the U.S. financial crisis was caused by Washington’s military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and taxpayers were paying the price. … Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has emerged as a nationalist strongman after reaching a status-of-forces agreement with the Bush administration requiring U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011.

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Summary: In the summer of 2008, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann claimed she had a plan to lower the price of gasoline to $2 a gallon by increased drilling, including offshore drilling and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. However, by fall, the price at the pump dropped to nearly $2 in a matter of weeks, simply as a result of reduced demand during the economic recession.

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Summary: On the 39th day after losing his 2008 primary challenge against U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, Aubrey Immelman reported that Pakistan was scrambling for foreign aid to ward off a possible economic meltdown while trying to contain sharply escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists. He also highlighted looming economic problems, citing a Washington Post report that the U.S. federal deficit was soaring toward the $1 trillion mark by the end of 2008, “creating the deepest well of red ink since the end of World War II.”

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Summary: On the 18th day of his 2008 campaign against U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, on a day five soldiers were reported killed in Afghanistan, Aubrey Immelman addressed the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, where violence had begun to spread to once-stable regions. He also reported that economic indicators showed the U.S. had begun to slide into recession.

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