NEWSMAX REPORTS: RUPERT MURDOCH MAKES PEACE WITH BARACK OBAMA

Rupert Murdoch agreed to a “truce” between his Fox News network and Barack Obama at a secret meeting with the Democratic candidate, according to the author of an upcoming book about the News Corp. chairman.

Writing in Vanity Fair, Michael Wolff — author of the Murdoch biography, “The Man Who Owns the News” — asserts that Obama viewed Fox News as among his most hostile critics and agreed to meet over the summer with Murdoch and Fox News Channel President Roger Ailes at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

Obama was “deferential” toward Murdoch, Wolff reports, but “lit into” Ailes.

“He said he didn’t want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just going to continue to abuse him and his wife, that Fox had relentlessly portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome — just short of a terrorist,” Wolff disclosed.

The three men then agreed to a “tentative truce,” Wolff writes.

Obama campaign spokesman Nick Shapiro acknowledged that the three men had an “opportunity to clear the air.”

A News Corp. spokesperson declined to comment on Wolff’s article, The Financial Times reports.

But one person at News Corp. disputed Wolff’s claim that Murdoch was becoming “embarrassed” that Fox’s right-wing positioning was “going a little far.”

STILL NOT DISCUSSED: STRUCTURAL ECONOMIC ISSUES

Hunger, Food Crises and Riots demonstrate socio-economic structural origins

Special to The Canadian

In recent months major international banks, financial newspapers and mass media have been forced to recognize that there is a major food crisis and that hundreds of millions of people face hunger, malnutrition and outright starvation. World conferences have been convoked and national emergencies have
been declared, as millions riot in nearly fifty countries, threatening to overthrow regimes. In North America and Europe, skyrocketing food prices, combined with stagnant wages, home evictions and debt payments threaten ncumbent regimes and increase pressures on all governments to take urgent action.

Mainstream responses are predictably inadequate, and their explanations for the crisis range from inadequate and self-serving to silly.

HELP NEEDED FOR HAITI—WHO IS TALKING ABOUT THIS?

Rescuers can’t get aid to starving Haitian city

GONAIVES, Haiti (AP) — The convoy rumbled out of the U.N. base toward a flooded, starving and seething city Thursday, carrying some of the first food aid since Tropical Storm Hanna drowned Gonaives in muddy water three days ago.

Hungry children at three orphanages were waiting for the canvas-topped trucks, loaded with warm pots of rice and beans and towing giant tanks of drinking water.

But the food never arrived Thursday.

The convoy crept over mud-caked, semi-paved roads past closed stores, overturned buses and women wading in water up to their knees with plastic tubs on their heads.

After about 45 minutes, the half-dozen trucks ground to a halt. U.N. peacekeepers wearing camouflage fatigues and bulletproof vests jumped out while others stood guard with assault rifles.

Before them, a huge gouge marred the road. The floods had split the asphalt, and water ran through the 10-foot-wide (3-meter-wide) gap.

The convoy turned around. And the children — like tens of thousands more in this increasingly desperate city — went another day without food.

Some 250,000 people are affected in the Gonaives region, including 70,000 in 150 shelters across the city, according to an international official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to=2
0release the information. Argentine Lt. Sergio Hoj estimated that half of Gonaives’ houses remained flooded Thursday.

Many houses were torn apart. Families huddled on rooftops, their possessions laid out to dry. Overturned cars were everywhere, and televisions floated in the brown water.

Gonaives — a collection of concrete buildings, run-down shacks and plazas with dilapidated fountains — lies in a flat river plain between the ocean and deforested mountains that run with mud even in light rains. Hanna swirled over Haiti for four days, dumping vast amounts of water, blowing down fruit trees and ruining stores of food as it swamped tin-roofed houses.

The official death toll rose to 61 on Thursday as Hanna finally moved north with near hurricane-force winds on a path toward the southeastern U.S. coast. But in the chaos there was no way to know how many people might be dead, or how many had been driven from their homes. Two other storms killed 85 people in August, and forecasters warned that fearsome Hurricane Ike could hit Haiti next week.

A BILLION FOR GEORGIA: WONDER WHY?

Try one word: OIL