Here’s your news, folks. See you back here Sunday evening. Enjoy your weekend.

International Developments

❖ “The United Nations refugee agency says that more than 200,000 Syrian refugees have fled to neighboring countries as the conflict has intensified”, with 30,000 new refugees in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan over the past week.

❖ “ Aleppo’s poor get caught in the crossfire of Syria’s civil war.” Robert Fisk interviews poor people stuck in Aleppo amid the fighting.

❖ “ Demonstration [in Cairo] turns violent as supporters of Egyptian president fought with protestors accusing [President Mohamed Morsi] of a power grab.”

International Finance

❖ “ Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has downgraded its outlook for HSBC Holdings from stable to negative. It fears US money laundering investigations could lose the bank business in the long-term.”

Money Matters USA

❖ Incomes for us regular folk “have dropped more since the beginning of the recovery than they did during the recession itself, when they declined 2.6 percent. Median income [$50,964] is now 7.2 percent below its December 2007 level and 8.1 percent below where it stood in January, 2000.” So why are they calling it a recovery?

❖ Having already stopped making cameras due to its financial crisis, Kodak is now thinking of selling off its “still-camera film and photo paper divisions.”

Politics USA

❖ Too funny for words: “ Huckabee: Republicans who denounced Todd Akin ‘are not rational’”

❖ ID Republican state representativ e Chuck Winder: “I would hope that when a woman goes in to a physician with a rape issue, that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage or was it truly caused by rape.”

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