Challenges In The News 09/02/08

Rising Food, Oil Prices Pose Challenges for Developing World. While advanced countries are also dealing with the rising price pressures, the challenges are much greater for developing countries, which had been making strides in recent years in improving economic stability and reducing poverty. “The food and fuel price surges have greatly raised the policy challenges associated with reducing poverty, ensuring food security, and maintaining macroeconomic stability.

The Supreme Court has now taken a centrol role in deciding who may be captured and detained as an enemy combatant, ruling that detainees, akin to criminal defendants, are constitutionally entitled to challenge their confinement through “habeas corpus” proceedings in federal district courts.

Auto makers say this timetable is too aggressive given the industry’s financial challenges.

The NYSE, which stood to gain financially if Mr. Grasso lost, long seemed ambivalent about the case, since Mr. Grasso is gone and the exchange is preoccupied with bigger strategic challenges.

In the rest of the world, the monster challenges of climate change, poverty, disease and competition for energy, food and raw materials, all magnified by bad government, are thrusting hundreds of millions into the depts. And we ain’t seen nothing yet.

It also may have produced a new political product in the White House: a president willing to test, confer and take chances, not just confront and challenge.
Challenging the administration’s North Korea capitulation would allow the senator to demonstrate that he is not George W. Bush 2.0, no flip-flop required.

So it’s reassuring that the two presidential candidates appear to take the energy crisis seriously and have ambitious ideas for attacking it. Sen. John McCain calls energy policy “one of (the) great questions” of this campaign, and Sen. Barack Obama says it’s “one of the great challenges that this generation of Americans will ever face.”

The new program would let the FHA insure as much as $300 billion in new mortgages, helping an estimated 400,000 homeowners. It still faces challenges, however, with the House planning to rewrite key details and the White House threatening a veto without major changes. "It's not the final stop, but it is a major stop in getting this bill done," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Banking Committee. "For those who said this Congress cannot come together in a bipartisan fashion to do something responsible about housing, this bill does that."

A man like you could lead the challenge.

A federal appeals court in Cincinnati has ruled that the owner of a company that distributes male sexual enhancement pills had no legal standing to challenge government efforts to obtain his private e-mails.