Snowmail: US economy in reverse

Last Modified: 30 Oct 2008
By: Alex Thomson

In tonight's show.

As things stand, barring major resignations with the BBC shenanigans etc, we start tonight in Las Vegas.

Where better to be, to mark the end of the USA's greatest spending splurge in its history.

And it's official, their economy is now contracting. Down 0.3 per cent in the last quarter.

Speaking of the last quarter, many around Vegas seem to be more or less down to that.

You can turn on the local news there and they go from budget repo sales of houses to news items about, well budget repossessions of houses.

All this is happening in the big, booming Republican west, which is still big, but it's not booming anymore.

And is it still Republican? Well everything's up for grabs, right down to McCain's home state of Arizona, just to the south.

The latest polls by the way, show Obama some seven points clear after he more or less bought up the entire US TV network for part of yesterday evening.

BBC crisis talks

There is a lot more around this evening. The BBC bosses have been locked up for much of the day discussing Tasteless Phonecalls Gate.

(Am I alone in wondering why it's all but impossible to get the Gate tag into this successfully?).

The complaintometer now apparently way past 30,000 for a piece of broadcasting which elicited precisely two, yet two, complaints at the time.

Well as I say, it gets top billing if there are major developments. Bids in for BBC interviews of course. Nothing definite to report.

Menezes witnesses' evidence

At the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes the jury has been hearing eyewitness accounts very close to the police shooting.

Their story thus far flatly contradicts the Metropolitan Police Officers'.

They say they heard no shouted warning before he was shot. Unlike the police they also recall no threatening movements by Mr de Menezes.

Congo fighting intensifies

Goma, in eastern Congo is tonight, a dangerous no-man's land.

This strategic frontier town, close to Rwanda has seen trouble across the day with rioting and reports of rape and looting. The Congolese army has fled.

The Tutsi rebels outside town stand ready to move in but have not done so as I write and have declared a ceasefire.

It is the culmination of several years of increasing violence in the area and the stimulus, as ever, Hutu-Tutsi ethnic tensions.

Hundreds of thousands of people already displaced, many of them from refugee camps in the first place.

Bomber kills 5 people in Kabul

Security in the Afghan capital continues to worsen.

A suicide bomber killed himself and at least five others inside the country's ministry of information and culture.

It's another attack in the heart of the capital on a building of clear symbolic and strategic importance.

Freak October weather

We've new evidence confirming that rising polar temperatures are conclusively caused by mankind's activities and, connected or not, there's more on the freakish October weather various parts have been experiencing up and down the country.