Portal:Current events/2008 October 7

Current events of October 7, 2008 (2008-10-07) (Tuesday)

Portugal recognizes Kosovo.(BalkanInsight) War on Terrorism in Afghanistan: In talks brokered by Saudi Arabia, the Taliban renounces its ties to al-Qaeda and sues for peace with Afghanistan. (CNN) Nobel Prize: The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded Yoichiro Nambu for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.(Wall Street Journal)(Nobel Foundation) 2008 Thai political crisis: The anti-government protester group were injured as police attacked barricades outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok injuring over 400 people, 2 found dead. (BBC News) (Reuters) Subprime mortgage crisis: Russia agrees to provide Iceland with emergency loans of 4 billion euros ($5.4 billion).(Reuters) Iceland's Financial Supervisory Authority takes control of troubled Landsbanki Bank.(MarketWatch) The Reserve Bank of Australia reduces interest rates by 100 basis points to 6.0 per cent to combat the effect of the subprime mortgage crisis. (Financial Times) The United States Federal Reserve announces plans to buy billions of dollars of short-term commercial paper to restore liquidity to the money market. (Los Angeles Times) The Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke warns that the crisis will weaken the United States economy well into 2009 and expressed a willingness to cut interest rates. (CNN Money) The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls by 500 points following Bernanke's comments. (New York Times) 2008 Russian financial crisis: President Dmitry Medvedev announces an extra 950 billion roubles ($36.4 billion) of new emergency credit for banks at a Kremlin meeting. (Reuters) A Hungarian plane is forced to land in Iran, countering earlier reports of a US military jet being forced to land for violating Iranian airspace. (BBC News) A bus carrying farm workers returning from Houtkop Farm plunges off a bridge on the outskirts of Piet Retief, Mpumalanga, South Africa, killing at least 31 and injuring 29.Condolences conveyed after Mpumalanga horror crash (SABC News)30 die, including two kids, as bus plunges off bridge (Sowetan)