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With the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 400 points today, and many market experts predicting more volatility ahead, some advisers are recommending their clients put some of their cash to another use: To buy that house or summer home at the shore. Getty ImagesPotential homebuyers certainly have plenty of incentives: Home prices are still way down in many parts of the country, and mortgage rates are nearing their all-time lows. Consider: The benchmark 30-year fixed-rate mortgage fell 1 basis point this week, to 4.45 percent — just a few basis points above the record low hit in October...

These last couple weeks we’ve been seeing more insanity than usual here in Argentina. It started a week ago with a public park taken over by immigrants from Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru and Argentine “villeros”. Once they installed themselves in this public park with tents, they started bringing in materials to build brick and mortar homes in it to make a “villa”(shanty town). These are often crime and disease infested places. Imagine this happening in the park right in front of your home. Well, the neighbors of Soldati didn’t like the idea either so they asked the Mayor of Buenos Aires,...

Armored cars rolled through smoke-filled streets in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday as police battled slum-based drug gangs for a fifth consecutive day in the city slated to host the 2016 Olympics. Live TV coverage showed heavily armed police exchanging gunfire with suspected drug traffickers in the hilly shantytowns on the city outskirts. Police targeted the Vila Cruzeiro slum in the northern part of the city, considered a stronghold of a gang thought to be behind ordering attacks. At least 10 armored Marine vehicles, never before used in battles in the city's slums, or favelas, transported soldiers into Vila Cruzeiro,...

More than 100 heavily armed gang members fled Vila Cruzeiro, a shanty town in the north of Rio, after a 40 hour gunfight with police. Television cameras captured many of the men escaping towards a wooded area before entering another nearby favela, Complexo do Alemao. A sergeant with Brazil's military police was injured by shrapnel close to the favela on Friday morning and gang members were reported to have fired shots at a police helicopter. A battalion of 800 soldiers, two air force helicopters and ten armoured vehicles were sent to the area to support police after President Luiz Inacio...

His poll numbers over here may be falling, but the New York Times found a place where Barack Obama is still very popular and bringing the hope: The slum-like “banlieues”outside Paris dominated by Muslim immigrants, in Thursday’s “Feeling Slighted by France, And Respected by the U.S.” by France-based reporter Scott Sayare. The residents of this poor, multiracial Paris suburb say they have been abandoned. For 30 years, they say, the French authorities have written off Bondy and neighborhoods like it, treating their inhabitants as terminal delinquents and ignoring their potential. Obama evidently has the French slum vote locked up:

Man, it was hard picking an op-ed mark this week because the chum slick was so thick with fresh chunks of juicy lunacy from Islam and our pals on the left. Here’s what I ping-ponged back and forth on Friday: Should I write about James Lee, the whiny and pathetic wannabe mass murderer? Y’know Mr. Lee, don’t ‘cha? He’s the radical pro-abortion, Al Gore ogling tree humper who got thumped by SWAT after grabbing hostages at the Discovery Channel. That’s a possible target of interest for a column (no pun intended) because liberals, not conservatives, it seems, are the ones...

Imam Behind Park51 Ignores Low-Income Tenants Pleas, They SayThe Muslim imam who plans to build a controversial Islamic center near Ground Zero should first take on a smaller project, like ridding his New Jersey apartment buildings of rats and bedbugs, angry tenants told ABCNews.com. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf owns buildings across the Hudson River in several New Jersey cities, including Union City, North Bergen and Palisades Park, which he reportedly renovated with tax dollars. Residents, many of whom are immigrants and most of whom are working-class Hispanic Catholics, say they have complained about unsanitary conditions for years. The imam, however,...

The Park51 mosque and community center near Ground Zero is not Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s first venture into real estate development. As The Record reports, beginning in the late 1970s, Rauf acquired five apartment buildings in Union City, North Bergen, and Palisades Park, all urban areas along the New Jersey bank of the Hudson River. He developed the properties with the help a series of government grants and loans totaling in the millions — including $384,000 in 1989 endorsed by Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.), then mayor of Union City, and $1,295,000 underwritten by then Hudson County executive Robert C....

While President Hugo Chavez struggles to revive the battered bolivar, in a hillside slum overlooking his palace, die-hard supporters are talking about getting rid of the Venezuelan currency altogether. Welcome to the 23 de Enero barrio, home to about 100,000 people and something of a laboratory for Chavez's nationwide socialist experiment. Here you find dogs named "Comrade Mao", and even a "revolutionary car wash." "We are creating a popular bank and are going to issue a communal currency: little pieces of cardboard," says Salvador Rooselt, a soft-spoken 24-year-old law student and community leader who often quotes Lenin and Marx. Some...

In the wake of the devastating earthquake, American eyes are again turned toward Haiti—something that only seems to happen when yet another disaster strikes, and never during the daily chaos and misery that plague the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. I’ve spent a good deal of time in Haiti, reporting first on the repression under the Duvaliers, then on the rise of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's popular movement, and then on the 1991 military coup that brought him down. I was there during the period of the 1994 military intervention that restored Aristede to power. US interest in the country seemed...

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration, in a major shift on housing policy, is abandoning George W. Bush’s vision of creating an “ownership society’’ and instead plans to pump $4.25 billion of economic stimulus money into creating tens of thousands of federally subsidized rental units in American cities. The idea is to pay for the construction of low-rise rental apartment buildings and town houses, as well as the purchase of foreclosed homes that can be refurbished and rented to low- and moderate-income families at affordable rates.

Egyptian police and armored cars charged into a crowd of a 1,000 irate pig farmers armed with stones and bottles, leaving 12 people injured as residents of a Cairo slum resisted government efforts to slaughter the nation's pigs to guard against swine flu. Cairo security chief Maj. Gen. Ismail Shaer said 14 people were arrested. Seven police were among the injured in the clashes with largely Christian garbage collectors who raise pigs on the refuse and live in the teeming slums of Manishyet Nasr outside the capital. The farmers blocked the road leading to their pig pens and hurled rocks...

Valerie Jarrett, Habitat Company, premier property managers provide residents with mice, sewer backups and collapsed roofs Mrs. Clinton assumed full taunting mode in a January Democratic presidential candidate debate. She aggressively battled “bad” Republican ideas, she told Obama, “when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Rezko, in his slumlord business in inner-city Chicago.” Obama feebly replied he was merely an associate at a law firm that represented a church group working with “this individual” and had done a few hours legal work. Hillary could have attacked Obama for accepting political contributions from Tony Rezko at the same time...

Urban peripheries in Third World countries have become war zones where states attempt to maintain order based on the establishment of a sort of "sanitary cordon" to keep the poor isolated from "normal" society. "Army sources confirmed that techniques employed in the occupation of the Morro da Providéncia favela [slum] are the ones Brazilian soldiers use in the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti" (Dantas 2007). This admission by Brazilian armed forces largely explains the interest of Lula da Silva's government in keeping that country's troops on the Caribbean island: to test, in the poor neighborhoods of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince,...

Latin America: An eruption of anti-U.S. bluster hasn't done Hugo Chavez much good back home. Thousands of Venezuelans rallied Saturday for his challenger, Manuel Rosales. This time they may give Chavez the boot. Rosales drew big crowds, including the poor, but Chavez's own rally the next day drew only a few thousand supporters, nearly all of them angry young men in red T-shirts. Despite an oil windfall, populist social spending and a big mouth abroad, all is not well for Chavez at home. The Sunday rally may signal a swing toward Rosales, who has quietly campaigned through the countryside and...

Rio de Janeiro, Apr 7 (EFE).- Brazilian authorities on Friday confiscated from a Rio de Janeiro shantytown an anti-tank rocket that members of a drug gang allegedly planned to use against police, officials said. The abandoned weapon was found on the roof of a home in Cidade de Deus, a western Rio shantytown that gained notoriety in a film by the same name about warring gangs of drug traffickers in the city's slums. The rocket was discovered by anti-drug police thanks to an anonymous tip. According to the tipster, the members of the drug-trafficking gang that controls Cidade de Deus...

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (Reuters) - Breathtaking views high above Rio de Janeiro's beaches and mountains can be yours for just a few dollars a day -- if you skip pricey hotels and sleep in a slum. Rio's slums, or favelas, are infamous for drug and gang violence. But a new hostel called "The Little Slum Inn" is attracting adventurous tourists, mainly from Germany, France and the United States, who dare to live amid the grit and poverty. "This place isn't for wimps. If you are uptight, you can go stay at the Copacabana Palace," said co-owner and shantytown dweller...

CZECH supermodel Helena Houdova took a break from the catwalk to visit communist Cuba and was arrested for taking photographs in a slum, she said today. The former Miss Czech Republic 1999 runs a foundation in New York that supports disadvantaged children in nine countries, and she wanted to see what she could do to help in Cuba. But on Monday, Cuban security police detained Houdova and her travel companion, Czech psychologist Mariana Kroftova, while they were taking photographs in the poor Havana neighbourhood of Arroyo Naranjo. The two women were held overnight in police custody and not allowed to...

TORONTO (Reuters) - To coincide with the world premiere of the "Lord of the Rings" musical in Toronto in February, a city tenants' group will crown a "Lord of the Slums." The group also wants slumlords to line up for a chance to win the "Golden Cockroach" award, and is eyeing a "Slums Unlimited" safari for tourists. The campaign by the Parkdale Tenants Association, which represents residents of a down-at-the-heels west end neighborhood, is taking aim at the city of Toronto and the government of Ontario over what it says are sub-standard living conditions for low-income renters. "When the city...

Starting January til May 2006 (second semester) is a walk-in single room up for lease in a three bedroom apartment. It is only three blocks away from the main gates of Georgetown University and is newly renovated with hardwood floors, granite kitchen countertops, wireless internet,two bathrooms and a furnished living room. It has a prime location at the corner of 34th and O Streets(only 3 blocks from M streetand Wisconsin Ave). The other girls in the house are Georgetown students and are a pleasure to live with. Rent is only $800/month Please contact me for more info! 3338 O St.,...

"The charges of racism-inspired foot-dragging isn't just nonsense. It's pernicious nonsense." This is how the New York Daily News called it regarding charges, from the usual circle of black leaders, that the rescue efforts in New Orleans were slow because the victims were black. The Daily News is right. Except it's even worse than the paper appreciates. What we are witnessing is a well-honed black political public-relations operation geared to obfuscation, stoking hatred and fear, and nurturing helplessness and dependence among black citizens. Such efforts keep black politicians powerful, diversity businesses prosperous and blacks poor.

The government of Rio de Janeiro state yesterday proposed to build a wall around its sprawling favelas in an effort to help control rampant crime in the picture postcard city. "The wall won't put an end to violence [in the slums] but if we don't contain it, it will destroy the [surrounding] forest, the economy of Rio de Janeiro and the lives of the city's residents," Luiz Paulo Conde, deputy governor, said on Monday. The proposal comes after yet another wave of violence rocked parts of the city during the Easter holidays, shutting down commerce, and killing 10 people, including...

The Habitat for Humanity, an organization affiliated with former president Jimmy Carter that affords and promotes low-cost housing, has decided that it would be a great idea to construct a theme park at their world headquarters in Americus, Georgia. The proposed theme park would have its visitors travel through a depiction of the world’s worst slums from Asia and Africa to Central America and the United States. Then it will deliver the visitor to such attractions as the “brick laying exhibit” and the “nail pounding display.” This is a concept that I am sure will leave the Disney Corporation shaking...

In a sprawling shantytown between the Salton Sea and a toxic dump site, children play barefoot on dirt roads, running beside leaking sewer lines and piles of rotting garbage thick with flies. Beneath their feet is broken glass; nearby, rusting machinery and wire. When the wind kicks up, they breathe dust and ash from an adjacent dump that contains elevated levels of cancer-causing dioxins. Their families are mostly farm workers who live in hundreds of hot and dilapidated trailers, many of them missing windows and siding. When the water pressure dropped a week ago, some residents collected the few drips...