Firefighters were trying to douse 60 fires covering 59 hectares (145 acres) in the countryside outside Moscow on Monday, the emergencies ministry said.

Ricardo Najera, a spokesman from the attorney general’s office, said on Sunday that the prisoners were set free from the Gomez Palacios Social Rehabilitation Centre in the northern state of Durango to carry out the killings.

He said the inmates were given weapons that were traced to the prison through bullets found at crime scenes and matched to weapons belonging to four officials.

The Congressional Budget Office reckoned in August 2009 the twosome’s cost to taxpayers could go as high as $400 billion. With housing showing renewed weakness, that number may rise.

It is also easy to see why the firms got into such a mess. These “government-sponsored enterprises” (GSEs) occupied a grey area between state and private ownership, benefiting from an implicit government guarantee on their own debt at the same time as they sought to maximize profits for shareholders.

That hybrid model granted the GSEs access to cheap funding and gave them the incentive to load their retained portfolios with subprime mortgages while maintaining capital levels scanty enough to make investment banks blush.

Although everybody agrees on the need to overhaul Fannie and Freddie, nobody is rushing to do much about it.

America’s thumping financial-reform bill, which was signed into law by Barack Obama on July 21, found room in its 2,319 pages to create “Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion” in various federal agencies, but did nothing on Fannie and Freddie.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday nominated an as-yet unnamed Canadian woman for the top post at the U.N.‘s Office of Internal Oversight Services.

The former director, Inga-Britt Ahlenius, a Swede, said over the weekend that her successor will inherit a unit in disarray, with some senior posts, including that of director of investigations, having been left vacant for several years.

Ms. Ahlenius, whose nonrenewable five-year term as head ended July 14, left the post after delivering a report to Mr. Ban alleging he interfered with the independence of the nominally independent office charged with rooting out U.N. corruption.

Such a move would fundamentally change both the way Wall Street operates and the way Americans think about life.

The Obama administration appears to be suggesting—very subtly—that homeownership isn’t a God-given right. That the American dream has morphed into an American entitlement. That millions of people who should not have been homeowners in the first place ended up paralyzed by unsustainable debt as a result.

The intelligence agency alleged that Nadia Rockwood, 36, along with her husband, compiled a list of 15 Americans who they believed were enemies of Islam.
The couple pleaded guilty to charges of lying to investigators and making false statements about domestic terrorism when they appeared in court in Anchorage, Alaska.

According to the article, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) issued 64 subpoenas for underwriting and other documentation for mortgage securities purchased by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.  FHFA is attempting to discover if there was shoddy underwriting or any other issues with the securities that could trigger buyback clauses in their sales contracts.  When a mortgage held by Fannie or Freddie goes bad, they review the file and may force the seller to buy back the mortgages if documentation or underwriting is lacking

But why do you not also worry about similar extensions of government’s reach into areas such as health-care and finance?  As with fears of terrorism, Americans’ concerns about the cost of medical care and the role of Wall Street have been cynically stoked and used by politicians to expand the role the state.  Vast and bloated bureaucracies are being created to exercise arbitrary powers that are unconstitutional as well as a threat both to our freedoms and to our prosperity.

In my view, we are already well along this troubling road. Consider:

Tareq Mitri said on Wednesday that the Cabinet had agreed to present a “detailed report” about Israeli “espionage” to the UNSC later this week.

The move follows the arrest of two employees, both technicians, from the state-owned Alfa phone company. They could face the death penalty if convicted of spying.

Ban, fresh from a trip to Afghanistan, met with British Prime Minister David Cameron Wednesday afternoon. But those discussions have taken a back seat to the controversy surrounding a leaked 50-page memo from the outgoing U.N. anti-corruption director.

Swedish diplomat Inga-Britt Ahlenius wrote in the memo that the U.N. is “drifting into irrelevance” under Ban’s supervision.

Zachary Chesser, 20, was arrested Wednesday on charges unrelated to the online “warnings” that he posted to “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker over the show’s 200th and 201st episodes, in which viewers were led to believe Muhammad was disguised in a bear suit—only it turned out to be Saint Nicholas in the bear costume.

Comedy Central censored the episodes when they were telecast in April, clumsily wiping out the cartoon bear-suited Santa Claus from its scenes.

Paul Gene Rockwood, 35, faces a sentence of eight years in prison as part of his plea agreement. His wife, Nadia Rockwood, 36, also pleaded guilty to lying to investigators who were asking questions about Rockwood. She is scheduled to be sentenced to five years of probation.

Rockwood is a follower of cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, according to court documents. Al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American cleric, has been linked to the failed Christmas Day bombing and an attack on military base in Fort Hood, Texas.