Now the buyers are running out of time and money. Paid $5.4 billion and an additional $890 million set aside for apartment renovations, landscaping and interest payments. Rents are down 25 percent from their peak.

Conservative members of the Supreme Court indicated they were extremely uncomfortable with restrictions that government has placed on the role of corporate spending on candidate elections and might rule broadly to strike what has been a long-standing fixture of campaign finance laws.

As his size 10s spun through the air towards George W Bush, Muntazer al-Zaidi �" the man the world now knows as the shoe-thrower �" was bracing for an American bullet.

"He thought the secret service was going to shoot him," says Zaidi's younger brother, Maitham. "He expected that, and he was not afraid to die."

Zaidi's actions during the former US president's swansong visit to Iraq last December have not stopped reverberating in the nine months since.

Next Monday, when the journalist walks out of prison, his 10 raging seconds, which came to define his country's last six miserable years, are set to take on a new life even more dramatic than the opening act.

Historians will look to September 2008 as a watershed for the U.S. economy. [notice no explanation of the CAUSE ED]

On Sept. 7 , the government seized mortgage titans Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac . Eight days later, investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, sparking a global financial panic that threatened to topple blue-chip financial institutions around the world. In the several months that followed, governments from Washington to Beijing responded with unprecedented intervention into financial markets and across their economies, seeking to stop the wreckage and stem the damage.