Cheat Sheet

A day of wild swings on Wall Street has ended with the Dow Jones Industrial Average nearly 200 points down, to 9,252.85. Only 200 points, you say? Yes, it's better than the last few days, but coming on the heels of an emergency move by the world's central banks—a coordinated rate cut that was supposed to boost international indexes—it was far from a positive day, with Asian markets taking a particular plunge. The Dow has lost 13 percent over the last five days of trading. Best of all? Wall Street veterans say investors should brace for more bad news over the next few months, and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson says he expects more financial institutions to declare bankruptcy. Happy Wednesday!

Intrepid New Republic reporter Noam Scheiber has come back from the Last Frontier with documents that shed light on what John McCain might call “the real Sarah Palin.” While not likely to be displayed alongside the Rosetta Stone, the Palin Doodles are edifying all the same. Palin scribbled down some broad themes when she was running for mayor of Wasilla in 1996. See if they sound familiar: “time for a change,” “lifelong Alaskan,” “part of the bureaucracy,” and (of course) “no tax increase.” Scheiber also unearthed a letter in which Palin warned of Wasilla becoming a “mini Seattle”—a movement she no doubt stopped singlehandedly. 

Harrowing report in this morning’s Wall Street Journal: In Tahwilla, one of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s last major strongholds, insurgents have a fiendish tactic—rigging abandoned houses with explosives and trying to draw troops inside. In this piece, reporting an incident from the summer, soldiers from the 1st Armored Division's 1-6 Infantry Battalion find an empty home that seems too perfect—large and cool, with a walled backyard. Soon they discover copper wires running into the property. Turns out the mousetrap is filled with artillery shells, bombs, and barrels of explosives. The soldiers escape, narrowly averting what a colonel calls “an al-Qaeda grand slam."

The $85 billion dollar loan sure helped AIG execs work out some major kinks—in their necks!  Days after the government saved the insurance provider from imminent bankruptcy, the executive team celebrated with a trip to the St. Regis Resort south of Los Angeles. 23,380 tax-payer dollars paid for golf, banquets and spa treatments. Even more ridiculous: Eric Dinallo, superintendent of the New York State Insurance Department, lauded the retreat. “The concept of bringing all the major employees together...to ensure that the $85 billion could be as greatly as possible paid back would have been not a crazy corporate decision," Dinallo told the House committee.

A Japanese and two American scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry today for discovering a fluorescent protein in jellyfish that can be used in medical research. Fair enough—anyone who discovers something useful in a jellyfish deserves a prize. The protein can be inserted into the DNA of lab animals and then tracked with an ultraviolet light, giving “researchers an instant way of monitoring processes that were previously invisible,” according to AFP. The breakthrough is not, however, very good news for the jellyfish—the scientists needed 10,000 of them to extract just a few grams of the precious liquid.

American prudery makes no exceptions. When Karita Matilla disrobes in the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Salome on Saturday night, the camera that broadcasts the performance to movie theaters around the country will modestly pan away. The Met’s general manager chose to omit the strip because the productions should be “family-friendly,” The Los Angeles Times reports. It seems a woman making love to the John the Baptist’s severed head is one thing. But as for breasts, please, there are children present. 

Superheroes thrive in times of trouble, so this really shouldn’t be so shocking: The upcoming Spider-Man musical, under the direction of the Lion King’s Julie Taymor, will be the most expensive production in theater history, topping $40 million. "It's off the charts," a source tells the New York Post. Even if the budget comes down, the show—produced by Sony with a rock score by Bono—will reportedly cost $1 million to stage each week, meaning that, in this economy, it should break even in, say, 8,000 years.

Fascinating story in the Independent: The blind have monopolized massage jobs in South Korea ever since Japanese colonists brought the tradition there half a century ago. Two years ago, a South Korean court ruled that a law allowing only the blind to work as masseurs “excessively discriminated” against those with sight. Since then: havoc. Last month, police arrested 26 blind masseurs for burning cars and threatening suicide. Although there are now roughly 7,000 blind masseurs and half a million sighted ones, the Korean government has offered to put a quota on the number of sighted masseurs. Protestors demand that the sighted only perform head and hand massages.

The American moviegoer stands to regain some pride this weekend when—fingers crossed—Ridley Scott's latest thriller, Body of Lies, knocks Beverly Hills Chihuahua off the top of the box-office. Scott's latest captures "the ironies of asymmetrical warfare in the age of terror," writes The New Yorker's David Denby. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, "our most reliably effective young leading man," as a CIA agent in the Middle East and Russell Crowe as his Washington-based superior. The territory may be familiar, Denby admits, "but the movie is smart and tightly drawn; it has a throat gripping urgency and some serious insights." Anything beats a talking dog. Body of Lies opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, October 8.

“Apartments asking $15 million are meant to be devoured, not ignored,” the Observer notes. But it seems no one has money left to do the devouring—the super-luxury bubble has burst. According to the Observer’s figures, there are now 168 “super-luxury” (north of $15 million) listings in Manhattan. This represents “dozens more than just half a year ago, and nearly twice the number from autumn 2006.” The paper provides a fun guide to the unsold pads, like a 13-room apartment at Trump Park Avenue, which has been gathering mold since November 2005. It was listed at $31 million in August.

The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and central banks from several other countries including China coordinated cut interest rates this morning after global markets continued to crash. It was the first time the Fed has ever coordinated its actions with other countries, and it comes in the wake of the failure of several emergency measures—the $700 billion bailout, the doubling of emergency loan facilities at the Fed, and the Fed’s decision to start buying up short-term commercial debt—to stem the crisis. The American rate now sits at 1.5 percent.