·:[ The (vast) Right Wing Conspiracy ]:·
• • • • •

How do you know a country is getting to be fiscally and financially stable? Look no further:

The Trade Bank of Iraq on Tuesday issued the country’s first credit and debit cards, from Visa International Inc., at a ceremony in Baghdad.

Visa cards were given to cabinet ministers, government officials and financial professionals, the bank said. Bank Chairman Hussein al-Uzri presented the first card to Adel Abdul Mehdi, one of two vice presidents and a former finance minister.

The bank said it would issue 30,000 Visa cards in Iraq by the end of the year. The company also plans to install the country’s first network of automated teller machines, which would enable cardholders to withdraw Iraqi dinars or U.S. dollars from their accounts.

The Trade Bank of Iraq is a state-owned bank founded in 2003 to facilitate Iraq’s international trade. It is capitalized at $100 million and has issued 1,537 letters of credit worth $5.7 billion since its establishment, the bank said.

First come the credit cards, then the big mortgages, loans, etc. The Iraqi Stock Market is also up, running, and expanding and improving.

I think my (upcoming) senior thesis on microlending/microfinance in developing democracies might just turn into a case study of the Iraqi and growing Eastern European economies, which is really what I want to focus on anyway…

I saw an ABC news piece on this brutal double homicide in Queens last week where the suspect was an ex-boyfriend and dismissed it as another in a long line of anger/depression/rage killings. Apparently there was a twist that led the boys in blue (the NYPD, for those not in NYC) to the killer:

A doomed Queens man’s chilling computer entry led cops to a suspect who allegedly robbed and killed the victim and his sister to finance a return to China, police said yesterday.

Jin Lin, 23, was charged with first-degree murder yesterday in the bloody slayings of Sharon and Simon Ng in their Kew Gardens Hills apartment Thursday, officials said.

Cops zeroed in on Lin, who once dated the woman, because Ng typed a journal entry into his computer fingering his sister’s ex-boyfriend as the suspect, police said.

“He wrote that he was wondering why Lin was there and wished he would leave,” said Police Officer Jennara Everleth, an NYPD spokeswoman.

You can actually read Simon Ng’s last blog entry right here, as it is still online. He was also a fellow CUNY student, attending Queens College. I guess blogs do have some kind of practical use after all….