Trump’s Support Is Flagging in the Suburbs — and Beyond
The New York Times•
Here’s the No. 1 reason why military veterans are denied a VA mortgage
Here’s the No. 1 reason why military veterans are denied a VA mortgageIn the housing sector, every day is Veterans Day. That’s because many lenders provide VA loans that are backed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Perhaps the most attractive benefit of a VA loan is that a borrower can receive a mortgage without making a down payment towards the cost of the home. A VA loan is an example of our country taking care of those who have taken care of us.Perhaps the most attractive benefit of a VA loan is that a borrower can receive a mortgage without making a down payment towards the cost of the home. A VA loan is an example of our country taking care of those who have taken care of us. But navigating the VA loan market can be difficult because too many lenders use financial jargon.But navigating the VA loan market can be difficult because too many lenders use financial jargon. If you’re in the market for a VA loan, there are four things to keep in mind:
1. Eligibility: Before embarking upon the path of finding the right mortgage, service members should start with checking whether they qualify. Not everyone who serves is eligible for a VA loan. It’s important to obtain a Certificate of Eligibility (COE) prior to applying for a mortgage because all lenders will require this.‘Not having a COE is the single biggest point of failure in getting a VA home loan.’Bryan Bergjans, Caliber Home LoansVeterans will need to submit a DD 214 form that shows their record of service, and active duty members must provide a current statement of service. Military spouses have another set of requirements altogether. “Not having a COE is the single biggest point of failure in getting a VA home loan,” said Bryan Bergjans, national director of military and veterans lending at the firm I run, Caliber Home Loans.
2. Affordability: While it’s true that VA loans are more affordable than typical 30-year fixed rate mortgages, they should still be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. There can be a divergence between the advertised price of a loan and the actual price that a borrower will pay, after factoring in all the costs associated with originating and servicing the mortgages. It’s important that borrowers ask their lenders for the precise monthly payment amount in advance, so they can factor this into their personal financial calculations.Only after knowing the monthly payment and other terms of the mortgage should you make a decision on whether to pursue the financing. Monitor the 10-year Treasury yield, which is closely associated with mortgage rates, to understand recent price trends in the market and take advantage of them when rates drop.
3. Understand changes in the law: The Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act, which goes into effect in 2020, will have a significant impact on the VA Home Loan Guarantee. The law permits veterans to borrow more than the previous limit of close to $485,000, which is set by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Previously, service members who lived in expensive areas would have to make a down payment on the amount their property exceeded this limit. The new law makes it so that service members can borrow the full amount of the loan without having to make a down payment. This is an important and impactful change that will enable more members to obtain the financing they need to embark upon the path of homeownership.
4. Personal goals: Before signing the paperwork for a VA loan, understand clearly what you’re trying to achieve. Are you trying to obtain a mortgage without putting down any capital? Or are you trying to obtain a specific payment amount by leveraging current rates? Perhaps you want to conserve your money so that you can afford moving in costs and refurbishments. Or maybe you want to actually put some money down so that your monthly payment isn’t so high.I’m proud that my firm is able to serve military members. I hope more companies in other sectors will find their own way to honor these heroes.Sanjiv Das is CEO of Caliber Home Loans, one of the largest purchase housing specialty firms in the U.S.. Previously, he was CEO of CitiMortgage.
More: Here’s why home prices keep going up — and what we can do about it
Read: This tax break for first-time home buyers could keep the housing market afloat
30 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia Is Only Pretending to Be a Major Power
30 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia Is Only Pretending to Be a Major Power Vladimir Yakunin, the former Russian Railways boss and KGB spy, leaned forward to describe the way the world is going. It was the middle of October, and he had just convened an annual gathering of statesmen from countries that are, as a rule, sympathetic to the Kremlin. Held each fall on the Greek island of Rhodes, the summit provides a chance for Russia’s allies to compare notes, assess opportunities and make plans for the future. Yakunin, an old friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, serves as the master of ceremonies.The global context this year seemed to suit his message perfectly. Five days before the summit opened at the Rhodes Palace, the island’s most luxurious hotel, the U.S. had announced that it was withdrawing U.S. troops in northern Syria, effectively abandoning the Kurds and giving Turkey and Russia free reign to do what they want in the region. The U.K.’s plan to leave the European Union had also just hit another embarrassing snag, as its government was forced to ask for yet another Brexit extension. Yakunin clasped his hands as he considered what all this meant for Russia and the world. “We can say the West is declining,” he told TIME. “The global architecture is changing.” He took a sip from his espresso, and added, “The liberal order will be changing.”But judging by the turnout in Rhodes this year, Yakunin and his allies back in Moscow are not in a prime position to define the terms of a new world order. The only head of state who showed up was Mahamadou Issoufou, the President of Niger. The handful of attending politicians from Europe were years out of office. Few stayed for the entire weekend. Martin Schulz, the former President of the European Parliament, left before the end of the first day of the conference.It seemed like a sign of the times for Russia. Compared to its influence in the late Soviet era, when Yakunin served as a KGB spy under diplomatic cover in New York City, the Kremlin today has little claim to the status of a modern superpower. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has played a central role in conflicts from the Middle East to Latin America. But its messengers, like Yakunin, have a tendency to overstate their country’s strength. Political experts insist that Putin lacks a strategy for filling the vacuum that President Donald Trump has left behind in Syria. Nor does Moscow have enough money to sustain a system of reliable alliances, the way that China has tried to do by investing billions of dollars each year in countries across Africa.“Russia can’t really fill this vacuum,” neither in Syria nor the broader Middle East, says Stefan Meister, head of the Program for Eastern Europe and Russia at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. “It will only play with it. It can destroy, but it’s not able to build up the region.” Whether President Trump likes it or not, the U.S. is still the only power that can do that, says Shada Islam, a director at a Brussels based think tank, Friends of Europe. “The player in chief is still the U.S.—it’s the power that counts in the region,” she says.The Russians, of course, don’t quite see it that way. One of Yakunin’s guests in Rhodes this year was Vyacheslav Nikonov, the Chairman of the Education and Science Committee in the Russian parliament, who also happens to be the grandson of the legendary Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. (The Molotov cocktail was named after him, though he was not its inventor; during the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939-1940, Finnish guerillas used the crude petrol bombs against the Russian troops.)Less than a week after the forum in Rhodes, some 1,000 miles to the east in the city of Manbij, Russian troops faced no resistance as they moved into northern Syria. It was a scene of triumph for Moscow to broadcast on state TV, as Russian reporters streamed videos from bases that had just been abandoned by American troops.But those images were hardly a reliable measure of Russia’s power in the Middle East. Since Putin intervened in the Syrian war in 2015 to defend the regime of Bashar Assad, Moscow’s role in the region has come with costs that Russia will have trouble bearing in the long run. “Many in Russia are reluctant to place the country in the position of a security provider because this would involve multifarious responsibilities. This is understood at Russia’s top leadership,” says Elena Chebankova, a Russian politics lecturer at Lincoln University. Russia will not go too far to act as “a world ‘policeman’ to the extent as the USSR did,” she says.In July, Russia unveiled a proposal for a new alliance in the Middle East, dubbed the Collective Security Concept for the Persian Gulf Region. Its aim is to create stability in the Persian Gulf and involve major global and regional players including China, Russia, India, the U.S. and the E.U. But the plan left many Gulf officials wondering what Russia would do to guarantee the security it promised, says Nikolay Kozhanov, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow. “And the answer was quite obviously, nothing,” says Kozhanov. “Russia is a major player without any special cards in its hands.”During Putin’s visits to Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia in October, their leaders rolled out the red carpet for the Russian President and declared a new era in relations with Moscow. But the trips turned out to be short on substance, says Rauf Mammadov, an energy policy expert at the Middle East Institute, a U.S.-based think tank. Putin came away with $3 billion in deals—a modest sum compared to the $300 billion Trump secured during his visit to Saudi Arabia in 2017.Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s oil company, signed up to buy a stake in a new gas project in the Russian Arctic October 2018, but so far it has not materialized. A much lauded partnership between Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and a UAE-based global investment firm Mubadala was created in 2013, but the two sides have only allocated a third of the $7 billion that is up for investment. Russia’s economic ties to Persian monarchs are “still a nascent process,” says Mammadov. Likewise in Egypt, Putin agreed a deal in 2014 to build a Russian free-trade zone on the Suez Canal—a project that remains on the drawing board, wrapped up in Egyptian red tape. But that did not stop Egyptian President Abdul Fattah Al-Sisi from touting the project during a meeting with Putin in Russia last month.The economic ties between Russia and China have also tended to produce more headlines than substance. Though Putin has hailed these relations as the “best they’ve ever been,” the primary proof has been the recent series of joint military drills, alongside plans announced last month for Russia to “radically enhance China’s defense capability” by helping the country to build a missile defense system.Putin and his Chinese counterpart are more like frenemies than allies, says Mathieu Boulègue, a Research Fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. For one thing, Russia is painfully aware that, with an economy 8 times smaller than that of China, it would need to accept the role of junior partner in any alliance with Beijing. “It’s not about cooperation,” says Boulègue, “but the messages it sends to the rest of the world.” The intended message is clear enough, he says: “‘We are not alone.’”But loneliness may be wiser than some of the partnerships Russia is courting. Consider its recent moves in Africa. Through a series of security deals and mining ventures, the Kremlin managed to build an alliance in the last two years with the Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir—only to watch him deposed in a popular uprising this summer. At the end of October, Putin brought the heads of state from 43 African countries to Sochi, his favorite resort on the Black Sea coast.The event produced another round of headlines around the world about Russia’s prowess in foreign affairs. But other than the pageantry, it was hard to see what Moscow stood to gain from these alliances. Only 3.7% of Russian goods end up in Africa today, while African goods account for just 1.1% of Russian imports. Russia’s current bilateral trade of $20 billion is just an eighth of China’s and half of the U.S.’s. Paul Stronski, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, sees Russian clout in Africa “tied to a handful of client states with relatively limited strategic significance.” That means Putin is still “nowhere near restoring the status that the Soviet Union once enjoyed on the continent,” Stronski told the BBC.The same can be said of Yakunin. Though he clearly enjoyed the chance to address his audience of hundreds in Rhodes, the spectacle of the event felt hollow. “It has no real meaning other than maintaining an attractive image of Russia,” says Elisabeth Schimpfossl, the author of Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie, who first attended the Rhodes summit in 2009. Then, as now, the gathering was mostly a “PR event,” she says. And in that sense, at least, it resembles a lot of Russia’s recent moves in international affairs.
Look Out America: Russia’s Is Claiming To Have Smarter „Smart Bombs”
Key point: Syria has been a critical testing ground for Russian military tech.
Russia claims to have developed an ingenious new smart bomb.
Or rather, instead of making the bomb smarter, it’s the aircraft carrying the bomb that has all the brains, according to the Russian news site the Saker.
The Saker article attributes the „amazingly accurate” and „quasi-miraculous” Russian bombing in Syria to a weapon called the SVP-24. The SVP-24 is a system that turns unguided conventional bombs into precision-guided weapons, similar to the U.S. Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). But whereas the JDAM is a guidance kit attached to an iron bomb, Russia’s SVP-24 attaches the guidance kit to the bomber itself.
„What this system does is that it constantly compares the position of the aircraft and the target (using the GLONASS satellite navigation system),” the Saker says.
„It measures the environmental parameters (pressure, humidity, windspeed, speed, angle of attack, etc.). It can also receive additional information from datalinks from AWACS aircraft, ground stations, and other aircraft. The SVP-24 then computes an ‘envelope’ (speed, altitude, course) inside which the dumb bombs are automatically released exactly at the precise moment when their unguided flight will bring them right over the target (with a 3-5 meter accuracy).”
Thus, „the pilot does not even have to worry about targeting anything,” according to the Saker. „He just enters the target’s exact coordinates into his system, flies within a defined envelope and the bombs are automatically released for him. He can place his full attention on detecting any hostiles (aircraft, missiles, AA guns).”
And why is this better than the JDAM? It’s cheaper, the Saker argues. Each JDAM kit costs around $25,000 per bomb, and when the bomb is dropped, the kit it expended. Because the SVP-24 is fitted to the aircraft rather than the bomb, it can be reused each time.
Don’t these tropes sound familiar? Brilliant new weapon unveiled (a constant refrain since the Smart Bomb Revolution in the Vietnam War). It is, it seems, the story of simple Russian engineering versus over-complicated American technology.
US wants UN to take up Dalai Lama succession: envoy
The Dalai Lama arrives for prayers wishing him a long life at the Tsuglagkhang temple in McLeod Ganj, India in September 2019 — the US wants the UN to look at the issue of who will succeed him
Washington (AFP) – The United States wants the United Nations to take up the Dalai Lama’s succession in an intensifying bid to stop China from trying to handpick his successor, an envoy said after meeting the Tibetan spiritual leader.
Sam Brownback, the US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, said he spoke at length about the succession issue with the 84-year-old Dalai Lama last week in the monk’s home-in-exile of Dharamsala, India.
Brownback said he told the Dalai Lama that the United States would seek to build global support for the principle that the choice of the next spiritual chief „belongs to the Tibetan Buddhists and not the Chinese government.”
„I would hope that the UN would take the issue up,” Brownback told AFP after returning to Washington.
He acknowledged that China, with its veto power on the Security Council, would work strenuously to block any action, but he hoped countries could at least raise their voices at the United Nations.
„I think it’s really important to have an early global conversation because this is a global figure with a global impact,” he said.
„That’s the big thing that we’re really after now, to stir this before we’re right in the middle of it — if something happens to the Dalai Lama, that there has been this robust discussion globally about it ahead of time,” he said.
„My estimation undoubtedly is that the (Chinese) communist party has thought a lot about this. So they’ve got a plan and I think we have to be equally aggressive with a plan.”
The Dalai Lama once traveled incessantly, drawing huge Western audiences with his good-humored lectures on compassion and happiness.
But the Nobel Peace Prize winner has slowed down and earlier this year suffered a chest infection, although he is not known to have serious health issues.
Brownback said he found the Dalai Lama „quite jovial” and that the monk had told him, „‘Look, I’m going to live another 15, 20 years; I’m going to outlast the Chinese government.'”
But Beijing has indicated it is waiting out the Dalai Lama, believing his campaign for greater Tibetan autonomy will end with him.
China, which argues that it has brought modernization and development to the Himalayan region, has increasingly hinted that it could name the next Dalai Lama, who would presumably be groomed to support Chinese rule.
In 1995, the officially atheist government selected its own Panchen Lama and detained a six-year-old identified for the influential Buddhist position — whom rights groups called the world’s youngest political prisoner.
– Seeking ‘unfettered’ access –
Mindful of Beijing’s plans, the 14th Dalai Lama has mused about breaking with the centuries-old tradition in which wandering monks look for signs that a young boy is the reincarnation.
He has said that he could pick his own successor, possibly a girl, or even declare himself the final Dalai Lama.
The US Congress has also stepped up efforts, including by mandating visa denials by the end of the year for Chinese officials unless Beijing eases restrictions on US diplomats, journalists and ordinary people seeking to visit Tibet.
Brownback said he would like access to Tibet, „but I want it unfettered.”
He said he similarly hoped to visit the western region of Xinjiang, which has drawn intense US scrutiny over the incarceration of some one million Uighurs and other Turkic-speaking Muslims.
„It is part of the same war on faith,” Brownback said of Tibet and Xinjiang.
– Fears in Nepal –
Brownback also visited Nepal, historically the gateway for Tibetans fleeing to India but which has increasingly clamped down under pressure from its giant northern neighbor.
Brownback said he raised fears for Tibetans with Nepal’s foreign minister, Pradeep Gyawali.
But he acknowledged Nepal’s difficult situation and said: „I would hate to be very harsh on the Nepalese because they’ve been so good over so many years to help the Tibetans.”
Brownback said that the burden was ultimately with China to allow freedom of movement — and not to interfere in Tibetan Buddhism.
„A government doesn’t own a religion,” he said. „A religion runs itself.”
„We hope we’ll get a number of other communities around the world to express similar positions and concerns.”
