DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — China has lost faith in the stability of the U.S. dollar and its first priority is to broaden the exchange rate for its currency from the dollar to a more flexible basket of currencies, a top Chinese economist said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum.
Full Article: biz.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush told black leaders Tuesday that his plan to add private accounts to Social Security would benefit blacks since they tend to have shorter lives than some other Americans and end up paying in more than they get out.
Full Article:cnn.com

A co-worker of mine commented, “Why didn’t he say ‘Line up against the wall and we’ll shoot you NOW…then you won’t have to pay anything.’ ” CNN published this story without comment.

by James Petras
A major diplomatic and political conflict has exploded between Colombia and Venezuela after the revelation of a Colombian government covert operation in Venezuela, involving the recruitment of Venezuelan military and security officers in the kidnapping of a Colombian leftist leader. Following an investigation by the Venezuelan Ministry of Interior and reports and testimony from journalists and other knowledgeable political observers it was determined that the highest echelons of the Colombian government, including President Uribe, planned and executed this onslaught on Venezuelan sovereignty.

Once direct Colombian involvement was established, the Venezuelan government demanded a public apology from the Colombian government while seeking a diplomatic solution by blaming Colombian Presidential advisers. The Colombian regime took the offensive, launching an aggressive defense of its involvement in the violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and, beyond that, seeking to establish in advance, under the rationale of “national security” the legitimacy of future acts of aggression. As a result President Chavez has recalled the Venezuelan Ambassador from Bogota, suspended all state-to-state commercial and political agreements pending an official state apology. In response the US Government gave unconditional support to Colombian violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and urged the Uribe regime to push the conflict further. What began as a diplomatic conflict over a specific incident has turned into a major, defining crises in US and Latin American political relations with potentially explosive military, economic and political consequences for the entire region.

In justifying the kidnapping of Rodrigo Granda, the Colombian leftist leader, the Uribe regime has promulgated a new foreign policy doctrine which echoes that of the Bush Administration: the right of unilateral intervention in any country in which the Colombian government perceives or claims is harboring or providing refuge to political adversaries (which the regime labels as “terrorists”) which might threaten the security of the state. The Uribe doctrine of unilateral intervention echoes the preventive war speech, enunciated in late 2001 by President Bush. Clearly Uribe’s action and pronouncement is profoundly influenced by the dominance that Washington exercises over the Uribe regime’s policies through its extended $3 billion dollar military aid program and deep penetration of the entire political-defense apparatus.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

by Terry Eagleton
…Blowing yourself up for political reasons is a complex symbolic act, one that mixes despair and defiance. It proclaims that even death is preferable to your wretched way of life. The act of self-dispossession writes dramatically large the self-dispossession that is your routine existence. Laying violent hands on yourself is a more graphic image of what your enemy does to you anyway. At the same time, the bomber forces a contrast between the extreme kind of self-determination involved in taking his own life and the lack of such self-determination in his everyday existence. If he could live in the way he dies, he would not need to die. At least his death can be his death, and thus a taste of freedom. The only form of sovereignty left to you is the power to dispose of your own death. Suicide, as Dostoevsky recognised, means the death of God, since you usurp his divine monopoly over life and death. What more breathtaking form of omnipotence than to do away with yourself for all eternity?…
Full Article:guardian.co.uk

Elvis, Betu and Renatu live in a rubbish dump. Every day the teenagers take out their wire pushcarts, collect the waste of the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre and bring it back to the illegal slum of Chocolatado to sort and then sell on.

It’s a grim place, made of reclaimed tarpaulins, waste timber, old plastic and metal. None of the shacks have running water or toilets, and most of them are deep in litter.

This, then, is the ideal backdrop for the launch today of the World Social Forum, which meets annually to discuss issues affecting developing countries.

Begun five years ago specifically to counter the annual meeting of world business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland, it has unexpectedly become a global political and social phenomenon.

More than 100,000 activists will be in Porto Alegre this year. They will be joined by two presidents, several Nobel peace and literature prizewinners, the world’s leading international non-government groups, healthworkers, MPs, educators, unions, students, the landless, indigenous peoples, intellectuals, environmentalists and dissident economists.

“It’s not perfect, but it is the most tangible global rejection of the neo-liberal globalisation policies of the US and G8 countries,” said Ricardo Jimenez, a Uruguyan doctor.

“But it needs to be seen in context. More than 1 billion people in developing countries live in slums; 800 million go hungry every day; 27 million adults are slaves; 245 million children have to work. The poor are everywhere still getting poorer, the cities are disintegrating and bankrupt. It is a response to a global scandal.”
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

LAS VEGAS — Alternately wisecracking and whimsical, Ted Turner took several pot shots at media consolidation but largely spared his old colleagues at AOL Time Warner during the opening keynote session at NATPE Tuesday morning.

The maverick mogul told some 750 NATPE delegates that the concentration of media might in the hands of five congloms had made it well-nigh impossible to break into the business — and, even more perniciously, made the news operations of such companies less critical of government.

But describing himself as “phased out” of the biz, the CNN founder came across to the NATPE contingent as more resigned than riled up. Feisty he was not.

Given war and environmental degradation, he pointed out, there’s a tremendous responsibility in running these operations.

“We need to be very well informed. We need less Hollywood news and a little more hard news,” Turner said in an opening 10-minute address. That young people get much of their news from sources like Jon Stewart on Comedy Central was, in his view, “frightening.”
Full Article: variety.com

by Gary Younge
Almost half of all African-Americans believe that HIV, the virus that causes Aids, is man-made, more than a quarter believe it was produced in a government laboratory and one in eight think it was created and spread by the CIA, according to a study released by Rand Corporation and the University of Oregon.

The paper’s authors say these views are obstructing efforts to prevent the spread of HIV among African-Americans, the racial group most likely to contract the virus.

“The findings are striking, and a wake-up call to the prevention community,” Laura Bogart, a behavioural scientist who co-authored the study, told the Washington Post.

“The prevention community has not addressed conspiracy beliefs in the context of prevention. I think that a lot of people involved in prevention may not be from the community where they are trying to prevent HIV.”

African-Americans are 13% of the US population but account for 50% of new HIV infections, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

African-American women constituted 73% of new female HIV cases in 2003.

The study, which was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, also revealed a slight majority believe a cure for Aids is being withheld from the poor; 44% think the people who take the new medicines for HIV are being used as government guinea pigs, and 15% believe Aids is a form of genocide against black people. The responses barely fluctuated according to age, income, gender or education level.

Na’im Akbar, a professor of psychology at Florida State University who specialises in African-American behaviour, stressed that these views are grounded in experience.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Israel is poised to expel a senior BBC journalist it accuses of criminal defiance of censorship laws over an interview with the nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu.

Simon Wilson, deputy chief of the BBC’s Jerusalem bureau, has been unable to return to Israel since the beginning of the year, when his work permit expired.

The government says no new visa will be issued until Wilson agrees to sign a letter acknowledging that he deliberately defied Israeli law, apologising and promising that it will not happen again.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Central banks are shifting reserves away from the US and towards the eurozone in a move that looks set to deepen the Bush administration’s difficulties in financing its ballooning current account deficit.

In actions likely to undermine the dollar’s value on currency markets, 70 per cent of central bank reserve managers said they had increased their exposure to the euro over the past two years. The majority thought eurozone money and debt markets were as attractive a destination for investment as the US.
Full Article: nytimes.com/financial times

by Gary Younge
There is one tiny corner of Cuba that will forever America be. It is a place where innocent people are held without charge for years, beyond international law, human decency and the mythical glow of Lady Liberty’s torch. It is a place where torture is common, beating is ritual and humiliation is routine. They call it Guantánamo Bay.

Last week the new United States secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, listed Cuba, among others, as “an outpost of tyranny”. A few days later President Bush started his second term with a pledge to unleash “the force of freedom” on the entire world. “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world,” he said

You would think that if the Americans are truly interested in expanding freedom and ending tyranny in Cuba, let alone the rest of the world, Guantánamo Bay would be as good a place to start as any. But the captives in Guantánamo should not ask for the keys to their leg irons any time soon. Ms Rice was not referring to the outpost of tyranny that her boss created in Cuba, but the rest of the Caribbean island, which lives in a stable mixture of the imperfect and the impressive.

In short, while the US could liberate a place where there are flagrant human rights abuses and over which they have total control, it would rather topple a sovereign state, which poses no threat, through diplomatic and economic – and possibly military – warfare that is already causing chaos and hardship.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk