Obama will lobby for Chicago 2016 bid at Olympic vote

President Obama said Monday he will travel to the IOC meeting in Copenhagen on Oct. 2 to support the Chicago 2016 bid.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

President Obama and the organizers of the Chicago 2016 bid for the Summer Olympic Games announced that Mr. Obama will, after all, attend the Oct. 2 meeting of the International Olympic Committee at which the 2016 host city will be chosen.

The announcement is a tremendous boost for the Chicago but, perhaps saving it from what otherwise could have been likely failure.

The heads of state for the other three bid cities – Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, and Tokyo – had all announced their plans to be in Copenhagen for the Oct. 2 vote.

As a result, Obama’s initial decision not to attend could have been fatal for Chicago’s chances. It is likely that the IOC would not have looked favorably on Obama refusing to go the extra mile for a bid from his hometown, regardless of his hectic healthcare reform schedule in Washington.

Indeed, the potentially decisive role that heads of state can play in Olympic bids was underlined four years ago, when experts suggested Paris was a shoo-in as host city for the 2012 Summer Games.

The day before the vote, French President Jacques Chirac was mocking the competition, saying “the only worse food than British food is Finnish” and “the only thing the British have done for Europe’s agriculture is mad cow disease.” Meanwhile, British Prime Minister was at the IOC meeting in Singapore lobbying the IOC heavily on London’s behalf.

The combination of the two events turned the bidding in London’s favor. Mr. Blair’s lobbying effort was so aggressive, in fact, that French organizers complained to the IOC, saying it was illegal. The charges were dismissed.

This will be the first time that a US president has gone to the IOC vote. But London 2012 established a new bar for bid cities, and Obama initial unwillingness to commit to those obligations were a great concern to Chicago 2016 organizers.

At a press summit earlier this month, they made it clear that they were doing everything in their powerto persuade Obama to go, but that the decision was ultimately his.

“We could not be more pleased to welcome President Barack Obama to our delegation for the IOC selection of the host city for the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games,” the US Olympic Committee said in a statement.

Obama’s decision leaves Chicago well placed for the Oct. 2 vote. One of the top analysts of Olympic bids rates Chicago as the second favorite to win the IOC vote, just behind Rio.

In his Olympic Bid Power Index, Ed Hula of Around the Rings gives Rio 84 points compared with Chicago’s 83. Madrid and Tokyo tie at 80.

“Rio has been able to deliver an emotional edge to its appeal that the other bids haven’t matched,” said Mr. Hula in a press release. “Chicago slips to second from the June index, but still scores three points higher, helped by the addition of financial guarantees and government support.”

Exiles Accuse Iran of Working On Detonators

Washington Post

By Edward Cody

PARIS, Sept. 24 — An Iranian exile group said Thursday that it has identified two previously unknown sites in and near Tehran where it says Iranian scientists are researching and trying to manufacture detonators for nuclear weapons.

The allegation, from the Paris-based Mujaheddin-e Khalq, or MEK, was designed to reinforce the exiles’ long-standing contention that the Iranian government, despite repeated denials, has an active program to develop a nuclear arsenal under the aegis of the Defense Ministry and the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The announcement was timed to coincide with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s appearance at the U.N. General Assembly and with intensified pressure from the United States and other major powers for Iran to allow full inspection of its nuclear-related facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

There was no way to confirm the authenticity of Thursday’s allegation. But previous MEK information has given Western intelligence agencies tips about some Iranian nuclear activities or provided details about research sites.

Mehdi Abrishamchi, an MEK activist, said that as far as he knew, no Western governments were aware of the existence of the two sites.

As did Ahmadinejad in interviews Wednesday, Iran repeatedly has denied a desire to acquire nuclear weapons and says its nuclear program is for peaceful energy use. According to statements from Iranian officials, activities connected to making nuclear weapons were halted several years ago.

But Abrishamchi said the two sites house programs designed to research and produce high-explosive detonators for atomic bombs.

The information came from “dozens of sources at different levels of the Iranian regime’s various organs” and was cross-checked with dozens more, he said in a statement.

Abrishamchi, a senior member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an MEK-run umbrella group, said the two sites were part of a complex known as METFAZ — the Farsi acronym for Research Center for Explosion and Impact — that apparently has been in operation for several years under the command of the Defense Ministry.

The first site, a research and administrative facility in eastern Tehran, was bought by the Defense Ministry under the name of Massoud Sadighi Divani, a senior ministry official, Abrishamchi said. Inside, scientists carry out computer simulations and other experiments to reach an effective design for high-explosive impact and penetration devices that could serve to detonate a nuclear weapon, he said.

The second site, about 20 miles to the east, is used to manufacture parts needed to construct the detonators, he said. Lying within a military zone with restricted access, it is surrounded by high concrete walls and includes tunnels dug into a nearby hill, he added.

Abrishamchi said the two sites basically continue work that was being done at Shian, a facility that was razed by Iranian authorities after being denounced by the MEK in 2003. He called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to try to inspect the sites as quickly as possible.

Egyptian paper: Coins found bearing name of Joseph

Biblical patriarch ID’d in hieroglyphs, depiction of cow linked to pharoah’s dream

WND

Egyptian coins carrying the name of Joseph, the biblical patriarch whose arrival in Egypt as a slave eventually provided salvation for his family during decades of drought across the Middle East, have been discovered in a cache of antique items shelved in boxes in a museum, according to a new report.

The report from the Middle East Media Research Institute said the coins with Joseph’s name and image were found in a pile of unsorted artifacts that had been stored at the Museum of Egypt.

MEMRI, which monitors and translates reports from Middle East publications and broadcasters, said the original report was in Egypt’s Al Ahram newspaper in Cairo.

The newspaper said the discovery countered claims by some historians that coins were not used for trade in Egypt at the time the Bible records Joseph and the Jews migrated there.

Those historians have argued that trade was done by barter.

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But researchers told the newspaper the minting dates of the coins in the cache have been matched to the period in which Joseph was recorded to be in Egypt.

“A thorough examination revealed that the coins bore the year in which they were minted and their value, or effigies of the pharaohs [who ruled] at the time of their minting. Some of the coins are from the time when Joseph lived in Egypt, and bear his name and portrait,” said the newspaper report.

The report carried an explanation of the discovery by a team involving researcher Sa’id Muhammad Thabet:

“Studies by Dr. Thabet’s team have revealed that what most archeologists took for a kind of charm, and others took for an ornament or adornment, is actually a coin. Several [facts led them to this conclusion]: first, [the fact that] many such coins have been found at various [archeological sites], and also [the fact that] they are round or oval in shape, and have two faces: one with an inscription, called the inscribed face, and one with an image, called the engraved face – just like the coins we use today,” said the report.

The newspaper called the find “unprecedented” and said, “The researchers discovered the coins when they sifted through thousands of small archeological artifacts stored in [the vaults of] the Museum of Egypt.”

The Egyptian newspaper noted that the Quran indicates clearly “that coins were used in Egypt in the time of Joseph.”

The report continued, “Research team head Dr. Sa’id Muhammad Thabet said that during his archeological research on the Prophet Joseph, he had discovered in the vaults of the [Egyptian] Antiquities Authority and of the National Museum many charms from various eras before and after the period of Joseph, including one that bore his effigy as the minister of the treasury in the Egyptian pharaoh’s court…”

The report continued, “According to Dr. Thabet, his studies are based on publications about the Third Dynasty, one of which states that the Egyptian coin of the time was called a deben and was worth one-fourth of a gram of gold. This coin is mentioned in a letter by a man named Thot-Nehet, a royal inspector of the Nile bridges. In letters to his son, he mentioned leasing lands in return for deben-coins and agricultural produce.”

The report explained that other texts from the Third, Sixth and Twelfth Dynasties also talk about coins.

“The archeological finding is also based on the fact that the inscribed face bore the name of Egypt, a date, and a value, while the engraved face bore the name and image of one of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs or gods, or else a symbol connected with these. Another telling fact is that the coins come in different sizes and are made of different materials, including ivory, precious stones, copper, silver, gold, etc.” the newspaper reported.

The museum research uncovered 500 of the coins “carelessly” stored in boxes.

One even had the image of a cow “symbolizing Pharaoh‘s dream about the seven fat cows and seven lean cows, and the seven green stalks of grain and seven dry talks of grain,” the report said.

“Joseph’s name appears twice on this coin, written in hieroglyphs: once the original name, Joseph, and once his Egyptian name, Saba Sabani, which was given to him by Pharaoh when he became treasurer. There is also an image of Joseph, who was part of the Egyptian administration at the time,” the report said.

Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away

News.Com.Au

ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.
The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent’s western coast.

Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth’s ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, The Australian reports. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month.

However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia.

East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week’s meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades”.

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

“Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally,” Dr Allison said.

The melting of sea ice – fast ice and pack ice – does not cause sea levels to rise because the ice is in the water. Sea levels may rise with losses from freshwater ice sheets on the polar caps. In Antarctica, these losses are in the form of icebergs calved from ice shelves formed by glacial movements on the mainland.

Last week, federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett said experts predicted sea level rises of up to 6m from Antarctic melting by 2100, but the worst case scenario foreshadowed by the SCAR report was a 1.25m rise.

Mr Garrett insisted global warming was causing ice losses throughout Antarctica. “I don’t think there’s any doubt it is contributing to what we’ve seen both on the Wilkins shelf and more generally in Antarctica,” he said.

Dr Allison said there was not any evidence of significant change in the mass of ice shelves in east Antarctica nor any indication that its ice cap was melting. “The only significant calvings in Antarctica have been in the west,” he said. And he cautioned that calvings of the magnitude seen recently in west Antarctica might not be unusual.

“Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off – I’m talking 100km or 200km long – every 10 or 20 or 50 years.”

Ice core drilling in the fast ice off Australia’s Davis Station in East Antarctica by the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-Operative Research Centre shows that last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m, its densest in 10 years. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.

A paper to be published soon by the British Antarctic Survey in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.

Raped at 8 and left for dead, a victim raises her voice

CNN

By Mayra Cuevas-Nazario

For nearly 20 years Jennifer Schuett has held onto every memory of the night she was abducted from her bedroom, raped and left for dead.

It was August 10, 1990. Schuett was 8 years old and lived alone with her mother in the first floor of an apartment complex in Dickinson, Texas. The bedroom windows faced the parking lot.

Investigators were never able to identify a suspect, but new DNA testing may change that.

CNN normally does not identify victims of sexual assaults. But Schuett wants to go public with her story– and her name– to increase the chances of finding and prosecuting her attacker.

“It’s not about me anymore,” she explained. “It’s about all the little girls that go to sleep at night. I know there are so many girls out there who have been raped and hurt. You have to fight back.”

For that, Schuett, 27, is relying on her voice, her memory and advances in DNA testing.

“I remember everything; I’ve always wanted to remember everything, so I can find the person that did this,” Schuett told CNN during a phone interview. “If I had blocked this out of my memory, the investigation wouldn’t have come this far. I’m a fighter.”

Schuett says she was alone in her bed when a man came creeping in through the window. She remembers waking up in a stranger’s arms as he carried her across a dark parking lot.

“When I opened my eyes, his face was the first thing I saw and he covered my face and mouth,” she said. “He ran with me to his car. He told me he was an undercover cop and that he knew my family. He seemed calm — not nervous, not aggressive.”

After they left the parking lot, he drove her through the streets of Dickinson, Texas, pulling into a mechanic shop next to her elementary school.

“Watch the moon. The moon will change colors and that is when your mom will come to get you,” she recalled him saying. “Oh, it looks like she is not coming.”

Schuett said he drove her to an overgrown field next to the school and raped her.

“He had a knife to my throat and touched my face and offered me Reese’s pieces,” she said. “I was scared but I knew I couldn’t be fast enough to get away. Cars would drive by but I couldn’t get away to get help.”

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Obama UN speech: all nations have responsibility to act

CSMONITOR

At the UN General Assembly, Obama said the US is ready to address global challenges such as nuclear proliferation. But the world cannot expect America to solve such problems alone, he said.

By Howard LaFranchi

UNITED NATIONS, N.Y. – President Obama assured the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday that the era of a unilateralist America is over. But, he said, the ensuing era of cooperation in addressing the world’s toughest challenges also requires a new sense of responsibility on the part of all nations.

In his first UN speech as president, Mr. Obama said the United States is ready to address challenges ranging from nuclear proliferation to global economic prosperity. Yet the world cannot expect America to figure out international challenges alone, he said.

“Make no mistake: This cannot be solely America’s endeavor,” he told a receptive General Assembly chamber. “Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone.”

At the same time, Obama said, all nations have a role to play: “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility.”

Obama’s “responsibility” theme echoes one he has used extensively in addressing domestic issues as well. But at the UN, the call for responsible action received an immediate rebuff from Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, who gave a rambling and at times incoherent speech in which he called the UN Security Council the “terror council” and belittled the UN as a dictatorship of the powerful.

Mr. Qaddafi’s speech, which droned on for about 90 minutes, exemplified the challenge before Obama in seeking cooperative action from the 192-nation body. The speech also seems bound to reinforce disdain in the US for the UN.

“President Obama has a very difficult task … if he expects to invest the UN with renewed credibility,” says Christopher Preble, director of foreign studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. “The UN is a weak and fractured institution” of “limited power and credibility,” he adds, saying that the US has been as responsible for that weakness as other countries.

In his speech, Obama pledged a new era of US multilateral action based on “four pillars” of major challenges: nonproliferation, peace and security, preservation of planet, and global prosperity.

On nuclear proliferation, Obama said, the next 12 months could be “pivotal”: The UN is set to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty next year, and the US and Russia are poised to agree on further reductions in their arsenals. But the challenge posed by Iran’s and North Korea‘s nuclear programs are also part of the challenge, he said, and go to the heart of the “responsibility” of all nations to act in ways that solve the world’s challenges.

“A world in which international demands are ignored will leave us all less safe,” he said, referring to Iran and North Korea by name and to their flaunting of Security Council resolutions. “If nations put the pursuit of nuclear weapons ahead of the prosperity of their own people, then they must be held accountable,” he added. “Treaties will be enforced.”

Obama dedicated a large chunk of his speech to his efforts to find peace in the Middle East, placing resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the context of his theme global responsibility.

And he acknowledged his personal popularity around the world, but he insisted that the “expectations about my presidency are not about me” but about rejection of an unsatisfactory status quo in the world – and “the hope that real change in possible.”

To underscore his theme, Obama quoted President Franklin D. Roosevelt, saying, “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man … or one nation,” but must be “the cooperative effort of the whole world.”

Saudi Arabia to send troops to Iraq?

WND

Alarms raised over Iran‘s increasing agitation of Shiites

Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium online newsletter published by the founder of WND. Subscriptions are $99 a year or, for monthly trials, just $9.95 per month for credit card users, and provide instant access for the complete reports.

A key Saudi Arabia leader is organizing a pushback against Iran’s plans to agitate Shiite Muslims across Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations, an effort that may even involve introducing Saudi Arabian troops into Iraq to protect the Sunni Arab minority there, according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

Saudi Prince Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz has become the point man in the efforts to defuse Iran’s planning.

Nayef, who is deputy prime minister to Saudi King Abdullah Bin-Abd-al-Aziz Al Saud, is working on strategies to thwart Iran’s efforts to agitate Shiite Muslims across the region.

He also has been the Saudi Interior Minister since 1975 and is responsible for maintaining order within the Saudi kingdom. For that reason he is particularly concerned over Iran’s recent efforts to agitate the Shiite minority inside the kingdom.

That worry has been aggravated by an ongoing insurgency in neighboring Yemen, where government forces are battling Shiite radicals in a confrontation that could spill over into Saudi Arabia.

Because Iran has begun to excite the growing Shiite populations in the Arab countries, Saudi Arabia has decided to put the tough interior minister in charge of coming up with a plan to counter Iran’s growing influence.

Keep in touch with the most important breaking news stories about critical developments around the globe with Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence news source edited and published by the founder of WND.

Ironically, it was Nayef who in April 2001 went to Tehran to renew diplomatic relations between the two countries. He also has met with Iranian officials over time to discuss such issues as counter-terrorism, drug-trafficking, money laundering and illegal immigration.

But Nayef recently has been vocal in his criticism of Iran for its financial and military support of Hezbollah, a Shiite faction, and Hamas, of Sunni extraction, even though Hamas has backers in Saudi Arabia and reportedly gets support from it, too.

Recent revelations that a Hezbollah cell was in Egypt to attack tourists there prompted major criticism from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt toward Iran. All three countries are predominantly Sunni and have been very vocal against Iran’s recent resurgence.

Nayef’s increased role in toughening the Saudi stance against Iran also has come about as a result of Iran’s nuclear development program. The Saudis are quite concerned that Iran will use the program to develop a nuclear bomb.

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Brzezinski suggests Obama shoot down Israeli jets

WND

‘They have the choice of turning back or not’

The national security adviser during the administration of President Jimmy Carter says the United States should shoot down Israeli jets if that nation chooses to take military action against a nuclear project in Iran.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, in an interview with the Daily Beast website,declared, “We are not exactly impotent little babies.”

Israel long has been thought to be considering a military strike against operations in Iran that could result in a nuclear weapon for the regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Israel has stated that it is unwilling to have its future threatened by a leader who believes it should be wiped off the map, as Ahmadinejad has stated, with access to nuclear weapons.

But such an Israeli attack on Iran probably would have to fly over coalition airspace in Iraq.

“Are we just going to sit there and watch?” Brzezinski demanded.

Get your dictionary to the Middle East: “Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict”

He said the U.S. has to be “serious” about denying Israel the right to attack.

“That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not,” he said.

“No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse,” he said.

The Liberty was a U.S. ship in international waters in the Middle East during the Six-Day War in 1967 that was hit by Israeli gunfire.

Brzezinski advised Carter on confrontations in Iran, Afghanistan and the Middle East during Carter’s White House tenure.

He said the Obama administration also already should have developed “a clearer position on what we are prepared to do to promote a Palestinian-Israeli peace.”

“Simply giving a frequent-traveler ticket to George Mitchell is not the same thing as policy. It took a long time to get going on Iran, but there is an excuse there, the Iranian domestic mess. And we are now eight months into the administration, and I would have thought by now we could have formulated a strategy that we would have considered ‘our’ strategy for dealing with Iran and Pakistan,” he said.

“For example, the Carter administration, which is sometimes mocked, by now had in motion a policy of disarmament with the Russians, which the Russians didn’t like, but eventually bought; it had started a policy of normalization with the Chinese; it rammed through the Panama Canal treaty; and it was moving very, very openly toward an Israeli-Arab political peace initiative,” he said.

WND columnist and New York Times best-selling author Mike Evans wrote about Brzezinski just before the 2008 election, explaining how Obama added Brzezinski to his list of “advisers.”

“One of Brzezinski’s first jobs as adviser was to defend Obama’s plan, if elected, to meet with Iran and Syria: ‘What’s the hand-up about negotiating with the Syrians or Iranians?’ asked Brzezinski. ‘What it in effect means is that you only talk to people who agree with you.’

“People who agree with you?” wrote Evans. “I, for one, would like to know just why Obama would want to talk with Iran’s president who denies the Holocaust, has called Israel a ‘stinking corpse’ and vowed to wipe it off the map.”

WND columnist Ben Shapiro noted about that time Brzezinski “believes that the Jewish lobby forces America into pro-Israel policy, and he defends Carter’s anti-Semitic book, “Peace, Not Apartheid.”

Coldest place in the solar system? Look to the moon.

CSI

Craters may hold evidence of Earth‘s history, and frozen ices at their floors could be valuable resources for lunar explorers.

By Peter N. Spotts

Looking for the ultimate place to chill out? Craters at the moon’s south pole may be the frostiest locale in the entire solar system.

There, 239,000 miles away in the permanently shadowed crater floors, “daytime” temperatures never rise above minus 396.67 degrees Fahrenheit, according to preliminary results from NASA‘s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

That’s potentially good news for human lunar exploration efforts.

Ices of water, methane, or ammonia from ancient comet collisions would be well-preserved at the bottom of these lunar freezers. Such ices could be valuable resources that human lunar explorers could use. And they would help answer questions about the arrival of such “volatiles” to the Earth-moon system – evidence that Earth’s geological processes have largely erased from its own surface.

“This is an exciting time for LRO,” says Richard Vondrak, who heads the solar-system exploration division at the Goddard Space Flight Institute in Greenbelt, Md.

The measurement is one of several initial intriguing results unveiled Sept. 17 during a briefing at Goddard. Launched in June, the orbiter officially began its mapping mission this week, orbiting the moon some 30 miles above the surface.

But during the LRO’s commissioning phase, which ended Tuesday, part of the craft’s highly elliptical orbit brought it much closer – within about 19 miles of the surface at the south pole region. Lunar-exploration planners have identified this area as the prime place to land US astronauts to begin exploring the moon, if the Obama administration and Congress give the nod.

The orbiter also has beamed back evidence that water or other hydrogen-bearing ices appear in more places than previous missions have suggested, largely because the orbiter’s instruments are more capable. In fact, evidence for ices is showing up not just on the floors of permanently shadowed craters. It’s also showing up beneath the moonscape between the craters.

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U.N. calls for replacement of U.S. dollar

WND

Joins Russia, China and G20 with demands IMF step forward

Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert, the premium online newsletter published by the current No. 1 best-selling author, WND staff writer and columnist. Subscriptions are $99 a year or $9.95 per month for credit card users. Annual subscribers will receive a free autographed copy of “The Late Great USA,” a book about the careful deceptions of a powerful elite who want to undermine our nation’s sovereignty.

World organizations, including the United Nations, are openly calling for the creation of a one-world currency to replace the dollar – and the Obama administration’s trillion-dollar deficits are serving as a trigger for the currency switch, Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert reports.

A United Nations report recommended that a new one-world currency should be created to replace the dollar as the standard for foreign-exchange holdings in international trade.

“If the plan succeeds, the United Nations would effectively end up replacing the United States as the issuer of the one-world international currency used as the standard of foreign exchange to settle international trade transactions,” Corsi wrote. “The move would obviate the need for any nation state in the future to be the arbiter of world trade, marking yet another blow to national sovereignty on the path to one-world government.”

The report, released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, or UNCTAD, endorsed a proposal that Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, issued by the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, “could be used to settle international payments.”

Red Alert has previously reported that Russia and China championed the idea to use the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights as a new international currency as a proposal that was adopted by the G-20 meeting held in London last April.

Corsi noted, “That G20 summit meeting took an important step toward creating a new one-world currency through the International Monetary Fund that is designed to replace the dollar as the world’s foreign exchange reserve currency of choice.”

Point 19 of the final communiqué from the G20 summit in London on April 2 stated, “We have agreed to support a general SDR which will inject $250 billion into the world economy and increase global liquidity,” taking the first steps forward to implement China’s proposal that Special Drawing Rights at the International Monetary Fund should be created as a foreign-exchange currency to replace the dollar.

The IMF created SDRs in 1969 to support the Bretton Woods fixed exchange-rate system.

“The international supply of two key reserve assets – gold and the U.S. dollar – proved inadequate for supporting the expansion of world trade and financial development that was taking place,” a document on the IMF website explains. “Therefore, the international community decided to create a new international reserve asset under the auspices of the IMF.”

When the Bretton Woods fixed-rate system collapsed, major world currencies, including the dollar, shifted to a floating exchange-rate system where the price of the dollar and other major world currencies was created by trading on international currency exchanges.

Until the current global economic crisis, SDRs issued by the IMF have been used by IMF member nation states primarily as a reserve account to support international trade transactions, not as an alternative international currency available to settle international debt transactions in danger of default.

“The discussion of using SDRs at the IMF as an international reserve payment system is further evidence that the momentum to create a one-world currency is gaining among not only among academic economists, but also among and professional economists holding prominent government positions,” Corsi wrote.

Red Alert previously reported that strong support for the idea of a one-world currency has recently come from Canadian economist Robert Mundell, who won a Nobel-prize in 1999, for his work formulating the intellectual basis for creating the euro.

Red Alert’s author, whose books “The Obama Nation” and “Unfit for Command” have topped the New York Times best-sellers list, received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972. For nearly 25 years, beginning in 1981, he worked with banks throughout the U.S. and around the world to develop financial services marketing companies to assist banks in establishing broker/dealers and insurance subsidiaries to provide financial planning products and services to their retail customers. In this career, Corsi developed three different third-party financial services marketing firms that reached gross sales levels of $1 billion in annuities and equal volume in mutual funds. In 1999, he began developing Internet-based financial marketing firms, also adapted to work in conjunction with banks.

In his 25-year financial services career, Corsi has been a noted financial services speaker and writer, publishing three books and numerous articles in professional financial services journals and magazines.

For financial guidance during difficult times, read Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert, the premium, online intelligence news source by  the WND staff writer, columnist and author of the New York Times No. 1 best-seller, “The Obama Nation.“

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