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Yes, countries should tell China that they will boycott Beijing Olympics if China does not pressure Burma to open up! That's the easy choice, but it's also the naïve one. In the first place, China is a dictatorship and faces many of Burma’s same problems: human rights, civil liberties, freedom of the press and internet. Realistically, what kind of help can we expect from China?
Seriously? It’s a waste of time! More than that: it seems to be another attempt of the US Congress to improve American image by pointing its fingers to other people’s mistakes. What about the American war against Vietnam? How many innocents died in that war? How can the world forget the My Lai massacre or napalm falling on children?
President Bush is so predictable! He needs a war, he desperately needs an enemy, and he wants to refurbish his vociferous threats against Evil. Who is Evil? It doesn’t matter. Once upon a time it was Saddam Hussein and his unseen stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Today it is necessary to replace the headless Saddam, and nobody is a better choice than the president of Iran.
Last week I was at a formal dinner in Canada when a woman seated next to me started to complain about the weak dollar. The Canadian dollar has been strengthening against the U.S. dollar, throwing bilateral trade into disarray.
The woman was an official from Export Development of Canada, but she might as well have been a Brazilian official. Brazilian authorities have the same complaint about the weakening dollar. In the beginning of 2003, Brazilians needed 3.5 units of their currency, the real, to buy one dollar. Now they need only 1.7. That’s a 50% drop, and it just keeps falling.
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