Russia wants the ruble to be one of the world’s reserve currencies as President Dmitry Medvedev renews his push to reduce the dollar’s dominance and make Moscow a global financial hub.

“Only three, five years ago it seemed like a fantasy” to create a new reserve currency, Medvedev said yesterday in a speech in St. Petersburg, Russia. “Now we are seriously discussing it.”

Medvedev, who has repeatedly called for a supranational currency to match the dollar, said discussions with China are continuing on broadening the global options. Russia sold U.S. Treasuries for a fifth consecutive month in April, the U.S. Treasury Department said June 15. The world may need as many as six reserve currencies, Medvedev said.

“It’s something that’s obviously needed,” he said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. “Developing a financial center in Moscow will considerably help to strengthen the ruble’s position as one of the reserve currencies.”

Reasserting Power

Medvedev’s comments underline Russia’s ambition to reassert its global power following the financial crisis. Gross domestic product shrank 7.9 percent last year, the worst contraction since the fall of communism in 1991, after the credit crunch sent commodity prices plunging.

If a country wants to alter the world economic order, including the number of reserve currencies, it must become an international financial center, Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer said in an interview yesterday.

“For a currency to be a reserve currency, you have to have capital markets in which you can sell it and buy it very easily,” Fischer said. “New reserve currencies don’t emerge by fiat. They emerge as countries change.”

The ruble and the yuan may by 2015 be added to the basket of currencies that set the value of International Monetary Fund units called special drawing rights, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Global Economist Jim O’Neill said. O’Neill coined the BRIC term in 2001 to describe the four nations — Brazil, Russia, India and China — that he estimates will collectively equal the U.S. in economic size by 2020.

Free Float

The ruble “has as many reasons to be in it as the pound,” he said today in an interview in St. Petersburg. “If Russia really wants to be in it, it’s got to allow people to use it all over the world.”

Allowing the ruble to trade freely is “very important,” O’Neill said.

“Inflation targeting is key,” he said. Without a shift to an inflation targeting regime, the ruble “isn’t going to be part of the SDR. You can’t have it both ways, really, unless the Chinese change the rules, which they might do by the end of this decade. China is going to be so big.”

Russia may “come very close to floating the ruble” in the course of one year to 18 months, Bank Rossii Chairman Sergei Ignatiev said in April. Even so, the central bank doesn’t need to take on legal obligations to stop intervening in the currency market, he said.

Yuan Flexibility

The People’s Bank of China today said it will allow more yuan exchange rate flexibility and reform of the exchange-rate mechanism as the nation’s economic recovery has “cemented” after the global financial crisis.

Medvedev said he envisages a new economic hierarchy allowing emerging-market giants such as Russia and China to drive the global agenda as the world emerges from the first global recession since the 1930s.

“We really live at a unique time, and we should use it to build a modern, prosperous and strong Russia, a Russia that will be a co-founder of the new world economic order,” he said.

The BRIC countries were net sellers of U.S. assets in April, driven mainly by Russian divestments, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. Senior Currency Strategist Win Thin said in a June 15 note.

Russia may add the Australian and Canadian dollars to its international reserves as the central bank diversifies the world’s third-largest stockpile away from the greenback, central bank First Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev said in a June 16 interview.

Though Russia is “very carefully monitoring what’s happening in the euro zone,” the emergence of the euro as a currency to rival the dollar’s dominance helped soften the impact of the global crisis, Medvedev said.

“If the world depended completely on the dollar, the situation would have been more difficult,” Medvedev said.

* “Mariam” gets green light to set sail All-female Lebanese aid ship to head to Cyprus first, says minister.

* Brazil dropping role in Iran nuclear dispute South American country scales back active support of Islamic Republic in nuclear dispute with West following Security Council’s decision to impose new sanctions

* Saudi King to Visit Obama Before Netanyahu Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah will visit U.S. President Barack Obama on June 29, setting the stage for the July 6th visit of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to the White House.

* Iran bars two UN nuclear inspectors over report Iran has told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) it will not allow two of its inspectors to enter the country, state media report.

* Geert Wilders: Change Jordan’s name to Palestine Rightist Dutch leader wants to end Mideast conflict by finding Palestinians ‘alternate homeland’

* The Muslim embrace Erdogan suddenly finds himself having to defend Turkey from being labeled as a pan-Islamic country and a supporter of terror

* Three Rwandan peacekeepers “killed in Darfur” Three peacekeepers have been killed in Sudan’s Darfur region, officials say.

* Arabs Want to Keep Building Jewish Towns in Judea and Samaria A new poll revealed that the vast majority of Arab oppose attempts by the PA to prevent them from working construction jobs in local Jewish communities.

* Middle East negotiators welcome Gaza blockade easing Quartet issues statement welcoming Israel’s change of policy towards Gaza, but says situation in territory ‘unsustainable and unacceptable’; urges immediate release of Gilad Shalit.

* EU needs persuasion skills at G20 summit EU officials have conceded that Europe still has considerable work to do before persuading other G20 members on the need for a global bank levy and fiscal consolidation.

Apocalyptic thought has a tradition that dates to the Persian prophet Zoroaster in the 14th century BC. Recently, anxiety has grown over the prediction of the end of the world in the Mayan calendar.

It’s true that the Mayan odometer will hit zeros on 21 December 2012, as it reaches the end of a 394-year cycle called a baktun. But this baktun is part of a larger 8,000-year cycle called a pictun, and there’s no evidence that anything astronomically untoward will happen as the current baktun slides into the next. However, that hasn’t stopped the feverish speculating that sells books and cinema tickets.

What kind of catastrophe would it take to end the world? Astronomical intruders provide a potentially serious threat. Impacts can be caused by stray rubble from the Asteroid Belt and the rocky snowballs that travel in highly elliptical orbits in the comet cloud. There are many fewer large bits of debris than small bits, so the interval between large impacts is much longer than the interval between small impacts

That’s good news. Every century or so, a 10-meter meteor slams into the Earth with the force of a small nuclear device. Tunguska was the site of the last, in 1908, and it was pure luck that that meteor landed in the uninhabited wilderness of Siberia. Every few thousand years, Earth can pass through unusually thick parts of the debris trail of comets, turning the familiar light show of a meteor shower into a deadly firestorm. Roughly every 100,000 years, a projectile hundreds of meters across unleashes power equal to the world’s nuclear arsenals. The result is devastation over an area the size of England, global tidal waves (if the impact is in the ocean), and enough dust flung into the atmosphere to dim the Sun and kill off vegetation. That could ruin your day.

Then there’s the “Big One”. About every 100 million years, a rock the size of a small asteroid slams into the Earth, causing global earthquakes, kilometre-high tidal waves, and immediately killing all large land animals. Creatures in the sea soon follow, as trillions of tons of vaporised rock cause drastic cooling and the destruction of the food chain based on photosynthesis. There’s good evidence that this happened 65 million years ago and our tiny mammal ancestors were the beneficiaries as the giant lizards were extinguished.

A hundred million years sounds like a safe buffer, but the next one could happen at any time. But you can take it off your worry list – astronomers have it covered. A network of ground-based telescopes scans the skies for bits of rogue rubble larger than a few hundred meters. That’s ample time to dust off the nuclear arsenals for an interception mission if we had to. Unfortunately, the Dr Strangelove approach creates lethal shrapnel travelling in the same direction as the original object; a smarter strategy is to send a spacecraft alongside it and gently “tug” it with gravity onto a slightly different trajectory.

When massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, the result is a titanic explosion called a supernova. The dying star brightens to rival an entire galaxy and emits high-energy particles that can destroy the ozone layer of a planet like Earth if it occurs within 30 light years. The demise of large North American mammals 41,000 years ago has been linked to a supernova, and several other mini-extinctions may be tied to the cataclysm of stellar death.

A supernova is a small squib compared to a hypernova. In this dramatic and rare event, the violent collapse of a very massive star ejects jets of gas and high-energy particles at close to the speed of light, and for a few moments the star outshines the entire universe in gamma rays.

If a hypernova went off within 1,000 light years, and Earth was within the narrow cone of high- energy radiation, we’d experience an immediate global conflagration. It’s brutal luck if a hyper nova ever goes off with its beam aimed at us.

On longer time scales, attention turns to the sheltering Sun. Our constant companion is midway through its conversion of hydrogen into helium. In about 5 billion years, its guttering flame will be extinguished. The Sun’s diffuse envelope will engulf the Earth and turn it into a lifeless cinder. This is death by stellar cremation.

If that seems like a comfortably distant prospect, the biosphere will actually die much sooner. The Sun burns hot as it gets older, and in 500 million years a turbocharged version of global warming will turn the Earth into a global desert.

That gives us plenty of time to find better real estate. Titan looks promising. It already has the nitrogen – just add oxygen and presto! Our second home. And those wild-eyed rocket scientists who want to save us from asteroids have a thrilling plan up their sleeves: deliberately bring an asteroid in close, and with each pass it will transfer a little energy to the Earth and nudge it further from the Sun. After a few million close calls we’ll have migrated to a more hospitable orbit.

*****

Stars come and go but galaxies seem eternal. A galaxy like the Milky Way acts like it has all the time in the world. Its spiral arms are cauldrons where new stars form out of gas that falls in like a fine rain from intergalactic space. Stars like the Sun will some day die, but in Orion and Taurus freshly minted stars are switching on for the first time. The bright fizz of supernovae is a sideshow; most stars die modestly and leave behind fading embers. Stellar lifetime is a strong function of mass because low mass stars are misers with their hydrogen. The lowest mass stars will eke out a dim existence for over a trillion years.

The end of the Milky Way will come slowly, in a stellar lockdown. Massive stars live short lives and die explosively as supernovae – leaving behind a neutron star or a black hole, neither of which emits any light. Stars like the Sun and those less massive will die as white dwarfs – that is, as slowly cooling, carbon-rich embers. Gradually the cycle of star birth and death will be irrevocably broken. More and more mass will be trapped in compact stellar remnants or cooling white dwarfs. In galaxies across the universe the lights will gradually go out, and after tens of trillions of years the universe will have faded to black. But as bleak as it sounds, the end of starlight doesn’t mean life must end.

A star shines by converting a tiny proportion of the energy locked in pure matter into radiation. The ultimate source of starlight is gravitational energy. There are many ways other than fusion to turn gravitational energy into heat or radiation, so even after the stars have all faded enterprising civilizations could live by harnessing the energy of black holes. New artificial stars could be created if nostalgia dictated.

*****

Fifteen years ago, it was discovered that the cosmic expansion is getting faster. The cause is inferred to be dark energy – a manifestation of the pure vacuum of space that has an effect opposite to gravity: it repels rather than attracts. Its existence was indicated by the fact that distant supernovae are fainter than expected in a decelerating universe. Dark energy is an embarrassment: fundamental theories don’t predict it, and no one knows how a pure vacuum can have such a bizarre property.

In some theories, dark energy is not the cosmological “constant” of Einstein’s original formulation, but varies over time and space. If dark energy grows, it will cause the universe to unravel in about 20 billion years in a crescendo called the “Big Rip”. First galaxies, then stars, and finally atoms will be torn asunder by dark energy. Nothing can survive; it’s an outcome of crushing finality.

Absent the big rip, cosmic acceleration will steadily remove galaxies from view. After 100 billion years, most galaxies will recede faster than the speed of light, leaving frozen final images on the edge of our horizon as if at the boundary of a black hole. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will merge and our view of the universe will end at the edge of this super-galaxy. On even longer time scales, familiar gravitational structures become unglued. In about 10^15 years, planets detach from their dead stars and drift through interstellar space. In about 10^19 years stars detach from galaxies and float off into intergalactic space. In most theories that unify fundamental particles in terms of a single super-force, the proton is not stable and will decay in something like 10^35 years. This vast time scale is to the age of the universe what the age of the universe is to a millisecond.

The decay of protons heralds a final drawn-out phase of disintegration in the universe, as everything falls apart. After protons decay, there are no stable atoms, presenting a challenge for life. The curtain falls with the slow evaporation of black holes by a process called Hawking radiation. The largest black holes evaporate on the inconceivable time scale of 10^98 years. We imagine the last inhabitants of the universe huddled around the evaporative glow of gamma rays from the last black hole, telling timeless stories about time. It was fun while it lasted.

Awil Salah Osman prowls the streets of this shattered city, looking like so many other boys, with ripped-up clothes, thin limbs and eyes eager for attention and affection. — But Awil is different in two notable ways: he is shouldering a fully automatic, fully loaded Kalashnikov assault rifle; and he is working for a military that is substantially armed and financed by the United States.

“You!” he shouts at a driver trying to sneak past his checkpoint, his cherubic face turning violently angry.

“You know what I’m doing here!” He shakes his gun menacingly. “Stop your car!”
The driver halts immediately. In Somalia, lives are lost quickly, and few want to take their chances with a moody 12-year-old.

It is well known that Somalia’s radical Islamist insurgents are plucking children off soccer fields and turning them into fighters. But Awil is not a rebel. He is working for Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, a critical piece of the American counterterrorism strategy in the Horn of Africa.

According to Somali human rights groups and United Nations officials, the Somali government, which relies on assistance from the West to survive, is fielding hundreds of children or more on the front lines, some as young as 9.

Child soldiers are deployed across the globe, but according to the United Nations, the Somali government is among the “most persistent violators” of sending children into war, finding itself on a list with notorious rebel groups like the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Somali government officials concede that they have not done the proper vetting. Officials also revealed that the United States government was helping pay their soldiers, an arrangement American officials confirmed, raising the possibility that the wages for some of these child combatants may have come from American taxpayers.

United Nations officials say they have offered the Somali government specific plans to demobilize the children. But Somalia’s leaders, struggling for years to withstand the insurgents’ advances, have been paralyzed by bitter infighting and are so far unresponsive.
Several American officials also said that they were concerned about the use of child soldiers and that they were pushing their Somali counterparts to be more careful. But when asked how the American government could guarantee that American money was not being used to arm children, one of the officials said, “I don’t have a good answer for that.”

According to Unicef, only two countries have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the use of soldiers younger than 15: the United States and Somalia.
Many human rights groups find this unacceptable, and President Obama himself, when this issue was raised during his campaign, did not disagree.

“It is embarrassing to find ourselves in the company of Somalia, a lawless land,” he said.
All across this lawless land, smooth, hairless faces peek out from behind enormous guns. In blown-out buildings, children chamber bullets twice the size of their fingers. In neighborhoods by the sea, they run checkpoints and face down four-by-four trucks, though they can barely see over the hood.

Somali government officials admit that in the rush to build a standing army, they did not discriminate.

“I’ll be honest,” said a Somali government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject, “we were trying to find anyone who could carry a gun.”
Awil struggles to carry his. It weighs about 10 pounds. The strap digs into his bony shoulders, and he is constantly shifting it from one side to the other with a grimace.

Sometimes he gets a helping hand from his comrade Ahmed Hassan, who is 15. Ahmed said he was sent to Uganda more than two years ago for army training, when he was 12, though his claim could not be independently verified. American military advisers have been helping oversee the training of Somali government soldiers in Uganda.

“One of the things I learned,” Ahmed explained eagerly, “is how to kill with a knife.”

Children do not have many options in Somalia. After the government collapsed in 1991, an entire generation was let loose on the streets. Most children have never sat in a classroom or played in a park. Their bones have been stunted by conflict-induced famines, their psyches damaged by all the killings they have witnessed.
“What do I enjoy?” Awil asked. “I enjoy the gun.”

Like many other children here, the war has left him hard beyond his years. He loves cigarettes and is addicted to qat, a bitter leaf that, for the few hours he chews it each day, makes grim reality fade away

He was abandoned by parents who fled to Yemen, he said, and joined a militia when he was about 7. He now lives with other government soldiers in a dive of a house littered with cigarette boxes and smelly clothes. Awil does not know exactly how old he is. His commander says he is around 12, but birth certificates are rare

Awil gobbles down greasy rice with unwashed hands because he does not know where his next meal is coming from. He is paid about $1.50 a day, but only every now and then, like most soldiers. His bed is a fly-covered mattress that he shares with two other child soldiers, Ali Deeq, 10, and Abdulaziz, 13.
“He should be in school,” said Awil’s commander, Abdisalam Abdillahi. “But there is no school.”

Ali Sheikh Yassin, vice-chairman of Elman Peace and Human Rights Center in Mogadishu, said that about 20 percent of government troops (thought to number 5,000 to 10,000) were children and that about 80 percent of the rebels were. The leading insurgent group, which has drawn increasingly close to Al Qaeda, is called the Shabab, which means youth in Arabic.
“These kids can be so easily brainwashed,” Mr. Ali said. “They don’t even have to be paid.”
One of the myriad dangers Awil faces is constant gunfire between his squad and another group of government soldiers from a different clan. The Somali government is racked by divisions from the prime minister’s office down to the street.

“I’ve lost hope,” said Sheik Yusuf Mohamed Siad, a defense minister who abruptly quit in the past week, like several other ministers. “All this international training, it’s just training soldiers for the Shabab,” he added, saying defections had increased.

“Go ask the president what he’s accomplished in the past year,” Sheik Yusuf said, laughing. “Absolutely nothing.”

Advisers to President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed say they have fine-tuned their plans for a coming offensive, making it more of a gradual military operation to slowly take the city back from the insurgents.

Awil is eager for action. His commanders say he has already proven himself fighting against the Shabab, who used to bully him in the market.
“That made me want to join the T.F.G.,” he said. “With them, I feel like I am amongst my brothers.”

The Turkish flag was raised over the Temple Mount last week, following the flotilla clash while Jerusalem police banned Jews from holding the monthly march around the ancient gates of the holy site because of “security concerns.”

Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld told Israel National News that the unprecedented flag raising was legal. 

The pictures of the Turkish flag waving over the Temple Mount, where the First and Second Holy Temples were built and where the golden-domed Al-Aqsa mosque now stands, were published on the Turkish web site PLS48.net.

One blogger pointed out that the incident of a foreign flag over the site coincided with the furor over a project by Muslims to built a 13-story mosque near Ground Zero in New York, where Muslim terrorists attacked and destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,500 people.

Although there is no law against raising flags over the site, the practice has been shunned in order to prevent flaring tempers from Muslims and Jews. The Israel flag was raised over the Temple Mount for a few hours on June 6, 1967, after all of Jerusalem was restored to Israel in the Six-Day War. It was taken down under orders of then-IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan.  

Recently-retired Haaretz journalist Nadav Shragai wrote two years ago that researchers previously have suggested various and often conflicting ideas concerning flags over the Old City. He disclosed the previously unpublished conclusions of a study on a political agreement with the Arab world over the status of Jerusalem and its holy sites.

The study was written by Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies Ora Achimeir after a study by a team led by Israel Prize winner Prof. Ruth Lapidot.

“Achimeir is skeptical about the possibility of both sides to the conflict flying flags without restrictions and believes that ‘the situation of hostility and competition between Israelis and Palestinians, which does not seem likely to dissipate in the near future, would lead to mass flying of flags that would turn the historic basin into a bedlam of flags and symbols.’” Shragai wrote.

He noted that during peace talks with Israel in 1978, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat suggested raising the Saudi Arabia flag over holy site in Jerusalem, but then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin fumed at the proposal. “There is no way that something of that kind will ever take place in Jerusalem,” Begin declared. “The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Jerusalem. The Israelis also do not raise any flag there. If there is peace, the Arabs will be able to fly flags on every embassy that they open in Jerusalem.”

Jimmy Carter, who then was President of the United States, warned that Sadat would not sign a peace treaty without the raising of the Saudi flag. He suggested that a flag would be flown only over the mosque and nowhere else over the Temple Mount, but Begin retorted, “Not on the Temple Mount,” according to Shragai. “We are losing our conscience. Is it not enough that we have forbidden [Jews] to pray on the Temple Mount? We will not be able to agree to that also for too long a time. But the raising of a religious flag on the Temple Mount would be tantamount to recognition that it belongs to the Muslims.”

Past peace plans that have been proposed by the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office have provided that foreign flags be considered “religious flags.” Even in the almost impossible likelihood that Muslims were to allow a Jewish flag over the Temple Mount, one would have to be invented because there is none.

The issue of flags in the area is so emotional that in 1984, the Muslim religious trust, known as the Waqf, demanded that the Jerusalem police unit on the Temple Mount remove an Israeli flag that was inside the commander’s room. The late Yosef Burg, who was Minister of Police at the time, ordered the flags be restored, an act that raised the ire of Muslims.