BRICS Nations Plan New Bank to Bypass World Bank, IMF

Mike Cohen & Ilya Arkhipov - Mar 26, 2013
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-25/brics-nations-plan-new-bank-to-bypass-world-bank-imf.html

The biggest emerging markets are uniting to tackle under-development and currency volatility with plans to set up institutions that encroach on the roles of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

The leaders of the so-called BRICS nations -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- are set to approve the establishment of a new development bank during an annual summit that began today in the eastern South African city of Durban, officials from all five nations say. They will also discuss pooling foreign-currency reserves to ward off balance of payments or currency crises.

“The deepest rationale for the BRICS is almost certainly the creation of new Bretton Woods-type institutions that are inclined toward the developing world,” Martyn Davies, chief executive officer of Johannesburg-based Frontier Advisory, which provides research on emerging markets, said in a phone interview. “There’s a shift in power from the traditional to the emerging world. There is a lot of geo-political concern about this shift in the western world.”

The BRICS nations, which have combined foreign-currency reserves of $4.4 trillion and account for 43 percent of the world’s population, are seeking greater sway in global finance to match their rising economic power. They have called for an overhaul of management of the World Bank and IMF, which were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, and oppose the practice of their respective presidents being drawn from the U.S. and Europe.

Reform Needed

“We need to change the way business is conducted in the international financial institutions,” South African International Relations Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said in a March 15 speech in Johannesburg. “They need to be reformed.”

The U.S. has failed to ratify a 2010 agreement to give more sway to emerging markets at the IMF, while it secured Jim Yong Kim, an American, as head of the World Bank last year over candidates from Nigeria and Colombia.

Finance ministers and central bank governors from the BRICS nations, who met in Durban today, agreed to set up currency crisis fund of about $100 billion, Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega told reporters today. He didn’t give details of proposed funding for the new bank, which Brazil wants established by 2014. The nation’s leaders are due to sign a final accord tomorrow.

FDI Inflows

Goldman Sachs Asset Management Chairman Jim O’Neill coined the BRIC term in 2001 to describe the four emerging powers he estimated would equal the U.S. in joint economic output by 2020. Brazil, Russia, India and China held their first summit four years ago and invited South Africa to join their ranks in December 2010.

Trade within the group surged to $282 billion last year from $27 billion in 2002 and may reach $500 billion by 2015, according to data from Brazil’s government. Foreign direct invesment into BRICS nations reached $263 billion last year, accounting for 20 percent of global FDI flows, up from 6 percent in 2000, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said on its website yesterday.

“If they announce a BRICS bank it will be quite something,” O’Neill said in an e-mailed reply to questions on March 15. “At a minimum it symbolizes they can achieve something as political group and means lots of other things could follow in the future. It also means that they will have their own kind of special World Bank, which may aid infrastructure and trade projects.”

Currency Pool

While BRICS leaders may approve the creation of a development bank in principle at the summit, details on funding and operations may take longer to finalize.

Russia favors capping each side’s initial contribution at $10 billion, Mikhail Margelov, President Vladimir Putin’s envoy to Africa he said in a March 15 interview in Moscow.

“It will be some time before it will be feasible for this bank to start financing say, a railway project,” Simon Freemantle, an analyst at Standard Bank Group Ltd., Africa’s biggest lender, told reporters in Durban yesterday. “That is some way out.”

Interest rates near zero in the U.S., Japan and Europe have fueled foreign investors’ appetite for higher-yielding assets, driving up currencies from Brazil to Turkey. Brazil has warned of a global currency war as nations take reciprocal action to weaken their currencies and protect export industries.

African Leaders

Brazil’s real has gained 1.9 percent against the dollar since the beginning of the year, while South Africa’s rand has dropped 8.7 percent in the period.

For South Africa, which makes up just 2.5 percent of total gross domestic product in BRICS, the summit is a way to showcase its role as an investment gateway to Africa. President Jacob Zuma has invited 15 African heads of state, including Egypt’s Mohamed Mursi and Ethiopia’s Hailemariam Desalegn, for talks with the BRICS leaders at the summit. For most of the BRICS leaders, it’s also the first opportunity to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping after his appointment on March 17.

“We will discuss ways to revive global growth and ensure macroeconomic stability, as well as mechanisms and measures to promote investment in infrastructure and sustainable development,” Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a statement yesterday.

To contact the reporters on this story: Mike Cohen in Cape Town at mcohen21@bloomberg.net; Ilya Arkhipov in Moscow at iarkhipov@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nasreen Seria at nseria@bloomberg.net

Oldest artist's workshop in the world discovered

Andy Coghlan
13 October 2011
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21046-oldest-artists-workshop-in-the-world-discovered.html

Grind up some ochre, melt some bone-marrow fat, mix the lot with a splash of urine – and paint your body with it. It sounds like an avant-garde performance but it may have happened some 100,000 years ago, in the oldest known artist's workshop – a cave in South Africa. The complex pigments that humans mixed there, and the tools they used to do it, are revealing just how cunning some of our earliest ancestors were.

The purpose of the paint is unknown, but the researchers who discovered the workshop at the Blombos cave on South Africa's southern coast think it was most likely applied to skin for decoration or ritual, or perhaps even as an insect repellent.

Inside the cave, Christopher Henshilwood of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his team found tools and two abalone shells that were used for mixing and storing the paint. Alongside one of them were quartzite stones used to hammer and grind ochre to a powder, and animal bones used to stir the powder with other materials, which included bone, charcoal, quartz fragments and other stones.

They also discovered evidence that some of the bones had been heated, probably to melt fat from the marrow that would have then bound the minerals. "There were also quartzite fragments to cement it, mixed with a liquid, probably urine," says Henshilwood.

The whole lot survived together in one place because after the cave was abandoned it filled with wind-blown sand, sealing the cache as a "time capsule", says Henshilwood.

Early planners

Whatever our ancestors did with their paint, the simple fact that they were mixing minerals to prepare it 100,000 years ago is in itself a major discovery, and tells us something about our ancestors' cognitive abilities at the time.

For instance, Henshilwood points out that this is the first known use of containers from that time. What's more, the artists would have had to collect ochre and other materials with the specific purpose of making paint in mind – a sign that they were planners – and needed a "basic knowledge of chemistry".

The nearest known source of ochre, he says, is at least 20 kilometres away from the cave, so the find demonstrates that Homo sapiens was capable of this high degree of organisation and planning only 50,000 to 100,000 years after the species emerged.

"It's quite simply stunning, first-rate work, and unambiguously dated," says Paul Pettitt, an anthropologist at the University of Sheffield, UK.

"What takes this into the stratosphere is the degree of organisation, of intent and of industry," he says. "It's highly thought out, and repeated, so this is a systematic production of paint."

Art or body art?

Could the paint have been used for murals rather than as body paint? Possibly, but no ancient painting has been discovered nearby. A few years ago, also in Blombos cave, the same team did find 13 engraved tablets of ochre, each about 2 centimetres square, bearing leaf-like or hatched designs. They are the same age as the abalone shells, and may have been some of the earliest lipstick.

Pettitt says that the earliest unambiguous art was made around 35,000 years ago, in the Chauvet caves of south-east France, and the earliest evidence of ochre pigment production dates from 60,000 years ago. The new Blombos find, however, shows that early humans were capable both of organised activity and of creatively making and using pigments much earlier than we knew before.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1211535

World For Press Freedom

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/22/united-states-ranked-36th_n_136788.html

World For Press Freedom
Danny Shea
October 22, 2008

The United States is ranked 36th in the world in terms of press freedom, up from 48th last year, according to a report released Wednesday by Reporters Sans Frontieres.

The US is tied with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cape Verde, South Africa, Spain, and Taiwan in the 36th spot. Iceland, Luxembourg, and Norway are tied for first. Iran, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea are all featured among the ten lowest-ranked countries.

According to the survey, the index "measures the state of press freedom in the world. It reflects the degree of freedom that journalists and news organisations enjoy in each country, and the efforts made by the authorities to respect and ensure respect for this freedom."

The ranking examines "every kind of violation directly affecting journalists (such as murders, imprisonment, physical attacks and threats) and news media (censorship, confiscation of newspaper issues, searches and harassment). And it includes the degree of impunity enjoyed by those responsible for these press freedom violations."

Self-censorship, financial pressure, the legal framework of the media, and the level of independence of the public media are also taken into account.

The report explains the United States' rise from 48th to 36th:

The release of Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami Al-Haj after six years in the Guantanamo Bay military base contributed to this improvement. Although the absence of a federal "shield law" means the confidentiality of sources is still threatened by federal courts, the number of journalists being subpoenaed or forced to reveal their sources has declined in recent months and none has been sent to prison. But the August 2007 murder of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey in Oakland, California, is still unpunished a year later. The way the investigation into his murder has become enmeshed in local conflicts of interest and the lack of federal judicial intervention also help to explain why the United States did not get a higher ranking. Account was also taken of the many arrests of journalists during the Democratic and Republican conventions.

Zimbabwe party: Military plotting to kill leader

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i4kT7pJlnuzY_vpKdTACcQYIPcvQD90OLCLO0

Zimbabwe party: Military plotting to kill leader
By MICHELLE FAUL
5-19-8

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Zimbabwe's opposition party accused the country's military Monday of plotting to assassinate the group's presidential candidate using snipers.

The Movement for Democratic Change said Morgan Tsvangirai planned to return to Zimbabwe to contest the June 27 runoff election once security measures are in place to protect him against the alleged assassination plot. The opposition says it received details of the alleged plot on Saturday as Tsvangirai was on his way to the airport in Johannesburg, South Africa, to return home.

"The assassination plot involves snipers," party Secretary-General Tendai Biti told The Associated Press after a news conference in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. He said 18 snipers were involved in the alleged plot.

"It is the military (plotting), the JOC (Joint Operational Command) that has been running the country" since Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, lost March 29 elections to Tsvangirai. "I cannot speak (more) of that because it would put a lot of lives at risk," Biti said.

Biti also condemned African leaders' failure to confront Mugabe, Zimbabwe's leader of 28 years, in the strongest terms yet used by his party.

He said the campaign of violence blamed on Mugabe's regime could backfire, saying that many of the millions of Zimbabweans who have fled the country planning to return to vote in the June runoff presidential election.

A third of the population has fled Zimbabwe in recent years as the country confronts chronic shortages of food, medicine, fuel and cash precipitated by the government's seizure of white-owned farms that once produced enough to feed the country and export to neighbors.

The government this month introduced a half-billion Zimbabwe dollar note in efforts to deal with runaway inflation that unofficial estimates put at 700,000 percent a year.

Tsvangirai says he won the elections outright. But official results and those compiled by independent monitors show he did not win the 50 percent plus one vote needed to avoid a runoff.

Biti said the runoff legitimizes Mugabe's "theft" and would not resolve Zimbabwe's crisis. He said it still was not too late to negotiate a "unity government of national healing." Not contesting was not an option as it would hand Mugabe victory, he said.

"The basic problem is that we have an old man, a geriatric, who is not prepared to give up power and that situation isn't going to change on June 27," Biti said.

A runoff was "merely extending and exacerbating the crisis" and legitimize "Mugabe's constitutional coup."

The answer, he said, is for African leaders to persuade Mugabe to negotiate a coalition government.

Biti railed against African leaders' failure to confront Mugabe: "What's concerning us is this lack of statesmanship, of leadership by African leaders," he said. "I think that the paralysis of leadership and perspective lies (with) certain officers indebted to Robert Mugabe. ..."

Mugabe's credentials as the leader of a liberation movement that fought a seven-year guerrilla war to force an end to white rule in 1980 still enhances his stature among many Africans.

But this year's crisis, and the violent government response, which human rights defenders say has killed dozens, injured hundreds and forced thousands from their homes, has divided leaders.

Biti's party has asked the Southern African Development Organization to replace South African President Thabo Mbeki as its chief negotiator in the Zimbabwe crisis.

Mbeki's insistence on "quiet diplomacy" to persuade Mugabe to change has largely failed, though his negotiations that led to election results being posted outside ballot stations did ensure a more open process that allowed the opposition to claim victory.

International efforts to intervene have been hampered by Mbeki and South Africa's current chairmanship of the U.N. Security Council.

"The Zimbabwe crisis is exposing every leader on the African continent, embarrassing us as Africans because we are not able to resolve our own problems," Biti said.

Amputee runner Oscar Pistorius wins appeal

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/news?slug=ap-run-cas-pistorius

Amputee runner Oscar Pistorius wins appeal
By COLLEEN BARRY, Associated Press Writer
5-16-8

MILAN, Italy (AP)—His Olympic dream suddenly revived, Oscar Pistorius can get back to what he loves most—running.

The double-amputee sprinter from South Africa was cleared Friday to compete in his bid to qualify for the Beijing Games.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned a ruling by the International Association of Athletics Federations that barred the 21-year-old runner from the Olympics and any other able-bodied competition because of his prosthetic racing blades.

Pistorius broke into a broad smile to a roomful of applause when the decision was announced. He reached toward his manager, Peet van Zyl, for a victory handshake.

“I am ecstatic,” Pistorius said. “When I found out I was crying. It is a battle that has been going on for far too long. It’s a great day for sport. I think this day is going to go down in history for the equality of disabled people.”

He is the first to acknowledge it will be a challenge to make it to the Aug. 8-24 Beijing Games. He holds the 400-meter Paralympic world record of 46.56, but must reach the qualifying time of 45.55 to compete in the individual event in Beijing.

“My hopes are very big for the Olympics for 2008,” Pistorius said. “I think the time period at the moment is very short. Obviously, I have the opportunity, so I am not going to let it go … but it is going to be very difficult in order to run those times.”

However, Pistorius also could be invited to join the South African relay team, which would not require him to qualify.

“We are very much hopeful that he will be part and parcel of our team,” said Leonard Chuene, president of Athletics South Africa.

If Pistorius does go to the Olympics, he will be competing alongside another amputee South African athlete: Natalie du Toit, who qualified for Beijing in open-water swimming.

Pistorius was born without fibulas—the long, thin outer bone between the knee and ankle—and was 11 months old when his legs were amputated below the knee.

“Oscar Pistorius is a determined and gutsy athlete who will now no doubt put all his energy into reaching the qualification standards for the Olympic Games,” the International Olympic Committee said in a statement. “If he makes it we would be delighted to welcome him.”

Pistorius will resume training in South Africa on Monday, before returning to Europe on May 28. Van Zyl said Pistorius will be running in able-bodied races July 2 in Milan and July 11 at the Golden Gala in Rome, and that many other offers have been coming in.

“A lot of the time we’ve had this year we’ve devoted to the court case,” Pistorius said. “Now when I get home my time can be dedicated to training. I am going to have to start thinking about getting my body in shape in order to run those (qualifying) times. I am hopeful there will be enough time but it is going to be very difficult.”

Regardless of whether he runs in the Olympics, Pistorius plans to compete in Beijing at the Sept. 6-17 Paralympics. He will prepare by running in disabled events in the Netherlands and Germany.

Pistorius appealed to CAS, the highest tribunal in international sports, to overturn a Jan. 14 ruling by the IAAF. Track and field’s ruling organization banned him from competing against able-bodied runners on grounds that his carbon fiber blades gave him a mechanical advantage.

A two-day hearing was held before three arbitrators at CAS headquarters last month. The panel said the IAAF decision is “revoked with immediate effect and the athlete is eligible to compete in IAAF events.”

“Oscar will be welcomed wherever he competes this summer,” IAAF president Lamine Diack said in a statement. “He is an inspirational man and we look forward to admiring his achievements in the future.”

Even if Pistorius fails to get the 400-meter qualifying time, South African selectors could add the University of Pretoria student to the Olympic 1,600-meter relay squad if it qualifies for the games among the top 16 in the world.

Pistorius would not require a qualifying time and could be taken to Beijing as an alternate. Six runners can be picked for the relay squad.

The IAAF based its January decision on studies by German professor Gert-Peter Brueggemann, who said the J-shaped “Cheetah” blades were energy efficient

Pistorius’ lawyers countered with independent tests conducted by a team led by MIT professor Hugh M. Herr that claimed to show he doesn’t gain any advantage over able-bodied runners.

CAS said the IAAF failed to prove Pistorius’ running blades gave him an advantage.

“If I had to look at the situation, how many amputee athletes use the exact same prosthetic leg as I do and don’t run nearly close to the same times?” Pistorius said. “I think running has become my purpose in life. It has become my calling in life.”

Associated Press Writers Graham Dunbar in Geneva and Celean Jacobson in Johannesburg, South Africa, contributed to this report.

Zuma Corruption Charges Revived

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/29/world/africa/29safrica.html

December 29, 2007
Zuma Corruption Charges Revived
By MICHAEL WINES

JOHANNESBURG — A South African anticorruption strike force revived and expanded criminal charges on Friday against Jacob G. Zuma, the new leader of South Africa’s dominant political party and the front-runner to become the nation’s next president.

The charges, confirmed in an e-mail message by Mr. Zuma’s lawyer, threaten to catapult the country into a political and legal crisis that could last well through 2009, when the next national elections are scheduled to be held.

The lawyer, Michael Hulley, said in the e-mail message that prosecutors delivered a summons to Mr. Zuma’s Johannesburg home on Friday ordering him to stand trial for “various counts of racketeering, money laundering, corruption and fraud.”

He did not elaborate, and a spokesman for the prosecutors did not return telephone calls. But the charges appear to stem from a lengthy investigation into bribes paid to secure a major military contract for a French arms maker in 2001. A court in Durban convicted Mr. Zuma’s business adviser last year of funneling roughly $170,000 to Mr. Zuma in exchange for help in winning contracts.

The corruption strike force, nicknamed the Scorpions, sought last year to prosecute Mr. Zuma on charges related to that case, but a judge rejected that effort on procedural grounds. With Friday’s summons, that effort appears to have been revived.

Mr. Zuma, reached at a ceremony on his home turf of KwaZulu-Natal Province where he handed out Christmas presents to children, refused to comment on the charges, according to news reports.

South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority, which is taking up the charges, has long indicated that the corruption investigation of Mr. Zuma would eventually lead to a trial. But the timing of Friday’s summons raised tensions in an already heated political struggle.

Last week Mr. Zuma, 65, wrested the leadership of the African National Congress from South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, in a bitter showdown at a party conference. The victory capped a political comeback for Mr. Zuma, who had been deputy president and Mr. Mbeki’s heir apparent until he was ensnared in the arms scandal in 2005, and Mr. Mbeki fired him.

Since then, the charismatic Mr. Zuma has cast himself as the victim of a government-led vendetta, while a party rebellion against Mr. Mbeki’s more distant leadership has sent Mr. Mbeki’s fortunes into decline.

Mr. Zuma’s ascension to the presidency of the African National Congress effectively splits the leadership of the nation in half, with Mr. Mbeki heading the presidency and Mr. Zuma in charge of the machinery that has elected most of the nation’s municipal officials and 7 in 10 members of Parliament.

Right or wrong, said Karima Brown, the political editor of the South African newspaper Business Day, many will see Friday’s announcement of revived charges as an attempt to sabotage Mr. Zuma’s career before he can absorb what is left of Mr. Mbeki’s domain. “It’s going to be a very testy time politically,” she said. “It feeds into the notion that Zuma is being tried in the court of public opinion.”

Mr. Zuma’s lawyer, Mr. Hulley, seized on that notion in his e-mail message. The rush to indict Mr. Zuma during a Christmas holiday and after his election as the party president, he said, “is calculated to quickly redress the popular support and call to leadership of the A.N.C. which Mr. Zuma’s election so obviously demonstrates.”

“This lends credence to the long-held view that the Scorpions are influenced and their prosecution informed by political considerations,” Mr. Hulley added.

Sipho Seepe, a longtime critic of Mr. Mbeki who leads the South African Institute of Race Relations, said he believed that the summons signaled the start of a political endgame between the forces supporting Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Zuma. “What you have here,” he said, “is a declaration of war.”

Other political analysts have been reluctant to endorse Mr. Zuma’s suggestion that he is the target of a vendetta. The evidence that Mr. Zuma was bribed, outlined in an exhaustive trial of his business adviser, is compelling, they have said, especially since his business adviser has already been convicted of bribing him.

Mr. Zuma’s trial, should it occur, promises to be a signal event in South Africa’s 13-year-old democracy. The Constitution bars convicted felons from holding national office, so the trial could determine Mr. Zuma’s political future. Mr. Zuma has also hinted that he will compel testimony from other senior officials of the African National Congress, bolstering speculation that corruption in the party’s senior ranks was hardly limited.

Government inquiries into the arms deal in which Mr. Zuma has been swept up have proceeded glacially since 2000, when a gadfly legislator, Patricia De Lille, publicly called the $4.5 billion contract corrupt to its core. A parliamentary inquiry largely dismissed her complaints, but the subsequent years-long Scorpions inquiry pointed to Mr. Zuma, his adviser Schabir Shaik and a French contractor, Thomson-CSF, in a corrupt arrangement to sell ships to South Africa’s navy.

Other reports, from journalists and officials in South Africa, Britain and Germany, have indicated that other senior African National Congress officials were involved in the deals. Mr. Mbeki has denied any improper role in the arms purchases.

Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting.