The International Monetary Fund wants more power to police the global financial system and a bigger role in emergency financing, managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said Friday.

In a speech to the Bretton Woods Committee, a finance reform think tank in Washington, D.C., he claimed that a stronger IMF also warrants a new global reserve currency that would serve as an alternative to the U.S. dollar.

"Strauss-Kahn said such an asset could be similar to but distinctly different from the IMF's special drawing rights, or SDRs, the accounting unit that countries use to hold funds within the IMF," ABC News reported. "It is based on a basket of major currencies."

http://rawstory.com/2010/02/imf-chief-pushes-power-worlds-stage/

Donald Rumsfeld was known throughout the world as the zealous U.S. Secretary of Defense who is waging a global "war on terror" in search of "terrorists" and "weapons of mass destruction." Most people, however, are not aware that Rumsfeld himself unleashed a chemical weapon of mass destruction upon the world in 1981-and it is still out there destroying people all over the world. That "W.M. D." is aspartame and it has been scientifically and anecdotally linked to millions of chronic illnesses and deaths.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_don_hark_080321_aspartame_and_ru...

When the last of the Olympic athletes ski, skate and slide out of town, Vancouverites will be left with an unexpected legacy: 970 cameras.

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/2951

"A bizarre blowup between a professor and a student in a Portland State University classroom recently has sent ripples of concern and curiosity through the campus. 

It also has prompted the student, openly accused by the professor of being an FBI informant and a killer, to hire a prominent local civil rights attorney, and led the university to launch an investigation into the educator.

Activists in Vancouver are threatening to hand out red tents to street people in the hope of attracting international attention to the problem of homelessness in the city during the Olympics and forcing the federal government to come up with a housing strategy.

The Pivot Legal Society said Monday it was ready to distribute 500 of the bright red tents emblazoned with slogans like "Housing is a Right" and "End Homelessness Now!"

The goal is to convince federal authorities to establish a national housing strategy, according to Pivot.