(Commodity Trade Alert) Listen to Obama and Geithner lately? Notice that they keep reading from the same playbook? The US needs to increase employment now. How do we do that? Well, they both keep saying the same thing: We need to increase exports. How do we do that? We need to be competitive on the world stage. In other words we need a weaker US dollar.

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The dollar’s recent rally, which has taken it to a six-month high, will soon fade against Asian and commodity currencies, says star economist Nouriel Roubini.

Commodity currencies include the Brazilian real, Canadian dollar and Australian dollar.

He anticipates a 15 percent to 20 percent drop by the greenback against these currencies in the next two to three years.

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(CNN) — When Annie Brown’s daughter, Isabel, was a month old, her pediatrician asked Brown and her husband to sit down because he had some bad news to tell them: Isabel carried a gene that put her at risk for cystic fibrosis.

While grateful to have the information — Isabel received further testing and she doesn’t have the disease — the Mankato, Minnesota, couple wondered how the doctor knew about Isabel’s genes in the first place. After all, they’d never consented to genetic testing.

It’s simple, the pediatrician answered: Newborn babies in the United States are routinely screened for a panel of genetic diseases. Since the testing is mandated by the government, it’s often done without the parents’ consent, according to Brad Therrell, director of the National Newborn Screening & Genetics Resource Center.

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The Western world, from Australia to the United States, UK and parts of Europe, are moving in a unified front toward dictatorial Internet censorship. Australia has led the way, despite outcry from its populace, by “filtering” out certain banned content. In the United States, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, in continuing his family’s tradition of oppressing free humanity, has pushed forward Cybersecurity legislation that has already passed the House. He has done so in the name of warding off ghastly cyber “attackers” conceivably fronting for al Qaeda while ushering in a means to restrict free speech and expression online for the general population.

There’s trouble brewing between the Ron Paul libertarians who staged the the first modern tea party in 2007 by dumping tea into Boston Harbor, and the neocon war hawks led by Sarah Palin who are furiously trying to hijack their message.

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ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Wake up investors. Are you prepared for the economic anarchy coming after a global-debt time bomb explodes? Are you thinking outside the box? Investing differently? Act now — tomorrow will be too late.

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Feb. 10 (Bloomberg) — Douglas Smith, chief economist for the Americas at Standard Chartered Bank, talks with Bloombergs Lori Rothman about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s prepared congressional testimony and the outlook for interest rates. The Fed may raise the discount rate before long as part of the normalization of Fed lending, a move that wont signal any change in the outlook for monetary policy, Bernanke said.

First the hedge fund manager, Jim Rogers, co-founder with George Soros of the Quantum Fund, says “sell any sterling you might have. It’s finished”. Then along comes another veteran of the hedge fund scene, Bill Gross of Pimco, to insist that “the UK is a must avoid. Its gilts are resting on a bed of nitroglycerine”.

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Don’t expect Greeks to swallow their medicine willingly.

Civil servants in the massive default risk country launched a 24-hour strike today to protest government cutbacks. Mob chants included “We won’t pay for their crisis!” and “Not one euro to be sacrificed to the bankers!” according to the New York Times.

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Following an investigation by this blog (and with the story also told in The Sunday Times), another major “mistake” in the IPCC’s benchmark Fourth Assessment Report has emerged.

Similar in effect to the erroneous “2035″ claim – the year the IPCC claimed that Himalayan glaciers were going to melt – in this instance we find that the IPCC has wrongly claimed that in some African countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020.

At best, this is a wild exaggeration, unsupported by any scientific research, referenced only to a report produced by a Canadian advocacy group, written by an obscure Moroccan academic who specialises in carbon trading, citing references which do not support his claims.

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