Newsweek has a special web report on Zimbabwe’s economy and how the US dollar is traded on the black market.

From Newsweek:

Officially, one U.S dollar is worth about 30,000 Zimbabwean dollars. As of last week the real price on the black market was about 35 million dollars, or 1,166 times the official rate. The bill for a simple meal I shared with five other people at an unassuming cafe in Zimbabwe last week came to 581 million Zimbabwean dollars. The black market value: US$21. If I had paid according to the bank’s rate? US$19,366.

See our previous post on the Zimbabwe economy: “Black market cowboys in Zimbabwe”.

US Attorney General Michael Mukasey stated on Friday that sales of counterfeit goods and piracy are funding terrorist groups around the world.

From the AP:

Attorney General Michael Mukasey warned Friday that the huge profits generated from piracy and counterfeiting are increasingly flowing into the coffers of terrorist groups.

In remarks to Silicon Valley executives at the Tech Museum of Innovation, Mukasey said the economy and national security of the United States are increasingly threatened by violations involving copyrighted software code, patented inventions and trademarked properties.

Terror groups are taking their cues from organized crime and increasingly funding their operations from counterfeiting and piracy, he said.

Read the entire speech here.

The Counterfeit Goods and Piracy market is estimated at $529.79 billion.

Colombian authorities have seized uranium from the guerrilla organization FARC.

From Reuters:

The material was found in a rural area long considered a guerrilla stronghold just south of the capital city Bogota. It is being examined by state experts, said a Defense Ministry statement.

The statement did not say where the uranium came from or what it could be used for.

“This appears to have been part of a black market operation that the guerrillas were trying to use to make money,” said Pablo Casas, an analyst at Bogota think-tank Security & Democracy.

FARC primarily earns revenue from its global drug trade operations, where it is estimated to make between $500 million to $1 billion.

From the Guardian’s Victor Keegan’s “Why piracy isn’t such a bad thing for music”:

The industry claims there are 20 illegal downloads for every legal one, yet it is clearly not affecting the real world on that scale. If a teenager downloads 20,000 tracks, what does he or she do with them? Sell them to others, who could download them for free anyway, or play them sequentially or randomly? Better to listen to the radio which repeatedly pumps out all the current hits. The point is that it may be wrong to download, but it is not affecting sales proportionately; and for sales lost, there are others gained from people like me who have hugely increased their purchases because there is now an easy, affordable way to do it through the likes of iTunes and mobile phones (but beware of unlimited data charges).

Read the whole column here.

Music piracy is estimated to cost the music industry $4.5 billion.

A new report from Shared Hope International has found that in a single month more than 400 children were working as prostitutes in Las Vegas.

From the AP:

More than 400 children were found working as prostitutes in Las Vegas during a single month last year, according to a national report that calls the city a hub for child sex trafficking.”You’ve got a lot of really good people trying to solve this problem in Las Vegas, but it’s a big problem,” said Linda Smith, president and founder of Shared Hope International.

The nonprofit, based in Vancouver, Wash., released the 165-page report Monday. It said “high-risk conditions of Las Vegas” including easy access to alcohol and drugs, 24-hour gambling, and a “hyper-sexualized entertainment industry” fueled a problem it dubs “domestic minor sex trafficking.”

The study, produced with funding from the U.S. Department of Justice, also finds the region possesses inadequate services to help those it calls victims of the sex trade.

Read the whole report here.

eBay’s business model could fundamentally change if the counterfeit case against it is found in favor of jeweler Tiffany & Co.

From the Wall Street Journal:

A legal showdown between jeweler Tiffany & Co. and eBay Inc. over counterfeit items has the potential to significantly change the way the online auction Web site does business, legal experts say.

After a bench trial in November, a federal judge in New York is now considering whether the San Jose, Calif., online auction Web site should be required to vet its millions of listings each day for counterfeit goods instead of relying on trademark holders to flag auctions of potentially inauthentic merchandise.

“I think this may be one of those cases that sets precedent,” said Peter D. Vogl, an intellectual property lawyer at Jones Day in New York.

 Tiffany is arguing that eBay is responsible to ensure that counterfeit goods are taken down. eBay’s position is that it does not have the expertise to determine whether a product is counterfeit.

Tiffany argues that eBay knew it had a problem with counterfeit items being listed on its Web site and did little to clean it up. Instead, eBay insisted the obligation rested with the New York jeweler to identify and alert it to auctions of counterfeit Tiffany silver jewelry.

eBay spends $10 million a year to combat counterfeit goods in its auction.  Tiffany spends $14 million on its anti-counterfeiting activities.

The AP reports on the case against Casa Quivira, an adoption agency in Guatemala, that has been charged with human trafficking and fraud.

From the AP:

wo Guatemalan lawyers retained by an adoption agency that has sent scores of children to the U.S. have been charged with fraud and human trafficking, their attorneys said on Monday.

Vilma Zamora and Sandra Leonardo, lawyers for Casa Quivira, an adoption agency under investigation for using fraudulent documents, were notified of a judge’s charges against them Monday, their attorneys told The Associated Press.

Milton Miranda, Leonardo’s lawyer, said they would appeal.

The article highlights the fact that 1 out of every 100 babies born in Guatemala ends up growing up in the United States.

Prosecutors describe their probe of Casa Quivira, considered Guatemala’s best adoption agency, as their first serious attempt to investigate a $100 million industry that has made tiny Guatemala the largest source of adopted U.S. babies after China.

Some 29,400 Guatemalan children have been delivered to U.S. homes since 1990, so many that one of every 100 Guatemalan babies born each year has been growing up in an American home.

Globally, Illegal adoptions are a $1.3 billion industry.

As Italy’s trash crisis continues, the spread of the smell of toxic trash has spread to the world famous mozzarella cheese of the region.

From the NY Times:

In the last few months, sales of buffalo mozzarella have dropped 40 percent, the product’s trade association says. The problem makes for a near-perfect morality play about Italy: For years, the nation’s paralyzed political class has done little to halt huge-scale illegal dumping of trash, some of it toxic, around Naples. That area happens to produce some of the best mozzarella.

A new trash crisis peaked yet again, and last week fears that food might be contaminated seemed confirmed when health officials announced elevated levels of the carcinogen dioxin in samples of buffalo mozzarella. Last weekend, South Korea banned imports of the cheese, and Italy began scrambling to avoid deep damage to one of its most emblematic products.

The residents of Naples believe that organized crime and illegal dumping of trash has led them to this situation.

From Reuters:

Residents blame the crisis on ineffective and corrupt politicians and businesses, and on gangland criminals who make fortunes out of waste transport and illegal disposal.

Prodi said a short-term solution would be to truck Naples’ waste to other parts of the country, a policy which would be resented by some in the rich north. Long-term, the region will have three incinerators, he said.

Illegal dumping and burning is blamed for poisoning the soil, water and air of large zones around the base of Mount Vesuvius and causing high instances of some forms of cancer.

The International Herald Tribune reports on Siberian carvers who are using extinct Woolly Mammoths tusks to create ivory figures.

As global warming melts the tundra in Siberia, remains of the Woolly Mammoth emerge from the ground.  Carvers then use the ivory tusks to create figures to sell in Asia.

Conservationists are encouraging the use of the Woolly Mammoth tusks because it cuts down on the need for poachers to kill living elephants.

From the IHT:

The trade, bolstered recently by global warming, which has melted the tundra and exposed more frozen remains, is not only legal but actually endorsed by conservationists. They note somewhat grudgingly that while the survival of elephants may be in question, it is already too late for mammoths. Mammoth ivory from Siberia, they say, meets some of the Asian demand for illegal elephant ivory and its trade should be encouraged.

While Ice Age ivory has been carved in Siberia since the 17th century, it was further helped by the international ban on the elephant ivory trade in the late 1980s. Russian exports of mammoth ivory – the only type of ivory legally imported into the United States – reached 40 tons last year, up from just 2 tons in 1989, said Aleksei Tikhonov.

As China continues its crackdown in Tibet, authorities in China have repeatedly restricted the news and information that is available to its citizens. People in China attempting to receive news are forced to gather information on the black market due to these restrictions.

An article by the International Herald Tribune mentions the various websites that are censored in China in regards to the protests in Tibet.

From the IHT:

The government appears to be blocking foreign Web sites inside China and censoring foreign television broadcasts here about the situation in Tibet. Youtube.com was blocked after the riots began and CNN and BBC broadcasts regularly go black after any mention of Tibet. The New York Times Web site also appeared to have been blocked or censored in recent days.

Over the weekend, the government allowed Chinese Web sites, which are usually heavily censored for political content, to post sharp critiques of foreign media reports about Tibet and to show graphic, violent images of Tibetans looting and attacking ethnic Han Chinese in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, on March 14.

The images have fueled outrage in China and led to a flurry of Web postings vehemently critical of Tibetans.

State-controlled news media have been allowed to report from Tibet and neighboring areas where violent protests occurred.

But foreign journalists have been denied access to Tibet and blocked from reaching neighboring regions with large Tibetan populations. Many foreign reporters who managed to get into Tibet after the riots were forced to leave.

Foreign journalists in China said those actions violated the government’s pledge to give them greater press freedoms and access to the country in the months leading up to the Olympic Games.

Protesters in Tibet claim that 140 people have died.  Due to the restrictions placed by the Chinese Government, it is difficult to verify those claims.