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Chavez says US warships threaten Venezuela, CubaTue Apr 18, 2006; By Greg Brosnan
CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - President Hugo Chavez, who accuses Washington of planning to invade Venezuela, said on Tuesday recent deployment of U.S. warships in the Caribbean Sea threatened his country and its ally Cuba.
Four U.S. warships, including an aircraft carrier, and 6,500 sailors, are in a two-month deployment in the Caribbean Sea dubbed "Partnership of the Americas" by the U.S. Navy.
"They are doing maneuvers right here," Chavez told a student meeting in the country's west. "This is a threat, not just against us, against Venezuela, against Cuba."
Chavez has repeatedly accused the United States of trying to oust him. U.S. officials say the self-styled socialist revolutionary and friend of Cuban President Fidel Castro threatens regional stability.
Chavez, who has created a civilian reserve to resist the assault he says Washington is planning, has threatened to repel U.S. forces with arrows coated with poison.
The United States, a leading buyer of oil from Venezuela, the world's No. 5 exporter, has dismissed his invasion talk as a ridiculous invention aimed at stirring up his supporters.
At least one warship has come as close to Venezuela as the Dutch island of Aruba, about 15 miles off its coast.
The Florida-based U.S. Southern Command has said the operations, which include visits to countries including Venezuela's neighboring U.S. ally Colombia, focus on threats such as "narco-terrorism and human-trafficking."
Hu visits Boeing plant
Wed Apr 19, 2006; By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Scott Hillis
EVERETT, Washington (Reuters) - Chinese President Hu Jintao toured a Boeing Co. aircraft plant on Wednesday, on the eve of a summit with President Bush, where he will be pressed to cut China's trade surplus with the United States.
On the second day of a four-day visit to the United States, Hu was to tour three Boeing assembly lines and be briefed on the new Boeing 787 jet currently under development which the company touts as its "super-efficient airliner."
China recently signed a deal with the company to buy 80 737 jets worth about $4 billion.
Hu was then scheduled to address several thousand Boeing workers at the plant near Seattle, and deliver what his aides said would be an important policy speech, before flying to Washington D.C. for his White House meeting with Bush on Thursday.
Hu dined with about 100 U.S. political and corporate leaders on Tuesday night at the home of Bill Gates, whose Microsoft Corp. has been a major victim of Chinese software piracy. In a meeting earlier with Gates, Hu reiterated China would move against software pirates.
U.S. industry groups estimate 90 percent of DVDs, music CDs and software sold in China are pirated. The intellectual-property issue is also expected to be on the agenda when Hu meets Bush, as part of the discussion on China's $202 billion 2005 trade surplus with the United States.
In his dinner remarks, Hu stressed the expanding relationship between China and the United States.
"Today, many cargo ships are very busy crossing the Pacific Ocean, laden with the rich fruit of our strong trade ties and friendship between our two peoples," Hu said.
"I am sure that with the further deepening of China's reform and opening up, we are going to see an even broader prospect for the economic cooperation and trade between China and Washington state and China and the United States as a whole."
China sought to quell U.S. trade complaints before Hu's visit by signing contracts worth $16.2 billion while Vice Premier Wu Yi visited the United States last week.
U.S. officials have complained that China is moving too slowly to revalue its currency, the yuan, which they see as badly undervalued, making Chinese exports artificially cheap.
Bush has also said he would bring up Iran's nuclear program. He wants China to cooperate in putting more pressure on Tehran through the U.N. Security Council.
A Chinese spokesman told reporters on Tuesday, "We hope that we will continue to work toward a peaceful resolution of the Iran issue."
Hu said on Tuesday that China and the United States "share common strategic interests in a wide range of areas, particularly in maintaining world peace, promoting global economic growth, combating terrorism and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
China's Oil Needs Are High on U.S. Agenda
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, April 18 — The competition for access to oil is emerging high on the agenda for President Hu Jintao's visit to the White House this week. President Bush has called China's growing demand for oil one reason for rising prices, and has warned Beijing against trying to "lock up" global supplies.
With crude oil selling for more than $70 a barrel and American motorists paying $3 a gallon for gasoline, American officials say the subject cannot be avoided at Thursday's meeting in the Oval Office, as it was sidestepped when Mr. Bush visited Beijing last fall.
China's appetite for oil also affects its stance on Iran, where a growing confrontation with the United States over nuclear programs has already unsettled oil markets. China has invested heavily in Iran, and as a permanent member of the Security Council, its position on the question of sanctions is crucial.
Even as Mr. Hu arrived in Seattle on Tuesday, Chinese and American negotiators were debating a proposal for the two presidents to announce a joint study of both nations' energy needs as a way to ward off conflict in coming decades, when China's rapidly expanding need for imported energy to sustain its growth may collide with the needs of the United States, Europe and Japan.
In 2004 China used some 6.5 million barrels of oil a day and overtook Japan as the world's second largest user of petroleum products. The largest, the United States, consumes about 20 million barrels a day.
The administration's focus on China's quest for oil was signaled when it published a revised National Security Strategy last month, approved by Mr. Bush, that contained a pointed new entry about China.
That country's leaders, the document declared, are "expanding trade, but acting as if they can somehow 'lock up' energy supplies around the world or seek to direct markets rather than opening them up, as if they can follow a mercantilism borrowed from a discredited era."
Mercantilism was a post-feudal doctrine of national economic health through protectionism, foreign trade and exports, but administration officials have repeatedly used it to describe China, just as they once used it in the 1980's to describe Japan's approach to global trade.
In the case of China, the term is increasingly employed to paint a picture of a 21st-century version of the Great Game, the 19th-century maneuvering for primacy in Central Asia, in which China's search for oil is merging with its desire for greater influence, from Africa to Latin America to the Middle East.
"They are buying long-term supplies wherever they find them, including in unsavory places like Sudan, Iran and Burma, where we won't buy," said Michael J. Green, a Georgetown University professor who directed policy on China at the National Security Council until late last year. "They say it is benign, because they don't interfere with the internal affairs of other nations. And we say it is anything but benign, because it finances these regimes' bad behavior."
The public discussion began in September, when the deputy secretary of state, Robert B. Zoellick, urged China to become a "responsible stakeholder" on the world stage. He suggested that China should rethink a policy of buying oil from the Burmese or the Sudanese simply because it could. "China's involvement with troublesome states indicates at best a blindness to consequences, and at worst something more ominous," Mr. Zoellick said at the time.
Nonetheless, Chinese officials said they liked much of his commentary because it suggested an equality between China as a rising power and the United States as an established one. So far, however, the officials have not responded to the administration's call to rethink their policy.
Addiction to Oil?
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