…North Korea’s communist government is urging women in the country to wear traditional Korean clothes instead of pants, according to a North Korean monthly magazine.

“Keeping alive our dress style is a very important political issue to adhere to specific national cultural traditions at a time when the U.S. imperialists are maneuvering to spread the rotten bourgeois lifestyle inside North Korea,” the Joson Yeosung (Woman) magazine said, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency…

Full story here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051104/ap_on_re_as/nkorea_no_pants

Today China dropped its policy of linking the Yuan to the dollar in a fixed exchange rate. For the past ten years the yuan traded at 8.277 to the dollar. As of today the value of the yuan trades at 8.11 yuan, which is still a state-set value but is moving towards a more market-based value based on a series of values in relation to the larger European currencies.

Many people - US lawmakers included - have been pressuring China for years to remove the fixed status of the yuan and have it float on the currency market. It’s been claimed that the Chinese government has undervalued the yuan as much as 40 percent giving Chinese exporters unfair advantages based on conversion.

The dollar is down against the Japanese yen - the bellwether of the Asian economy - on the news.

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