The U.S. economy lost the title of “world’s biggest” to the euro zone this week as the value of the dollar slumped in currency markets.

Taking the gross domestic product of both economies in 2007, the combined GDP of the 15 countries which use the euro overtook that of the United States when the European currency surged to a record high of more than $1.56 per euro.

Independence protesters burned shops and cars in the Tibetan capital Lhasa on Friday and Chinese police were reported to have shot dead at least two people, in the fiercest unrest in the region for two decades.

China accused followers of the Dalai Lama of “masterminding” the uprising, which shatters its carefully-cultivated image of national harmony in the buildup to the Beijing Olympic Games.

A spokesman for the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader called the allegation “absolutely baseless”. The Dalai Lama appealed to China to stop using force and begin dialogue. Similar protests in the past have been crushed with gunfire and mass arrests.

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

Several thousand law enforcement agencies are creating the foundation of a domestic intelligence system through computer networks that analyze vast amounts of police information to fight crime and root out terror plots.

As federal authorities struggled to meet information-sharing mandates after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, police agencies from Alaska and California to the Washington region poured millions of criminal and investigative records into shared digital repositories called data warehouses, giving investigators and analysts new power to discern links among people, patterns of behavior and other hidden clues.

Venezuelan and Ecuadorean troops deployed on Colombia’s frontier last night as South America’s military and diplomatic crisis escalated into a dangerous showdown between President Hugo Chávez and Colombia’s US-backed government.

Venezuela started shutting crossing points on the 1,400-mile border to try to isolate its neighbour after Bogotá made a series of extraordinary allegations about the Venezuelan leader funding Marxist guerrillas intent on building a uranium-enriched “dirty” bomb.

“Colombia proposes to denounce Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, in the international criminal court for sponsoring and financing genocide,” said President Alvaro Uribe.