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Ashraf Laidi, chief market strategist at CMC Markets, said Wednesday a “serious case of dollar damage” was underway.

“We long warned about the day of reckoning for the dollar emerging at the next economic recovery,” Mr. Laidi said in a note.

Mr. Laidi said economic recovery would weigh on the greenback as real demand for commodities, coupled with improved risk appetite, caused investors to seek higher yields in emerging markets and commodity currencies. This would draw investment away from the U.S. dollar, which was dragged down by growing debt and the risk quantitative easing would eventually spark a surge in inflation.

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Concern has been mounting that the increasing U.S. debt load, as well as a potential inflation time bomb in the form of the quantitative easing, could drag down the greenback. Garnering attention is the risk the United States could lose its triple-A sovereign credit rating, which reflects the chance of the borrower defaulting on its debt.

The discussion, in a 90-minute meeting in the Cabinet Room that included Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and other top administration officials, came on the eve of a much-anticipated speech Mr. Obama is to give Thursday on a number of thorny national security matters, including his promise to close the detention center at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Human rights advocates are growing deeply uneasy with Mr. Obama’s stance on these issues, especially his recent move to block the release of photographs showing abuse of detainees, and his announcement that he is willing to try terrorism suspects in military commissions — a concept he criticized bitterly as a presidential candidate.

The two participants, outsiders who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was intended to be off the record, said they left the meeting dismayed.

They said Mr. Obama told them he was thinking about “the long game” — how to establish a legal system that would endure for future presidents. He raised the issue of preventive detention himself, but made clear that he had not made a decision on it. Several senior White House officials did not respond to requests for comment on the outsiders’ accounts.

“He was almost ruminating over the need for statutory change to the laws so that we can deal with individuals who we can’t charge and detain,” one participant said. “We’ve known this is on the horizon for many years, but we were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama administration over these powers is really stunning.”

In a new report from Alexandria, Va.-based Center for Naval Analyses, a bevy of high-ranking former Army and Navy officials stress that the country’s reliance on oil poses a threat to national security and undermines the country’s ability to wage war. That’s because the hegemony of oil empowers plenty of dodgy nations, and because it imposes huge (and expensive) logistics strains on the U.S. military, as made clear in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Crude oil futures had already risen on a weaker dollar, Nigerian unrest, strength in equities and Tuesday’s bullish oil inventory report from the American Petroleum Institute.

This week’s U.S. refinery fires also helped lift the oil complex, keeping RBOB gasoline futures climbing.

According to a Times study of ammunition markings, of 30 rifle magazines removed from the corpses of insurgents in eastern Afghanistan last month, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, “identical” to ammunition the United States has provided to Afghan government forces.

Although “the scope of that diversion remains unknown,” the newspaper warned that “poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped insurgents stay supplied” in the wake of “only spotty” US and Afghan controls of weapons and ammunition sent to Afghanistan.

Following criticism for failing to account for thousands of rifles provided to Afghan security forces, some of which have been found in the hands of militants, the Pentagon launched a database documenting small arms supplied to Afghan units.

And the US-led Combined Security Transition Command Afghanistan, which is responsible for training and supplying Afghan forces, has said it has prioritized accounting for all Afghan military and police property.

“The emphasis from our perspective is on accountability of all logistics property,” the transition command’s deputy chief, Brigadier General Anthony Ierardi told the newspaper.

Leakage of Pentagon-supplied armaments to insurgents is an “absolutely worst-case scenario,” he said.

But no similar system of accountability is applied to ammunition, which is more difficult to trace than firearms.

Military officers told the newspaper that US forces do not examine all captured arms and munitions to determine how they fell into the hands of insurgents and whether the Afghan government was supplying — even indirectly — the Taliban.

The source, who was not cleared to speak with the media and would not be identified, said the U.S. government would pay for the assets by assuming the automaker’s $6 billion of secured debt and forgiving the bulk of the $15.4 billion of emergency loans that the U.S. Treasury has provided to GM.

The government is negotiating the terms on which it will assume GM’s secured debt and might make an the offer to holders of the debt that is far superior to the one made to Chrysler LLC’s secured lenders, the source said.

Chrysler filed for bankruptcy in April and has proposed paying its secured lenders about 28 cents on the dollar.

At a Tuesday press conference held at the Daimler museum in Stuttgart, Germany, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Daimler management board member Thomas Weber said the contract between the two companies calls for joint collaboration on the Smart electric car and future models.

Daimler has invested a “double-digit million-dollar sum” to acquire about a 10 percent stake in California-based Tesla, Weber said.

“We are about to combine the best of the old and new school,” Weber said during a press conference, which was Webcast. “We are both deeply convinced that electric powertrains will play a major role in sustainability mobility.”

The two companies last year announced that Tesla would supply the lithium ion battery for the Electric Smart EV, a small town car. Telsa designs and makes the packs using battery cells used in consumer electronics.

Daimler plans to test those cars this year and to mass-produce the Electric Smart EV in 2012, Weber said.

The company, which has been working on electric-vehicle technology since the 1970s, chose to partner and invest in Tesla to help Daimler bring cars to market quickly, Weber added. “The first priority was to find the quickest and most straightforward solution,” he said.

The preservation is so good, it is possible to see the outline of its fur and even traces of its last meal.

The fossil, nicknamed Ida, is claimed to be a “missing link” between today’s higher primates – monkeys, apes and humans – and more distant relatives.