Global News Journal

from UK News:

From Celtic Tiger to road kill: Ireland’s rapid economic descent

How the mighty have fallen. When I lived in Ireland five years ago, the country had a spring in its step. Its property magnates were snapping up prime real estate in central London, or paying eye watering sums for prestigious sites in crowded Dublin. Their banks were some of the top-rated in Europe, busily acquiring businesses in the United States and eastern Europe. High-end housing estates mushroomed, a gleaming new tram system was installed, and the finance district buzzed and hummed with industry as international businesses flocked to a country they praised for its low taxes and well-educated workforce.

Of course, the warning signs were there. House prices were ridiculously inflated (I wrote back in 2006 that less than a fifth of houses for sale in Dublin were on offer below 317,500 euros - the level at which property tax kicked in for first time buyers). The economy was highly exposed to its banking sector and to external shocks, as the central bank recognised at the time - although it saw the risks as limited : "While the strengthening of domestic demand puts the euro area in a better position than previously to withstand a U.S. slowdown, this challenge would intensify if the U.S. economic situation were to deteriorate sharply," the Irish central bank said in October 2006. "This, however, still remains a risk scenario rather than the baseline one."

Anglo Irish bank - the disgraced lender that will cost the Irish government up to 34 billion euros to bail out - was a shining star of the country's banking system. "We're confident about the future," Anglo Irish's then-group finance director, Willie McAteer, told me in a phone interview in 2006. "When he had half a billion (euros in profit) in '04 we talked about making a billion in five years' time. I suppose now we're looking forward really to 2010 to one and a half billion".

The Irish finance minister during this period was one Brian Cowen, now the country's Prime Minister who is fighting for his political life. Cowen's parliamentary majority has been slashed to less than four in the lower chamber and his government is – unsurprisingly- deeply unpopular. The government has slashed public spending to pay for its ballooning deficit and help fund the bank rescue. Propping up the troubled lenders will lift the country's deficit to 32 pct of GDP, with the underlying deficit to GDP at 12 percent. That's among the highest of all advanced economies globally.

Hardly surprising, then, that recent opinion polls suggest a new coalition of centre-right Fine Gael and centre-left Labour will sweep to power in elections due in 2012 at the latest. What more that alliance could do to salve the pain for Ireland, though, is unclear. Many of the glamorous housing estates I marvelled at on my way to work each morning (largely wondering how anyone could afford to live in them) now stand empty: Ireland – with a population of 4 million – has 300,000 unsold or unfinished houses. Official unemployment stands at nearly 14 percent. True unemployment is thought to be closer to 20 percent.

The way out will be long and painful: it’s a path Ireland trod at the end of the last century and few who enjoyed the benefits of that growth in the early noughties thought they’d be back here again so soon. But it's also possible that the overly optimistic view of Ireland seen a few years ago is currently being matched by an overly pessimistic view of the future. As my colleague Peter Thal Larsen of Reuters Breakingviews points out, delivering a credible four-year budget plan later this year is crucial. Ireland may be down, but it's not yet out.

from Tales from the Trail:

Special Relationship? How quickly they forget….

So much for "Hilly-Milly".

Just last year U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gushed to Vogue magazine about  former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband,  calling the young diplomat a dashing addition to the international scene.

"Well, if you saw him it would be a big crush. I mean, he is so vibrant, vital, attractive, smart. He's really a good guy. And he's so young!" Clinton said in remarks that provoked a spate of joking British tabloid headlines about the new "special relationship" between the United States and Britain.

Well, absence doesn't appear to have made the heart grow any fonder. Asked on Wednesday if she had any advice for Miliband following his decision to bow out of frontline politics after losing a Labour Party leadership contest to his younger brother, Clinton was brief.

"I have no advice for anyone in politics. I'm out of politics. I obviously wish him well and I am very intrigued by the interesting political dynamics that are occuring inside the United Kingdom," Clinton said, before launching into a positive assessment of the state of relations with Britain's current government.

Asked again if she had any farewell words for Miliband, Clinton finally managed a few: "I enjoyed working with him and wish him well."

It was left to visiting German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle to sum up Miliband's exit from the international diplomatic round robin, where new faces appear in the wake of every big election.

The dark side of German reunification

Germany will mark the 20th anniversary of its reunification on October 3 — but not everyone in Germany will be celebrating two decades together.

German unity has been a shaky marriage. That may seem like a surprise to people outside Germany. But opinion polls inside Germany show widespread discontent, especially in the formerly Communist east. Chancellor Angela Merkel has called it a success and other political leaders will be singing the praises of unification in their lofty speeches and German media interviews this weekend. But for many in the east, like straight-talking Brandenburg state premier Matthias Platzeck, German unification in 1990 was not a merger of equals but instead an “Anschluss” (annexation) with West Germany taking over East Germany.

Many easterners have endured change, hardship, upheaval and various negative developments – including sometimes being evicted from their houses that people who fled during the Cold War returned to reclaim. Free speech and freedom to travel have been great but the price has been high: millions lost their jobs, their homes as well as the fabric of their society and their way of life. Many are still struggling to come to terms with life in reunited Germany – and are understandably nostalgic about life in East Germany, to the great irritation of western Germans who have helped pay  1.6 trillion euros to rebuild the east. 

Reasons for their disenchantment can be seen everywhere: The eastern population has shrunk by about 2 million, unemployment soared, young people are moving away in droves and what was one of the Eastern Bloc’s leading industrial nations is now largely devoid of industry. Did it all have to happen like that? Platzeck thinks not. There are no ghost towns in the east yet but some cities with dwindling populations have torn down thousands of flats on their outskirts and let the forests grow back around them.

It should come as little surprise, then, that an opinion poll published in Stern magazine on Wednesday found 67 percent of easterners do not feel like they are part of a united country and only 25 percent said they felt like “ein Volk” (one people) – by contrast 47 percent of the westerners surveyed feel that the two parts of Germany have overcome what divided them in the last 20 years. Another poll found that one in 13 easterners would have preferred if the Berlin Wall were still splitting the two Germanys.  Another survey found 25 percent the situation in the east has worsened in the last 20 years.  It is also hardly surprising that eastern Germans vote for different political parties than their western brethren.

 We had the chance to talk to Platzeck, a leader in the centre-left Social Democrats and probably the most popular leader in eastern Germany, about his “Anschluss” comment – a loaded term that is usually associated with Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938.  This is what he had to say: 

“There was an ‘Anschluss mentality’ at the unification negotiations. There is a lot that went wrong in those talks. We tried to explain (to West German negotiation partners) that when a society takes on a new form with a small group joining a larger group, it’s important to include some elements or symbols from the smaller group for the sake of harmony. That way the smaller group won’t feel like they’ve been overwhelmed and run over. But there was nothing the smaller group (East Germany) left in united Germany. …It was like ‘Look, children. We’ll take you in, we’ll pay for it all, but forget your demands’. That’s the attitude I was talking about.

from Reuters Investigates:

Morbid money-spinners

If the life settlements market seems ghoulish, here’s a British scandal which isn’t doing the image of the business any favours. It’s one of the worst the country’s seen.

Around 30,000 mainly elderly investors in the UK put their money into a company called Keydata, hoping to make a little extra cash to fund their own retirement with the promise of a healthy return.

What they were buying sounded kosher, even if it did depend on how fast their wealthy American counterparts were dying. Of course, the investors may not have known that.

As is so often the case with these things, the projections were a little optimistic. And then some other irregularities blew up. Around 100 million pounds went missing, one of the business’s partners dropped dead in Singapore and the investment company was shut down by the regulators, leaving British pensioners like Tony and Pam Tobin out of pocket.  The Serious Fraud Office is investigating.

Tony and Pam Tobin

Undeterred, the other key character behind Keydata is determined to fight the regulators’ decision.  "I am someone who can make the impossible possible," he tells us.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Does that U.S. “retribution plan” for Pakistan still stand?

One of the more interesting details in the advance reports of Bob Woodward's "Obama's Wars" is that Washington had prepared a "retribution plan" in the event of a major attack on the United States which is traced back to Pakistan.

"While no contingency plans exist for dealing militarily with a collapse of nuclear-armed Pakistan, there is 'a retribution plan' in place, developed by the Bush administration, if the United States suffers another 9/11-style terrorist attack," according to the Los Angeles Times. "That would involve bombing and missile strikes to obliterate the more than 150 al Qaeda training and staging camps known to exist, most of them in Pakistan, which presumably would suffer extensive civilian casualties."

Madeleine Albright pumps iron — and vouches for healthy lifestyle

We knew she was tough — but this tough?

“I can leg press 450 pounds,” the former U.S. Secretary of State modestly told a panel on health in Mexico City on Friday.

Albright, who also served in the 1990s as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, spoke of the importance of good nutrition at a panel sponsored by dietary supplement company Herbalife, which counts some 50,000 Mexicans among its global distributors.

The challenges of eating right have not been lost on the eminent Albright, who now sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, chairs global strategy firm Albright Stonebridge, and is a professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University. “The only thing I can tell you is that as Secretary of State and before that as UN Ambassador I got very fat because I was eating for my country,” Albright said.

When seated at dinners next to global heads of state, Albright was inevitably presented with sumptuous — and caloric — national dishes, which took a measure of skilled diplomacy to decline. “I would try to diet and push it around the plate and the person would look at me and say ‘Why aren’t you eating our national whatever?’ It was a very fattening job.” But a healthy lifestyle has come easier in recent years, Albright said, who shared the following tidbit from her exercise regime. “One of the things that nobody ever believes about me that’s true is that I can leg press 450 pounds and I exercise three times a week,” she said.

Health is a crucial, yet under emphasized component of Mexico’s economic development, health experts said. The pressing problem of security in the midst of a brutal drug war that has cast a shadow over the country and slowed a recovery from recession. Whereas partnership between the United States and Mexico in the auto and high-tech sectors has already been established, to the benefit of both countries, the market in Mexico for health products has been “barely touched,” said the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual. “One area we have only just started to touch is health. Health and healthcare and the provision of health products,” said Pascual.

The stakes are high for Mexico, a country with some 45 million who live in poverty, according to the ambassador. And the link between poverty and insufficient nutrition is strong. The country has the highest percentage of overweight citizens, at 70 percent, according to a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, followed by the United States at 68 percent. Mexico is No. 2 in obesity, with 30 percent of the population so affected, compared to 34 percent in the United States. “It undercuts what Mexico is trying to do in terms of developing a healthy, hard-working population that can change the economic picture in Mexico,” said Albright.

Colombia kills a top rebel leader, any chance for peace?

Colombia has killed a top rebel leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC. The aerial bombardment of Mono Jojoy’s jungle camp – which was complete with tunnels and a concrete bunker – was one of the hardest blows to the guerrillas in their more than four-decade-old insurgency. Since the launch of a U.S.-backed offensive in 2002, the rebels have been on the run, pushed back to remote hideouts and forced to use ambushes and other hit-and-run tactics. The new government of Juan Manuel Santos says that there can be no talks until the FARC stop attacks and release security forces held by the rebels. The Marxist insurgents have called for talks before and used discussions to regroup. Colombia had dealt significant blows to the group before, but has been unable to completely defeat the guerrillas. Can the insurgents be defeated militarily? What should Colombia do to end its conflict?

Mexican reporters decry gagging in brutal drug war

After his newspaper printed a series of reports about a drug gang with ties extending from the Mexican state of Chihuahua to Los Angeles, California, the editor of El Diario in Ciudad Juarez, Pedro Torres, received a chilling phone call. ”If you publish other news about this … we will kill your people,” said the voice on the other end of the line.    Threatened and intimidated by drug cartels and seemingly abandoned by authorities, journalists covering Mexico’s violent drug war are increasingly self-censoring in order to stay alive. Patricia Mercado of Imagen de Zacatecas put it simply:    “We’re not doing investigations because we’re being threatened and we can’t say anything about the drug gangs.”  Mexico today is considered one of the world’s most dangerous places for reporters since President Felipe Calderon launched a war in 2006 on violent cartels fighting for dominance in the lucrative drug trade. Robberies, extortions, kidnapping, threats — and worse — are part of the daily landscape for many living in Mexican border towns today.   The violence has so far claimed the lives of over 29,000 people, undermining the global image of Mexico.  More than 30 media workers have been killed or disappeared since late 2006, according to U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). A recent report by the CPJ on “Silence or Death in Mexico’s Press” can be found here.  Reporters covering Mexico’s escalating drug war not only are forced to contend with the drug traffickers, but corrupt local and state authorities who operate with impunity, said participants at a full-day conference on Sept. 23 sponsored by the Interamerican Press Society (SIP) and the CPJ. “We’re in the middle of two forces that are trying to limit our ability to do journalism,” said Torres. “What they’ve managed to do is to pressure us to report only the most basic news.”    Mercado said local authorities are “washing their hands of it all.” “They’re not imposing the law, their police have infiltrated the narcs. Unfortunately the federal government isn’t doing anything either,” said Mercado. “I don’t feel protected.”  Last week, a photographer from El Diario, which publishes across the border from El Paso, Texas, was killed by drug gang hitmen, the second journalist from that paper to be killed in the last two years.  The newspaper published an editorial on Sunday addressed to the cartels, asking them to tell the newspaper what was wanted of them, in order to avoid more deaths.   That controversial stance spurred a sharp rebuke from the federal government, which vowed never to make a truce with the cartels. Members of the CPJ and SIP say they’re encouraged by recent assurances by Calderon that he will push for legislation that would make attacks on the press a federal crime. Similar legislation stalled in Congress two years ago. “It pains me that Mexico is seen as one of the most dangerous places for the profession,” the CPJ said Calderon told them in a meeting this week at the presidential palace.    But journalists on the front lines are increasingly skeptical of the ability of any authority — local, state or federal — to control the bloodshed.  The United States granted asylum this week to Ciudad Juarez-based journalist Jorge Luis Aguirre, who had received a threatening phone call in November 2008, minutes after the murder of a fellow reporter, in which he was told he was the next reporter to die.   Drug violence has now spread from the border region to the northern business center of Monterrey, and has even cropped up in previously sheltered tourist havens like Puerto Vallarta and Cuernavaca, outside Mexico City. Another challenge to press freedom and safety is coming from inside the media organizations themselves.  Some reporters and editors working for  border area newspapers are paid off by the cartels, who pressure them not to publish certain stories.    The Pacific state of Sinaloa has a big problem with corrupt journalists, said Ismael Bojorquez of Sinaloa’s Rio Doce. Papers, he said, need to “clean house.”  “You can’t do your job as a journalist if you’re on the payroll of an organized crime group,” said CPJ executive director Joel Simon. “It’s happening on a large scale.” Given the risks, reporters have drastically scaled back coverage of the drug wars and violence in their cities. Specific incidents of violence mostly go unreported now, with papers publishing broader analyses, or statistical reports to keep their readers informed — and the cartels at bay.

At India’s Commonwealth Games, shame might be a blessing

This story by Jason Overdorf originally appeared in Global Post.

There’s still a chance that Delhi will pull off the Commonwealth Games next month. In India, anything is possible. There’s even a chance that people will call this futile exercise in mismanagement a success. But that would be a real shame.

Shame is the word of the week here, with 10 days left before the scheduled opening ceremony of what the erstwhile jewel in the British crown once hoped would be the largest and most impressive Commonwealth Games ever. Now, the growing fear is that the event may not come off at all, as the threat looms of a boycott by England, Scotland and Wales.

Even as organizing committee chairman Suresh Kalmadi struggled to persuade a skeptical and hostile press that the city and venues would be ready, the seemingly endless problems mounted.

Gunmen on a motorcycle shot two Taiwanese tourists in a possible terrorist attack over the weekend. On Tuesday a footbridge attached to one of the entrances for the showpiece Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium collapsed, injuring 27 workers and leaving three laborers in critical condition.

As unusually persistent monsoon rain pounded on, a section of the ceiling fell in a few hours later. An epidemic of dengue fever, exacerbated by the delayed construction work, overwhelmed area hospitals. And, horror of horrors for India’s fastidious Hindus and their stiff-upper-lipped onetime rulers alike: Inspectors discovered human excrement in some of the posh flats of the hastily built Games Village.

Tardy Obama plays second fiddle to Swiss at UN

It happens every year. When the U.S. president arrives at the United Nations for the General Assembly’s annual gathering of world leaders, the east side of midtown Manhattan goes into lockdown mode. You can’t cross the streets before he arrives and until well after the most powerful man in the world has safely arrived inside the headquarters of world diplomacy.

President Barack Obama was a little late this year and unable to keep his prestigious spot as the second speaker in the annual marathon of speeches. When Obama failed to show, the Swiss president of the General Assembly Joseph Deiss announced that the president of his homeland, Doris Leuthard, would take Obama’s place and give Switzerland’s address.

Deiss assured the delegations from the United Nations’ 192 members that this was not because the Swiss had ambitions of becoming a world power, but in order to keep things moving. Of course, Leuthard enjoyed a standing-room only audience at the assembly hall, a rare opportunity for the small but wealthy Alpine nation.

After Leuthard finished, Obama stepped up to the iconic dark green podium. Wearing a dark suit and a U.N.-blue tie, he paid homage to the 65-year world organization.

“We meet within an institution built from the rubble of war to unite the world in pursuit of peace. And we meet within a city that for centuries has welcomed people from across the globe, demonstrating that individuals of every color, faith and station can come together to pursue opportunity; build a community; and live with the blessing of human liberty.”

The Middle East figured prominently in Obama’s address, his second before the General Assembly. He touched on Iran’s nuclear program, stressing that the door was still open for diplomacy, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He urged Israel to extend its moratorium on settlements and called on the Palestinians and Israelis to press ahead with their peace negotiations.

“Israel’s settlement moratorium has made a difference on the ground, and improved the atmosphere for talks,” Obama said. “Our position on this issue is well known. We believe that the moratorium should be extended. We also believe that talks should press on until completed.”