Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
from MacroScope:
APEC’s robots stealing the show
A guide at the "Japanese Experience" exhibition talks to Miim, the Karaoke pal robot, on the sidelines of the APEC meetings in Yokohama, Japan on Nov. 10. REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao
Miim is one of the more popular delegates at the APEC meetings in Yokohama Japan. She sings. She dances. She tosses her shoulder length hair. She may not be able to spout an alphabet soup of APEC acronyms like the other Asia-Pacific delegates. But she's still pretty lively. For a robot.
This week's meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum have been earnest and most comprehensive . Foreign and trade ministers issued a 20-page statement about all the things they talked about -- a giant free trade zone, protectionism, the Doha round, easing restrictions on businesses, simplifying customs procedures, promoting green industries, cooperating on health and security, you name it. They also have been, and pardon my French here, excruciatingly dull. So far, the meetings and their stupefying statements have been a testimonial to Japan's skill at stating the ambiguous. Call it the opaque meetings. Journalists from around the Pacific rim have been desperately trying to find news as the 21 APEC leaders gather for their annual pow-wow this weekend.
The annual "silly shirts" photo shoot, in which leaders don native attire for the class picture of their summit is usually good news fodder, but is going to be a big let-down this year. The leaders are merely being asked to show up wearing "smart casual" for the photo shoot on Saturday night, before they head inside for a Kabuki show.
Which brings us back to Miim, the karaoke robot. She, er it, is one of 130 exhibits on display at "Japan Experience", a government-sponsored exhibition in the Pacific Yokohama convention center where the APEC meetings are taking place. The exhibit also features "personal mobility vehicles", a cyborg suit named HAL that enables the wearer to lift really heavy stuff and perform heroically in disaster relief, a talking delivery robot, cute robotic seal pets for use in pediatric therapy, and much other cool stuff .
"Welcome to APEC Japan 2010," the anatomically correct Miim says. "This exhibition shows Japan's strengths and attractions. Please see, feel and touch advanced technology and initiatives of Japan."
Death-Defying Doha
Just as the World Trade Organisation is organizing an intensive push to complete the Doha round trade talks, the atmosphere among negotiators is as pessimistic as it ever has been.
“Gloom” and “frustration” are just two of the more printable words circulating at the WTO’s headquarters by Lake Geneva.
Jonathan: this is great, but you were welcome to have quoted my paper with its doubts on whether DOHA can ever succeed if WTO continues to follow the same approach as it has up to now. It has been published as a Policy Brief by ECIPE. Are you planning a part two?
Oz PM Rudd gets an “F” for language
As the U.S. Congress roils over use of the word “liar” against President Barack Obama, Australia is in uproar over the prime minister’s use of the F-word.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, once a diplomat, was this week forced to defend his “robust” language used against a group of unhappy junior lawmakers in his own centre-left Labor Party while slashing back their official pay entitlements.
“I don’t care what you f**kers think!” Rudd told the backbench group, which included three women, in a private conversation later leaked widely to newspapers.
Rudd, talking to reporters ahead of a meeting of G-20 group leaders in the United States, said he had only been making his point clear to members of his own union-based party.
“I think it’s fair to say that consistent with the traditions of the Australian Labor Party, we’re given to robust conversations,” he said. “I make no apology for either the content of my conversation or the robustness with which I expressed my views.”
Unlike in Washington, where standards of political behaviour are closely entwined with ideas of respect, Australia’s parliament functions with a rough-and-tumble unthinkable in the United States, but which can still raise eyebrows.
Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, was notorious for the parliamentary vitriol he unleashed, famously describing the upper house Senate, now frustrating Rudd’s climate change agenda, as “unrepresentative swill”.
I think the issue is not so much how politicians behave in private meetings but rather how they behave in Question Time where their grandstanding and cheap political and personal shots are at the expense of informed debate.
Merkel smiles through pre-election jitters
That was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s message during a 90-minute grilling in Berlin by journalists at her last major news conference before the Sept. 27 election. Even though opinion polls show a narrowing in her re-election campaign and amid a growing nervousness in her conservative party, Merkel was a picture of tranquillity.
Although some of her conservative party allies are pushing for her to raise the volume and intensity of what has been an exceedingly cautious campaign, Merkel made it abundantly clear that she is not at all worried. Perhaps it was all a good bit of acting. But she answered even the most surly of questions from the pack of 100 journalists with a nationwide TV audience watching with smiles and jokes along with the usual assortment of evasive answers.
Like she has so often in the last four years, Merkel managed to find a shimmer of optimism in just about every query hurled her way. She turned each question about opinion polls showing the lead of her preferred centre-right alliance narrowing upside down by pointing out the centre-right still has a lead.
“The opinion polls are quite encouraging for us,” Merkel said even though the centre-right’s lead over a trio of left-leaning parties has shrunk to just two points in two polls and disappeared into a dead heat in a third. Two weeks ago, the centre-right had a six- to eight-point lead in those same polls over the Social Democrats, Greens and Left party. Four years ago, Merkel’s centre-right alliance also had a big lead before the election that evaporated on election day. The conservatives are particularly nervous after having seen their support plunge in the final days of the last two campaigns in 2002 and 2005.
Merkel also skated over questions about her shaky performance in a TV debate on Sunday against her rival Frank-Walter Steinmeier, her decision to go on a long summer vacation last month rather than campaign and her trip to Pittsburgh late next week just before the vote to attend a G20 summit.
“I treated myself to a two-week holiday because I felt it was appropriate and important – so that I could be happy and available right up to the end of the election campaign,” she said at one point. “I actually was quite satisfied with my performance in the TV debate,” Merkel said, disagreeing with the view of even many in her party that Steinmeier got the upper hand because she took such a cautious approach.
Quake tours, spartan rooms at no-frills G8 summit
Hiking through rubble-strewn streets, taking in a quake exhibit or bedding down in a concrete police compound — leaders at this week’s G8 summit in the Italian town of L’Aquila are in for a change of pace from the routine luxury spa and resort experience of past summits.****** Devastated by an April earthquake that killed nearly 300 people and ringed by tent camps with portable toilets, L’Aquila is a far cry from previous G8 host cities like the Baltic seaside town of Heiligendamm, French lakeside resort Evian and Scottish golf resort Gleneagles.************ ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** U.S. President Barack Obama and other leaders are being housed in a grey police school building on the outskirts of the mountain town, where they are to stay in spartan rooms with granite floors and cream-coloured walls and furnished with little more than simlpe wooden beds with white sheets.****** “There won’t be the luxuries of hotels on (Sardinia’s) Emerald Coast or (Rome’s) Via Veneto, but there will be dignified accommodation worthy of welcoming such important people,” said Italy’s emergency services chief, Guido Bertolaso.****** Room service menus will be absent, but each room will be supplied with instructions on what to do in the event of another earthquake. Aftershocks have been persistent and plentiful in the run-up to the summit.****** In their free time, leaders can browse through an exhibit on “100 years of earthquakes” in Italy or take up Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s offer of a guided tour of areas laid to waste by the tremor, like Germany’s Angela Merkel did on Wednesday.******Earthquake victims have even welcomed leaders with a giant sign on a hill near the summit site declaring “Yes we camp” to protest the slow pace of reconstruction in the area.****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ****** ******For all the lack of luxury, L’Aquila does guarantee voters back home will see images of their leaders rolling up their sleeves under the hot Abruzzo sun at a time of recession and financial turmoil.****** “I think it’s better to have (the summit) in a damaged zone than in an ultra-touristy region where people are spending millions of dollars on their vacations, while the leaders are there to discuss solutions to the global economic crisis,” said Dimitri Soudas, spokesman for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, ahead of the summit.****** Italy was initially set to host the annual summit of leaders from the world’s richest nations on the picturesque island of Sardinia, but hastily moved it to L’Aquila citing solidarity with victims when faced with complicated logistics and spiralling costs.****** One thing that won’t be lacking at the summit is fine Italian cuisine, since good food is not a luxury given up easily in Italy. Among the local delicacies on offer are goat on skewers, baby lamb, rabbit from the small town of Goriano Valli, artichokes from Prezza and red garlic from nearby Sulmona.
from UK News:
On the frontline of the G20 summit
Abolish money. Punish the looters. Eat the bankers.
Ageing 1960s hippies and their youthful anti-globalisation descendants joined in an angry anti-capitalist protest at the Bank of England on Wednesday, waving placards and shouting slogans reflecting a common fury at perceived corporate greed.
With worldwide recession destroying jobs by the week, protesters at the G20 protest in the City of London demanded an end to what they see as a global, predatory system that robs the poor to benefit the privileged.
"Welcome to Pig City: One war -- class war" was the placard held up by a masked man standing on the doorstep of the central bank.
As hooded protesters scrawled "Peace and Love" on the walls of the Bank, Drogo, an elderly man in flowing multi-coloured robes and carrying an orb on a wooden stick, pointed at staff peering out of the Bank of England's windows and said:
"I am here to tell these fat bankers to get off their arses and save the planet.
These bankers are all terrible people and all need to be fired. We can then organise a demonstration to complain that there is no one left paying above average taxes from an above average wage to fund our unemployed/low pay – low tax/ student lifestyle.
drone drone…zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
from UK News:
Ghost of past failure haunts G20
Stopping off in New York during a marathon, 18,000-mile diplomatic offensive before next week’s G20 summit in London next week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recalled a conference held in eerily similar circumstances in London 76 years ago.
Sixty-six nations gathered for the June 1933 London Monetary and Economic Conference which was aimed at lifting the world’s economy out of the Depression.
But amid American opposition to European plans to return to a system of fixed exchange rates, the conference collapsed and the world put up trade barriers, jobless ranks swelled and the rise of Fascism took the world into war.
“There was no further progress other than a resort to protectionism for the rest of that decade,” Brown told a business audience during a five-day pre-summit tour that has taken him to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, New York, Brazil and Chile.
Brown must be hoping desperately that history will not repeat itself when he hosts a meeting of leading industrial and developing economies in London on April 2 to try to chart a way out of the worst global financial crisis since the 1930s.
Again there have been signs of transatlantic division in advance of the summit, with many Europeans resisting U.S. pressure for more fiscal stimulus to boost the economy, while the Europeans put the emphasis on tightening regulation of the financial sector.
Mirek Topolanek, prime minister of the Czech Republic which holds the current European Union presidency, was quoted this week as saying U.S. President Barack Obama’s huge economic stimulus plan was “the road to hell”.
It is often said that desperate diseases must have desperate remedies. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, because the desperate remedy recommended by every country contains a high percentage of self-interest, it takes on an emotional charge which, if thwarted, leads to crises and damaging international rifts. Ultimately, in the 30s it led to war.
Politicians always want to posture and seem bravely full of activity. They should actually scarcely be allowed near an economic crisis. First, middle and last they want their own personal importance to be augmented. They can never be seen to make sacrifice for the good of all; always they must pursue the narrowest, most selfish interests of their consituents. True statesmen are revealed by history to be incredibly rare.
During the cold war it was often said that summit meetings only rubber-stamped what the technocrats had achieved. Failure of a summit had occurred long before the apparent protagonists [premiers, presidents] had boarded their ‘planes.
There has been too little time for the technocrats to have achieved much prior to the upcoming G20 meeting. So, bland platitudes will probably be the best possible result. Overwhelmingly the most beneficial real outcome will be that that an environment is created for technocrats to keep talking. A thousand small compromises and adjustments between nations are required for disaster to be avoided.
Politicians should be required to take an oath before summits along the lines recommended for physicians by Hippocrates: First, Do No Harm.
from MacroScope:
Stealing Steinbrueck’s show?
Peer Steinbrueck, the front man in Germany's fight against the financial crisis, has a new challenge on his hands: Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. The young economy minister, in the job for only a month, is already proving to be a thorn in Finance Minister Steinbrueck's side. The telegenic 37-year-old is coming up with policy initiatives that challenge Steinbrueck's plans, and draw media attention away from him.
This is new territory for Steinbrueck. Until last month, he was able to capitalise on the low profile of former economy minister Michael Glos to make himself Germany's primary spokesman on matters financial and economic -- and the man Chancellor Angela Merkel turned to for leadership on these issues. Glos's shock resignation last month opened the way for Guttenberg to make the step up from Bavarian politics to the national stage, and he hasn't looked back.
This week he proposed amending a planned law on saving stricken banks, which was drafted by Steinbrueck's ministry, to try to avoid nationalising them. The idea may not take off, but it grabbed media attention. And while Steinbrueck (wiping face in picture) joins other G20 finance ministers this weekend for a meeting in England, Guttenberg (left in picture) will be preparing for a trip to the United States next week, where he will meet Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner -- Steinbrueck's opposite number -- as well top White House adviser Lawrence Summers, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and World Bank President Robert Zoellick.
"Peer Steinbrueck has to share the crisis management with high-flyer Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg -- much to his displeasure," ran a headline in Friday's edition of the Handelsblatt business newspaper.
With a federal election looming in September, Guttenberg is using every opportunity he can to boost his profile. As a member of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), Bavarian sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats, he is naturally more politically allied with the chancellor than Steinbrueck, a Social Democrat. His suave demeanour and aristocratic background are a contrast to Steinbrueck's plain-speaking approach, and his media blitz could start to drown out Steinbrueck's message.
"Like fire and water, these two", Handelsblatt wrote.
(Reuters photo: Fabrizio Bensch)
