Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
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.
from The Great Debate UK:
Ghosts of Germany’s communist past return for election
- Erik Kirschbaum is a Reuters correspondent in Berlin. -
Will the party that traces its roots to Communist East Germany's SED party that built the Berlin Wall soon be in power in a west German state?
Or is the rise of the far-left "Linke" (Left party) in western Germany to the brink of its first role as a coalition partner in a state government with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) simply a political fact-of-life now so many years after the Wall fell and the two Germanys were reunited?
Will a "red" government in Saarland scare away investors and doom the state, as its conservative state premier Peter Mueller argues in a desperate fight to his job?
Or will the new leftist alliance in Saarland be able to better tackle state's woes, as the SPD state premier candidate Heiko Maas insists?
Depending on your Weltanschauung, that's what Sunday's election in three German states boils down to -- an emotional debate about whether the ex "Communists" in the form of the Left party should be allowed to be part of the next Saarland government or not.
It doesn't matter that the Left has already been in eastern state governments and will probably also be part of the next state government in the eastern state of Thuringia, which also elects a new state assembly on Sunday.
The results tonight came in as expected with the SPD and Left winning enough to form new leftish governments in Saarland and Thuringia states. http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews /idUSTRE57T1I020090830
Trade and Mutually Assured Destruction
Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo has an original view on protectionism.
Instead of promising not to raise barriers to trade (and quietly ignoring their pledges), leaders should hit back hard with all the legal means available at any country trying to use protectionism to shield itself from the crisis at the expense of others.
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?