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.
Even WTO chief Pascal Lamy says that Doha – already the longest running trade round – will not meet the latest 2010 deadline set by G20 leaders unless governments really instruct their negotiators to make the necessary compromises, and negotiators start to put those compromises down on paper.
Lamy, who suspended the round in 2006 but has led a renewed push for the last three years, and others point to the enormous progress made towards a deal in eight tortuous years.
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?
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.
Zedillo, who steered Mexico through the 1994/95 “Tequila crisis” and the 1997/98 Asian crisis, compares this to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction that kept the nuclear peace during the Cold War.
