This week Ed Luce explores how primary victories in Arizona and Michigan, while having returned Mitt Romney to the front of the GOP pack, may ultimately have cost the party the election in November.
The pro-democracy protests since December’s disputed parliamentary elections are hopeful for Russia’s long-term future. Here, at last, is an economic middle class finally demanding a proper say in their country’s governance, legal protections for their families and property, and an end to pernicious corruption. Sociologists have forecast this for years – sometimes more in hope than conviction.
But in the shorter term, the shifts under way in Russia that the demonstrations highlight do not bode well for economic policy and stability. Vladimir Putin’s return as president after Sunday’s election will usher in Russia’s most uncertain period since before his first presidency in 2000.
By David Pilling in Hong Kong
The election for Hong Kong chief executive, the rather po-faced name the business-minded city gives to its mayor, may have passed you by. After all, with an election committee of only 1,200 members that takes its cue from Beijing and only two credible candidates, it surely lacks the slapstick spectacle of something like the Republican primaries.
Think again. What ought to be a boring exercise in “managed democracy”, in which a captured Hong Kong elite does Beijing’s bidding, has turned into something altogether more exciting.
From the FT’s Brussels Blog:
Over the last 24 hours, a flurry of activity has taken place surrounding Greece’s €200bn debt restructuring, most of it expected but some of it potentially destabilising. Because the moves involve highly technical – but still significant – judgements by occasionally obscure groups, Brussels Blog thought it was time for another guide to what to watch for in the ensuing days.
The most eye-catching announcement was the one made last night by Standard & Poor’s declaring Greece to be in “selective default”. Luxembourg prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker, chair of the group of eurozone finance ministers, put out a statement saying the move was “duly anticipated” – and he’s right. S&P signalled this way back in June when the first talk of a Greek restructuring began.
Marie Colvin spent much of her career as a journalist telling the stories of ordinary people whose lives had been devastated by war. But her death in Homs today, may actually do more to bring home the horrors of the Syrian conflict to a western audience, than the thousands of reports that have been filed on the suffering of ordinary Syrian civilians.
The heroic war correspondent is a staple character in western films – and somebody that western audiences easily identify with. Colvin, who was killed alongside Remi Ochlik, an award-winning French photographer, certainly fitted the mould. She had bravely covered conflicts all over the globe.
By Gideon Rachman
The question of whether a war will break out over Iran’s nuclear programme has been around for so long that it is easy to become almost blasé. In 2006 Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was already asserting dramatically: “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany.”
By Shawn Donnan, FT World News Editor
Anthony Shadid (C) as he interviews residents of Cairo's impoverished Imbaba neighborhood, during the Egyptian revolution. AFP PHOTO/ED OU FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Middle East and its conflicts have generated plenty of great works of journalism. However, the reporting produced by Anthony Shadid, the New York Times correspondent who died on assignment in Syria on Thursday, was exceptional.
While many others have found a calling in grand analysis of the region’s geopolitics, his was in the often heartwrenching stories of its people.
For more than a decade, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner gave the Middle East’s citizens a compelling voice in a western media often more prone to stereotype and cliché.
Lest it be thought that I regard all global economic governance as a crock and don’t give credit where it’s due, congratulations to the US for accepting that “zeroing” – a way of blocking imports by disregarding evidence you don’t like – is dead. In theory Washington will try to negotiate its reacceptance in multilateral talks at the World Trade Organisation, but everyone knows those are going nowhere.
It’s another illustration of two general principles: 1) WTO rules might be patchy, but where they exist, they have held up pretty well, certainly a lot better than protectionism doomsters have been warning; 2) say what you like about the Americans but when they sign up to a trade treaty, eventually, even after a lot of bitching and moaning, they generally stick to it.
Diplomatic response to Syrian crisis in the balance and elections in Uttar Pradesh
With a diplomatic response to the crisis in Syria in the balance at the United Nations, Middle East correspondent Michael Peel, who recently visited Syria, and Middle East editor Roula Khalaf join Shawn Donnan to discuss the situation.
And, as India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, goes to the polls, FT south Asia bureau chief James Lamont and James Fontanella-Khan explain the importance of the election and the risk faced by the Congress party and the scion of the Gandhi dynasty, Rahul Gandhi, in particular.
“Outside” being the WTO, in this case.
Dave Camp and Max Baucus, Congress’s two top dogs on trade, want the administration to try to make currency misalignment a WTO matter (originally Brazil’s idea). Good luck with that one. Since the WTO works by consensus, China can block this issue on its own. Regarding the renminbi, the consultancy fees for working out just how undervalued is undervalued would put international economists’ kids through college for decades to come.
So what’s going on here? Possibly the creation of a distraction in an attempt to forestall currency legislation on the Hill. Camp doesn’t like it, and although Baucus voted for it last year, he would probably be secretly happy to see it stalled indefinitely, not being a confrontationist firebrand. If Congress decides to pass a bill to fix this awkward example of judicial meddling in the near future, it could provide a vehicle on which China-bashers can attach some more radical legislation.
The conventional wisdom is that when the economy picks up and unemployment comes down, trade and currency disputes generally abate. On the other hand, there is an election coming up, and POTUS gave a pretty clear indication in the State of the Union that he thinks that warming up the old protectionist rhetoric from four years ago might play well in the Midwestern swing states. Don’t hold your breath for a currency deal coming out of Geneva – Capitol Hill is the real battleground for this one.
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