Blog posts tagged "G20"

September 26, 2009 3:08 pm 2 Comments

Big news at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh. The economics are having to take back seat to the huge news that America, Britain and France have known for ages that Iran has a second secret nuclear facility. It’s a very major announcement that has re-jigged the president’s schedule and completely altered the agenda – for [...]

September 25, 2009 9:49 am 1 Comment

Snub-gate has made it on board Air Force One. The row over whether or not Gordon Brown was “snubbed” by President Obama because he didn’t get a sit-down, one-on-one, meeting with him (despite repeated requests from Downing Street) has now been taken up by the White House press corps.    On board the presidential plane [...]

July 8, 2009 11:26 am 3 Comments

By the time you are reading this I hope to be supping on mozzarella di bufala in a medieval Italian hilltop town full of churches stuffed with paintings by Renaissance masters. The reality will probably be that I shall be going through umpteen security scanners along with some 3000 other journalists queuing for the G8 [...]

April 3, 2009 1:56 pm No Comments

A selection of newspaper front pages from G20 countries on the day after the London summit. Barack Obama is a prominent theme.

April 2, 2009 4:08 pm 16 Comments

Watch out for my colleague Alex Thomson’s report tonight on how the much-hyped G20 protests, policed at a cost of millions, were today dominated by a few hundred Somalis, Ethiopians and Eritreans, which was not what much of the media, on hand in case of a scuffle, had in mind. They were protesting about human [...]

9:38 am 51 Comments

Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, is supposed to represent the whole of Africa at the G20 this week – apart from the South Africans, who are the only African G20 members. Yesterday afternoon one of his advisers told me she doesn’t want him to be seen as yet another African leader out with the begging [...]

April 1, 2009 4:56 pm 27 Comments

G20, LONDON – A quick post on a hectic day: I’ve just interviewed Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian prime minister and the only representative from Africa (outside the G20) to attend the summit.

10:07 am 3 Comments

That’s the question our sister programme More 4 News put to viewers, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber and Steve Alambritis from the Federation of Small Businesses. It follows Barack Obama’s gift of 25 classic American movies to Gordon Brown when the British PM visited Washington last month.

March 23, 2009 3:07 pm 4 Comments

Obscene would be putting it too strongly, but it did seem odd talking about dead African children amid the gilded Louis XIV interiors of Lancaster House last week. One of London’s finest townhouses, just across the road from Buckingham Palace, this is where Rhodesia’s independence from Britain was signed in 1979.

11:03 am No Comments

George Soros in today’s FT makes similar points to those raised in my posts on Africa (Zambia here and Tanzania coming later today), Latvia and Hungary about the need “to protect the periphery countries from a storm created in the developed world… the periphery countries will suffer even more than those at the centre”.