What We’re Reading

Mar 12th, 2009 9:39 AM UTC
By Steve Wilson

Washington Post – Treasury Seeks Billions More to Aid Ailing Nations

U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner yesterday unveiled a sweeping plan that calls on the United States and other nations to offer billions more to bail out economies in crisis and prods a reluctant Europe to prop up the reeling world economy with more aggressive government spending. Geithner said the administration will ask Congress to make $100 billion more available — nearly doubling the current U.S. commitment — to the International Monetary Fund to aid struggling nations. The debate over how to rescue the global economy is setting up a clash of ideas just as finance chiefs are converging in London this weekend to hash out a unified approach to the crisis.

CNN – Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton team up to honor women
  
Yesterday, first lady Michelle Obama joined Secretary Hillary Clinton at the State Department to celebrate champions of women’s rights around the world. The event was to celebrate the State Department’s Women of Courage Awards, but highlighted how both the current and former first ladies have made women’s rights a signature issue. You “can’t solve problems of financial crisis, climate change, disease and poverty if half of the population is left behind,” Clinton said. The rights of women will “always be central to our foreign policy.”

Reuters – IMF, Africa agree new partnership, call for aid
  
African nations and the IMF agreed on Wednesday to a new partnership and called on industrial countries to keep their promises of increased aid despite the global financial crisis. “It is time for the IMF to adapt to this new era,” IMF Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said at the end of a two-day conference on the IMF’s role in Africa and the impact of the financial crisis. He said developed countries could no longer tell others how to run their economies. “It is totally unfair that African countries and other low-income countries which had nothing to do with the causes of the crisis are now hard hit,” he said.

AP – U.N. Chief to Share Concerns with Congress
  
Buoyed by President Obama’s pledge to work on bringing peace to Darfur, the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is making the rounds of Capitol Hill to strengthen cooperation on climate change and other pressing global crises. Yesterday, the Secretary-General met with Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., the House Foreign Relations chairman, and with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Climate change was expected to dominate Ban’s meetings. There also has been interest on the Hill about Sudan.

L.A. Times – World hunger, the crisis inside the economic crisis
  
A LA Times columnist writes that the economic crisis is now hitting the world’s bottom billion. With food prices remaining steady and job opportunities plummeting in the developing world, chronic malnutrition and hunger is once again the rise. The columnist writes, “If the Group of 20 leading and developing nations meeting in London this weekend pushes the food problem to the back burner to focus only on financial stabilization, the annual begging for emergency food aid — the most expensive, least sustainable form of foreign aid — will never end, and neither will the suffering.”

-Steve Wilson

TAGS: ONE, Policy News