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INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS: HIGHLIGHTS AND EXCLUSIVES, NOVEMBER 3, 2008 ISSUE
COVER: The Green Rescue (All overseas editions). Paris Bureau Chief Christopher Dickey and Special Correspondent Tracy McNicoll report on why a growing number of countries around the world are opening up to clean energy businesses and taking advantage of the lucrative possibilities that come with them. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and American presidential candidate Barack Obama have all taken up the cause of what United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called a "green New Deal" that would rebuild and reshape the world's economy the way President Franklin Roosevelt's program did during the Great Depression. "I know that some people may be saying that the difficult financial circumstances that the world now faces mean that climate change should move to the backburner of international concern," Brown said. "I believe the opposite is the case."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165769
'A Full Blown Crisis.' Chief European Economics Correspondent Stefan Theil looks at why emerging markets will not save the world. After a series of economic implosions in the 1990s, former shooting stars such as India, Vietnam, Hungary and Argentina had shored up their national balance sheets, paid off the IMF and built up significant rainy-day savings. Now currencies are imploding, capital flows are drying up and central banks from Asia to Latin America are drawing down their reserves to prop up currencies. It turns out that vital parts of many countries' economic success have been as unsustainable as an American zero-down, adjustable-rate mortgage.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165771
The Best Hope Is Stagnation. Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, writes that the United States today looks like Japan in 1998. Both have seen crises of solvency leading to a credit freeze and the failure of large financial institutions. The difference, according to Sharma, is that "the United States has been forced to move quickly to the bailout phase following the financial-market panic of this year," rather than waiting nearly 10 years as Japan did from 1990 to '98. "The lesson of Japan is that U.S. policymakers can prevent a depression but can't engineer a new growth cycle," Sharma writes. "This is not so much about a crisis in capitalism or the demise of the Anglo-Saxon model...It's the beginning of an era that may come to be known as the Great Stagnation 2.0."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165770
The World That Awaits. Contributing Editor Richard N. Haass offers advice on the global challenges that await the 44th president. In a memorandum to the president-elect, he writes that the world he is about to inherit "is not the world you've been discussing on the trail." "The good news is that many of the arrows in Iraq are finally pointing in the right direction and it will not dominate your presidency. The bad news is that you know you are in for a rough ride when Iraq is the good news," writes Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165648
The Right Way Back. New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg offers the next U.S. president advice on how he should handle issues such immigration, education and the economy after taking office. "By the time you take the oath of office, the worst of the bank panics should be behind us. And while the economy may well be in a full-fledged recession, leading the country out of it, and laying the foundation for a new century of growth and prosperity, can't be done in a few short months-and it can't be done with regulatory reform alone," Bloomberg writes. "It is critical that you not allow Congress to confuse regulatory reform with an economic agenda. The long-term health and strength of the nation's economy depends less on the shape of federal regulations than on the country's capacity for growth and innovation."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165642
INTERVIEW: Britain's Comeback Kid. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown tells Special Diplomatic Correspondent Lally Weymouth what he thinks about the global financial crisis and shares his thoughts on creating a new global financial framework. One of the key components to what he envisions is an early warning system for the world economy. "You need either the Financial Stability Forum or the International Monetary Fund to be effective at looking at trends and forces across continents," Brown says. "You need to have rules for global supervision that are similar between countries. So you need standardized accounting rules; you need standard ways of dealing with write-offs; you need standard ways of dealing with disclosure and transparency."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165651
The Age of Innocents. Special Correspondent Michael Miller reports that while the vast majority of those killed in Mexico's violent drug wars are affiliated with the cartels, a growing number of innocents, including children, have been killed in the past year. The violence is a reaction to President Felipe Calderón's aggressive moves against the cartels. When he came to power in 2006, Calderón announced he would use federal troops to target narcotraffickers. The increased attacks on innocents since then suggest the cartels are now trying to increase their pressure on Calderón. The message: call off the troops or else.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165780
BOOK REVIEW: What Vietnam Teaches Us. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reviews Gordon M. Goldstein's "Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam." Kissinger writes that the book illuminates the five years (1961-1966) during which the defense of South Vietnam was Americanized as well as the mistakes we are still making today.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165653
WORLD VIEW: Why McCain Won. Senior Editor and Columnist Jonathan Alter writes about the Democratic Party's nightmare: losing the election because of "low-information voters" and racism. It probably won't happen, but "millions of people in the rest of the world assume that Barack Obama cannot be elected because he is black. They assume that the original sin of American history-enshrined in our Constitution-cannot be transcended," Alter writes. "I go into next week's election with a different assumption-that the common sense and decency of the American people will prove the skeptics wrong."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165657
THE LAST WORD: Robert Gates, U.S. Secretary of Defense. In a recent interview with Newsweek, Gates discussed the national security challenges he sees waiting for the next administration and why this is a more dangerous world than it was during the cold war. "In the cold war, you had the cosmic risk of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. But the truth is that, other than the Cuban missile crisis and maybe one or two other occasions, that threat was really theoretical," Gates says. "The reason I said it was a more dangerous world...is that the consequences of conflict, or an attack, are not nearly as cataclysmic as had there been a conflict with the Soviet Union. But the risks of one are far greater."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/165810
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