China restless (.kmz), Geneva sleepless
Bear with me: I am trying something new today - blogging about two obsessions at once. If you click the link above, and you have Google Earth loaded onto your computer, you should see an annotated map of the last two weeks of social unrest in China. I believe it is an elementary form of something called "mashup". The data is taken from the latest Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Monitoring social unrest update and I plan to do one of these regularly: Chinese city names, let alone counties and rural police stations, can get you very confused and I wanted to see if there was a geographical pattern to the unrest reported. The answer is yes, obviously, for the ongoing post-earthquake unrest in Sichuan. But there is also an interesting ethnic sub-theme: many of the areas where there is unrest are either border areas or places where there are large minority populations. It's too soon to draw any conclusions from this but worth marking.
Obsession number two is the Doha trade round. Here's what I have been told about what happened last night, according to my contacts at the talks....
UPDATE! I am now being told 2000 hrs GMT is the likely collapse point for the Geneva talks. The watch shop at the airport better stay open late.
"The new group of seven key WTO powers (U.S., European Union, Japan, Australia, Brazil, India and the newly added member China), met until the early hours of Thursday morning to see whether they could thrash out a deal to save the Doha Round. The effort seems so have failed.
"Only those that were in the room actually know what happened; and they are not talking. Rumors circulating around the WTO suggest that it was a long, hard and gruelling night. No progress to speak of, just a confirmation that the differences between the seven members remain wide, and that no one is prepared to make the next move. The talks could very possibly collapse tonight.
"A this morning confirmed that the seven countries "still remain too far apart," but he has not given up."
When something happens, we will try to make sense of it on Newsnight
Comment number 1.
At 26th Jul 2008, barriesingleton wrote:TEST
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