o visit the President and hopes to use the opportunity to secure a global response to the economic crisis before next month s G20 summit in London.Mr Obama s economic stimulus package, the Prime Minister said: If America and Britain did similar things for the economy then the effects would be magnified. acknowledged public concerns that the invasion of Iraq had damaged the transatlantic partnership. I want to talk about the renewal of our relationship for new times, he said. an interview with talkSPORT, he hinted that the stiff reserve he displayed towards George Bush on his first visit to Washington as Prime Minister had been replaced by warmth for a President he sees as a fellow progressive: I think the impression he has given of America to the world is transformative. I think people s view of America is changing as a result. will support Mr Obama in efforts to reduce dependence on foreign oil and achieve a low-carbon economy that could, he says, create hundreds of thousands of jobs across the world and drive economic recovery. Brown will also call on countries to renounce protectionism as one of the six key elements of a global new deal at the G20 summit on April 2. Mr Obama is under pressure to protect jobs by putting up trade barriers. items on the agenda today will be Afghanistan, the Middle East and climate change, plus an attempt by Mr Brown to get Mr Obama s commitment to the goal of universal access to primary education by 2015. Blair will be in Washington for a climate change conference but is not expected to meet his successor.The Economist 27th 2008 Iraq it really coming right? SHOULD be momentous. In Baghdad in the middle of this week, after fierce debate and protests on the streets, Iraq s fractious parliament at last voted to approve a withdrawal agreement with the United States, under which all American troops will leave the country by the end of 2 011. And yet the mood of this exhausted country is far from jubilant. Mosul, 320km (200 miles) north of Baghdad up the Tigris river, the governor of Nineveh province, Doraid Kashmoula, furrows his brow, fiddles with his worry-beads in one hand, stubs out yet another cigarette with the other and reels off a litany of woe in his dankly curtained office. The scion of a prominent Sunni Arab family, he took the job two years ago after his predecessor, his cousin, was assassinated.then he has survived half a dozen murder attempts. His son, a brother and four cousins ??have been killed by insurgents. His house has been burnt down. He is protected both by the Kurdish guerrillas, who control the eastern half of the city and a clutch of fortified government buildings in the western half, and by the Iraqi army and police, with American forces at their shoulder, when he ventures farther afield.
Security is slowly getting better, he says, without much conviction. At present the insurgents carry out about ten attacks a day in his province, including car bombs and ambushes, mostly in the vicinity of Mosul. In each of the past four months, more than 100 civilians and about a score of army and police have been killed, according to official figures.provincial council s chairman, another Sunni Arab, tells a similar tale. From a drawer in his desk he takes a sheet of paper displaying 12 coloured photographs of martyrs: four brothers and eight cousins, all murdered because of their kinship to himself. A councillor representing the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), a long-established Sunni outfit which heads the main Sunni block in the national parliament and is led by one of the country s two vice-presidents, Tariq al-Hashemi, says that 420 of his party members in Mosul have been killed in the past two years. Nineveh s deputy governor, a Kurd, says that 1,600 of his people in Mosul have died at the hands of insurgents since the American invasion-as have many more Arabs. knows how many insurgents operate in the area. Maybe 5,000, says the council chairman, describing a spectrum from al-Qaeda fanatics to secular Baathists. Plus a million supporters, he adds, with a mirthless laugh. As the Americans and their Iraqi army allies successfully hunt them down elsewhere in Iraq, many have gravitated to Mosul. It is close to Syria, from which foreign jihadists still infiltrate. The city has a history of Baathist loyalty to Saddam Hussein and hostility to the Shias, who count for barely 5% of its people. s multiple fault-lines are especially visible-and occasionally bloody-in Nineveh and Mosul. Some towns in the province have a record of Shia-Sunni enmity. Nineveh has Iraq s largest minority of Christians, themselves divided into various sects, some speaking Aramaic, the language of Christ. In a northern arc dwell the Yazidis, more than 500,000-strong they claim, who follow an ancient religion that reveres a Peacock Angel; many Muslims damn them as devil-worshippers. Then there are the Shabaks, who claim descent from Persi...
