Angela's ashes

[CHIMO]

At the edge of town there are cornfields, then thick woodlots, and beyond these a fenced-off compound the other children dared not visit. The plain, earnest 14-year-old girl would finish her work in the math class for gifted students each afternoon, bid farewell to her friends at the entrance to the squat red-brick school and make the long walk back to that mysterious place.

Angela Kasner always came from outside: Her father, a Lutheran minister, moved his family shortly after her birth from wealthy, West German Hamburg to this underpopulated northeast corner of communist East Germany, near his birthplace. It was a voyage of conviction: Horst Kasner was a believer in both Marx and God, and wanted to use both to support the new German Democratic Republic.

Angela was never quite accepted here. She faced double exclusion, as the protected child of an elite Party member and at the same time a Western-born outsider with a religious affiliation that made her suspect and untrustworthy. So she developed strategies: a deliberate, silent non-engagement; an avoidance of causes; and a plodding, careful approach to problems.

“I must admit I didn't see any leadership qualities in her – she struck me as a very competent student,” says Hans-Ulrich Beeskow, the math teacher who tutored her to her first major achievement as an East European “math olympics” champion, guiding me around her childhood home. “She was a slow but methodical student, and she had a particular approach: She would propose a possible solution, and then work backwards to see how she'd be able to arrive at it. I still see that approach in her today.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/angelas-ashes/article1302366/



Report: US-Initiated WTO Rules Could Undermine Regulatory Overhaul of Global Finance

LORI WALLACH: Well, see, this is the most peculiar aspect of it. The European Union, as you just mentioned, Angela Merkel, among others, have been pushing for more regulation, and in fact they want the G-20 to have a—to establish a global floor of regulation. The US hasn’t been for that. It’s not going to be in this communiqué, but they’ve really been pushing. But simultaneously, it’s the European Union that is the major instigator of deregulation.

And so, the big development is we finally were able to get documents that actually explain what the plan is for the WTO Doha round, and it’s the European Union that’s been pushing the worst of it. I mean, they literally want a provision that is a standstill, a freeze in place, on regulation, while simultaneously they’re calling for re-regulation. You can’t have it both ways.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/25/report_us_initiated_wto_rules_could