President Bush today tackled an array of subjects in a press conference with reporters.
The topics included: the state of the U.S. economy, including high energy and food prices; the progress of military operations in Afghanistan; the plans for extra spending on the war in Iraq; presidential relations with Congress; the decision by former President Jimmy Carter to meet with leaders of the terrorist group Hamas; and Bush’s expectations of how the next president will approach the war on terror.
A Senate Republican committee leader today blamed an ongoing global food crisis on “decades of misguided environmental and energy policies.”
James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said worldwide access to food is declining and prices are skyrocketing because of meddling politicians bureaucrats in Washington who have been afraid of expanding energy supplies.
Current policy that has led to the consumption of more corn as ethanol-based fuel rather than as food “has skewed common sense and has violated the principles of a sound energy policy,” Inhofe said on the Senate floor.
He urged Congress to revisit its December 2007 biofuel mandate and admit that it made a mistake by implementing it, and he said the Environmental Protection Agency should review its statutory options to relieve the impact of the mandate.
The United States will only hurt itself if it rejects a trade agreement with Colombia because America already has opened its market to Colombian products, according to a business executive focused on the relationship between the two countries.
Miguel Gomez Martinez, executive director of the Colombian-American Chamber of Commerce, made the comments in the latest issue of “America’s Business,” a show produced by the National Association of Manufacturers.
Only registered voters in the United States of America get to elect their next president come November, but seeing as how the United States is a global power and all, the Better World Fund thinks it’s time for a “global conversation” about that next president’s agenda.
The group, whose mission is to strengthen ties between the United States and United Nations, has launched an online video project called On Day One. It invites anyone to submit “ideas about what the next president can do on the first day of his or her administration to help address the world’s most pressing challenges.”
Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, is among those to offer his thoughts: “End the cowboy diplomacy. The next president needs to [restore] American credibility and American political and moral authority around the globe by reaching out to the rest of the world.”
Watch more videos here or at On Day One’s YouTube channel.
World leaders gather in Davos, Switzerland, next week for their annual forum to discuss how to make the world a better place. This year, they will be getting an assist from the online world.
The YouTube video-sharing site has invited its audience to submit video answers for the Davos gathering, much as they submitted video questions for presidential debates co-hosted by CNN and YouTube last year. The question that YouTube users are being asked to answer is, “”What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?”
The deadline for video answers is Monday, and since Jan. 1, YouTube users have been ranking each other’s answers. The highest-rated videos will be screened in Davos.
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