More summitry: APEC (A Perfect Excuse to Chat)

while george is winging his way from alaska to japan, let's see what he's headed into in busan, south korea - besides a mob of protestors (see below)...

Since it was founded 16 years ago the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum (Apec) has been dismissed by its critics as “A Perfect Excuse to Chat” or mocked for its awkward name as “four adjectives in search of a noun”.

[...]

“Apec is balanced on the brink of terminal irrelevance,” Allan Gyngell and Malcolm Cook of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, an Australian think-tank, wrote in a report last month entitled “How to Save Apec”.

Apec’s agenda had become “bewilderingly large”, the report said, covering issues ranging from shoulder-launched missiles and road accident statistics to projects for women exporters. “The expansion of the organisation’s functions seems inversely related to progress on its core goals,” it noted.

[...]

Supporters of Apec say the meeting will help co-ordinate the regional response to the threat of a bird flu pandemic. “This is not just a health issue,” said the official. “If you shut the borders there are all kinds of economic consequences.”

Even so, Apec’s critics think the forum, which will also look at matters such as energy security and negotiations to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons programmes, will lack focus.

lacks focus, eh... and so george is headed there to do what, precisely...? be "presidential...?"

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