With east Africa in the grip of famine after its worst drought in 60 years, Germany's Africa policy coordinator has fingered an unlikely culprit: China. Agence France-Presse reports:

Guenter Nooke told the daily Frankfurter Rundschau it was clear that "this catastrophe is also man-made".

"In the case of Ethiopia there is a suspicion that the large-scale land purchases by foreign companies, or states such as China which want to carry out industrial agriculture there, are very attractive for a small (African) elite," he said.

"It would be of more use to the broader population if the government focused its efforts on building up its own farming system."

He said that the Chinese investments were focused on farming for export which he said can lead to "major social conflicts in Africa when small farmers have their land und thus their livelihoods taken away."

Today, a written statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry vehemently denied the allegations. "China has never had plans to buy land overseas, and China has never purchased land in Africa," the statement said, adding that Nooke's claims stemmed from "ulterior motives." The Foreign Ministry also announced today that it would provide $14 million in emergency food assistance to the Horn of Africa.

Beijing's protestations aside, Chinese investment in African farmland has ratcheted up significantly in recent years, as the government seeks to quell concerns about long-term food security. One estimate puts the number of Chinese farm workers in Africa at 1 million. Meanwhile, the Atlantic quotes a June 2009 report in the Chinese weekly Economic Observer that describes how Beijing "was planning to rent and buy land abroad" to deal with "increasing pressure on food security."

That said, it's worth noting that China is far from the only foreign investor with major land holdings in Africa today. Private and public investors from India, the United States, and the petrostates of the Middle East, to name a few, have taken their piece of the African land grab, which brought 15 to 20 million hectares of the continent under foreign investment between 2006 and mid-2009. By way of comparison, that's equal to the size of all the farmland in France. If Nooke is right about the connection between foreign investment and famine, seems like there's plenty of blame to go around.

Via Spiegel, Germany has finally tipped its hand as to how it plans to resolve the continuing crisis on the European periphery. With Berlin's blessing, the EU will soon help Greece buy-out its old debts at reduced cost:

At the moment, Greek state securities are being traded at a sizeable discount to their face value. A five-year bond, for example, is being traded at around 70 percent of its face value -- sometimes a little more, sometimes a tad less. Under the plan, in order to improve its debt position, the Greek government would offer to buy back securities from its creditors at a premium over the current market price. The transaction would be backed by the EFSF.

Investors would now face a choice: If they were to accept the bonds, then they would have to book a considerable loss. At the same time, they would have certainty that the losses would not be even greater.

Give credit to the policymakers for getting the central idea right: mere austerity is no match for the massive sovereign debt owed by Greece and its fellow PIIGS. Unfortunately, though, the EU hasn't dropped all its bad habits. This intervention, like its predecessors, seems destined to be a combination of too late, too weak, and too small.

The central problem is that the buy-out program is going to be entirely voluntary for the bond creditors, which raises the question of who, exactly, is going to participate in it. Bonds from Greece, Portugal and Ireland are held by hundreds of European banks, insurers and pension funds, few of which can afford to take the massive write-down on offer without being forced to declare bankruptcy (or seek bailouts) themselves. Getting the ledgers truly and sustainably straight across Europe will inevitably require a greater share of the pain being distributed to the institutions who were loaning all the cash in good times. But why would they abandon their leverage, and expose their massive vulnerability, without being forced to?

Indeed, the dirty secret of the whole EU financial crisis is that German banks are at the center of it, holding hundreds of billions of euros of questionable bonds. German policymakers have said little about that fact publicly, while, behind the scenes, they've used their influence to obscure it. They were abetted by the suspect stress tests applied to banks by the EU last year (these were the same stress tests that Irish banks managed to pass shortly before being nationalized).

But as Europe plans a new set of stress tests that it promises will be more stringent than the last, the day of true reckoning -- and the beginning of Europe's real healing -- might not be too far off.

As the G-20 talks get underway, we're thrilled to have Clyde Prestowitz guest-blogging for us over the next few days. Clyde is the president of the Economic Strategy Institute here in D.C. He served as counselor to the secretary of Commerce during the Reagan administration and as vice chairman of the President's Committee on Trade and Investment in the Pacific.

Be sure to check out his most recent book, The Betrayal of American Prosperity: Free Market Delusions, America’s Decline, and How We Must Compete in the Post-Dollar Era as well as his piece, Lie of the Tiger, from the November print issue of FP. -JK

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First, Barack Obama was shellacked in last week's congressional elections. Then, the U.S. president was garlanded in India and Indonesia. Now he's in Korea, where he's about to be waterboarded by the G-20.

Oh sure, the G-20 will come up with some paper-over language that will allow everyone to sign on to some vague agreement that it might be a good idea to achieve global rebalancing at some undetermined time in the next century. But this is just what the Japanese would call tatemae -- the packaging or superficial appearance of things. The honne -- the truth or actuality -- is that whether he knows it or not, the U.S. president has arrived in Seoul to preside over the end of the Flat World.

In fact, the Obama administration is demonstrating a lot of schizophrenia about this. In India, Obama couldn't stop spouting the conventional wisdom about how international trade is always a win-win proposition and how those who express concern about the offshoring of U.S. services jobs to India are just bad old protectionists.

At the same time, however, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is calling for some kind of deal for the G-20 governments to take concrete actions to reduce their trade surpluses or deficits. To be sure, Geithner has quickly backpedaled from his original proposal that governments would set hard numerical targets for the allowable limits of surpluses and deficits at 4 percent of GDP. His first fallback position was that the numbers would be only voluntary targets or reference points. When that elicited a new round of incoming fire he retreated further to the current proposal for agreement that each country will take the measures it thinks necessary to reduce excessive surpluses and deficits. Hardly much of a deal at all.

Yet even this is a revolution. No matter how watered down, Geithner's proposal is a call for managed trade. It is an implicit admission that contrary to 50 years of the preaching of economists, trade deficits matter. Even bilateral trade deficits can matter if they are big enough because they distort capital flows and exacerbate unemployment in the deficit countries. Further, it is an admission that unfettered, laissez-faire free trade is not self-adjusting and therefore not really win-win.

This implicit admission by Geithner has been manifested even more strongly (but still implicitly) by some of our leading free-trade economists and pundits. Thus, Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner and long a champion of conventional free trade has called for tariffs on imports from China. So has Washington Post columnist and eternal free trader Robert Samuelson, and even the Financial Times' economics columnist Martin Wolf has suggested that some offsetting response to China's currency manipulation might be necessary.

But Obama isn't going to get agreement to any of that in Seoul. None of the other countries want to face the fact that the United States cannot be Uncle Sugar and the buyer of last resort forever. In fact, Obama has asked both the Germans and the Chinese to help out a bit by consuming more and exporting less. The Germans told him bluntly to get lost and the Chinese told him somewhat more politely to get lost. So the honne is that the Germans, because they're Germans, and the rest of Europe, because it is in terrible financial shape and can't borrow any more, are bent on creating jobs by dint of export-led growth. Essentially, they are saying they are going to create jobs by taking U.S. jobs. The Asians are saying and doing the same thing. Neither Asia nor Europe is likely to take steps that will achieve significant rebalancing in any reasonable period of time. That, of course, means no new jobs for Americans.

The big question is whether or not Obama will respond to that refusal by taxing foreign capital inflows, imposing countervailing duties on subsidized imports, matching the tax holidays and other investment incentives used by China and others to induce off-shoring of U.S. production, and challenging the mercantilist practices of many Asian countries in the World Trade Organization (WTO). These are all measures that he could take himself in an effort unilaterally to reduce the U.S. trade and current account balances and thereby create jobs for Americans.

If he does, he is sure to be harshly criticized by the apostles of the conventional wisdom. But if he doesn't he is sure to be toast in two years.

Britain's deep cuts in defense spending mean it's far less likely that Her Majesty's armed forces will participate in future military interventions like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it will also reduce Britain's footprint in another part of the world, Germany:

Britain is to pull the last of its troops out of Germany 15 years ahead of schedule as part of a wide-ranging program of defense cuts.

Some 20,000 British service personnel are set to leave Germany in the next decade. The troops, originally stationed in the aftermath of the Second World War, had previously been set to remain until 2035.

Between this and Germany settling up its World War I debt, it does appear that Europe's 20th century wars may actually be over now. 

Tough times call for tough sacrifices. Economies everywhere, desperate to continue their uphill climb out of the global recession, have imbibed this sound logic, however grudgingly. The French, however, don't seem agree with the conventional wisdom: strikes erupted this morning across the country in response to President Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal to bump the retirement age from 60 to-gasp!-61 or 62.

Sarkozy has defended the new measure as a reasonable adjustment given increasing life expectancy. Indeed, he might be excused for merely following in the footsteps of his European colleagues-Germany recently raised the retirement age from 65 to 67. (Then again, these days any comparison to Angela Merkel may do more harm than help.)

So far, the French aren't buying the President's explanations, bringing the country to a near stand-still.  14 percent of teachers and 8 percent of hospital workers left work today to participate in protests, airport travel was disrupted, and even news agencies took a hit. NPR reported that "because there aren't enough journalists available to deliver news bulletins, the main public radio news channel in Paris is playing pop music intermittently."

It doesn't have quite the same high stakes as the Google-China showdown, but German Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner's broadside against Facebook's user privacy policies is an interesting case. Via Der Spiegel, here's an excerpt from her open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In particular, she takes issue with Facebook's passing user data to third parties and advertisers and its habit of changing its terms of use without telling users: 

As you know, I, in my capacity as Federal Minister of Consumer Protection, am striving to ensure that personal data on the Internet is protected. Private information must remain private - I think that I speak for many Internet users in this respect. Unfortunately, Facebook does not respect this wish, a fact that was confirmed in the most recent study by the German consumer organisation "Stiftung Warentest". Facebook fares badly in this study. Facebook was graded as "poor" in respect of user-data policy and user rights. Facebook also refused to provide information on data security - it was awarded a "5" (= poor) in this category as well. It is therefore all the more astounding that Facebook is not willing to eliminate the existing shortcomings regarding data protection, but is instead going even further. [...]

Should Facebook not be willing to alter its business policy and eliminate the glaring shortcomings, I will feel obliged to terminate my membership.

I doubt Zuckerberg is trembling at the prospect of losing Ilse Aigner as a user, but she's probably the highest profile official to voice complaints that are shared by quite a few users. In any event, this case blurs the traditional battle lines of Internet privacy debates in that it's the popular company that wants to collect user data and the government that wants to protect it. 

Oskar "The Red" Lafontaine, the polarizing leader of Germany Left party is stepping down to fight prostate cancer. Der Spiegel explains why this could be bad news for Angela Merkel's Conservative coalition:

Lafontaine's departure has robbed the party of its biggest electoral asset and is set to provoke a power struggle between its pragmatic eastern German wing and the more ideological westerners. It has also raised the likelihood of a broad-left wing "Red-Red-Green" alliance between the SPD, the Left Party and the Greens to challenge Angela's Merkel's center-right coalition in the 2013 general election, and in a string of regional state elections leading up to it.

Lafontaine, a populist who called former President George W. Bush a terrorist and questioned Western efforts to halt Iran's nuclear program, is a hate figure in the SPD because he abandoned the party in 1999, when he ditched his job as finance minister in a dispute with the SPD chancellor at the time, Gerhard Schröder. [...]

Media commentators say Lafontaine's exit creates a power vacuum in the Left Party and removes an obstacle to Red-Red-Green alliances. But they warn that major policy differences remain between the SPD and Left Party, and that the SPD cannot expect a major rebound just because the Left Party's heaviest hitter has quit the stage. The damage, commentators argue, has already been done.

Even with all the Left's votes, a Red-Red-Green coalition still wouldn't have beat the alliance between Merkel's CDU and the pro-business Free Democrats in the last election, but given the fragility of Merkel's coalition, this is certainly not welcome news.

Y2K has finally hit... about ten years late. Millions of Germans are currently coping with the effects of a systemic breakdown in the country's credit and debit card services. The episode is -- amusingly, except to those affected -- reminding many of the much-feared millennium computer bug.

"A piece of software on the affected cards, programmed by our suppliers, is defective, and cannot correctly recognize this year's number, 2010," the German DSGV banking association said on Tuesday.

Germans have been caught without massive supplies of bottled water, canned food, flashlights and first-aid kits -- but it seems life will go on. Fewer than half of German cards are affected, though that's little comfort to the many that've had their credit card eaten by the ATM.

Banking officials are claiming the problem will be fixed by next week.

They're the kind of citizens any cash-starved government would want: a group of wealthy Germans have launched a petition this week calling for higher taxes on wealthy Germans. The group claims that Germany could raise €100 billion if the richest people paid a five percent wealth tax for two years. 

Germany is not known as a low-tax country--tax revenues were 37% of GDP in 2007, in line with other EU countries, and above countries like South Korea (29%) and the United States (28%). The petitioners claim, though, that those who "made a fortune through inheritance, hard work, hard-working, successful entrepreneurship, or investment" should put their money into an economy that, while better off than some other EU counterparts, is still facing rising unemployment through next year.

But deficit hawks shouldn't start dreaming of a shift in worldwide tax perceptions: the petition has fewer than fifty signatures, and, after their most recent rally, one signatory told the AFP that it was "really strange that so few people came."

When it comes to using Holocaust metaphors, the power of suggestion is a loaded and delicate thing. Striking the right chord becomes ever more slippery when, for example, you use the most recognizable image of Holocaust evil, Adolf Hitler, to illustrate the recklessness of unprotected sex. But you just about lose any hope of keeping that line clean and clear when you make a Hitler sex video for an AIDS PSA. Which is what a small German AIDS awareness group called, Regenbogen e.V, did. 

While the Telegraph says the clip appears to be a "typical advert" at first glance, I imagine most American viewers won't agree. The act of intimacy being portrayed is basically soft-core porn. It shows two very naked hard-bodies engaged in some very steamy sex. (Warning: this video ain't for the kiddies and is probably not safe for work.) The commercial's obvious-to-the-point-of-insult message, that unprotected sex is very, very dangerous, is hammered home with a rather indelicate ... bang. As the couple reaches climax, the man's face is revealed -- it's Hitler. Scary, indeed.

Not surprisingly the ad, released in Britain to coincide with World AIDS day, has created a storm of controversy. A spokesman for the National AIDS Trust, the group that coordinates World AIDS Day in Britain, had this to say: 

Of course there are many HIV organisations that run their own campaigns, however I think the advert is incredibly stigmatising to people living with HIV who already face much stigma and discrimination due to ignorance about the virus.

"On top of this it fails to provide any kind of actual prevention message (e.g. use a condom) and may deter people to come forward for testing.

"The advert is also inaccurate because in the UK thanks to treatment HIV is a manageable condition that does not necessary lead to AIDS.

Hans Weishäupl, creative director of das comitee, the group that created the ad for Regenbogen e.V, defended the work:  

A lot of people are not aware that Aids is still murdering many people every day. They wanted a campaign which told young people that it is still a threat," he said. "In Germany, Hitler is the ugliest face you can use to show evil." 

Provocative it may be, but successful? I doubt it. Would it be a gross and malicious misinterpretation to use this ad to say that people who have unprotected sex, or people with HIV or AIDS, are as evil as Hitler? Absolutely. Is it a stretch to say there are folks out there who will do just that? Nope.

Using the evil führer's personage for good is a tricky business, one that should perhaps be left to the Charlie Chaplins of the world. 

Spiegel reports:

This week, two of Germany's most important solar energy projects came online -- the second biggest solar power project in the world and one of the first solar thermal "power towers." The projects are part of the country's plan to provide 20 percent of its energy through renewable sources.

Officials flicked on the switch at two of Germany's most important new solar energy sites on Thursday. In the eastern state of Brandenburg, the world's second-largest solar energy project went online. And halfway across the country, in North Rhine-Westphalia, a smaller scale but perhaps equally important facility launched -- Germany's first solar-thermal power plant.

MICHAEL GOTTSCHALK/AFP/Getty Images

If you got it, flaunt it. At least that's what my grandmother used to say, and I imagine if she could see the campaign ads coming out of Germany this week, she'd probably laugh. And Vera Lengsfeld, who is running for a parliament seat in Germany's upcoming September elections, is banking on the fact that constituents will have a sense of humor.

The ad (shown above) pairs pictures of Lengsfeld and none other than Chancellor Angela Merkel, shoulder to shoulder showcasing the bountiful assets bestowed upon them by Mother Nature -- two very ample bosoms barely contained by two seriously wide and plunging necklines. The line that runs across reads: "We have more to offer."

No doubt, where there's more chest, there's more attention. Lengsfeld, who did not clear the ads with Merkel, reports that traffic to her blog has increased, getting as many as 17,000 visitors since this campaign went public.

Her takeaway on all this? 

If only a tenth of them also look at the content of my policies, then I will have reached many more people than I could have done with classic street canvassing."

It's an interesting acknowledgement on Lengsfeld's part, she's clearly aware that the show-stopping photos aren't appealing to the thinking minds of men and women, though it sounds as though she's hoping the ad's wit will trump the old T&A approach.

Many of those not laughing are likely to be women who find the posters, and the ploy behind them, cheap and offensive. The glass ceiling runs far and wide, thicker over some places than others, and apparently the profiles of men cast long shadows, even over the most powerful women in global politics. Truthfully, I'd like to see a man foolish enough to market his campaign "package" in the same fashion ... Or has Berlusconi kind of done that already?

MICHAEL GOTTSCHALK/AFP/Getty Images

Although Britain's expenses scandal hurt politicians on both sides of the aisle, the Labour Party did bear the brunt of the blow, with several cabinet ministers resigning in the aftermath. The opposite may happen in Germany: Chancellor Angela Merkel's health minister is under fire after her official car was stolen, but, fortunately for Merkel, the health minister is from the opposition.

The German health minister, Ulla Schmidt, has been criticised after her official car was stolen in Spain, where she was using it during her vacation.

The 90,000 euro (£78,000) Mercedes S-class was stolen in Alicante.

Mrs. Schmidt flew there at her own expense. Her chauffeur drove 2,400km (1,500 miles) to meet her so she could carry out some official business.

But opposition politicians want to know why she needed her car in Spain, when embassy vehicles are available.

Schmidt has filled the role of Health Minister since 2005, when Merkel's Christian Democrats formed a grand coalition with the opposition Social Democrats. Schmidt's scandal comes at a particularly poor time for her party, as Merkel's party has increased its lead in the polls to 12 points only two months before a new round of elections. 

Also, German ministers get a Mercedes S-class for official business? Snazzy.

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a transnational, multi-denominational, interfaith co-op of superheroes? International diplomacy may well have found a new medium: the comic book -- forging inspired coalitions, and trumpeting unlikely champions. 

In anticipation of upcoming elections, a 64-page comic novel featuring heroine Angela Merkel has hit Germany's streets. As some critics are noting that it took three and a half years for the German chancellor to be satirized in this way is something of a compliment, especially when pitted against  similar works based on Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown. Indeed laughs wasn't the only aim with the Merkel bio-comic: "We wanted to both amuse and educate readers about the main points in her life," its creator told reporters.

And while Merkel may be giving Wonder Woman a run for her money, Batina the Hidden, the burka-wearing heroine of The 99, a Muslim comic book series, is suiting up to join forces. 

The United States' DC Comics and Kuwait's Teshkeel Comics will collaborate on an "unprecedented" miniseries collaboration expected to hit shops within the year.

Characters of The 99 anthology battle evil the "Islamic way," representing the 99 attributes of Allah. The 99 comic books "sell about 1m copies a year, enjoy a high profile in the Middle East. The adventures are to be made into an animated film, while the first of several 99-inspired theme parks has opened in Kuwait."

There's some question about how Wonder Woman's immodest getup will cross the cultural lines abroad while others are accusing the American creators of "Muslim pandering," but creators are optimistic that in a post-Bush world, the American superheroes will be welcome among Middle East readership. 

And so it would seem Obama will be adding international comic book alliances to his list of recent triumphs.  

ADEK BERRY/AFP/Getty Images