The black-tie soiree, canceled last year because it might have seemed flippant during a buildup toward war in Iraq, has been reinstated. The executives and politicians have reserved suites in fancy hotels. As for security in these days of terror threats and alarms, the airspace over this snow-struck Alpine village will be closed and hundreds of police officers and up to 6,000 troops will be on patrol.
The World Economic Forum is once again luring the elite of business and governments and a handful of advocacy groups to the Alps, opening its annual session here yesterday.
But this year, 2,100 participants from 94 lands are mulling developments in a world with no single political focus and no overwhelming economic certainties.
Since a midyear session in Jordan last June, the road map to peace in the Middle East has become an indistinct trail to no obvious destination, while the US occupation of Iraq confronts a seemingly sustained insurgency. Signs of a global economic recovery conflict with worries about the weak dollar, corporate malfeasance, and other uncertainties stretching from China's boom to Europe's borrowing.
"This year you don't have an overriding issue," said Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the Forum, whose participants this year are set to include, among others, Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general; US Vice President Dick Cheney; former US President Bill Clinton; President Mohammad Khatami of Iran; King Abdullah of Jordan; General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan; and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
A contingent of American business leaders will include Bill Gates of Microsoft; Hewlett-Packard's chief executive, Carleton Fiorina; and Coca-Cola's chairman and chief executive, Douglas Daft. Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, is also set to attend.
Participants will be looking for potential breakthroughs on some points, Schwab said. Annan and Erdogan may discuss UN plans for territorial resolution in Cyprus, whose northern part has been under Turkish occupation since 1974. And around 20 trade and economic officials -- though not the most senior trade negotiators from the US or the EU -- are set to talk about restarting the global trade talks that collapsed last September in Cancun, Mexico. Cheney and Bremer are likely to urge broader international backing for the US vision of transferring power in Iraq, meeting officials said.
But there are notes of caution, too. One aim of the conference, Schwab said, will be to "make sure that people don't become euphoric" about the signs of global economic recovery.
The five-day gathering is not meant to reach any binding conclusions. Under pressure from busy executives, the program has been slightly shortened and downtime for skiing scrapped.
In recent years, the gathering, first held more than 30 years ago, has also acted as a lightning rod for opponents of globalization. Some groups have simply held their own meetings in Davos, but others have taken part in raucous protests.
But this year, anti-globalization groups have not applied for permission to march in Davos itself. Instead, they plan to demonstrate in a nearby town, Chur. The Swiss police say some protesters may try to break through a police cordon to reach Davos.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained