This was not the first time that Japan had impressively reinvented itself.

Indeed, given Germany s surprisingly impressive employment performance, another Wirtschaftswunder appeared to be in the making.

Moreover, Hu has fomented nationalism, not by taking understandable pride in China s impressive economic growth, but by demonizing Japan.

In particular, China s breathtaking economic success seems to point to the existence of viable authoritarian alternatives to the Western idea that freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and the market economy are bound together.

In particular the outstanding success of the work of Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh with the Grameen Bank, has led to the attempts to spread microenterprise credit schemes around the world.

But Israel s breathtaking victory against three Arab armies in 1967 brought it not only grandeur, but also moral and political decay.

More troubling still is that Libya s violence reveals certain features of the Middle East that had been forgotten after the heady success in Tunis and Cairo.

Two hundred years of breathtaking innovation since the dawn of the industrial age have produced rising living standards for ordinary people in much of the world, with no sharply rising trend for unemployment.

So did the meteoric rise of the Nasserist candidate Hamdin Sabbahi to third place, and the fourth place finish of Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, who was backed by liberals and hardline Salafi Islamists alike.

Redundant workers have ended up in worse performing activities, such as informal services, causing economy wide productivity to stagnate, despite impressive manufacturing performance.

Senator Barack Obama's astounding success in Iowa the first of the caucuses that will ultimately result in the victorious nominee from each of the two main political parties going on to contest the 2008 US presidential election has struck a chord with many Caribbean bloggers.

Korean popular culture has also crossed borders, particularly among younger people in neighboring Asian countries, while the impressive success of the Korean diaspora in the US has further enhanced the attractiveness of the culture and country from which they came.

But former Premier Wen Jiabao rightly described this impressive growth performance as unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable, highlighting the many economic, social, and environmental costs and challenges that have accompanied it.

As is apparent from the curriculum vitae of Professor González Campos, the Spanish candidate is a jurist with an outstanding professional background that combines a brilliant teaching and research career in the field of international law with a distinguished record as a judge and adviser on international affairs.