Regarding President Obama’s November 17-20 junket to southeast Asia, Investors Business Daily (IBD) wrote:So amid all the colorful and flirty photos from President Obama's first tour of Southeast Asia, what did he actually accomplish? As usual, he served himself politically in what was largely a Potemkin mission abroad.

New Zealand will not sign a Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement unless it removes tariffs on dairy products and allows the state-owned drug-buying agency to stay, Prime Minister John Key said yesterday. "We are not prepared to see dairy excluded," he said. "In the end, New Zealand can't sign up to the TPP if it excludes our biggest export."

Meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in Phnom Penh on Nov. 20, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda expressed a desire to accelerate talks to settle certain bilateral trade issues so that Japan can begin negotiations on entering the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade zone.

During remarks in Singapore, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Secretariat Executive Director Muhamad Noor has commented that the recent regional trade agreement breakthroughs in the Asia-Pacific are consistent with the goal of a region-wide free trade area.

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - The Indonesian delegation at the Annual Conference of the World Parliament (IPU, Inter-Parliamentary Union) urged the organisation to create a transparent and a fair world trade system. "In addition, the system should be non-discriminative, inclusive and concerned about the welfare of developing countries," said Arif Budimanta, an Indonesian legislative member of commission XI. 

Nov 26 (Reuters) - Russia has recently taken "a surge of protectionist measures", some of which break the global trade rules, the European Union said on Monday, citing in particular a ban on imports of live animals from the EU and a recycling fee on imported vehicles.

OTTAWA — The European Union wants Canada to agree to compensate European companies for any losses that stem from changes to health, environment or safety rules in Canada, according to documents obtained by The Canadian Press. A recent draft of the investment chapter of the broad free-trade agreement that Canada and the EU are negotiating shows 50 pages of complex, widespread disagreement between the two governments over how their investors should be treated in the other’s jurisdiction.

(Reuters) - China blamed quantitative easing for damaging emerging economies and rejected Brazil's proposal of using world trade rules to compensate for currency misalignments, during a debate at the WTO on Monday.

On his first trip abroad since he was re-elected, Barack Obama became the first US President to visit Burma before attending the East Asia Summit in Cambodia.

The World Trade Organisation's Dispute Settlement Body has adopted a report pertaining to the dispute over anti-dumping duties applied by China on grain oriented flat-rolled electrical steel (GOES) from the United States. GOES is a high-tech, high-value magnetic specialty steel that is used primarily by the power generating industry in transformers, rectifiers, reactors, and large electrical machines.