
With President Barack Obama on his way to meet his Chinese counterpart in Beijing for talks on global climate change and a range of other issues, a poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org shows that publics in more than half of 20 nations disapprove of the way China and the United States are dealing with global warming.
The poll asked respondents to grade China and the US on several dimensions. China gets poor marks for how it handles human rights--on average 52% say China does not respect human rights while just 36% say it does. The US does better, with 50% saying it is respectful and 38% it is not.
(Photos: Pete Souza/White House Photo, Office of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom)
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Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC World Service global poll finds that dissatisfaction with free market capitalism is widespread, with an average of only 11% across 27 countries saying that it works well and that greater regulation is not a good idea.
In only two countries do more than one in five feel that capitalism works well as it stands--the US (25%) and Pakistan (21%).
The most common view is that free market capitalism has problems that can be addressed through regulation and reform--a view held by an average of 51% of more than 29,000 people polled by GlobeScan/PIPA.
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