8. No! Mr Obama

In a recent speech to the UN Security Council, Barrack Obama suggested that other countries should not be ready to criticise the US and then turn to it for help.

Many people around the world were looking for signs of a change of approach in the US camp. There has been a noticeable easing of tensions in some areas, and if we are hearing correctly there are significant efforts to improve the US way of conducting foreign policy. That we all applaud.

Whereas Mr Obama may well have implemented changes to the way the administration works the damage done by many decades of cultural and economic abuse is going to take some time to overcome, and to those of us well away from internal US politics there hasn't been any real sign, yet, of a change of modi operandi.

American companies are still pushing their products onto the world market as if theirs was the only way to do something. Until the word reaches the operational floors of many of the big American businesses that people in other countries see things differently, and expect to have their own cultural input into situations the situation cannot change.

Mr Obama's comment that those who oppose the American way need to join it or stop complaining sound very much like the "if you're not for us you're against us" approach of his predecessor. How about allowing people to have a different opinion?