HONG KONG — Leaders of the world's most powerful nations and a few less powerful hangers-on, like Canada and Italy, have just spent a few more billions of their taxpayers' money as they failed to devise a rescue plan for a world economy that is still perilously close to the cliff edge of disaster.
Well, that's not entirely true. The leaders meeting in Toronto produced a communique that papers over the cracks between the countries, notably the United States, pressing for renewed economic growth as the answer to the world's woes and those, mainly the Europeans but with Prime Minister Naoto Kan's Japan in support, urging that cutting government deficits and the heavy overhang of debts is the most urgent task.