World Trade Organization chief Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is expected to be reappointed Friday for a second term, in the shadow of the coming return of Donald Trump and his disdain for international trade rules.Okonjo-Iweala, the first woman and the first African to head the WTO, is the only candidate in the race, paving the way for the body’s 166 members to re-elect the 70-year-old Nigerian at a closed-door meeting.”It’s not so much that everyone loves Ngozi,” a source close to the discussions told AFP.Rather, members were “worried that if she doesn’t get reinstated, then it’s possible that the administration in Washington would slow things (or) block other contenders”, leaving a void at the top, the source said.”The alternative of no one leading the organisation is unacceptable to them.”Directors-general are typically chosen by consensus.This made it possible in 2020 for Trump to block Okonjo-Iweala’s appointment for months, forcing her to wait to take the reins until after President Joe Biden entered the White House in early 2021. Her term ends in August 2025, and the appointment process expected to lead to her next term had initially been scheduled to take months.But once it became clear that Okonjo-Iweala was the sole candidate, the discussions chair determined there was backing for a proposal by African states to bring forward the appointment.- Tensions – The unstated objective is to “accelerate the process, because they did not want Trump’s team to come in and veto her as they did four years ago”, said Keith Rockwell, a senior research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation.Rockwell, a former WTO spokesman, said that speeding up Okonjo-Iweala’s reappointment “creates tensions in the relationship with the United States, for sure — tensions which would probably have been there under any circumstances, but now this raises the stakes”. During Trump’s first term, the WTO also faced relentless attacks from his administration, which crippled the organisation’s dispute settlement appeal system, and threatened to pull the United States out of the organisation altogether.Trump has already signalled he is preparing to launch all-out trade wars, threatening to unleash a flurry of tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico on his first day in office on January 20.”The festival of tariffs announced to date shows that he has no intention of following any rules,” said Elvire Fabry, a researcher at the Institut Jacques Delors think-tank.”The United States would not even need to withdraw from the WTO,” she told AFP. “They are freeing themselves from the WTO rules”. In this context, the WTO chief will have “a firefighter role”, she said. – ‘Very difficult’ -It will be a question of “saving what can be saved, and making the case that there is no real alternative to the WTO rules”, said another source close to the discussions on speeding up Okonjo-Iweala’s reappointment.”It will be a very difficult mandate, with little certainty about what will happen.” Rockwell noted that the WTO’s problems were not solely linked to Washington.”It is a time right now in which application of the WTO rules has deteriorated,” he said.”You can’t blame all of this on the United States. That’s true of many other members as well.”Dmitry Grozoubinski, author of the book “Why Politicians Lie about Trade”, agreed.”Governments are increasingly turning to trade measures to address issues like national security, environmental competition, and re-industrialisation, and policymakers aren’t as moved as they once were by arguments that their ideas violate the letter or spirit of WTO commitments,” he told AFP. “If president-elect Trump makes destroying the WTO a priority,” he said, the organisation’s “options will be limited as the institution is not built to withstand overt demolition from within its membership”.Since taking the WTO reins, Okonjo-Iweala has tried to breathe new life into the fragile organisation, pushing for fresh focus on areas like climate change and health. But pressure is growing for WTO reform, in particular of the moribund appeals portion of its dispute settlement system, which collapsed during the first Trump presidency as Washington blocked the appointment of judges. 

Japanese electronics giant Sony is set to celebrate 30 years since it launched the PlayStation console, the little grey box that catapulted the firm into the gaming big league.PlayStation was Sony’s first foray into the world of video games and when it hit the shelves in Japan on December 3, 1994, the company needed to sell one million units to cover its costs.In the end, the gadget became a legend, selling more than 102 million units, helping to launch many of the industry’s best-loved franchises and positioning Sony as a heavyweight in a hugely lucrative sector.”PlayStation changed the history of video games,” said Hiroyuki Maeda, a Japanese specialist in video game history.”It truly transformed everything: hardware, software, distribution and marketing.”One of the keys to its success was broadening the appeal of a pastime that had often been dismissed as a hobby for children. From the off, the firm was clear that it wanted to trash this image.In part this stems from Sony’s rivalry with Nintendo, which was already a dominant player in the sector by the mid-1990s, but whose games skewed young.- Sony ‘humiliated’ -The original PlayStation can trace its history to a falling out between the two great Japanese firms.They had partnered in the late 1980s to develop a version of the Super Nintendo console with an in-built CD player.But Nintendo suspected Sony were using the project as a way to muscle into the gaming sector and abruptly cancelled the partnership in 1991.”Sony found itself in a humiliating position,” said Maeda, so pushed ahead with the project by itself.The hardware proved to be revolutionary, CD-ROMs being cheaper and storing much more data than the cartridges used by Nintendo and other consoles.And to further distinguish itself from Nintendo, Sony courted a young adult audience with fighting games like “Tekken”, out-and-out horror with “Resident Evil” and “Silent Hill”, and military titles like “Metal Gear Solid”.Its advertising also followed a more grown-up path.Hollywood auteur David Lynch was drafted in to direct ads for the PS2 launched in 2000 — conjuring a nightmare vision of floating heads and talking ducks certainly not meant for younger audiences.”The older audience obviously had better purchasing power than children,” said Philippe Dubois, founder of M05, a French association that aims to preserve digital heritage.The PS2 is still the most successful console in history, having sold more than 160 million units.- ‘New sensations’ -Over the past 30 years, the competition has intensified and the technology has been honed.While Sega and other rivals have fallen by the wayside, Microsoft has entered the fray with its Xbox, and Nintendo is still on the scene with its Switch console.But the industry is enduring tough times.A surge in popularity and investment during the pandemic has subsided and Sony’s PlayStation division recently laid off hundreds of workers.Plenty of analysts are also predicting that cloud gaming will soon render consoles obsolete.Sony appears undaunted though, recently launching an upgraded version of its PS5 with a marketing push that highlighted new AI features.Bloomberg has reported that the Japanese firm is also planning a new hand-held version of the PlayStation, which would once again pit it against old rival Nintendo, undisputed king of portable devices.However, for the purists, few innovations were as great as the original console’s ability to handle 3D graphics.The technology was instrumental for the appeal of classic games such as “Tomb Raider” and “Final Fantasy VII”.”We discovered sensations, emotions that we hadn’t experienced with earlier consoles,” said French YouTuber and PlayStation enthusiast Cyril 2.0.He said he had collected almost every title released for the PlayStation in Europe — some 1,400 — and insisted the formula for success was not complicated.”For consoles, games are still the most important thing,” he said.