GroundTruth

PITTSBURGH – A fog is just lifting over the city of three rivers as world leaders begin to arrive here for the Group of 20 summit.

Led by GlobalPost managing editor Tom Mucha, GlobalPost has provided an outstanding body of work on the global economy in recent weeks. That coverage culminates over the next two days as the G-20 leaders try to come up with the game plan to keep the global economic recovery rolling forward and how to prevent the world from sliding back into crisis.

We have been working in partnership with one of our newspaper syndication partners, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, one of America’s great city newspapers, which has done an excellent job covering the events. Their on-line team has built a very cool web page for the paper’s coverage and a running blog, “The Big Story.”

The Post-Gazette has also featured our interactive graphic, “The World Comes to Pittsburgh: A G-20 Survival Guide,” which was edited by Mucha and created by our ace web developer Luke Parlin out of our offices in Boston. The graphic features 20 reports from 20 correspondents on the G-20 counries and is a survival guide to the events here, providing you with the players and the positions they hold. Tom and Luke also worked with our correspondents in the field to build “World of Trouble: Is the Nightmare Over?” This is the third version we’ve published of an interactive map that allows you to see the global economic crisis — and the slow grinding recovery — from the vantage point of our correspondents around the world.

Here in Pittsburgh, I have been working with Cynthia Skrzycki, a GlobalPost businesss columnist and expert on regulation who also happens to live here in Pittsburgh. So she provides the groundtruth for us on this great city.

I arrived in Pittsburgh and immediately starting writing about this gritty and welcoming city and how it was bracing for the world to arrive on its doorstep. The city was chosen to host the G-20 summit because of its stunning Renaissance from a dying steel mill town to a vibrant, modern city that has reinvented itself as a center for medicine, academia and technology.

There’s heavy security here with 900 Pittsburgh police and 1000 additional police sworn in from forces around the country who are on hand to protect the city from a small army of protesters, activists and anarchists who are threatening to disrupt the gathering of world leaders as they did so effectively at past summits in San Francisco and Genoa, Italy. Wednesday, Greenpeace successfully carried out an operation by climbing a bridge with repelling ropes and unfurling a huge banner that read: “DANGER: Climate Destruction Ahead. Reduce CO2 Emissions Now.”

The next days will bring to a culmination an extraordinary week for those who follow foreign policy debates on Afghanistan, Iran, Israel-Palestine and the efforts by the US and the Group of 20, of G-20, countries to address the crisis. And GlobalPost is covering it all from the psychotic ramblings of Muammar Gadhafi to the important speech by President Obama to the protests that greeted Iranian president Ahmadenijad in New York. Be sure to check out the analysis-with-edge by our new GlobalPost columnist, Mohamad Bazzi, who will be writing on the Muslim world for us.

It’s a big week for those who follow the issues that affects us all — the struggles against terrorism, climate change, nuclear proliferation, the global economy and the Obama administration’s still emerging foreign policy — and GlobalPost has a lot of groundtruth for you to check out. Let us know what you think by posting comments here or on GlobalPost.