The world according to The Economist (2)

Each week I will chose some interesting articles from recent issues of The Economist.

From number 8597 (september 13th 2008):

In a long briefing the huge problems facing Egypt are discussed. What will happen when the current president Hosni Mubarak steps down? He is not likely to leave voluntarily but he is 80 years old and will not hang on for much longer. The country is corrupt, authoritarian, poor and violent, and Mubarak bears a lot of responsibility for that. Even though Egypt has made some progress when it comes to the economy, hardship will continue and around 45% of the population is still poor or very poor according to the article. So what's going to happen? Will Mubarak's son Gamal take over? Will there be civil war? What will the Muslim Brotherhood do?

A short but telling article, How dukes improved diversity, is musing over the fact that New Labour's effort to make the House of Lords more representative and "less posh, less white and less male" has mostly succeeded in making it less representative due to the fact that most members are now from the London area, leaving the rest of Britain with very few voices in Westminister. Voices that were there before.

In Brazil, as in so many other developing countries where the economy has taken off, the middle class is rising. An article, Half the nation, a hundred million citizens strong, looks at what that might mean for Brazilian politics. Less people are poor, more children go to school, more people work in the "white" sector and the number of cosmetic operations done each year is increasing (it is now the second highest in the world). The growing clout of the middle class may make Brazil more stable, more conservative, more predictable. Well, more middle class.

The world according to The Economist (1)

Each week I will chose some interesting articles from recent issues of The Economist.

From number 8596 (september 6th 2008):

Lexington (the weekly column about USA) wrote about Sarah Palin and the frustrating fact that John McCain continues the Republican habit of chosing candidates based on their views on moral issues and especially abortion, which they of course must be against, and not based on their competence.

In an article about aid, the theme was the fact that there are so many aid organisations working in poor countries that it has gone out of hand and become counterproductive. They are competing with each other and doesn't co-ordinate the ground work and the countries they are supposed to help are simply swamped. For one thing the bureaucracy is overwhelming recieving countries and the article qoutes African health workers that has to spend their days sitting in meetings with western delegates instead of doing there job, working with those that are sick.

Another article, a report from the West Bank, tells about how the Palestinians are more and more cut of from their land and their neighbours by Israel's security barrier. The reasons for building it is to stop suicide bombings in Israel, but the way it zigzags deep into Palestinian areas and not along the pre-1967 border suggests another reason. Grabbing land for settlers, which will make peace even more difficult to achive.