A new issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly is out, on passing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. A review of Jungle Capitalists: A Story of Globalisation, Greed and Revolution by Peter Chapman. A review of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About it by Paul Collier. Three for Thought: What you need to read about global poverty. Arrested development: Distribution of aid is too important not to pause for a moment while discovering how funds might best be allocated. Is Bob Zoellick the next Paul Wolfowitz? Bush's popular nominee to head the World Bank could fall prey to the same problems that doomed his predecessor.
From Time Asia, a special issue on Hong Kong, 10 years after the handover. A review of The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order by David Smith; China: Fragile Superpower by Susan L Shirk; and Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China by Duncan Hewitt. The introduction to Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan by Daniel V. Botsman. Masahiko Fujiwara's The Dignity of a State re-ignites the debate about whether there are specifically “Asian” values.
From Prospect, Stephen Oppenheimer responds to readers' questions and comments on his October 2006 article on British ancestry. From The Observer, it is the debate on everybody's lips - just how British are we? Then came plans for a British Day. Then Gordon Brown spoke of "British jobs for British people". As a new study demands we celebrate "where we live" to combat social division, is there any way to define a nation's values? In Britain, the Scout movement still struggles to shake off a reputation as a place where men in shorts teach boys to tie rope. The French President's beautiful and strong-willed wife refuses to conform to expectations of how a statesman's spouse should behave. So maybe it's not surprising that she seems to attract more attention than her husband. Murder in the Pyrenees: When the unpopular mayor of Fago was found dead in a ditch, virtually the entire population of the isolated Spanish hamlet came under suspicion, writes Leslie Crawford. One man confessed - but was he telling the whole story. Sons of Italy: A long line of conservative Italian political thought goes ignored when we get caught up looking at Italy's current state
The Thin Iraqi Line: Can the U.S. train Iraq's military and police to be the anchor that steadies the country, or will they become part of the sectarian storm that terars it apart? The Guidebook for Taking a Life: The set of rules — a kind of jihad etiquette — that seek to guide and justify the killing that militants do is growing more complex. Defeat’s Killing Fields: An American defeat in Iraq would throw the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval.
From The Washington Post Magazine, freshman congressman Joe Courtney, elected by a margin of 83 votes, is learning that the first requirement of power is self-preservation. A review of The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the Most Corrupt Congressman Ever Caught (and an interview). Red Meat Season: The base likes it bloody. The candidates dish it up. Do the rest of us have to swallow it? Joel Achenbach wants to know. Noam Scheiber on how Mitt Romney's campaign shows who really runs the GOP. Fred Thompson is like Reagan without the new ideas. Nicholas von Hoffman on why we need fringe candidates. Politics 2.008: How will the Internet influence the presidential election?
