With all the surprising people's revolutions that broke out in the Middle East and North Africa this year, will Africa follow soon? Not likely, which this Toronto Star tries to explain why. Poverty, a lack of a strong middle class, ethnic divides, and a lack of strong united heritage are the reasons cited. It's not surprising but it's a good little description of how complex sub-Saharan Africa is.

Get a glimpse into one of the few real remaining monarchies in the world, Swaziland, here. Swaziland, not Switzerland, is a little round country that is nestled snugly between the Northeast of South Africa and Mozambique. The article nicely describes this country ruled by a king and a charming little place that is actually a bit better off than much of South Africa, especially crime-wise, but it also has the highest AIDS rate in the world. It's also a place where media and political freedoms are seriously curtailed and there have been protests and detention of opposition figures in past months. As people become more modernized and economic problems become more pronounced, the monarchy will need to modernize and one wonders how long it can last.

Economist Amartya Sen compares India to China, showing how India seriously lags China, and even poorer neighbor Bangladesh, in health, education and poverty. It's hard to see that other than democracy, and even then this is dubious, India has nothing over China. On the other hand, it's also a good example of why democracy is useless without other factors like economic growth, stability and low corruption.

Things looking up in Africa's potential powerhouse? This Time Magazine article suggests they are as Nigeria prepares for presidential, parliamentary and regional elections later this month. Bedeviled by massive corruption, conflict and regional, religious and ethnic divisions, Africa's most populous nation and oil giant has never risen to its potential. The article makes the case that a turn in fortune for the better in Lagos, the former capital and megacity of over 20 million, might signify an improvement for the nation, though it's still kind of a stretch.

The world has changed a lot in the past 100 days, with Japan being somewhat brought to its knees by a freak combination of natural and nuclear disasters, and the Arab world being thrown into upheaval. While Japan has managed to control its ongoing nuclear problems (which may or may not have been seriously blown out of proportion by Western media), the Arab world, specifically Libya, is still facing serious issues. The Toronto Star describes the Arab uprising surviving 100 days and still going strong. Libya is in the midst of civil war with Western aerial military intervention, while Yemen, Bahrain and Syria have seen public protests and deaths of civilians.
The US has led the Western aerial intervention (now led by NATO, but with the US still in a leading role) in Libya, despite widespread foreign and local (US) concerns about military action against another Muslim country, and this is strongly a result of Libyan opposition, Arab League and international pressure for supporting the anti-Muamar Gadhafi rebels. What it shows is that for all the talk about US imperialism or conversely, the decline of the US, Europe is still not prepared or not willing to step up. I've never been a strong supporter of the US but this is one instance where it does not deserve the bulk of criticisms for its military role. On the other hand, there have been a slew of voices saying that this is all a sleigh of hand done by the US and Western powers, that instead of having been dragged kicking and screaming, the US actually orchestrated it this way, but for now, I'm going to say it sounds mostly like conspiracy theory.

The deck of this article below the headline says it all. As Japan recovers from its devastating natural disasters and civil war continues in Libya, West Africa, specifically the Ivory Coast (Cote d'Ivoire) is on the brink of civil war itself. The tensions stem from the results of last November's presidential elections, in which the incumbent leader Laurent Gbagbo declared his victory despite supposedly losing. The alleged winner, opposition leader Alassane Ouattara, has continued his claim for the presidency and forces loyal to him have started fighting with Gbagbo's troops. The nation endured a savage civil war, one of several in West Africa at that time, during the earlier part of the last decade and hasn't really recovered from it. If war was to break out again, it would be devastating and would require intervention from West African, African or even the international community.

Spare a thought for the Irish

The Celtic Tiger is no more, brought down stunningly by the 2008 global crisis. All those years of strong economic growth and sky-high housing and building prices and new construction was halted and ended, resulting in a crisis that many of Ireland's people still seem to be having difficulties understanding and getting over. Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair writer and author of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine and The Blind Side, wrote a lengthy piece that examines the Irish crisis. It's a sad story, with Lewis showing a sympathetic side whilst also describing in definite detail how the Irish helped cause their nation's economy to implode. Unlike the US and the rampant greed and duplicity behind its notorious subprime mortgage scheme that led to the global crisis, the Irish spending was less cynical and driven by more genuine optimism. Case in point, the Irish bank executives who benefited greatly from the rise in housing purchases invested in their own firms' bonds and stocks. This isn't the same as the heads of major banks and financial institutions in the US who walked away from the crisis chastened but with tons of cash. If there are any bankers in the world who deserves a little sympathy, it should be the Irish ones. But the biggest lesson in the article is how people who saw the housing boom for what it really was and who actually spoke out were ridiculed and derided. In the end, they were right but rightly so, there's no schaudenfraude.