- In the US the Libyan city of Benghazi has gone from being shorthand for the furore over the 2012 attack on the US embassy to a political weapon for the Republican party, says the FT’s Geoff Dyer.
- Jeffrey Frankel, professor of economics at the Harvard Kennedy School, argues that the US is still the worlds largest economy by some distance: “the fact that rice and clothes are cheap in rural China does not make the Chinese economy larger. What matters for size in the world economy is how much a yuan can buy on world markets.”
- Egypt is begging tourists to visit despite politicial turmoil as livelihoods dwindle and nest eggs disappear.
- Boko haram doesn’t literally mean “Western education is a sin”. A more subtle translation of the name reveals that the group actually has a rather domestic focus.
- As monarchic dynamics shift in the Arab Gulf, the disputes of the Kuwaiti royal family are shifting into public view.
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Smart Reads May 9, 2014
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