Is foreign aid effective ?
To accept handouts for one's needs is injurious to pride - be it for an individual or nation. When poverty was grinding, Bangladesh and other similarly placed countries swallowed it by accepting foreign aid in large dollops. The debate as to whether aid really helps countries grow is not settled...
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Ten Weimar lessons
Since the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, Germans have looked back anxiously to the collapse of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s and the rise of Nazism. But with many of the world's democracies under growing strain and authoritarianism on the rise, the lessons of...
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Unequal rules
The luxurious foliage that formed such a pleasant natural barrier around one side of the National Parliament didn't come up on its own. It was planned, planted and nurtured. So when nature chose to uproot, twist and mangle many of those trees in the form of an unusually savage nor'wester,...
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The political crisis in the Maldives: An overview
The Maldives is a chain of atolls in the Arabian Sea, south west of Sri Lanka with only a population of 400,000, has been in the news since the beginning of February this year. The capital city Male, where one-third of the country's population live, is just 2.4 metres above...
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