• The Australian Financial Review warns that Brazil should try to avoid the trajectory of Italy from the 1990s on in falling prey to Berlusconi-like populism.
• Bookforum looks at the very early history of word processing for writers.
• Bloomberg View suggests that an inflexible China is on its way towards a Japan-style slump.
• CTV News reports on despair ( Read more... )

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Jack Kerr of Vice reports on something that actually does look quite sketchy.

FIFA and the Asian Football Confederation may be turning a blind eye to the illegal movement of players into Asia ( Read more... )

Language Log and Language Hat both linked to the paper "Links that speak: The global language network and its association with global fame". The abstract?

Languages vary enormously in global importance because of historical, demographic, political, and technological forces. However, beyond simple measures of population and economic power, there ( Read more... )

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The Guardian Weekly's Claire Gatinois reports on the controversies surrounding Angolan investment in former colonizer Portugal. Portugal, in a pronounced economic slump even before the global economic slowdown in 2008, is increasingly dependent on oil-rich Angola, whether as a destination for Portuguese migrants or as a source of investment. Many ( Read more... )

Gerhard Siebert's brief Foreign Affairs article describing how the very small ex-Portuguese island state of São Tomé and Príncipe, located off the Central African coast in the South Atlantic, makes for depressing reading. The island state last appeared here in a 2003 post reacting to a coup attempt on the island and pointing to the role of Brazil ( Read more... )

Simon Romero's New York Times article describing how growing Brazil is building up a growing presence in Africa, via trade and aid and cultural projection and the like, is worth reading in full. Brazil is the most populous and, in aggregate, the biggest economic power on the shores of the South Atlantic; it makes sense that as soon as it was able, ( Read more... )

One thing I've observed here for the past few years, as far back as 2003, is the accelerating (and non-exclusive) integration of the different Lusophone countries of the world--Brazil, Portugal, Angola and Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde and Sao Tomé e Principe, East Timor in the Pacific--in any number of domains. After a sufficient ( Read more... )

Huh. Inter Press Service's Mario do Queiroz came up with another interesting story.

With the announcement that his country is ready to buy Portuguese debt, the president of East Timor, José Ramos-Horta, set a precedent in international economic relations that was universally praised in political and financial circles in this southern European ( Read more... )