Word: lite
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...frozen to halt panicked runs, and an enraged middle class took to the streets. The country went through five Presidents in just two weeks. Wall Street feared that the crisis, one of the worst in South America's history, would spread next door to giant Brazil--where the élite predicted financial ruin if Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, head of the left-wing Workers' Party, was elected President that year--and even to stable Chile, where executives groused over glasses of Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon that the U.S. Congress might block Santiago's free-trade pact with Washington...
...Mauritius is good Africa, Angola is not. An élite cadre of government figures, Angolan bosses and foreign oil companies holds on to the soar-away gains of its 35% growth while the country stagnates in destitution and inflation. Partly that's due to the lack of a diversified economy to harness the oil wealth. As a foreign diplomat puts it, "If you're dying of thirst, you can't drink from a fire hose. The water comes out too fast." But it's also due to corruption: a 2004 Human Rights Watch report claimed that $4.22 billion...
...panic over Zuma? South Africa's élite suspect he's a wannabe strongman in the mold of the rulers in much of postcolonial Africa to the north. Many senior ANC figures regard Zuma with open disdain. Defense Minister Mosiuoa Lekota, an Mbeki supporter, recently warned that anyone who still sang Mshini wami was "not right in the head." Zuma, a heavyset man with an easy charm and ready laugh, dismisses his critics as out of touch with ordinary South Africans. "The majority in this country have not seen anything wrong with Zuma," he told TIME earlier this year...
...unhappy with what they claim is the government's pursuit of economic growth over equality: millions of South Africans still live in the same tin-roof townships to which they were confined under apartheid. A target of particular outrage has been the emergence of a moneyed black élite around the party leadership--people like Sexwale and Ramaphosa...
Even if the Ariases win, they risk becoming another symbol of Latin America's gaping chasm between a hyperwealthy élite and the abject poor. Panama and its reformist President, Martín Torrijos, may have a good business plan for the future, but the nation's near 40% poverty rate is a legacy of decades of banana-republic rule and dismal social spending. Hilda declined to speak to TIME on the record because the case is still pending, but her granddaughter Madelaine Urrutia, who sits on the board of a children's charity, insists, "We are a family with...