Word: muchness
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...More Hope Than Change Of course, global expectations were always going to be tough for Obama to meet. When he was elected President, much of the world, including Asia, considered Obama their leader too. From climate change to a détente with Islamic nations, Asians hoped Obama would somehow solve a multitude of global problems. But there was no magic wand, nor has Obama's connection to Asia translated into significantly closer ties. "Even though he grew up in Indonesia, Obama's strength is as a local community activist, not as a foreign policy expert," says Bara Hasibuan, foreign...
...very different from the midcentury, rural township of his fiction - a place where peasants ride stoic donkeys and heavily laden camels walk the dusty streets. Film buffs may know it from Zhang Yimou's 1988 adaptation of Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, set during the Japanese occupation. In fact, much of Mo Yan's fiction - from the 1996 epic he describes as his magnum opus, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, to Frog, published at the end of 2009 - is set in a world seemingly remote to the 350 million or so Chinese born after 1980 and the start of Deng...
...placing much of his writing in the past, and through the adroit subtlety of his magic-realist style, Mo Yan avoids stirring up the animosity of the country's ever vigilant censors any more than he needs to. Take his latest novel. With China's highly controversial one-child population-control policy as its topic, Frog traces the life of a midwife who witnesses forced late-term abortions, forced sterilization and other horrors, and it does so whimsically - in the form of four letters and a play. The midwife's struggle to reconcile her conflicting loyalties to party, family...
...impact was greater because Britain's growing wealth has fueled growing inequality. The gap between rich and poor is only slightly narrower in the U.K. than in the U.S. and yawns much wider than in other European countries. Social mobility has stalled. The gulf between City financiers and low-income Londoners is profound. "The bankers look down from their gleaming towers in the City, and they see a depressed and depressing East End," says Dominic Carman, the parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Democrat Party in Barking. "From the East End, the City looks like an El Dorado of gleaming spires...
Fool's Gold That distant El Dorado may have enriched only some Britons, but the turbulence shaking it is felt by everyone. There's little agreement among politicians or economists about quite how much of a basket case Britain has become. "Although the economy is now growing, recovery is still in its early stages and remains very fragile," Brown said in a March 10 speech in the City. Labour says the recovery is due to the government's lead in global efforts to stabilize the banking system and its $30 billion of fiscal stimulus and argues that stimulus spending must...