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Until recently, Spain was one of the European Union's great success stories. In 1992, Spain's per capita GDP was 70% of the E.U. average; by 2006 it was 90% of that of the 15 pre-2004 members. Growth helped cut unemployment, which had hovered near 20% for decades, to 8.3% in 2007, and drew hundreds of thousands of immigrants to a country that had, in the '50s and '60s, sent its own desperate citizens abroad. (Read: "Bitter Harvest in Spain's Olive Country...
...beyond brazen in his forced marriage of suicide raids on homophobes and the cartoon mockery of rural Southerners - sort of al-Qaeda and Al Capp. But he and Universal (which paid a hefty $42.5 million for rights to the movie and launched a worldwide marketing campaign that brought the pre-release tab to about $100 million) had two hints that things could go wrong. One was the death of Michael Jackson, which spurred the filmmakers to remove a scene in which Brüno asks La Toya Jackson for the King of Pop's phone number. (See pictures...
...Universal had high hopes for Brüno's opening weekend. Buoyed by the film's robust $1.6 million at Thursday midnight screenings and impressive pre-buys of tickets on Fandango and other sites, a studio insider told industry blogger Nikki Finke on Friday morning, "If it holds up, we'll do $50 million." The Friday figures supported that optimism: Brüno amassed a sensational $14.4 million. But the movie plummeted nearly 40% its second day, to $8.8 million. Meanwhile, the next five movies on the chart - Ice Age 3, Transformers 2, Public Enemies, The Proposal and The Hangover...
Feeling protected - surrounding an enterprise with the law and security to allow it to prosper - is essential to business and development, no matter where you are. But it has been Africa's pre-eminent blight in the half-century since colonialism that many of its rulers offered nothing of the sort. The businesses that thrived amid the war, autocracy and corruption of postindependence Africa were of a depressing sort: emergency aid, arms-dealing, disaster journalism and security-ringed extractive industries for whom development was too often someone else's problem. There were exceptions, countries like Botswana and Mauritius and businessmen...
...government, is the single payer in their system, but if the rest of us were to get exactly the same coverage, it would be--gasp!--Socialized Medicine. I have to assume these gentlemen have no idea what it would cost to replace their coverage, given their ages and pre-existing conditions, in the free market they admire so much. David Kelly, TUCSON, ARIZ...