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Each week
The Economist's Editor in Chief, John Micklethwait, selects a number of articles from the latest edition of the newspaper as recommended reading. His selection is called the Editor's Highlights. You can receive this regularly
by e-mail, or view his top picks below.
February 19th - 25th 2011
The awakening
THE people of the Middle East have long despaired about the possibility of change. They have felt doomed: doomed to live under strongmen who have hoarded their wealth and beaten down dissent; doomed to have as an alternative only the Islamists who have imposed their harsh beliefs-and beaten down dissent. And the West has surrendered to this despair too, assuming that only the strongmen could hold back the extremists. This week we have a six-page briefing on the awakening in the Arab world. In our cover leader we argue that the time has come to end the grim symbiosis between the oppressor and the oppressed. The prize could be a family of new democracies: not Poland or the Czech Republic, but Turkey, perhaps, or Indonesia.
Also, you maybe interested in:
Barack Obama's useless budget
No worse than the Republican one, but still a recipe for a fiscal heart attack
La Tragicommedia Italiana
Sad, old and not really that funny: Silvio Berlusconi goes on trial
Barbarians at the gates of Brazil
Private equity discovers a new market
The bright side of black carbon
It could be easier to deal with than carbon dioxide
Beijing gets bigger and bigger
The government feels under pressure from the new arrivals
