Weekend Reading
Much news today about the extremely hot temperatures across Spain. It’s not just hot in southern Europe. In Finland,
“A branch of the K-Supermarket chain in Helsinki’s Pohjois-Haaga district has invited 100 customers to sleep in its air-conditioned store on Saturday.
Finland’s August average is 19C but temperatures approached 30C this week and few have air-conditioning at home. A store manager told the state broadcaster that beer sales would end at 9 p.m. (2000 GMT) as usual though snacks would be available.”
For everyone who’s sweltering in place this weekend, click on through to EarthPhotos.com for a nice, big, cooling view of this waterfall, just up the road from us here in southern Appalachia.
Meanwhile, here are a few worthy articles for your quality time with your air conditioning this weekend:
Debt traps. First Sri Lanka, with the Chinese-financed port at Hambantota. Next maybe, Pakistan. Then, Will Djibouti Become Latest Country to Fall Into China’s Debt Trap? by Amy Cheng in Foreign Policy.
A tour d’horizon looking at the global urban/rural split: Urban-rural splits have become the great global divider by Gideon Rachman in the FT.
Why don’t people feel like they’re getting anywhere? Annie Lowrey explores the government’s role in The Atlantic with the article Jeff Bezos’s $150 Billion Fortune Is a Policy Failure.
Then there’s the other Somalia, in No pirates allowed: The democratic, pro-Western, successful, totally unrecognized Democratic Republic of Somaliland by Geoffrey Clarfield at the National Post. Consider also the related, and frightening-looking new book The Desert and the Sea: 977 Days Captive on the Somali Pirate Coast by Michael Scott Moore.
Patrick Porter argues that we’re never going back to the world as it was B.T., before Trump. Then he argues that it never was that way, anyway: A World Imagined: Nostalgia and Liberal Order.
It’s a depressing summer in British politics, this second summer since the Brexit vote, just months now before the Big Break. Gaby Hinsliff isn’t out to lift your spirits with Dark forces gather as UK politics heads for rock bottom in The Guardian.
But maybe stuff like that is no way to start a weekend. So how about some travel writing from Coldnoon.com? Sulila Anar writes about a bus trip from the Ecuadorian Sierras to Amazonia in From Mountains to Jungle: A Not-So-Fast-and-Furious Bus Trip in Amazonia.
Good weekend, everybody.
