EGYPT

EGYPT
Al Ahram, Cairo, June 8: We've failed Somalia, just as we failed Sudan before it. We've failed to identify problems in their early stage and do something about them. This is something we tend to do, but nowhere more so than in the southern stretches of our world, where Africa and the Arab region merge. We get obsessed with problems on our eastern front -- Iran, Iraq -- and forget about the south.
Sudan is now faced with partition. The Abuja agreement may excuse rapid international deployment at any moment.
Intervention
Stability in Darfur has become a synonym for intervention. Major countries use the idea to find a toehold in a region rich with strategic minerals. ... Much of the current debacle could have been avoided had we dealt with our problems in a democratic way instead of waiting for chaos to spread and intervention to follow.
Somalia is the next candidate for foreign intervention.
The Arab League should do something for Somalia -- preferably organise a national accord conference. Emphasis here should be not just on restoring law and order, but on creating a sustainable form of democracy before everyone starts talking about foreign intervention. It is high time the Arabs start focussing on the southern front, not just the eastern one.
JAPAN
Yomiuri Shimbun, Tokyo, June 14: The 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average last week dropped below the 15,000-level for the first time in six months. It plummeted Tuesday, suffering its biggest single-day loss this year.
The other major stock indexes in Asia also are falling. It is hard to tell when this spontaneous worldwide decline will end.
Observers have pointed out that market concerns over the future of the U.S. economy have caused share prices to fall.
After U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke last week expressed concerns about inflation, the U.S. market has become bearish due to investor worries that the Federal Reserve will keep raising interest rates.
Withdrawing funds
In Japan the view prevails that foreign investors have begun withdrawing their funds from the Tokyo stock market. Observers are increasingly concerned that a U.S. economic slowdown will adversely affect the Japanese economy.
Meanwhile, economic indexes still show the economy set to make a powerful recovery.
Due to the burgeoning economic recovery, the government has begun discussing when to declare an end to deflation and the central bank is considering lifting its zero-interest rate policy. However, if stock prices wallow at a low level for an extended period of time, there are genuine concerns that private consumption and capital investment will be badly hit.
The government and the central bank should be cautious in implementing policy measures, and take every possible risk into consideration.
BRITAIN
The Telegraph, London, June 14: When David Lammy, the culture minister, wrote to local authorities at the beginning of the year, urging them to keep public libraries open, about 50 were threatened with closure. His words, supported by no more tangible help, seem to have had a negative effect, for today the figure is more than 100, out of a total of just over 3,000. This is a crisis.
Councils, more heavily reliant than ever on central government funding, flounder in attempts to balance their budgets. First, they closed public lavatories; now it is the turn of public libraries, as an "easy option". Yet nothing could be as harmful to the people that councillors purport to serve.
Declining support
Even in areas such as Buckinghamshire, where villagers have volunteered to take on the running of their libraries, they have done so with the galling knowledge that the proportion of the council budget spent on libraries has fallen by 60 per cent in the time that council tax has risen by 140 per cent.
Free public libraries have been a glory of Britain since the Public Libraries Act of 1850. They have been an engine of social improvement and a nursery of cultural continuity. It was by a breach of trust that, in the past 30 years, books have been jettisoned to make room for facilities that parallel those of cyber-caf & eacute;s.
Youngsters cannot learn habits of self-reliant inquiry by playing on the internet, unless they also have the opportunity to explore the world of books and weigh up their worth. The number of books in libraries has fallen from 105 million a decade ago to 84 million today. To close library buildings is to surrender to a new Dark Age.