Magic Statistics

Tesco, the third-largest retailer in the world, today announced plans to take on numero uno Wal-Mart on its home turf beginning next year.

Tesco, which is Britain's biggest retailer, said Thursday that it intended to enter the US market in 2007 with the opening of small convenience stores on the country's West Coast.
. . .
In Britain, Tesco earns about 30 percent of consumers' money spent in traditional grocery stores, while its tills ring up about one in every eight pounds spent by British shoppers.

Wal-Mart owns Britain's second-biggest supermarket chain Asda, while the French supermarket Carrefour is the world's second-biggest retailer.

Carrefour has recently run into problems in connection with the Cartoon Jihad. The company's removal of Danish products from its shelves in Muslim countries has resulted in a Belgian campaign to boycott Carrefour.

via The Pearcey Report.

During 2000 and 2001, Dictator President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe encouraged violent and fanatical supporters to seize lands owned by white farmers. The farming families were often brutalised and some were murdered before their property was looted and burned. Anarchy reigned throughout the countryside. The Zimbabwe Supreme Court ruled the confiscations illegal, but Mugabe simply ignored the judgment until he got around to packing the court with his people.

The white farmers had employed hundreds of thousands of black workers and generated about half of the country’s total exports. Predictably, the Zimbabwean economy soon collapsed. Zimbabwe is now dependent on foreign charity for food.

Somewhat belatedly, Mr Mugabe has changed his mind about the land grab. Come back, he says, let’s let bygones be bygones.

[T]he officials with the unenviable task of rebuilding Zimbabwe's economy have reached the unavoidable conclusion: some of those hated white farmers must be allowed to return.

Mr Mugabe now appears to agree. He will not, of course, eat humble pie. He will probably pose as a magnanimous leader, inviting back his former enemies in the interests of national recovery.

The Government of Zimbabwe is expected to announce within days that it is willing to offer state leases to the 250 white farmers still living on portions of their former land. Many are cynical and skeptical. Says one,

"It's bloody miserable out there. All our friends have gone, our equipment has been broken, irrigation has been vandalised, our homes have been wrecked, the roads are a mess, our workers have gone so why should we return?"
. . .
"We should be campaigning for compensation, not going back to help people who wrecked our country."

Journalist Peta Thornycroft recently blogged from Zimbabwe.

Paul Marshall says Islamists have been successfully expanding the area under the control of extreme Shari'ah law in the Muslim world. He spoke with Christianity Today about this.

In 1975, only one major country practiced these types of laws: Saudi Arabia. Beginning in 1979, you had the overthrow in Iran of the Shah by Ayatollah Khomeini, and Iran began to institute similar laws. There are differences: Iran is Shiite; Saudi Arabia is Sunni. But in terms of the hudud laws, the criminal laws, which involve amputation, crucifixion, stoning, and so on, they're very similar in outlook. In both cases, the status of women is very, very poor. The status of minorities is very, very poor.

Other places where extreme Shari'ah has become powerful include Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Chechnya, and some parts of Malaysia and Indonesia. Islamist views are also growing in Europe.

One of the frightening things about Europe is that the second- and third-generation immigrants are much more radical than their parents. You're not getting assimilation; you're getting the opposite. In places such as England, the first generation of immigrants from Pakistan 30 or 40 years ago came in, got menial jobs, opened shops, and were sort of marginalized but relatively peaceful. They wanted to make a success of life. The radicals are their children and in some cases even their grandchildren. As time goes on in Europe, the Muslim populations are becoming more radical, and, of course, the total numbers of Muslims are increasing. This is a frightening phenomenon for Europeans.

Dr Marshall is not optimistic about the possibilities of slowing the growth of radical Islam in the near future.

Read the whole thing.

Dr Marshall, senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom, recently wrote about the Mohammed cartoons, saying that European governments had nothing to apologise for.

Iranian leaders, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, call the controversy over the Mohammed cartoons "a blessing from God". Amir Taheri says the whole shebang was a carefully planned and coordinated set-up. He's got the story here.

Some Danes are now saying the same thing.

The Danish media and Government have accused a group of Danish imams of stoking up the "cartoon wars" by touring the Middle East with a dossier to seek international support for their protest.

See also this piece entitled "A carefully orchestrated outrage".

This version of events gains credibility from the fact that an Egyptian newspaper re-produced several of the allegedly blasphemous, offensive, and insulting cartoons back in October, but no one said a discouraging word. Now watch the video! Today's New York Times connects some of the dots, but it still doesn't have the whole story.

The group put together a 43-page dossier, including the offending cartoons and three more shocking images that had been sent to Danish Muslims who had spoken out against the Jyllands-Posten cartoons.

Mr. Akkari denied that the three other offending images had contributed to the violent reaction, saying the images, received in the mail by Muslims who had complained about the cartoons, were included to show the response that Muslims got when they spoke out in Denmark.

Yeah, right! Didn't the Times used to undertake investigative journalism? Nowadays, it seems to have trouble just keeping up with yesterday's news.

Taheri reference via The Free West.
Egyptian newspapers via little green footballs.
Video reference via Michelle Malkin.

"If I could find a better way I'd drop Alpha tomorrow. I'm not interested in Alpha; I'm interested in people coming to know Christ."

Read the whole thing for information on Rev Gumbel's conversion to Christianity and other interesting background.

via titusonenine.

A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), entitled Aid and Growth: What Does the Cross-Country Evidence Really Show? (NBER Working Paper No. 11513), finds little evidence that foreign aid has ever stimulated economic growth in the recipient country.

[C]o-authors Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian conclude that regardless of the situation — for example, in countries that have adopted sound economic policies or improved government institutions — or the type of assistance involved, aid does not appear to stimulate growth over the short or long term. They point out that their exhaustive analysis should not be taken as an argument that aid cannot ever help the growth of countries that receive it, only that there is no discernible robust impact of aid on growth, positive or negative in the past.

The authors looked at data from the period 1960 through 2000. They analysed the data by decade, kind of aid (food, sector-targeted, etc.), source of aid (bi-lateral or multi-lateral), socio-economic policies adopted in the recipient country, etc.

In all of these analyses, Rajan and Subramanian were unable to find a consistent, discernible impact of aid on economic conditions in the recipient country. The authors emphasise that their findings do not mean that aid cannot be beneficial in the future, only that this does not seem to have been the case in the past. They call for further research into why aid has not proven effective and how aid effectiveness can be improved.

This post is based on the extended non-technical summary in the February 2006 issue of the NBER Digest. The full paper costs US$5 for an electronic copy.