In a made-for-D.C. story, a professor at Georgetown University announced this summer that he had enough support in the Malaysian parliament to return to that country and become Prime Minister. Anwar Ibrahim was the country's finance minister in the nineteen nineties and led the country through a fiscal crisis before his political career was derailed by trumped up charges of sodomy and corruption (of course, now that he's trying for a political comeback, sodomy charges have returned).
The country's current leader, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has lost confidence thanks to economic problems including a battle with inflation, a drop in the country's stock market and now fall-out from the U.S. credit crisis. Here's an interesting interview with the Ibrahim himself, in which he promises to follow the economic lead of John Kenneth Galbraith, refers to the current government as court jesters, and and refers to being "clapped in the slammer."
--Tim Fernholz
