The Econ­o­mist has issued its pre­dic­tions for the world in 2008, and here’s what they’re bank­ing on: The Democ­rats, and par­tic­u­lar­ly Hillary Clin­ton, nar­row­ly win the upcom­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Mean­while the Unit­ed States, which has nev­er met a bub­ble it does­n’t like, will get mired down with hous­ing and cred­it prob­lems. And look­ing for a new eco­nom­ic engine, the world will turn to Chi­na and India. Even bet­ter for Chi­na, it will host the Olympics in Bei­jing, win many medals, and feel like it has arrived (or rather re-arrived) as a nation. But per­haps feel­ing a bit too proud, it might ratch­et up ten­sions with Tai­wan, while the U.S. sur­pris­es every­one, even itself, by pos­si­bly strik­ing a “grand bar­gain” with Iran. Oth­er than that, George Bush will accom­plish lit­tle dur­ing the last year of his admin­is­tra­tion, and politi­cians will talk lots about cli­mate change. But whether they actu­al­ly do any­thing is any­one’s guess.

For more pre­dic­tions, check out The Econ­o­mist’s full write-up, and keep an eye on The Econ­o­mist pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) where I’m sure these issues will get fuller cov­er­age in the com­ing days.

Sub­scribe to Our Feed

Below, you’ll find excerpts from TIME Mag­a­zine’s con­ver­sa­tion with Stephen King. You can access the full inter­view here. King turns up the heat after the jump.

STEPHEN KING: So who’s going to be TIME Per­son of the Year?

TIME: I real­ly don’t know, there’s a very small group of peo­ple who make that deci­sion.

STEPHEN KING: I was think­ing, I think it should be Brit­ney Spears and Lind­say Lohan.

TIME: Real­ly?

STEPHEN KING: Yeah. You know, I just filmed a seg­ment for Night­line, about [the movie ver­sion of his novel­la] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, “You guys are just cov­er­ing — what do they call it — the scream of the pea­cock, and you’re miss­ing the whole fox hunt.” Like water­board­ing [or] where all the mon­ey went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to dis­ap­pear. And yet you get this cov­er­age of who’s gonna get cus­tody of Brit­ney’s kids? Whether or not Lind­say drank at her twen­ty-first birth­day par­ty, and all this oth­er shit. You know, this morn­ing, the two big sto­ries on CNN are Kanye West­’s moth­er, who died, appar­ent­ly, after hav­ing some plas­tic surgery. The oth­er big thing that’s going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peter­son] killed his… wife. And mean­while, you’ve got Pak­istan in the midst of a real cri­sis, where these peo­ple have nuclear weapons that we helped them devel­op. You’ve got a guy in charge, who’s basi­cal­ly declared him­self the mil­i­tary strong­man and is being sup­port­ed by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, whose rai­son d’e­tre for going into Iraq was to spread democ­ra­cy in the world.
(more…)