Unlike the age in which Africa was patchily mapped through a distinctly colonialist lens, one could argue that today, we all finally know what the continent − and indeed the world − actually looks like.
Lots of migrants move north to escape drug cartels and violence, but America's proximity to poor, patchily governed countries to its south is a business opportunity for criminals, too.
The argument that only a state-funded health system can work in Britain has long ignored an inconvenient truth: namely that outside periods of boom-time spending, the system is badly stretched, patchily managed and suffers from low productivity in too many areas.True, the NHS benefits from economies of scale and is highly valued for being free at the point of use.
That would still allow direct talks to get going before Mr Netanyahu's ten-month freeze on settlement building ends on September 26th.In this section Will he, won't he? Clean them up Hard to get out Talk of talks The last of the Jewish Arabs ReprintsThe freeze has been applied patchily, but settlers and their backers are hailing its end as a moment of triumph.
China's intellectual-property laws are not bad on paper, but are enforced patchily and partially.
China imposes no such burden on legislators; officials are subject only to patchily and secretively enforced requirements to report their incomes.
Looking at 25 countries, he finds that dependence is generally much lower, but patchily so.As the table shows, portfolio liabilities in the 18 months to June 2005 for the group as a whole were $118.5 billion, far less than the $170.7 billion that came in before June 1997.
Sadly, the code was only enforced patchily on the Amazon frontier, while never making much sense for old-established farms in southern and south-eastern Brazil.That flaw remains.
But systems based on a voucher principle have performed patchily.
The first is that fruiting trees are patchily distributed in both space and time (though in the tropics, where almost all monkeys live, there are always trees in fruit somewhere).
Many of the ruling Islamists are patchily educated, having spent their youth bearing arms in Iran.Despite the relative calm in which the election passed, the south remains perilously crime-ridden.
