Public Radio International (PRI)

Middle class revolutionary: Maram Kaff, 27, is a product developer at a Cairo bank in Egypt. She and her mother took part in the uprisings that eventually ousted Hosni Mubarak. (Photo by Matthew Bell, PRI’s The World)

Egypt is currently holding its first free presidential election, more than a year after the revolution that was successful in part because it had the support of Egypt’s middle class. The longer term impact of the revolution for Egyptians – including the diverse swath of people from the middle class – is far from clear. And that is something Maram says she’s well aware of.

Dr. Iman Ezzeldin, Maram’s mother, says plenty of middle class liberals like her now feel that the revolution was a mistake, because the Egyptian military and the Islamists are firmly in control. More.

GujuratiMatrimony is just one of the many localized marriage websites across India. (Image: screen grab of gujaratimatrimony.com)

The model is familiar to anyone who’s been online dating in the US: you make a series of selections to narrow down your search. The Indian matrimony sites offer countless drop-down menus covering things like eating habits, religion, income, and caste.

The caste system in India is now more about shared commonalities than social standing, says the company CEO, Murugavel Janakiraman. It’s about removing friction in a relationship, simply reducing the chances of two people having uncomfortable differences of opinion. Caste as an indicator of commonality in terms of things such as food, tradition or culture.

Indeed, the higher up India’s social ladder you go, the easier it is to pick and choose which aspects of caste matter to you. In fact, at the very top of the ladder you find a group that’s now able to leave caste behind altogether: the new super-rich, India’s millionaires. More.

What if an academic test that you took at the age of 11 determined your life’s course?

When David Ward was 11 years old, he took a state exam introduced by the British government — it was called Eleven Plus. If he passed the exam, Ward would be among the chosen few, plucked from the working classes to be enrolled in an elite government-run school—and likely college after that. (Photo: David Ward by Patrick Cox, PRI’s The World)

Ward and three others in his class of sixty passed the exam. They had earned themselves places in what in Britain are called grammar schools. But Lesley Ebbetts did not pass the exam. She was sent to a school categorized as Secondary Moderns, which quickly became viewed as places where ungifted children ended up, where they were housed until they were old enough to go to work.

Where Ward and Ebbetts ended up later on in life is a bit of a surprise, but more surprising is how the British government is bringing back its 1960s social experiment. More.

Buford, Wyoming, now belongs to Pham Dinh Nguyen, a Vietnamese businessman in Ho Chi Minh City. (Photo by frankenstoen, Flickr)

Nguyen paid $900,000 for the right to own Buford — all 10 acres of it.

The one resident of the town, Don Sammons — who also happens to be the mayor — is planning to pack up and leave, so he put the town up for auction. Sammons had worked as a radio operator in Ho Chi Minh City during the Vietnam War.

More.

Brazil’s “Gang of Blondes” is on a crime spree, kidnapping female shoppers and maxing out their credit cards. (Photo supplied by Brazilian Police)

The police say the gang is responsible for at least 50 kidnappings in Sao Paulo and in Rio de Janeiro since their crime spree began in 2008.

“The gang [is] composed mostly [of] blonde, young, middle-class and educated women .. all of them live a double-life, acting as normal people while being part of a criminal organization …” said the BBC’s Gerardo Lissardy.

More.

Carpooling the German way: German commuters connect with each other on a website called Mitfahrgelegenheit to find carpools.

In a parking lot outside of Munich’s main train station, Lars Biederstedt meets the people he’ll spend the next five to six hours with. Biederstedt drives from Munich (where he works) to Berlin (where his parents live) almost every weekend.

Biederstedt never drives to Berlin alone. Instead, he offers seats in his van through the Mitfahrgelegenheit site, one of those wonderfully rich German words that means, essentially, “a lift.”

The site is run by a German company called Carpooling.com, which hopes to provide its services in America.

More at Theworld.org.