In many parts of China, officials are caught between two competing priorities: industrial development and food production. Most often, officials’ prime concern is industrial development—characterized by factories and mining, usually—since it is the bigger driver of economic growth. But, predictably, unfettered industrial development results in extremely poor conditions for food production. And it’s getting worse. Much worse.

The financial industry has gotten a bad rap over the past few years, but there are good things happening on Wall Street as well. For a prime example, look to Merrill Lynch, which has just announced a partnership with New York State on a social impact bond aimed at decreasing recidivism for inmates released New York’s prisons. As the Social Finance reports, Merrill Lynch and a group of other investors have pledged to invest in the Center for Employment Opportunities to cover the upfront costs of preparing 2,000 inmates for work outside prison.

The dispute between India and the United States over the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York is more complicated than it looks. The tiny Indian Foreign Service (just 1,750 people) is an elite body of carefully selected, extremely well-trained and very intelligent career civil servants. The IFS faces some problems, though. First, it is so small that it has a hard time managing India’s growing international portfolio. Second, as Indian politics becomes more populist, life gets harder for the elite bureaucracies, including the foreign ministry, who ruled the roost in India’s post-independence era.

As everyone knows, the evening of December 31 is New Year’s Eve. But why is December 31 New Year’s Eve? And why is the next year the number 2014?

Another day, another California city drowning in pension debt. This time, the city is Desert Hot Springs, a small community just outside the Los Angeles area, which is now sitting on the edge of bankruptcy due to a history of unrealistic revenue estimates and generous pension promises to public workers.

That little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying so cutely in the manger is the biggest trouble maker in world history, and the shocking claims that Christianity makes about who he is and what he means irritate and antagonize people all over the world.

As we teeter on the cusp of 2014, a whirlwind and partial summary, not so much on what’s been happening lately across the Middle East, but on what it all really means.

Chicago’s attempts to address its pension crisis show an ugly picture of blue failure and the fracturing of the coalitions that so long gave the blue model political dominance. Blue pols who rose to power on blue principles are now increasingly alienated from the blue constituents who put them in power. But even more importantly, the constituents themselves are now divided against each other, because the pension crisis pits the interests of providers of government services against the recipients of those services.

From the time of General Nasser, the Egyptian military’s core competence has been crushing the Muslim Brotherhood — for 60 years its most powerful rival. Killing some leaders, imprisoning others, keeping still others on a very short leash as the representatives of a quasi-legal political movement: this is what the Egyptian army and its police allies in the interior ministry know how to do, and since Mohamed Morsi’s downfall they appear to be doing it very effectively once again.

The world is getting used to horrendous bomb attacks and tens of millions of people now live in countries where terror aimed at innocent civilians has become almost a normal tool of politics. It is easy to become callous and indifferent to daily reports of dozens killed by these methods, and to accept the unacceptable as the new normal. That tendency needs to be fought against, and whether the murders take place in Bagdad, the Sinai, Syria or Volgograd, we should fight the tendency to turn the victims into statistics.