Cool the anxiety over the dollar’s reserve currency status.  Even the Chinese know the yuan won’t become a global reserve currency for decades. Xia Bin, an advisor to China’s central bank, wrote in the China Finance magazine: “The dollar will serve as the most important world reserve currency for a quite long time in the future”.  […]

The scale of Indian corruption never ceases to amaze.  Details from a case in the state of Karnataka provide a rare peek into one of India’s many cans of worms.   The NYT reports: A computer file from 2008 listed payoffs that Adani Enterprises [the largest company in the business empire of India’s sixth-wealthiest man] […]

The future of Manhattan has been located in Africa.  Researchers have discovered a giant rat that uses a mohawk full of poisonous spikes to kill its prey. Considering the fashion choices of many residents of NYC’s Lower East Side and the steady growth of immigration from Africa to the US, I predict that any day […]

We recently posted a story about how the growth of Chinese innovation, when studied closely, isn’t flying ahead at the pace many analysts suggest. Now comes this story about how plagiarism pervades Chinese academia, especially in science and life science papers. When the Journal of Zhejiang University-Science became the first to subscribe to anti-plagiarism software, the editors […]

The federal debt ceiling has not ended America’s financial woes, but budget cutbacks will soon be coming to a state near you.  As Nicholas Johnson at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told the Washington Post: ‘The debt-limit deal inevitably will lead to large federal cuts in programs for state and local governments…This is […]

News from other New York boroughs continues to bolster Queens’ stature as the most glamorous of the city’s five. Brooklyn’s parks host tribes of vagrants who hunt the local wildlife and cook it over open fires; in Manhattan, as this video shows, rats the size of squirrels have lost their fear of man and frisk […]

Stories about hip young white people moving into decaying urban centers and revitalizing them with their trendy creative brilliance are a dime a dozen.This has something to do with the urbanist bias of the blue journalist world; it also reflects print media’s desperate quest to sell dead trees to people under 30.It has little to […]

From Baghdad via AP: Iraq’s political leaders gave the government the green light Tuesday to begin negotiating a deal with the U.S. to keep American troops in the country past the end of the year to train Iraqi security forces.The good news: they want us.  The bad news: they need us.US military forces should stay; […]

The long running eurozone crisis turned a corner last night, and the news isn’t good.The list of basket cases has grown by two: Spain and Italy can no longer raise money in the bond markets at sustainable rates.  The Spanish government has given up its attempt to serve out its term and has called early […]

The contest for Asian supremacy is heating up.  China’s more assertive military and political posture in the age of Obama is provoking reactions from the neighbors.  In recent weeks Vietnam and the Philippines have spoken up; now even the often reticent and self-effacing Japanese are toughening their tone. As the UPI story has it: China’s […]