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Debt deal won't put Americans back to work

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-31

THE Great Recession of 2008 has morphed into the North Atlantic Recession: it is mainly Europe and the United States, not the major emerging markets, that have become mired in slow growth and high unemployment. ...

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Ridding food safety road of rats

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-30

IT was Franz Kafka who wrote, "So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being." The Chinese government understands this concept and has done an extraordinary job of "putting...

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Debunking 3 myths of 'bogeyman' outsourcing

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-30

OUTSOURCING of services has been a persistent cause of panic and protectionism in recent years, especially in the US since the 2004 presidential election. Back then, the Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry, upon hearing that digital x-rays...

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Europe threatened with banking casualties

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-29

"APRIL is the cruelest month," wrote T.S. Eliot at the beginning of his great poem, "The Waste Land." But, if Eliot had been a professional investor who had observed European financial markets over the last few...

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Thoughts on Metro's good samaritan

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-27

IT'S raining. I woke up, looked out of the window, and saw the rain. Not the harsh rain of a storm unleashed by Eudora [Greek goddess of heavy rain] to destroy and cause harm; but the soft rain of Tlaloc [Aztec...

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World overreacts to debt-to-GDP ratios

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-26

ECONOMISTS like to talk about [debt] thresholds that, if crossed, spell trouble. Usually there is an element of truth in what they say. But the public often overreacts to such talk. Consider, for example, the debt-to-GDP...

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Applying the Talmud logic to restructuring

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-26

THERE are two ways to look at Greece's unsustainable sovereign-debt mountain. There is, first, a pragmatic and short-term perspective, which focuses on ensuring some form of orderly restructuring (possibly for...

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Population bomb ticks to our peril

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-24

THE world is in the midst of the greatest demographic upheaval in human history. Although the human race took perhaps 1 million years to reach 1 billion people (around the year 1800), we have been adding successive...

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Fix skewed sex ratio with American brides

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-24

THE year 2010 was the year of census operations and billions were spent in enumerating and profiling the populations of the largest countries in the world. The greatest contemporary world power, the United States,...

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Fallen cherry blossoms inspire industrial ecology

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-23

THE notion of sustainability-as-less - fewer people, resources and production together with less consumption and pollution -is not enough. On the one hand, we absolutely need to do all of these things if we are...

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Ragman's story briefly rouses us from indifference

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-23

A MAN was walking down the street when he was attacked by robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and left him half dead on the sidewalk. By chance, a distinguished professor was going down that same street. When...

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Material girls lose good men

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-22

HOME ownership is extremely important for Chinese people, and is even more significant when marriage is in the question. Traditionally, a Chinese man will either purchase a home before proposing to his girlfriend,...

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DNA in meteors suggests we're not alone

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-20

FIFTEEN years ago when scientists postulated that a Martian meteorite named Allan Hills might contain evidence of microscopic fossils of bacteria, the news was received with a mixture of astonishment and skepticism....

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Friendship game builds Duke's ties with China

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-19

AS the plane touches down just after 11pm local time at Shanghai Pudong International Airport, the passengers applaud. After a 22-hour departure delay and 17 hours of flight time from Durham, North Carolina, the...

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Bridging moral gulf between man and ape

Opinion | Foreign perspectives
2011-8-16

TWO new movies - one a science-fiction blockbuster, the other a revealing documentary - raise the issue of our relations with our closest non-human relatives, the great apes. Both dramatize insights and lessons that...