What follows is a first person account from an American soldier, deployed in Iraq, whose main task was to help the country “rebuild”.
It’s not a very happy report.
With the declared end of combat operations in Iraq arrives a period of reflection and review, of praise and blame.
The manufactured nature of this turning point notwithstanding, we can’t help trying to sum the seven years up into nice, neat summaries.
Back-to-school season started off on sale, with retailers receiving new merchandise in August, and then marking it down to get it out the door.
All of the discounting was a troubling sign for the fall and holiday seasons.
To make it through the worst of the recession, retailers cut prices aggressively, which hurt their profits.
They say they have learned their lesson and are trying to retrain consumers to buy at full price by having fewer items available,
As the economy remains weak, the number of troubled banks creeps higher, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said in its report for the second quarter.
Agency officials said the list of “problem banks” reached 829 in the second quarter, an increase of 54 lenders, many of which were small community banks.
While that is a smaller increase than in previous quarters, the number of problem banks remains at its highest level in more than 16 years.
The Chinese government recently ran an enormous help-wanted advertisement
seeking professional managers for some of its biggest state-controlled companies,
a novel but not unprecedented move that apparently reflected unhappiness with the companies’ current performance.
The advertisement, two broadsheet-newspaper pages of small type,
sought applicants for 20 senior management jobs
in industries like nuclear power, auto manufacturing and textiles.
In recent years the limits of physics and finance faced by chip makers had loomed so large that
experts feared a slowdown in the pace of miniaturization
that would act like a brake on the ability to pack ever more power into ever smaller devices like laptops, smartphones and digital cameras.
Scientists at Rice University and Hewlett-Packard, though, have reported they can overcome a fundamental barrier
This past summer brought heady days for China’s state-controlled banks.
In July, the Agricultural Bank of China made its stock market debut, bringing in $22 billion for the largest public offering ever.
A sister government-run bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, has had one of the highest stock market values of any bank in the world.
But the windfalls have created an unusual problem for China: white-collar unrest.
The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch.
The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies.
Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.
As part of the draft of a law governing workplace privacy, the German government last month proposed placing restrictions on employers who want to use Facebook profiles when recruiting.
The bill would allow managers to search for publicly accessible information about prospective employees on the Web
and to view their pages on job networking sites, like LinkedIn or Xing.
In a new report, Morgan Stanley analyst Arnaud Marès argues that the sovereign debt crisis is not confined to Europe.
“It is a global crisis,” he writes, “and it is far from over.”
The report argues that standard debt/GDP ratios are misleading
A gauge of German investor sentiment fell more than expected this month,
while industrial production in the euro zone was flat in July, according to recent reports that reinforced perceptions that
the region’s economic recovery had peaked well before output recovered to precrisis levels.
The ZEW index of economic expectations, a poll of 277 financial market analysts conducted by the Center for European Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany,
