Strong prospects await global companies that invest in Africa’s consumer, agricultural, natural-resource, and infrastructure sectors.
Africa’s economic growth is creating substantial new business opportunities that multinational companies often overlook.
At least four categories together could be worth $2.6 trillion in annual revenues by 2020:
Even by the standards of this deficit-ridden state, Illinois’s comptroller, Daniel W. Hynes, faces an ugly balance sheet.
Precisely how ugly becomes clear when he beckons you into his office to examine his daily briefing memo.
He picks the papers off his desk and points to a figure in red:
$5.01 billion.
After the math department at the University of Texas noticed some of its Dell computers failing, Dell examined the machines.
The company came up with an unusual reason for the computers’ demise:
the school had overtaxed the machines by making them perform difficult math calculations.
Dell, however, had actually sent the university, in its own hometown of Austin,
desktop PCs riddled with faulty electrical components that were leaking chemicals and causing the malfunctions.
We’ve talked frequently about what we see as the intelligence and vision of the Chinese leadership when it comes to overall economic policy.
Indeed, this past week, we ran a significant Feature Analysis that analyzed ways in which they may be achieving a fundamental re-orientation of the economy:
This was the deal that Gema Díaz, 34, thought she had made:
When she took a job with this city as a purchasing agent 12 years ago, she knew her salary would be low.
But the income would be reliable.
She could expect steady raises, manageable hours, six weeks of vacation, a good pension and the usual benefits —
from free health care to subsidized housing.
On this July 4th weekend, we wonder:
Who will pay for the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill, now the largest environmental disaster in American history?
For now, BP appears to be the deep-pocketed party footing many of the bills, including setting up a $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the spill.
But the legal endgame of sorting out the final tab among the companies that owned the well and worked on the Deepwater Horizon rig has also begun.
A polar bear display for the zoo. Free towels at public swimming pools. A “drug-free Parliament by 2020.”
Iceland’s Best Party, founded in December by a comedian, Jon Gnarr, to satirize his country’s political system, ran a campaign that was one big joke.
Or was it?
Last month, in the depressed aftermath of the country’s financial collapse, the Best Party emerged as the biggest winner in Reykjavik’s elections, with 34.7 percent of the vote,
That a German player named Mesut Özil scored the goal that sent his nation through to the second round of this year’s World Cup
is a sign that something fundamental has changed about what it means to be German.
A country which, until quite recently, refused to give citizenship even to the German-born children of immigrants,
Three weeks after thousands are thought to have died in a wave of ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan,
and days after a somewhat bizarre national referendum on a new constitution,
the interim government here has yet to provide a convincing explanation of why it occurred —
a reflection, experts and former officials say, of the leadership’s inner turmoil and a possible portent of troubles to come.
