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Bangladesh’s garment sector represents roughly $19 billion in annual revenue and employs nearly four million workers, most of them women. It sells more than $4.5 billion worth of goods to the United States each year. 

Crippled eurozone to face fresh debt crisis this year, warns ex-ECB strongman Axel Weber

Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff said the launch of the euro had been a "giant historic mistake, done to soon" that now requires a degree of fiscal union and a common bank resolution fund to make it work, but EMU leaders are still refusing to take these steps.

"People are no longer talking about the euro falling apart but youth unemployment is really horrific. They can't leave this twisting in wind for another five years," he said.

What is ironic is that these vines represented about the least scary GMO crop imaginable.  They were engineered to be resistant to a disease called Fan Leaf Virus that is spread by nematodes that live in the soil.  Back before people understood this disease it was unintentionally spread to many grape-growing areas.  Once a given vineyard is contaminated with the nematodes and virus, grapes will only survive for a few years on that site before declining and dying.  Some of the best wine production areas around the world are seriously compromised this way, and there has been no lasting cure.

at was being tested in Colmar was a “rootstock.”  All grapes are cuttings of the desired variety (Gewurtztraminer, Cabernet, Chardonnay…) grafted on to a root that is resistant to various pests.  The Colmar roots would have also been resistant to the virus.  The top of the vine (all that is above ground) would be exactly like all the neighboring vineyards.  In theory the grapes wouldn’t die in a few years (that is what the researchers were hoping to demonstrate).

but this same irrationality is hindering efforts to provide things like virus resistant Cassava to poor farmers in Africa or virus resistant Papayas to people in Thailand. 

he world is now using a record amount of oil even though Europe and the United States are paring back.

The communist Derg junta was ousted in 1991 and five years later only 27.5% of school-aged children received primary education; today that figure stands at over 85%, according to the World Bank.

In August 2005 the government embarked on an ambitious expansion plan, simultaneously building 13 universities across the country at a cost of $550m, paid for out of the education budget.

Ten more universities are under construction, all of which have already begun to admit students, increasing even further the country's higher education capacity.

“The rise of industrial big data is moving at twice the speed of other big data. That’s a great opportunity.” said William Ruh, the head of global software at G.E. “There’s all kinds of experiences that we’re going to create.”

The other is a kind of application software to help power companies figure out how to best build out and operate their turbines. By October, G.E. hopes to have similar applications out for railway, mining, and oil and gas companies.

Effectively, G.E. is taking the data-driven tools and strategies used by Google and Facebook to the much larger global economy.

In most cases, mining tar sands involves drilling two horizontal wells, one above the other, into the bitumen layer; injecting massive gouts of high-pressure steam and solvents into the top well, liquefying the bitumen; sucking up the melted bitumen as it drips into the sand around the lower well; and then refining the bitumen into “synthetic crude oil.”

Economists sometimes describe a fuel in terms of its energy return on energy invested (EROEI), a measure of how much energy must be used up to acquire, process, and deliver the fuel in a useful form. OPEC oil, for example, is typically estimated to have an EROEI of 12 to 18, which means that 12 to 18 barrels of oil are produced at the wellhead for every barrel of oil consumed during their production. In this calculation, tar sands look awful: they have an EROEI of 4 to 7. (Steaming out the bitumen also requires a lot of water. Environmentalists ask, with some justification, where it all is going to come from.)

To obtain shale gas, companies first dig wells that reach down thousands of feet. Then, with the absurd agility of anime characters, the drills wriggle sideways to bore thousands of feet more through methane-bearing shale. Once in place, the well injects high-pressure water into the stone, creating hairline cracks. The water is mixed with chemicals and “proppant,” particles of sand or ceramic that help keep the cracks open once they have formed. Gas trapped between layers of shale seeps past the proppant and rises through the well to be collected.

Ukraine: Running in Place

Corruption is simultaneously a cause and symptom of this situation. According to Transparency International’s 2008 Global Corruption Report, higher education is widely considered one of the most corrupt spheres in Ukrainian life. The report cites a survey conducted the previous year by Management Systems International and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in which 47.3 percent of respondents said a bribe was demanded up front in their dealings with universities, while 29 percent said they gave a bribe on their own initiative.

Many teachers, from the primary to the university level, received their formal education 10 or 20 years ago and have not updated their qualifications since. There is no movement to force teachers at any level to update their skills.

The Insourcing Boom

But in 2011, Appliance Park employed not even a tenth of the people it did in its heyday.

By 1955, Appliance Park employed 16,000 workers. By the 1960s, the sixth building had been built, the union workforce was turning out 60,000 appliances a week,

A Mafia Legacy Taints the Earth in Southern Italy

Camorra

One environmental group estimates that 10 million tons of toxic garbage has been illegally buried here since the early 1990s, earning billions of dollars for the mafia even as toxic substances leached into the soil and the water table.

How to Build a Perfect Refugee Camp

German Village Resists Plans to Strip It Away for the Coal Underneath

Plucking the geese

Nigeria's President Jonathan 'must act over fuel scam'

Young and Educated in Europe, but Desperate for Jobs

It is not that Europe will never recover, but that the era of recession and austerity has persisted for so long that new growth, when it comes, will be enjoyed by the next generation, leaving this one out.

She spent two years bouncing between short-term contracts, which employers have sharply increased during the crisis to cut costs and avoid the expensive labor protections granted to permanent employees.

Northern Europe’s Drag on the World Economy