Global Economy

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.

Postal Service Reports Improved $5 Billion Loss

It attributed the net loss mostly to a 2006 law that requires it to pay $5.5 billion annually into a health fund for its future retirees.

As a result of its financial troubles, the agency has defaulted on three annual payments into the fund. It has also exhausted its $15 billion borrowing limit from the Treasury Department. More recently the agency has asked for permission to

In a Bean, a Boon to Biotech

A single, large coal plant, if built with the best-available technology, can reduce emissions by the annual equivalent of taking a million cars off the road compared to the subcritical coal-plant technology still prevalent in most countries.

Switzerland’s Proposal to Pay People for Being Alive

On Tuesday, a company appearing at the Amazon conference said it had run in 18 hours a project on Amazon’s cloud of computer servers that would have taken 264 years on a single server. The project, related to finding better materials for solar panels, cost $33,000, compared with an estimated $68 million to build and run a similar computer just a few years ago.

“It’s now $90 an hour to rent 10,000 computers,” the equivalent of a giant machine that would cost $4.4 million, said Jason Stowe, the chief executive of Cycle Computing, the company that did the Amazon supercomputing exercise, and whose clients include The Hartford, Novartis, and Johnson & Johnson. “Soon smart people will be renting a conference room to do some supercomputing.”

This year, Gartner calculated that A.W.S. had five times the computing power of 14 other cloud computing companies, including IBM, combined.

South Florida Faces Ominous Prospects From Rising Waters

Last year Ukraine consumed about 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, most of it imported from Russia, while producing about 19 billion cubic meters, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

Shale gas technologies are altering the geopolitics of energy from Russia to the Middle East. Three territories — Russia, Iran and Qatar — hold about half the conventional reserves of natural gas. But shale is found in many other places, including India, China, Australia and in Eastern Europe, undercutting the power of the oil sheikhs and the Kremlin.

Ukraine, despite producing some domestic gas by conventional extraction, remains highly dependent on Russia’s Gazprom, which cut off its supplies in 2006 and 2009 in pricing disputes. As a result, Ukraine pays exceptionally high prices for natural gas,

Freshwater Stores Shrank in Tigris-Euphrates Basin

Explore DR Congo in maps and graphs

DR Congo: Cursed by its natural wealth

Last year Germany, not China, ran the world’s biggest current account surplus. And measured as a share of G.D.P., Germany’s surplus was more than twice as large as China’s.

Instead, however, Germany failed to make any adjustment at all; deficits in Spain, Greece and elsewhere shrank, but Germany’s surplus didn’t.

European Borders Tested as Money Is Moved to Shield Wealth

Russia is making increasing efforts to deter the biggest country in its former empire from looking west and to prod it into joining the rival, Kremlin-led Eurasian Customs Union instead.