Trade
Vietnam Rights Still Obstacle to TPP Membership Voice of America ...Vietnam is still facing challenges in its bid to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), despite optimism following 10 days of multi-national trade talks in Hanoi...
Chinese firms closing gap on US tech giants like Google South China Morning Post ...No Chinese company has wide international brand recognition, but e-commerce giant Alibaba may change that. Its initial public offering in New York on Friday, tipped to be the largest ever in the United States, has understandably gained global attention. If, as expected, US$21 billion is raised, the previous record flotation by Facebook and Visa will have been bested and its valuation could be almost as much as Amazon's. The listing will be a watershed moment for China's technology firms...
State Battles
Who’s Wrecking Michigan’s Public Education? Democracy Tree ...Judging by their actions, Republican lawmakers must think that the problem is too much money spent on education, given their unrelenting efforts to divert resources away from the School Aid Fund...
Ohio Has Lost 4,648 State Union Jobs Since John Kasich Took Office Plunderbund ...Some of these losses came when the Kasich administration privatized Ohio’s prison food service. Kasich pitched the idea as a way to save the state money, but the contract with Aramark to provide meals to Ohio’s inmates has ended up causing nothing but problems as the company’s low-paid, poorly-trained workers have failed to show up for work, been caught having sex with the inmates and, again and again, can’t keep maggots out of the food...
“Job Destruction” Rising Under Kasich, Top Economic Analyst Finds Plunderbund ...“July was the 21st consecutive month when Ohio’s job growth was below the USA national average,” Zeller, who resides in Cleveland, told ONB. “Ohio’s year over year job growth rate for July was 1.00%. The USA job growth for July was 1.92%. This was not just a one month fluke for July. It is a continual problem that has been ongoing for 21 straight months...
War on Workers
FedEx worker dies after being pinned by his delivery vehicle Kansas City Star ...the worker was outside of his delivery vehicle at a residence when it rolled and struck him. Authorities arrived and found the worker pinned between the vehicle and a house...
State Police Officer Dies in Pennsylvania Ambush New York Times ...Law enforcement officers from three states were searching on Saturday for a suspect or suspects who ambushed two troopers at a state police barracks in northeastern Pennsylvania, killing one and wounding the other...
7 women working tirelessly to attack equal rights for women Salon ...Here is a list of nine women who have made a career out of opposing women’s struggle for social, political and economic equality...
Student Loan Debt Burdens More Than Just Young People New York Times ...the number of aging Americans with outstanding student loans had almost tripled from about 700,000 in 2005, whether from long-ago loans for their own educations or more recent borrowing to pay for college degrees for family members...
Young Households Are Losing Ground in Income, Despite Education New York Times ...the median family headed by someone under 35 years of age earned $35,509 in 2013 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that is 6 percent less than similar families reported in the first such survey, in 1989...
Miscellaneous
Spy court renews NSA metadata program The Hill ...With a surveillance reform bill stuck in the Senate, the federal court overseeing spy agencies on Friday reauthorized the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk collection of Americans' phone records...
France is a mess, and Europe is worried Salon ...Despite the pharaonic scale of the building work for the new railroad, the French economy has run out of steam...
Trying to Hit the Brake on Texting While Driving New York Times ...A chemical engineer who built a company that made motors and docking stations for NASA, Mr. Tibbitts, 57, spent the last five years coming up with a novel way to block incoming and outgoing texts and to prevent phone calls from reaching a driver...
