I suppose we should have seen it coming when China launched its own version of the Apollo spacecraft – three Chinese astronauts circling the Earth – a few years ago.  It was at a time when the U.S. space program was, at best, going sideways, partnering with Russia, making short trips to the Space Station [...]

World’s Billionaires 2010
Carlos Slim Helu takes No. 1 spot on Forbes World’s Billionaires list as a record 164 10-figure titans return to the ranking amid the global economic recovery.
For the third time in three years, the world has a new richest man.
Riding surging prices of his various telecom holdings, including giant mobile outfit America Movil [...]

Richard Wald now teaches at the Columbia Journalism School. But for many years, he was a leading figure in the news business, first in print, then running NBC News and finally with Roone Arledge during ABC’s heyday. Wald is the man who brought David Brinkley to Sunday morning for ABC. So when he wrote this [...]

2010 is widely expected to be the year Web video enters the mainstream. HD streaming is finally possible on both ends of the pipe; companies are racing to get Web TV playing on real TVs; more and more people continue to stream video from Hulu, even as its stable of shows and videos remain volatile. [...]

After no shortage of fretting and back-and-forth with the financing, Dutch supercar manufacturer Spyker is finally buying Saab from GM. Soooo…what will Saab’s new owners do with the brand? Autoblog reports that Spyker may use Saab’s mechanical underpinnings, borrowed from Opel, as a chance to push the envelope on design.
This is actually a very, very [...]

Mark Muro worries in the New Republic that the problems E-Ink, the Cambridge, Mass., company behind Kindle screens (and most of the other e-readers) has had manufacturing screens in the United States are a sign of terminal American decline. Muro takes his cues from Willy Shih, a Harvard Business School professor who wrote a post [...]

Wal-Mart not big into porn. Earlier this week Wal-Mart (WMT) purchased Vudu, an online video distributor, to help fuel its digital media strategy. Vudu, though, made some of its money selling porn. Wal-Mart doesn’t make any of its money doing anything close to that. (The company’s vigilant scrubbing of any explicit content is well-documented.) Thus, [...]

The only thing going in Toyota’s favor during Wednesday’s congressional testimony was that so much time was spent interrogating Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood on the role that the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) might have played in helping Toyota to avoid a major recall in 2007. Or whether the agency should have acted more [...]

As the U.S. slowly gets its high-speed rail program going, China is moving full speed ahead with its much larger system. Although some critics see this as a technical and social failure, [...]

It’s actually somewhat disturbing that oftentimes when accomplished econobloggers like Ryan Avent and Felix Salmon examine transportation issues, they operate in such a seeming void of experience. In this post from today, Felix summarizes a snit between Avent and Andrew Samwick, crediting them with both being right even though they are at apparently opposite extremes [...]