3xwy Blog

China is now second only to the U.S. in the number of billionaires, and nowhere is the country’s entrepreneurial zeal more apparent than in the southern city of Wenzhou. The past year has been hard on China’s entrepreneurs, but they are still wheeling and dealing in Wenzhou.

LiveScience.com – China supplies most of the rare earth minerals found in technologies such as hybrid cars, wind turbines, computer hard drives and cell phones, but the U.S. has its own largely untapped reserves that could safeguard future tech innovation.

AP – A private equity firm said Friday that it will buy the owner of the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants for about $619 million in cash.

AP – German tires and car parts maker Continental AG reported Tuesday that its net loss widened by 50 percent in 2009 as the economic downturn hit the auto industry hard, sapping demand for its products, but said it expected an improvement this year.

Reuters – Growing mountains of U.S. government debt will increase pressure on Federal Reserve to hold interest rates low, making it harder to avoid inflation, a senior Fed official said on Tuesday.

Reuters – The ballooning U.S. budget deficit and growing mountains of federal debt will increase pressures on the Fed to hold interest rates low and make it harder to avoid inflation, a senior Federal Reserve official said on Tuesday.

Security forces dispersed opposition protests as hundreds of thousands of government supporters massed Thursday in a central square of the Iranian capital to mark the 31st anniversary of the revolution that created the Islamic republic. Authorities clamped down hard to prevent a major show of force by the opposition amid one of the country’s most important political occasions.

What do an airport baggage screener and a radiologist looking for breast cancer have in common? Both suffer from the limitations of the human eye. A new study finds that when we’re searching for rare things, like tumors and guns, they’re a lot harder to see.

Reuters – Americans slightly slowed their consumption of hard liquor last year, a trade group said on Tuesday, proving that spirits are relatively resilient in a recession, but not immune.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa was in a hard-fought race with his former army chief. Both men had worked together to defeat the Tamil Tiger rebels in a conflict that had continued for about 25 years.