It may have been the politician's practiced habit of emotional concealment, but in his concession speech last night, the smiling outgoing Portuguese Prime Minister Jos Socrates hardly looked like a man distraught with defeat. Nor, for that matter, did his opponent, Paulo Passos Coelho, seem gleeful with triumph. In fact, all of Lisbon seemed subdued, greeting news of the victory of Passos Coelho's center-right Social Democrat party with little more than a bit of flag-waving and ...

"I'm very, very sorry to say that my business is skyrocketing," the personal-finance guru Suze Orman said one late January afternoon. The Dow was down almost 200 points, and Orman was lounging on the terrace of her San Francisco town house, wearing a leopard-print tunic and cowboy boots. She looked up and popped a grape into her mouth. "This is happening because of the lies and deceit and greed of Wall Street, the mortgage companies, the SEC, the Administration," she ...

There was a time--yes, my children, the legends are true--when J.R.R. Tolkien was not cool. Really. Very much not cool. Also video games, and Spider-Man, and the X-Men. There was a time, not even that long ago, when you could get beaten up by jocks in the woods behind the backstop for being down with the X-Men. Not that this happened to me personally. Friend of mine. Friend of mine's cousin, actually. Lives in Canada. You wouldn't know him. The ...

This fall, young girls in China's southern Guangdong province will be learning a new subject in school: how to avoid becoming a mistress. Although Chairman Mao kept a stable of women at his disposal, extramarital peccadilloes were frowned upon during China's more fervent socialist years. But as economic reforms have helped Guangdong become one of the nation's wealthiest regions, the province has been beset by a flood of ernai, literally, "second breast," as mistresses are commonly known ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Monde. Standing in front of a stopped truck in the desert, two workers in red overalls are pumping water out of an oil slick before installing a new derrick. The landscape is moonlike. Off on the horizon is the city of Karamay, a ...

Discussions on Chinese economic relations are hardly a magnet for paparazzi — unless, of course, they include a star speaker. So when France's Finance Ministry hosted a conference in Paris on June 16 about China and Europe's common challenges, dozens of photographers crowded into the auditorium, elbowing each other for a spot in front of the stage, where they trained their cameras on the short, gray-haired man at the podium: International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. DSK, as he's widely ...

Read "Where the Recession Proof Jobs Are". The best recession-proof jobs are those that are least sensitive to economic downturn, and which have the highest combined scores for pay, projected workforce growth, and number of openings. See pictures of office cubicles around the world. div { font-family: arial; font-size: 11px; text-align: left; } #305 { width: 525px; } .titlerow-a { background-color: #cc0000; float: left; width: 23px; font-weight: bold; padding-left: 0px; color:#fff;} .titlerow-b { background-color: #cc0000; float: left; width: 210px; text-align: left; ...

You've got to give Donald Trump credit: he's everywhere, and everywhere he goes, he manages to offend in new and different ways. Take his quotes in the latest book by MSNBC Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, Knowing Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You're Worth. When asked about hiring working moms, the Donald replies skeptically, "She's not giving me 100%. She's giving me 84%, and 16% is going towards taking care of children." As a single working mother of ...

There are higher-yielding varieties of groundnut than those that farmers in Malawi tend to plant, but getting them to switch is tough. Better seed is pricey, increasing their risk. So researchers from the World Bank ran an experiment. With local NGOs, they offered the farmers loans. Some loans even came with a crop-insurance policy: if the season was dry and the yield a dud, the debt would be forgiven. The farmers' risk was lowered. Of farmers offered conventional loans, 33% ...

Charles Rangel --Democratic Congressman from New York and Korean War vet Staying the course in Iraq means increasing our troop strength, and, not surprisingly, recruitment and re-enlistment levels are down. But proposed enlistment bonuses and other economic incentives will not make the military any more attractive to upper-middle-class young people. Increasingly we will be a nation in which the poor fight our wars while the affluent stay home. To correct the disparity among those who serve, South Carolina Senator Fritz ...