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...change - and it has started to. Beijing's plans to increase the service sector's overall contribution to the economy by 3 percentage points by 2010 - to 43% of GDP - and by 10 points a decade from now. Earlier this year, the government ordered state-owned banks to step up lending to service-sector companies. Beijing has also begun to break down barriers that have prevented foreign companies from investing in highly regulated areas of the economy. Health care, which should generate an enormous number of jobs going forward as China's population ages rapidly, is one example. Taiwanese companies...
...corridor to see his boss. Petrov is deliberately cagey about business prospects. Yes, an economic crisis is now raging, "but this is not the first time we've had one," he says. Indeed, back in 1998, Denisov adds mysteriously, "it was a crisis that helped us move a step ahead." Business, both insist, has not been affected. But press Petrov on prospects for next year and he shifts uneasily in his seat. "We will be making some correction," he finally concedes. Putin himself couldn't have put it better. The question is: Just how much pain will Russians have...
...means alone. Franz-Josef Ulm, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a concrete expert, says "there's not one single cement company that is not looking at" ways to improve the resistance of concrete. He still sees room for improvement. The next step is to create materials with higher strength but that use the same amount of initial material, says...
...most pressing fear is that Pakistan, worried about Indian retaliation for Mumbai, will send more troops to shore up its eastern border, taking away vital resources from the fight against the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups along its border with Afghanistan. That would enable these groups to step up their operations against U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. It's a prospect that troubles not just the Bush Administration but also its successor. President-elect Barack Obama has said he will devote some "serious diplomatic resources" to settling the dispute over Kashmir...
...Holbrooke is a great negotiator, but he's also a great intimidator, and the first step toward resolving the war in Afghanistan is to lay down the law in both Islamabad and Kabul. The message should be the same in both cases: The unsupervised splurge of American aid is over. The Pakistanis will have to stop giving tacit support and protection to terrorists, especially the Afghan Taliban. The Karzai government will have to end its corruption and close down the drug trade. There are plenty of other reforms necessary - the international humanitarian effort is a shabby, self-righteous mess; some...