eWeek.com reports that “
According to the Los Angeles Times, “[a]cross the United States, many cities are finding their Wi-Fi projects costing more and drawing less interest than expected, leading to worries that a number will fail, resulting in millions of dollars in wasted tax dollars or grants when there had been roads to build and crime to fight.”
In the Washington Times, Lawrence Kudlow points out that, even though some reforms are in order to improve America’s innovation environment, “the United States is actually doing quite a lot right” when it comes to competitiveness. The U.S. economy, Kudlow points out, has “vastly outperformed its industrial trading partners in Europe and Japan. Amazingly, we’ve slogged through only five negative-GDP quarters over the last 25 years, for an unbelievable prosperity rate of 95 percent. Our stock market has increased twelvefold in this period.”
The International Herald Tribune reports that “Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. opened a two-day set of negotiations Tuesday between members of the cabinets of the United States and China with the goal of reducing economic tensions between the two countries. […] In recent weeks, the Bush administration has negotiated furiously with China to secure some eye-catching new agreements to unlock Chinese markets for American goods. China, in response, has told the United States that it plans new purchases of $30 billion worth of U.S. technology companies – a shopping spree that dwarfs any China has gone on previously.”
In another China story, the International Herald Tribune writes that “China will back away from a proposal that would have required bloggers to use their real names when registering on Web logs, following an outcry in the Internet industry, official media reported Tuesday. The government said that it would instead promote a ‘self-discipline code’ on the Internet, to encourage, rather than mandate, bloggers to register under their own names, the report said. It cited draft guidelines published by the Internet Society of China.