I demand a recount! Or a re-survey! Or some form of redress for the aspersions Travel + Leisure magazine has cast not only on the City of Angels but on all of us Angelenos.Recently, the magazine released a survey of travelers who, in all their wisdom, concluded that Los Angeles surpasses New York as the rudest city in America.Excuse me?My first reaction was fear that I would never again be able to

IMS Health Inc. operates in the shadows of the healthcare industry, gathering data that drug makers can use to sell medications more effectively. The data, however, are taken from the prescriptions that doctors write for their patients. That information is at the heart of a dispute over how far states can go to protect privacy ― a dispute that has reached the Supreme Court, and one that could broa

China’s double-digital economic growth over the past years has helped it replace Japan as the world’s second largest economy. In terms of gross domestic product China exceeded Japan from the second quarter of 2010 and its full-year GDP was more than 39 trillion yuan ($5.93 trillion), as indicated by statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics. That means China now has the second largest glob

A massive archive of documents leaked to al-Jazeera and Britain’s Guardian newspaper offers irrefutable proof that years of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians have been an empty sham. The papers make clear that the time has come for Palestinians and anyone interested in the cause of justice to abandon the charade of official diplomacy and pursue other, more creative and nonviolent path

In his State of the Union address, President Obama said that repealing his health-care law would increase the deficit by $230 billion. While technically true according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, this statement is misleading.In CBO’s own words: “(the) legislation contained a set of provisions ... which CBO and (Joint Committee on Taxation) estimated would have a gross cost of about $

China’s State Council document released on Thursday to further check housing prices reflects the central government’s determination to deflate the property market bubble and stabilize or even lower real estate prices that have been rising for the past few years. Despite the series of measures the government took last year to rein in housing prices, statistics show that the number of houses sold an

The suspension of all bullet train service Jan. 17 on JR East’s five shinkansen lines ― Tohoku, Akita, Yamagata, Joetsu and Nagano shinkansen lines ― reminds railways and any organization, for that matter, of the importance of sharing important information among personnel concerned and designing a computer system that can flexibly cope with changing situations. At 8:23 a.m. on that day, a screen o

For years, many Middle Easterners have operated on the premise that things could continue as in the past. Arab autocrats assumed they could rule forever, and many Israelis thought they could occupy forever.President George W. Bush tried to explode the status quo by imposing democracy on Iraq from above, but we’ve seen where that led.As of this month, we are entering a new era ― for Arabs and Israe

During the 2008 financial crisis, the federal government reacted in a frantic, ad-hoc fashion, tapping taxpayers for bailouts galore, running roughshod over the rights of bondholders and catching the American people unaware and unprepared. In contrast, we still have time to prepare for the looming crisis threatening to engulf California, Illinois, New York and other state governments.The new Congr