From left, Tom Neely, Ward Schumaker and Esther Watson
Post-Bubble Portraits The great housing-fueled market bubble couldn’t burst, could it? The best Wall Street minds and their best risk-management tools failed to see the crash coming.

By JOE NOCERA

‘The story that I have to tell is marked all the way through by a persistent tension between those who assert that the best decisions are based on quantification and numbers, determined by the patterns of the past, and those who base their decisions on more subjective degrees of belief about the uncertain future. This is a controversy that has never been resolved.’

By MARK LEIBOVICH and GRANT BARRETT

WASHINGTON — Politics without buzzwords is like sports without clichés, math without numbers or Blago without bleeps. Tough to imagine, in other words, especially in such a game-changer of a campaign year in which buzzwords were flying like shoes.

Buzzwords are what political wiseguys use to sound all important and knowing in a profession whose prime currency is the illusion of being both. They are like secret passwords for the chattering class, the verbal equivalent of a terrorist fist jab.

By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG — Chinese authorities have begun blocking access from mainland China to the Web site of The New York Times even while lifting some of the restrictions they had recently imposed on the Web sites of other media outlets.

When computer users in cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou tried to connect on Friday morning to nytimes.com, they received a message that the site was not available; some users were cut off on Thursday as early as 8 p.m. The blocking was still in effect on Saturday morning.

By Sven Egenter

ZURICH (Reuters) - The fairy tale tram rattles along Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich’s posh shopping street, beneath the twinkling Christmas lights as if this was just any other year.

Inside the tram, children listen to tales of Santa Claus, outside their parents rush from shop to shop, loaded with bags, ignoring the tales of global economic doom and gloom.

Retailers are rejoicing about record sales and a table in restaurants is as hard to get as a hotel room in ski resorts.

From Jan 1, hotel lobbies and carparks are out of bounds to them

By Jermyn Chow and Amresh Gunasingham

PHOTO: REUTERS

THE short list of public places still open to smokers will shrink even further next month when a nationwide smoking ban is extended to hotel lobbies and carparks, among other areas.

The ban, part of a drive to stamp out smoking that began nearly four decades ago, comes into effect on Jan 1.

It will include non-air-conditioned offices, lift lobbies, multi-storey carparks and anywhere within five metres of the entrances and exits of buildings.

By Andrew Jacobs  

BEIJING: Local officials in Shandong Province have apparently found a cost-effective way to deal with gadflies, whistleblowers and all manner of muckraking citizens who dare to challenge the authorities: dispatch them to the local psychiatric hospital.

According to an investigative report published Monday by a state-owned newspaper, public security officials in Xintai city have been institutionalizing residents who persist in their personal campaigns to expose corruption or to protest the unfair seizure of their property. Some people said they were committed up to two years, and several of those interviewed said they had been forced to consume psychiatric medication.