Life's a zoo: Monkeys in India, Mass. economy, and the GOP presidential candidates

After reading the IHT article on trains in India yesterday, another article on urbanization in India caught my eye in The New York Times today--and if yesterday's article was intriguing, today's is, well, a little bizarre. The article examines the danger posed by monkeys in New Delhi. It draws attention to the fact that urbanization is destroying the monkeys' natural habitats and forcing them into more populated areas. What is really fascinating, though, is the way people interact with them. A Hindu group feeds them every week as tribute to a Hindu monkey god, despite fines levied against them if they are caught. Others, though, hire private monkey catchers to rid them of the animals. Apparently, they can be quite dangerous, which the article illustrated well with the example of the deputy mayor falling to his death while trying to fight off monkeys on his balcony. Examples such as this make the article timely and give the newspaper a reason to bring to light such an interesting story.

A Boston Globe article on the sluggish economy uses specific examples to illustrate economists' prediction that economic growth in Massachusetts will slow down for the next few years. While not encouraging by any means, the article is both comprehensive and comprehensible. It uses 2004, when growth was nearly twice what it is expected to be in the near future, as a time against which to measure the current economy, and in particular, it notes what factors contributed to growth then. The article brings together many relevant issues--the real estate market, oil prices, the approaching holiday shopping season--to give a macro-scale overview of the economy.

The election news cycle continues to baffle me, probably because campaigning has been running such an unusual course. Already, as The Washington Post notes today, the GOP candidates are ganging up on Hillary Clinton as their likely opposition. The article also draws attention to the fact that Republican candidates are running spots against Clinton during a period when they would normally be using those ads to fight the competition in their own party. Quotes in the article are mainly drawn from campaign managers and those directly involved in the election; it would have been interesting to see some kind of meta-analysis of what this means to the campaign cycle in the form of comments from a political scientist or someone more removed from the fray.