Prosperity

Gunmen targeting a rival drug cartel opened fire in a crowded bar in the northern city of Monterrey, killing at least 20 people and wounding several, authorities said Saturday. The attack occurred late Friday in the Sabino Gordo bar in downtown Monterrey, a prosperous and once-orderly industrial hub that has been buffeted by more than a year of fighting between the Zetas, known as the country's most violent drug gang, and the Gulf cartel. Authorities said most of the dead — four of them women — were bar employees.

Lima was always gray. The Peruvian capital, for much of the year, had this overcast dullness; the sun rarely shone, it never rained, it was just damp and gray. Your hair didn't dry. Your clothes molded, literally, in the closet. When I returned to Peru this month for the first time in 26 years, Lima was still damp and gray. That had not changed. But many other things had. Peru has the fastest-growing economy in Latin America, having registered substantial growth nearly every year for a decade.

Marco Rubio, the Florida senator and Republican rising star, delivered his inaugural speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, calling for a new "American century" in which innovation kick-starts a new era of economic prosperity. Rubio, elected last November, has been in office for more than six months, but Tuesday was the day set aside for the traditional "maiden" speech, his formal debut in the chamber. The Miami-born son of Cuban immigrants, Rubio, at just 40, is already viewed as a serious candidate for the 2012 vice presidential nomination.

If there's hope for 51-year-old Brett Miller, then you could say there's hope for the American dream. When Miller was a boy, upstate New York and the Hudson River Valley embodied the industrial might of the nation and the broad-based prosperity that made middle-class families such as Miller's the envy of the world. For 40 years, his father earned a good living from the sprawling General Electric Co. complex in Schenectady that built steam turbines for the nation's electric power companies and nuclear engines for its submarines.

Reporting from New Orleans Is it a crisis, or just Bowl Championship Series business as unusual? January's national title game featured teams currently under NCAA investigation and was staged by a bowl, the Fiesta, beset by alleged financial improprieties. Auburn (Cam Newton recruitment probe ongoing) and Oregon (recruiting service payments called into question) got to the title game through a complex rankings system that, because of a computer operator's error, had two teams in the wrong order.

Everyone is familiar with stories of businessmen jumping to their deaths from window ledges during the Great Depression. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that those stories, sometimes viewed as apocryphal, have a strong basis in fact: The rate of suicides rises during times of economic hardship and declines in periods of prosperity. The association, however, holds strongly only for adults of working age, those between 25 and 54 years old, the authors reported Wednesday in the online version of the American Journal of Public Health.

If per capita carbon emissions in China and India rose to car-happy U.S. levels, global emissions would increase by 127%, according to the International Energy Agency. If their emissions stopped at the levels found in hyper-dense Hong Kong, world emissions would go up less than 24%. As the Asian economies prosper, the United States should hope that they embrace the skyscraper more than the car, and we should reform our own policies that subsidize sprawl. China, a manufacturing powerhouse, is already the world's biggest carbon emitter, but ordinary Chinese remain remarkably parsimonious in their energy use. Matthew Kahn, Rui Weng, Siqi Zeng and I, in a study published in 2010, estimated carbon emissions for urban households in China, measuring only household emissions and personal transportation.

Rising commodity prices may be stoking inflation worries abroad and starting to pinch U.S. consumers at the grocery store, but for farmers strolling the grounds of the world's largest farm equipment show the good times are rolling. People good-naturedly jostled to be the first to test drive John Deere's new skid loader at the World Ag Expo, a 60-acre stretch of dusty earth and buffed machinery. They smiled as they flocked to place orders for new combines, cotton balers and top-of-the-line tractors.

Anyone who has traveled to both the desert-like north of Sudan ? where the capital city of Khartoum is located ? and the flood-prone south cannot help but notice the extraordinary differences between them. The people of the north are mostly lighter-skinned, Muslim Arabs. Those in the south tend to be darker-skinned, Christian and animist rather than Muslim, more recognizably African. The north borders the Arab nations of Egypt and Libya; the south leads to Kenya, Uganda and Congo. These disparate regions were melded into one country as part of the same blunt imperial exercise that deformed so much of the world: The British, that is, decided it should be so, creating a nearly 1-million-square-mile nation whose linguistic, cultural, racial and historical contradictions were readily apparent long before the country became independent in 1956.

When your closest neighbors include Southern California's only nuclear power plant and its largest military base, you hardly even blink when the thunder of high explosives echoes over the hills or sirens wail a nuclear alert drill. Exposure to danger comes with the geography of San Clemente, a prosperous, laid-back Orange County beach town flanked on three sides by steep, brush-covered hillsides, the San Onofre power plant and the Pacific Ocean. Wildfires often break out during military exercises in the brush-covered hills of Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton or in coastal canyons that creep down the hillsides toward the ocean.