China finally slows; The anti-MBA; Life in Kenya waste dump; Dell stock falls 17%; Vatican Bank chief sacked; India petrol price hike won't curb deficits

1 China finally slows (The New York Times) A nationwide real estate downturn, stalling exports and declining consumer confidence have produced what a Chinese cabinet adviser, quoted on the official government Web site on Thursday, characterized as a “sharp slowdown in the economy.” Though the Chinese economy continues to expand, construction workers are losing jobs in droves and retail sales grew last month at the slowest pace in more than three years. Investments in fixed assets have increased more slowly this year than in any year since 2001. The most striking feature of the slowdown is that it extends beyond the coastal provinces, which depend on exports and are closely linked to the global economy, to the country’s far more insular interior, including cities like Xi’an in northwestern China.

China’s unexpected economic difficulties are starting to unnerve investors in world markets, especially commodity markets, as China is the world’s largest consumer of most raw materials and the second-largest consumer of oil. A deepening slowdown would ripple across the world economy. Government indexes show real estate prices are falling in more than half of the country’s top 70 urban markets, Xi’an among them. Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services and Moody’s each issued reports on Thursday warning that many of China’s real estate developers face a severe cash squeeze as apartment sales slow to a crawl. The developers still owe heavy interest payments on bank loans.

2 The Anti-MBA (The New York Times) The International Masters Program in Practical Management begins by telling the students that most graduate business degrees “are destructive” or that the case-study method, the hallowed approach adopted by Harvard and many of the world’s other leading business schools, is actually “demeaning.” But then, most management courses don’t have Henry Mintzberg. He holds two graduate degrees in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But since at least 2004, when he published his book “Managers Not MBAs,” he has acquired a hard-earned reputation as the scourge of conventional management education. The rise of the business-school-trained MBA, he says, is “a menace to society.”

“The philosophy of the case study method is that you simulate management practice on the basis of reading a 20-page study. George W Bush went to Harvard Business School and I don’t think he even read 20 pages. But he’s a good example of how disastrous that approach can be,” Dr. Mintzberg said. With Jonathan Gosling, Mr. Mintzberg founded the IMPM in 1996 as a kind of anti-MBA.

Instead of recruiting students in their 20s or early 30s with little or no business experience, the IMPM requires candidates to have at least 10 years of management experience. Rather than focusing on functional skills like accounting, marketing or finance, the program is devoted to what it calls “management mind-sets”: it encourages students to consider their own business difficulties and ambitions from a variety of perspectives. In contrast to the use of case studies to develop analytical tools under the tutelage of a professor, Dr. Mintzberg’s students are expected to “share competences” with each other based on their own experience as managers.

3 After 175 years, New Orleans ceases to have a daily newspaper (The New York Times) The Times-Picayune, a 175-year-old fixture in New Orleans and a symbol of the city’s gritty resilience during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, has buckled under the pressures of the modern newspaper market. Advance Publications, owned by the Newhouse family, said Thursday it would scale back the printed edition to three days a week and impose staff cuts as a way to reduce costs as well as shift its emphasis to expanded online coverage.

The decision will leave New Orleans as the most prominent American city without a newspaper that is printed every day. But it also reflects the declining lure of the paper as a printed product. In 2005, before Katrina struck, the paper had a daily circulation of 261,000; in March of this year, the circulation was 132,000.

4 Life in a Kenyan waste dump (San Francisco Chronicle) Weighted with heavy sacks of discarded milk bags and meat bones slung across her back, a plastic bag of rotting cabbage in her hand, Rahab Ruguru walks through a smoky landscape of putrefied burning trash. "Working here is how I am able to feed my children," said the 42-year-old mother of six. "Dodging pigs, used condoms, eating what I find. No, it's not good for me. But it is a job, and I have to persevere."

Ruguru is one of an estimated 6,000 scavengers who arrive daily to mine the Dandora Municipal Dump Site, a sprawling, 30-acre garbage dump located nearly 10 miles north of Nairobi's thriving business district. Nearly 1 million people live in slums surrounding Dandora, the city's only trash site. While scavenging provides a living for Ruguru and others, some slum dwellers are campaigning to close it down. As a result, the dump's future has become the subject of a continuing political debate.

International law requires dump sites to be decommissioned after 15 years, but Dandora has been in operation for nearly 40 years. While the Nairobi City Council declared the site "full" in 2001, an estimated 2,000 metric tons of waste is dumped daily, city officials say. Ruguru arrived in Dandora after post-election violence in 2007 forced her family to leave their farm near the western town of Eldoret. Except for her youngest child, a 4-year-old daughter, her entire family works the dump daily to pay for food, clothes and school books and uniforms. For Ruguru, the dump's relocation will make little difference in improving her life. "If this site moves, then I will move with it," she said.    

5 Dell stock falls 17% (San Francisco Chronicle) Dell stock dropped 17% after the company forecast fiscal second-quarter revenue missed analysts' estimates. It was the biggest decline since 2000. The Texas PC maker also missed expectations for first-quarter sales and earnings. The company is reorganizing how it packages its products as demand for Apple's iPhone and iPad and other mobile devices eats into its notebook sales.

6 Catering for Mark Zuckerberg’s wedding (San Francisco Chronicle) In case you weren’t wondering about what kind of food was served at billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s wedding, he got it catered by two Palo Alto restaurants: “Food was from two decidedly budget friendly local restaurants Fuki Sushi and Palo Alto Sol. Dessert? Burdick chocolate mice, which the couple had nibbled on their first date. These cost, if you are wondering, $3.25 a piece, less if you order them in catering-sized packages.”

7 UK recession worse than thought (The Guardian) The prospect of fresh action to boost the flagging British economy loomed larger on Thursday after official figures showed a steeper fall in activity than previously thought and the crisis-hit eurozone drifted towards a deeper slump. Labour seized on data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that gross domestic product declined by 0.3% in the first three months of 2012 as evidence that Britain is ill-prepared to withstand a deterioration in the rest of Europe over the coming months. The ONS had originally pencilled in a 0.2% drop in output for the first quarter

8 Has India’s government stalled? (BBC) "I will be the first person to say we need to do better," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said this week while releasing his troubled government's report card on three years in office during its second consecutive stint. "But let no one doubt that we have achieved much." With nearly 7% growth despite a global downturn, India remains one of the fastest growing economies in the world, he said.

But many things don't quite square up, say critics. Vast swathes of the country, including many of the main cities, go without electricity for several hours every day despite the uptick in generation. India's red-hot telecom industry is now bedevilled by charges of rigging spectrum auctions, and large scale cancellation of licenses. Inflation is menacingly on the rise again, and social welfare spending is hobbled by leakage and graft. The government is also seen as being unable to make up its mind as to who really constitutes the poor. Economic reforms have stalled, investment has slowed and the rupee is tanking.

But the real problem, as analyst Pratap Bhanu Mehta says, may lie in Congress, the ruling party behind the government. He says the party has put India's growth story at risk, presiding over "an appalling administration where institutions are unravelling", pushing myopic social security schemes, and being out of sync with fast changing federal impulses. It is a government which many believe - and some opinion polls suggest - has lost its authority.

9 Vatican Bank chief sacked (BBC) The director of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, has been removed from his post for dereliction of duty, the Vatican says. The bank's board of directors unanimously passed a no-confidence vote in Mr Gotti Tedeschi, a statement said. It said he had failed "to carry out duties of primary importance", but it did not elaborate. In 2010 Italian police launched an investigation against Mr Gotti Tedeschi as part of a money-laundering inquiry. Members of the board believed Mr Gotti Tedeschi's dismissal was needed to "maintain the vitality of the bank", the Vatican statement said.

10 China smells a cannibal (Johannesburg Times) Police in southwest China have detained a man suspected of murdering more than a dozen boys and young men, chopping up their bodies and selling the flesh to unsuspecting consumers, reports said. Zhang Yongming, 56, was detained two weeks ago in Nanmen village in Yunnan province and is being investigated over the murder of a 19-year-old man in late April, the Guangxi News website reported. It said Zhang had previously served almost 20 years in jail for murder. Zhang was known in the village as the "cannibal monster," the site reported, quoting residents as saying they had seen green plastic bags hanging from his home, with what appeared to be white bones protruding from the top. Police feared that Zhang had fed human flesh to his three dogs, while selling other parts on the market, calling it "ostrich meat", according to The Standard.

11 Rio+20 is our future (Ban Ki Moon in Khaleej Times) Twenty years ago, there was the Earth Summit. Gathering in Rio de Janeiro, world leaders agreed on an ambitious blueprint for a more secure future. They sought to balance the imperatives of robust economic growth and the needs of a growing population against the ecological necessity to conserve our planet’s most precious resources – land, air and water. And they agreed that the only way to do this was to break with the old economic model and invent a new one. They called it sustainable development.

Two decades later, we are back to the future. The challenges facing humanity today are much the same as then, only larger. Global economic growth per capita has combined with a world population (passing seven billion last year) to put unprecedented stress on fragile ecosystems. We recognise that we cannot continue to burn and consume our way to prosperity. Yet we have not embraced the obvious solution – the only possible solution, now as it was 20 years ago: sustainable development. Fortunately, we have a second chance to act. In less than a month, world leaders will gather again in Rio – this time for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20.

12 India petrol price hike won’t curb deficits (The Wall Street Journal) India's move to raise gasoline prices could signal the government's intention to start improving its finances, but doesn't address the bigger problems of a large fiscal deficit and a widening current-account gap, analysts say. The two deficits are the main concerns shrouding India's economy, analysts say, hurting confidence in the nation's prospects, holding back investment and battering the rupee.

While Wednesday's 11.5% rise in gasoline prices is a step in the right direction, observers say, subsidies on diesel and cooking gas are the main concerns. Diesel alone accounts for about 43% of India's total fuel-product sales. The government still regulates diesel and cooking-gas prices, and partly compensates state-run companies for selling the fuels at discounted rates in an effort to control inflation. This swells the government's subsidy bill, a principal factor in India's fiscal deficit, forecast to be 5.1% of gross domestic product in the year ending in March 2013.

had been arrested hours after the alleged attack and would appear in court today. The latest incident comes weeks after the boy and his seven-year-old sister both claimed they had been dragged into the same school toilets and raped on separate occasions over the past two months. A teacher was suspended by the Education Department shortly after the allegations surfaced last month, but he has yet to be charged with any crime.