Thomas Cook axes 2,500 jobs; When reading declines; City with the world's worst air quality

1 Thomas Cook axes 2,500 jobs (Rupert Neate in The Guardian) Thomas Cook, the world's oldest travel firm, is cutting 2,500 British jobs and closing 195 of its high street travel agencies. Peter Fankhauser, Thomas Cook's Europe and UK chief executive, said it was "never easy" to make job cuts but insisted the company had to make sure its administrative costs were "as low as possible".

The company, which has already cut more than 1,100 jobs over the past year, will shed up to 1,600 jobs in its high street shops with the remainder coming from administrative positions. The new jobs cuts represent more than 15% of Thomas Cook's 15,500 staff. Having recently shut 149 stores, Thomas Cook will be left with 874 travel agencies across the UK and Northern Ireland.

Thomas Cook, which has been struggling since the 2011 Arab spring uprisings in the Middle East and north Africa put off holidaymakers, lost £590m in the year to the end of September 2012. The company, which was founded by cabinet maker Thomas Cook in 1841, has debts of more than £1.5bn. Thomas Cook takes 23 million people from across Europe on holiday every year.

2 Decline in reading (David Toscana in The New York Times) Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.

One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?” Mexico is floundering socially, politically and economically because so many of its citizens do not read. Upon taking office in December, our new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, immediately announced a program to improve education. This is typical. All presidents do this upon taking office.

For many years now, the job of the education secretary has been not to educate Mexicans but to deal with the teachers and their labor issues. Nobody in Mexico organizes as many strikes as the teachers’ union. And, sadly, many teachers, who often buy or inherit their jobs, are lacking in education themselves.

3 City with the world’s worst air quality (John Upton in The Sydney Morning Herald) The New York Times’ India Ink blog reported that air pollution was more than twice as bad in Delhi on January 31 as it was in Beijing. There are 46 cities, in such countries as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India, Mexico, and Nigeria, where average pollution levels exceed those of Beijing. Overall, India recently ranked last in a list of 132 countries surveyed for their air quality.

Most of the pollution that I inhale in Delhi comes from diesel-burning trucks and buses. Other aerial filth that enters my lungs broke away from petrol as it combusted incompletely in cars and from natural gas burned by auto rickshaws. Coal-fired power plants and agricultural burning take a toll, as do makeshift campfires that line the streets at night during the winter, where everything from leaf litter and cow dung to rubber motorcycle saddles are burned for warmth.

It's not that officials here don't care. Efforts to cut pollution from vehicles in Delhi in the late 1990s and early 2000s, by taking such steps as switching auto rickshaws over to natural gas and requiring annual vehicle inspections, helped clear the air. But as the city's wealth grows, it is experiencing an explosion in the number of cars and other vehicles on its roads, pushing air pollution levels back up again.