Leadership is needed from Boston `eds' and `meds' (The Boston Globe) 

By Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson  |  December 6, 2004

OUTSIDE OF Red Sox celebration and Big Dig turmoil, what makes today's Greater Boston globally famous and distinctive? Answer: its universities, colleges, and research hospitals and laboratories, a collection of intellect arguably without peer on Earth. Take these institutions away and the regional economy would shrivel in the face of an exodus of hundreds of thousands -- faculty to staff to students, MDs to lab workers.

The group has started inventorying university community outreach efforts. We know they'll find lots. Flying under the region's political radar, little noted by the media, multiple initiatives are running -- 240 service-based programs at Harvard alone, for example.

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2004/12/06/leadership_is_needed_from_boston_eds_and_meds/
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The Disparate Consensus on Health Care for All (The New York Times) 

By STEVE LOHR

Published: December 6, 2004

Dr. Himmelstein, an associate professor at the Harvard Medical School, advocates a fairly sweeping overhaul of health care in America by moving to a single-payer system run by the government. The nation, he said, can no longer afford the costs of bureaucracy in the American system.

Dr. Himmelstein was a co-author of a study last year, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, that found that administrative costs represented 31 percent of total health care spending in the United States, about double the proportion in Canada, which has a single-payer system.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/business/businessspecial2/06universal.html click url to read

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Beijing Loves the Web Until the Web Talks Back (The New York Times) 

By TOM ZELLER Jr.

Published: December 6, 2004

Indeed, as the number of people online in China has quintupled over the last four years, the government has shown itself to be committed to two concrete, and sometimes competing, goals: strategically deploying the Internet to economic advantage, while clamping down - with surveillance, filters and prison sentences - on undesirable content and use.

The OpenNet Initiative - an international partnership linking Internet and legal research centers at the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University - tracks state filtering and surveillance practices.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/business/businessspecial2/06net.html click url to read

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The Successor to Greenspan Has a Very Tough Act to Follow (The New York Times) 

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Published: December 6, 2004

Speculation on who will succeed Mr. Greenspan has focused on Martin S. Feldstein, a prolific author and former adviser to President Reagan who is now a professor at Harvard University and president of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass.

But a growing number of Republicans say that the top candidate may be R. Glenn Hubbard, 46, who was a chief architect of President Bush's tax cutting packages of 2001 and 2003 and is the dean of Columbia University's School of Business.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/business/businessspecial2/06fed.html click url to read