Editor Notes

On Feb. 19, MarketWatch.com, the Dow Jones subsidiary that provides stock market quotes and business and financial news, reported that executives of China’s Cnooc Ltd. asked to delay the signing of an estimated $850 million oil deal until after the Chinese New Year, which fell on Feb. 3.

Since Jan. 25, days of rage have erupted across the Arab world and in other parts of the globe, with unarmed men, women and children pitting themselves against some of the most repressive regimes and some of the most dehumanizing dictates.

Discrimination is a multimillion-dollar cost factor in the business of doing  business. Perpetrators have to pay up when caught: victims must be compensated; lawyers must be paid; and, in the aftermath of due process, there are hefty fees to shell out to clean up the image of the business. Meanwhile, the damage to productivity is irreparable.

On Saturdays, I like to walk around the commercial section of my community. It’s a bustling enclave of small businesses, stretching several blocks in either direction of the intersection of two of the borough’s busiest thoroughfares.

If imitation is the best form of flattery, then the jobless immigrants who introduced dollar vans to U.S. commerce are due for some puffing up. So, too, does the informal economy, where dollar van-type “popular entrepreneurship” thrives.

As a child I learned to fear ignorance. My mother would open her eyes wide and wag her hand menacingly as she dismissed a senseless argument with the words, “I don’t deal with ignorance!”

Nothing is sweeter than the cry “Fight!” on a warm day in grade school. As summer temperatures tug at lawmakers in Washington, a fight has broken out between Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota democrat, and Anthony Travers, chairman of Cayman Finance, voice of the Cayman Islands’ financial services industry.

In his State of the Union address in January, President Obama announced a goal of doubling the country’s exports over the next five years to support two million jobs.