The news announced last week that preliminary tests on a new vaccine for Ebola were 100 percent effective came as a cause for excitement.
Outside the White House compound on the evening of Aug 5, an American woman displayed tens of thousands of colorful paper cranes in strings placed on the ground in front of her.
While meteorologists and skiers debate about Beijing being a wintery enough city to host the Winter Olympics, a storm of a different kind has been brewing on the Internet over one of the official anthems Beijing commissioned for the games.
The International Monetary Fund is scheduled to formally meet later this year to review whether to include the Chinese currency in its Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket.
China and Japan have been suffering from diplomatic stagnation for years due to rising tensions over the sovereignty of Diaoyu Island after Japan and then Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda unilaterally announced the "nationalization" of the island in 2012.
Despite Chinese consumers' unceasing ardor for Apple iPhones, two homegrown companies - Xiaomi and Huawei - have recently overtaken the California kingpin in smart phone market share in China.
The failure of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks to reach a final deal last Friday in Maui, Hawaii, contrasted sharply with the optimistic mood in Washington early in the week among some officials and pundits that the largest US trade pact since the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will be sealed.
Southeast of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Virginia is a huge restricted access area known as Marine Corps Base Quantico. On Tuesday, I was among a group of foreign journalists allowed to visit the base to see how some 1,800 Marine officers are produced each year.
Chinese and American pundits hope that the state visit to the United States by President Xi Jinping in September will be another major opportunity for the two nations to expand cooperation and manage key differences.
Usually when a stock market plummets, sales of big-ticket items such as automobiles often feel the aftershocks.