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Medical experts argue that Congress should provide significant funding for medical research to combat bird flu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abraham Lincoln would have well understood the challenges facing many modern emerging nations. In Lincoln's America, as in many developing nations today, sweeping economic change threatened older industries, traditional ways of living, and social and national cohesion by exposing economies and societies to new and powerful competitive forces. Yet even in the midst of the brutal and expensive American Civil war--and in part because of it--Lincoln and the Republican Congress enacted bold legislation that helped create a huge national market, a strong and unified economy governed by national institutions, and a rising middle class of businessmen and property owners. Figuring out how to maximize the benefits of globalization while minimizing its disruptions is a formidable challenge for policy makers. How do you expand opportunities for the talented and the lucky while making sure the rest of society doesn't fall behind? It may be helpful to look at the principles that informed the policies that Lincoln and the Republican Congress instituted after they came to power 1861: • Facilitate the upward mobility of low and middle-income groups to give them a significant stake in the country. • Emphasize the good of the national economy over regional interests. • Affirm the need for sound government institutions to temper the dynamics of the free enterprise system. • Tailor policies to the national situation. • Realize that a period of turmoil may present a unique opportunity for reform. These principles drove the reforms that helped Americans cope with and benefit from rapid technological advances and the fast integration of the American economy in the nineteenth century. They may be instructive to today's policy makers who are struggling to help their own citizens integrate into the fast-changing global economy of the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herd behavior among investors has)s produced many of capitalism's great achievements, says Robert D. Hormats of Goldman Sachs International. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the new book titled, `Kissinger: A Biography,' by Walter Isaacson, which is an in-depth profile of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

States that the Group of Seven summit in Tokyo, defying universally low expectations, avoided the paralysis many had predicted and instead produced meaningful results. What was accomplished; Critical need for progress in three areas--growth and jobs, world trade, and developing and former Communist nations.

Expresses the important roles of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in international financial crises. Factors that make it harder for the IMF to perform its traditional role; Reasons for the market greater flows; Important aspects of the crisis; Suggestions with regard to changes in the role of the IMF.

This section presents a quotation from Goldman Sachs executive Robert D. Hormats regarding the importance of consumers to the developments in a communist country.