Free Republic

Looking to bargain hunt the recent plunge in Chinese stocks—bid up in an "enormous speculative frenzy" over the past year—would be like "catching a falling knife," former Morgan Stanley Asia Chairman Stephen Roach said Tuesday, just days after returning from a trip to China. Chinese stocks were volatile again overnight, but closed well off session lows, as investors remained doubtful of the efficacy of Beijing's recent market rescue measures. "The bubble is bursting" and predicting the bottom is anyone's guess, Roach told CNBC's "Squawk Box" in an interview. He added, however, that China's efforts to transform its economy remain unchanged....

In America, it seems perception is everything. Amid our economic turmoil, it may seem egregious to say that our standard-of-living has continued to rise, but that is exactly what has been happening. Through pretending and borrowing, we have continued to live in a land of make-believe where we can always afford to live a little better, despite any real basis for this assumption.

Hundreds of toads have met an unexplained, explosive demise in Germany in recent days, it was reported on Saturday. According to reports from animal welfare workers and veterinarians as many as a thousand of the amphibians have perished after their bodies swelled to bursting point and their entrails were propelled for up to a metre. It is like "a science fiction film", according to Werner Smolnik of a nature protection society in the northern city of Hamburg, where the phenomenon of the exploding toad has been observed. "You see the animals crawling on the ground, swelling and then exploding," he...