What We Read Today 06 September 2014

Econintersect: Every day our editors collect the most interesting things they find from around the internet and present a summary “reading list” which will include very brief summaries (and sometimes longer ones) of why each item has gotten our attention. Suggestions from readers for “reading list” items are gratefully reviewed, although sometimes space limits the number included.

• Goldman Sachs: Why Stock Pickers Have Suffered a Really Bad Year (Steve Russolino, The Wall Street Journal) Only 23% of large-cap mutual funds are beating the market this year. Russolino thinks that this might bode well for the rest of 2014 as fund managers re-evaluate their portfolios and increase trading.

• Coffee’s Caffeine Buzz Evolved Separately from Tea’s (Ewen Callaway, Nature Magazine, Scientific American) Coffee plants habituate pollinators to caffeine and that is a key to their survival. Another interesting research fact is the biochemistry of caffeine formation in coffee plants is different that in other caffeine containing plants such as teas and cacao. That may indicate two independent origins for caffeine in plants.

• Recent articles about Ferguson:

Ferguson Police Chief Lied About Why He Released Alleged Michael Brown Robbery Tape: Report (Simon McCormack, Huffington Post)

• Articles about wars elsewhere in the world:

Boko Haram crisis: ‘Bodies litter’ Nigeria’s Bama town (BBC News)

Damaged Buildings and Psyches Challenge Schools in Gaza (Jodi Rudoren, The New York Times)

White House confirms al-Shabab leader killed in airstrike in Somalia (Craig Whitlock, The Washington Post)

ISIS, Libya, NATO, and Preventing the Next 9/11 (Dennis J. Kucinich, The Huffington Post)

MAP: Islamic State’s brutal massacres in Syria and Iraq (Swati Sharma, The Washington Post)

Obama Says US Will ‘Degrade and Ultimately Defeat’ ISIS Like Al Qaeda (Erin Dooley, abc News)

U.S. says forms ‘core coalition’ to counter Iraq militants (Phil Stewart and Julien Ponthus, Reuters)

Querying Nato’s rapid reaction force (Jomathan Marcus, BBC News)

Cease-fire takes effect in eastern Ukraine amid discord and skepticism (Sergei Loiko and Carol J. Williams, LA Times)

There are 10 articles discussed today ‘behind the wall’.

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