The Economist has published a shocking account of gendercide, especially in Asia, where couples abort girls at stunning rates. "The destruction of baby girls is a product of three forces," the magazine says: "the ancient preference for sons, a modern desire for smaller families and ultrasound scanning and other technologies that identify the sex of a fetus. In societies where four or six children were common, a boy would almost certainly come along eventually; son preference did not need to exist at the expense of daughters."

Nowhere is the problem worse than in China, where most couples remain limited to one child. In some provinces, 130 boys are born for every 100 girls. Back in 1990, Indian economist Amartya Sen estimated that 100 million females were "missing" from Asian populations. That number is far higher now.

What to do? asks the Economist. It offers one example:

"In the 1990s South Korea had a sex ratio almost as skewed as China's. Now, it is heading towards normality. It has achieved this not deliberately, but because the culture changed. Female education, anti-discrimination suits and equal-rights rulings made son preference seem old-fashioned and unnecessary. The forces of modernity first exacerbated prejudice -- then overwhelmed it."

Mike Madison at Pittsblog lists the many great things that Google claims it would do for the Pittsburgh region if it decides to try out its new ultra-super fast broadband network here. Among them: "Enhanced education, job training and workforce preparedness for the 21st century; state-of-the-art delivery of health services to a much wider population base; the network infrastructure to support the new innovations for which Pittsburgh is famous, in research, technology, development, education, health, business, the arts and many other areas." And so on.

Mr. Madison continues:

"Pretty great, right? There's hardly a piece of Pittsburgh that wouldn't be made better by Google, given that it's solvent and aggressively future-oriented and Pittsburgh is neither. The city is outsourcing its visioning, and there's nothing wrong with that. So why stop with fiber? How about:

"The Googleplex of the Alleghenies, formerly known as Pittsburgh International Airport. Use Google's network management technologies to get Pittsburghers where they need to go, when they need to go there, without public subsidies. Pothole management, street repair and snow removal: infrastructure is infrastructure. While we're at it, how about a Google service that minimizes the likelihood that drivers will slow down needlessly when they approach tunnels?"

Guy Sorman in City Journal: "The financial crisis of 2008, still far from over, has done severe damage to the reputation of the free market. The crisis, we are assured, was caused by the withdrawal of the state and an excess of deregulation. To get out of it will thus require a massive return to public spending and intervention, which is in fact what we see happening all over Europe and in the United States.

"However, what we might call the Greek affair should make us question the statist solution. We ought to consider the possibility that public management could prove even more dangerous than private -- that state regulation is no less chancy than deregulation. The duplicity and corruption of Greek public accounting was more than an error of bookkeeping. The concealment of the country's real budget deficit necessarily involved a gigantic network of complicity that included the whole political class, the state bureaucracy and the banks."

Carbolic Smoke Ball delivers this bombshell exclusive:

"The atomic scientists at the University of Chicago who maintain the Doomsday Clock, the [timekeepers who] warn of global annihilation when the clock strikes midnight, accidentally sprung the hands of the clock forward one hour [last] Saturday night, pushing them past midnight.

" 'Our janitor didn't realize that the hands of the (Doomsday) Clock are never "sprung ahead" for daylight savings,' said a grim Dr. Noah Swayne, director of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. 'That janitor is likely responsible for destroying civilization as we know it.' Swayne said the Earth could be annihilated at any time."

Cartoonist Rob Rogers does "Rob's Rough," an early look at his work and his creative process, exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.