North America

In a preview of more pain to come for US, and global, workers, moments ago Nike announced that it will soon be parting ways with approximately 2% of its 70,700 global workforce, or roughly 1,500 employees.

Nike introduced the Consumer Direct Offense, a new company alignment, resulting in leadership and organizational changes as part of which the company would see an overall reduction in about 2% of the company’s global workforce to "streamline and speed up strategic execution."

Authored by Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk via Bawerk.net,

Viruses, violent conflicts and a host of other regional calamities helped revive peoples’ desire to migrate permanently to another country between the years 2013 and 2016 as the number of potential migrants climbed to 710 million, according to a Gallup poll.

The 2017 Global Peace Index was released last week and it found that the world has actually become a slightly safer place during the past year. However, as Statista's Niall McCarthy notes, the divisive presidential election in the United States and its fallout has resulted in peace levels in North America deteriorating.

161 countries were analyzed in the index and the U.S. actually experienced the greatest decline in peace out of all them, plummeting 11 places to 114th most-peaceful country.

Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more oil in Texas … new technology is about to unlock an extremely shallow field that is brimming with heavy oil that has been impossible to recover--until now.

Many oil companies have spent many millions of dollars trying to unlock this gem, but expensive steam injections weren’t efficient enough to make it competitive or economic, even if they had succeeded.