New construction booms.

Despite its role as an epicenter of the real-estate bubble burst in 2008, Miami’s housing and condo market have returned with a bang in 2013. Due in large part to Latin American investors looking for a safe investment, in February, the housing market in Miami grew in value by 10.4 percent. Unsurprisingly, as a result, developers are rushing to build more—most notoriously the $1.05 billion Brickell City Centre.

Read it at The New York Times

Prince Albert, Tony Soprano, and Bill Clinton were all known for theirs: the power paunch. Sean Macaulay on the most exquisite of all male accessories.

As he does every year, Prince Albert of Monaco attended this month’s Monte-Carlo Rolex Masters tennis tournament. The 55-year-old head of the House of Grimaldi did all the appropriate regal things: he brought his wife, he applauded enthusiastically, he presented the winning medals. He also swapped his crested blazer for some tennis whites to play a few sets in an exhibition game, revealing a new dimension to the royal playbook. Namely, his majestic paunch.

And despite all the Malthusian nonsense, we've still got plenty of oil and natural gas, reports the National Journal's Amy Harder.The United States has double the amount of oil and three times the amount of natural gas than previously thought, stored deep under the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, according to new data the Obama administration released Tuesday.In announcing the new data in a conference call, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell also said the administration will release within weeks draft rules to regulate hydraulic fracturing, technology that has come under scrutiny for its environmental impact but that is essential to developing all of this energy.

Questions linger in the wake of the Bangladeshi disaster

Matt Yglesias took a lot of flak last week for responding to an Erik Loomis post about the tragic collapse of a Bangladeshi garment factory by saying: It's very plausible that one reason American workplaces have gotten safer over the decades is that we now tend to outsource a lot of factory-explosion-risk to places like Bangladesh where 87 people just died in a building collapse.* This kind of consideration leads Erik Loomis to the conclusion that we need a unified global standard for safety, by which he does not mean that Bangladeshi levels of workplace safety should be implemented in the United States.

Free trade comes at last to the salami industry, reports the New York Times:The United States Department of Agriculture will relax a decades-long ban on the importation of many Italian cured-pork meat products from some regions of Italy starting May 28, including sought-after staples such as salami.On Friday, the department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services announced that an in-country assessment had determined that four regions and two provinces of Italy are free of swine vesicular disease, a dangerous communicable ailment that infects pigs, and that “the importation of pork or pork products from these areas presents a low risk.

Munir uz Zaman/AFP/Getty

The list of retailers whose clothing was made at the Bangladesh factory complex where the collapse has killed nearly 400 is growing. Nina Strochlic on the unending cycle of tragedies.

Was your shirt or jeans stitched by one of the nearly 1,000 garment workers who were injured or killed in the recent factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh? You might want to check the label.In the week since an eight-story, four-factory complex collapsed in Bangladesh, online records and physical debris revealed a growing list of international retailers tied to the suppliers housed in the Rana Plaza building. More than a dozen brands have been identified—including big names like The Children’s Place, Benetton, Mango, and Primark—and a number of these companies have emerged to explain their association with the shoddily built, illegal bloc that housed the factories.

Marcus Nilsson/Gallery Stock

Inside big pharma’s campaign to hype—and treat—women’s sexual dysfunction.

Pharma's race for a 'pink viagra' finally has a winner, and the promises for it are grand. Osphena, as the recently FDA-approved drug is called, is the newest answer for painful sex. The drug’s creator, pharmaceutical company Shionogi, Inc., is particularly interested in the more than 64 million U.S. women who have hit menopause, half of whom, it claims, could use the drug. In theory, that’s a lot of women who could be having a lot better sex, and soon.

Mark Lennihan/AP

The retail giant might have worked with the Bangladesh factory that collapsed, killing hundreds. So why is its stock suddenly rising? Daniel Gross on Penney’s paradoxical comeback.

Sometimes it seems like the department-store chain JCPenney is simply gathering evidence for a business-school study in crisis management.The company has suffered epic public-relations and image problems. There was the splashy hiring and relatively rapid firing of former Apple retail executive Ron Johnson. Under Johnson, the chain alienated customers by doing away with discounts and sales, only to reinstate them after sales plummeted. The pursuit of Martha Stewart to bring her business to Penney led to messy litigation with rival Macy’s.

Makes $195 million before opening in U.S.

Apparently there isn’t a worldwide economic slowdown for Tony Stark. Disney’s Iron Man 3 got off to a huge start internationally this past week, growing to more than $195 million in the U.K., South Korea, Australia, Mexico, and France, even before it opens in the U.S., China, Canada, and Russia later this week. Over the past few years, many big-budget Hollywood films have started opening abroad before they do in the U.S. as they seek to capitalize on the much more lucrative global market.

Read it at The Wall Street Journal

Cut into texting revenues.

Remember when getting unlimited texts was the next big thing for mobile users? Now chat apps like WhatsApp have surpassed text messaging as the most preferred method of mobile communication, taking a huge chunk out of a major cash source for phone companies. Analysts expect messaging on apps to grow to more than 41 billion a year—double the number of texts. They also think Facebook should watch its back, as the messaging apps are seen as a potential threat to Facebook supremacy in social media. 

Read it at The Financial Times