Individual investors who still hold any doubts about Mainland China’s future growth potential should take a long hard look at Airbus SAS, the Pan-European commercial airliner maker that is now building airplanes in that country.

Chinese regulators rejected Coca-Cola Co.’s (KO) $2.3 billion bid for China Huiyuan Juice Group Ltd., China’s largest juice company.

As crude oil prices smash the $135-a-barrel barrier for the first time, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia say they will take action to protect their state-owned oil companies.

“If oil prices keep going up, it is simply not in any country’s best interest to keep subsidizing these prices indefinitely,” says Peter Gastreich, a UBS oil and gas analyst, in the Financial Times.

They call him the Indiana Jones of finance. He arrived in Manhattan in 1968 with $600. He retired 12 years later with millions. No one knows for sure, but these days, the rumors say he’s worth several hundred million.

Nothing in life is perfect. In fact, to write such a sentence means most of my life must be pretty darned all right. After a too long and too snowy winter, I am, today sitting on the back porch with laptop in lap. Yeah, the WIFI signal just barely makes it out to here… the G5 in my office is hardwired to the Internet so it’s blazingly faster.