*Monocle* and high-altitude cities

NOT many global cities of nearly 9m people lack an underground line, but until the end of last year the eastern city of Hangzhou was one of them. Now city slickers and rural migrants squeeze together inside shiny new carriages, checking their smartphones and reading free newspapers like commuters the world over.

Months before Hurricane Sandy hurled the Atlantic Ocean into houses and cities along the East Coast, another record-breaking cyclone battered North America, helping push this year's Arctic sea ice to a record low, a new study finds.

Acting Secretary Rebecca Blank joined business leaders from across the country earlier this week at the White House Business Council American Economic Competitiveness Forum on Travel and Tourism to discuss the administration’s actions to help grow travel and tourism and support the millions of jobs associated with the industry. Travel and tourism is a bright spot for the American economy, leading the recovery with growth that has outpaced the growth of the overall economy by almost 800 percent and on pace for another year of record high international visitors to the U.S.  Since even before the passage of the Travel Promotion Act in 2010, the Administration has been focused on the importance of travel and tourism.  The President recognized the importance of developing the travel and tourism industry and issued an Executive Order last January that created a new inter-agency Task Force co-chaired by the Secretaries of Commerce and the Interior and charged them with developing a National Travel and Tourism Strategy to increase both domestic and international travel throughout the United States, with the goal of increasing the United States’ market share of worldwide travel. The Task Force included representatives from every agency and department whose mission intersects with the travel and tourism industry. The Task Force released the National Strategy in May with an ambitious goal of attracting 100 million international visitors ($250 billion in spending) to the U.S. annually by 2021 -- a 60% increase above the 62 million international visitors in 2011. The National Travel and Tourism Strategy laid out a blueprint for reaching that goal by focusing on five areas: Promoting the United States Enabling and enhancing travel and tourism to and within the United States Providing world-class customer service and visitor experiences Coordinating across government Conducting research and measuring results

There's no end to our quest for self-improvement — the urge to do everything better, smarter, faster, cooler. In this spirit, we've compiled our 24 best packing tips and tricks — some old standbys, some new hacks — to get you from A to B and back to A with a little more spring in your step and a little less sag in your shoulders.

It takes seven years to train dolphins to sniff for mines and explosives, and it also takes a skilled human trainer to teach the dolphins. It's not hard to figure out where this story is headed. Please consider Navy dolphins, sea lions losing out to robots. Like the factory worker and travel agent before them, some Navy dolphins trained to hunt down mines are scheduled to be replaced by computers in five years.

Ski-borne mountaineers took to the Swiss Alps overnight Thursday in the legendary Glacier Patrol, a gruelling race of up to 53 kilometres (33 miles) across the snowbound peaks."We're going to die," quipped Yves Petremand as he, a relative and a friend prepared to set off from the Alpine resort of Zermatt on the way to Verbier, over mountains of up to 3,650 metres."It's going to be tough but we're ready for it," he added.

I'd like to read this Monocle article on how the Swiss postal service is successfully reinventing itself as "a global media and technology company," as that appears to be what our Postal Service wants to do. Apparently, there's a lot of opportunity at "the intersection of data networks and the old-fashioned letter routes" and the Swiss have tapped it.