Flu shots are safe, cheap and pretty much universally recommended.

But how well do they really protect us from getting sick?

The most comprehensive review to date, just published online by The Lancet, suggests that flu vaccines aren't as effective as many of us have thought.

In a hurry-up world, the garden keeps its own time. Old-fashioned plants like raspberries, asparagus and rhubarb ask us to slow down and wait for the sweet reward they offer. Commentator Julie Zickefoose revels in the waiting.

I have a friend who lives up in the mountains of North Carolina who loves to give me wonderful plants. Usually Connie gives me native prairie plants, and I plop them in the meadow, and it's no big deal. But this year she gave me raspberries. Not just any raspberries. Golden raspberries.

As Rick Perry unveils his flat tax plan, we take a look back at the history of the flat tax, from Abraham Lincoln to Steve Forbes to 9-9-9.

The slow pace of job creation has revived interest in getting promising new technologies out of university labs and into the marketplace. At Stanford University, a group of academic researchers from all over the country gathered to take a crash course in how to turn their projects into startup companies.

Canadians are not feeling very loved by the United States. The latest spat comes after the U.S. announced that any Canadian traveling to the country by air or boat will be charged a $5.50 tax.

The tax had been discussed and discarded before, but a new free-trade deal signed with Colombia prohibits tariff exemptions for travelers from Canada.

The sentiment in Canada is perhaps best captured by the headline in today's National Post:

Rick Perry doesn't have a catchy marketing slogan for his tax plan. But he's hoping the idea of a flat, 20 percent income tax rate will do for his campaign what "9-9-9" did for Herman Cain's.

"We need a tax code that unleashes growth instead of preventing it; that promotes fairness, not class warfare," Perry said during a speech at the ISO Poly Films factory Tuesday in Gray Court, S.C.

From the shaky, grainy video, we have an idea of what the last moments were like for Col. Moammar Gadhafi. But over the past few days, his top security official, who was captured along with Gadhafi, has been talking about the final weeks of one of the most notorious despots in modern history.

As Mansour Dao, who says he is also Gadhafi's cousin, puts it, Gadhafi left Tripoli on Aug. 18 or 19, before the rebels made a push for the capital city. He left to Sirte, what was a stronghold, and his son Saif al-Islam left for Bani Wald.

Despite claims to the contrary, a insightful economic analysis suggests that it wouldn't be in most employers' business interests to stop providing health insurance when the main coverage provisions of the federal health overhaul kick in.

In recent weeks, at least 80 business owners have fled Wenzhou in eastern China and gone into hiding because they can't pay crushing debts to the city's empire of underground lending firms and loan sharks.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao became so concerned that he flew to Wenzhou earlier in October to try to keep the problem from spreading.

The city's credit crisis highlights some of the flaws — and potential risks — of the banking system in the world's second-largest economy.

Business Owners Trapped By Debt