Advocates for a level playing field between traditional brick-and-mortar retailers and their online-only competitors are celebrating the implementation of "sales tax fairness" in California. Last week, online-only retailers, such as Amazon.com, began collecting state sales tax in California.

With a staggering $444bn in annual revenue, Walmart has generally been sluggish and conservative, allowing tech innovations to be toyed with by rivals such as Amazon.com. But in the last few months, Walmart has quietly started acting like quite the aggressive start-up.

International Civil Aviation Organization authorities have encouraged the more than 700 officials that convened in Montreal for its High-level Conference on Aviation Security to adopt new airfreight security measures. A risk-based approach to cargo safety is key, ICAO personnel reiterated during the conference.

The advancement of technology, combined with demand from customers, has continued to fuel interest in radio frequency identification tagging systems. Yet for all the attention paid to RFID, data from APQC's Open Standards Benchmarking in logistics shows a majority of organizations have not adopted an RFID tagging strategy.

John L. Kent, director of logistics and supply-chain management programs at Missouri State University, offers a look at how the educational curriculum in supply-chain management programs is changing - and what employers are looking for in new graduates.

The era of easy growth for Chinese companies is coming to a close. Sales growth is slowing, while margins and profitability are under pressure. To reach the next level, Chinese companies need first to overcome a more challenging economy at home, where the days of relying on low labor costs, price competition, and a giant domestic market to fuel growth are over.