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Declan Walsh describes the role of the military in Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan which has marginalized political parties and democratic process. The shift in Pakistan towards a democratic state shows the limits of the military's role in politics. Throughout Asia and Latin America, beyond just the Arab world, S. Korea, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, the movement is towards democratic processes of government. As political parties mature a more centrist position was adopted in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Islamist parties in Turkey, a similar trend is likely in the rest of the Muslim world as political parties are able to mature and deliver in economic terms and improving living conditions. The Saudis and UAE may be able to deliver in economic terms because of oil prices and supplies, each country and the people in the region has to determine how it will tackle its economic problems and move forward or fall behind in a rapidly developing global economy. Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey and India are no exception....

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Seen as a rural urban divide, less educated and well educated and tech workers the situation in France looks similar to that in the US in the elections of 2016 and 2020. With business in the US and European Union shifting manufacturing to China and the governments neglecting rural areas, decline in standard of living for people on pensions that have not kept up with the cost of living, the situation in France as in the US is decades in the making. Bernie Sanders and Melenchon were appealing in different ways to younger people yearning for change and a system that would correct these changes.   Melenchon coming this close to less than one percentage point of Le Pen in the first round of French elections shows that a straight Macron Le Pen version of what has happened is an oversimplification, just as seeing the changes in America under president Biden vs Trump would be a simplification, as voters for Sanders who voted for Biden are changing the Biden agenda and setting America on a new path. A path to reshoring jobs that were sent to China, rebuilding American manufacturing, increasing workers wages and restoring workers leverage for higher wages, investing $2 trillion in child care, housing, supporting worker incomes and families, supporting older Americans on pensions. In the same way beneath the idea that nothing has happened after the yellow vest protests for cost of living, that has not only not gone away- but increased in the concern for cost of living in this election with the surging inflation - new developments are happening.  Even as Germany under Merkel appeared not be changing in 2020- 1 year after Merkel the situation will have changed completely to address social concerns that were ignored earlier and to invest in infrastructure in a big way. Behind this is a fundamental change that is taking place. Facing a challenge from totalitarian states the fabric of society in the free world, the US, Germany, France, other EU states, India, and nations in the free world will have to respond with changes that restore the fabric of society to what it was before this kind of fracturing, bringing all parts of society together to bring all the energies in place for rebuilding, investing in infrastructure, restoring local manufacturing and renewal. It requires a unified effort to be put in place to respond in the right way.     ...

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King points out that trade agreements are not what they used to be as most tariff barriers are whittled down. He says more than 70% of imports come into the U.S. duty free, and the average tariff is about 1.5% declining significantly in the last 2 decades. If all import restraints are lifted it would increase U.S. economic output by less than 0.05% by 2017, according to the International Trade Commission. This figure is also cited by Krugman in the NYT with a column saying the Trans Pacific Partnership(TPP) trade agreement pushed by the Obama administration is no big deal. King also points out that the U.S. already has free trade agreements with Australia, Peru, Chile, Singapore and other TPP countries. Some experts see China's success with setting up the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) attracting India, UK, Germany, France and other countries, is creating pressure on the U.S. to come up with its own response in the form of TPP with Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Peru, Chile and other countries....

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Willingham of the NYT points to the crisis in the U.S.as many adults with high school education lack even the most basic skills to understand or check facts. National Assessment of Education Progress tests show little progress over 30 years. He cites the tests from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy for 2003 showing 95% of the people could not compare two editorial opinions and check a table for the facts.  Willingham says the problems are the lack of vocabulary, the lack of knowledge of usable facts that writers assume the reader knows.   Building and providing knowledge intensive education early on in earlier grades is needed. Standardized tests need to check for this knowledge so that it builds up. Don't ask about random topics, if a child is taught knowledge on New Zealand, he should be tested with questions on New Zealand. The Common Core Standards neglect this importance of content intensive, content rich information in curriculums. Massachusetts improved education by emphasizing knowledge. High information texts should be used in early grades so that children pickup knowledge early on and build on this grade after grade. The important thing is no to see reading comprehension as a skill but something that is intertwined with knowledge, the more knowledge exposure one has early on the better so that reading comprehension grows quickly and advances. Willingham brings up the idea that technology is not the culprit, it is not the answer either. What is important is to correctly grasp the need for vocabulary and knowledge and push this in the early grades to get good reading comprehension that advances grade after grade. Also important is getting children excited about reading, to get their imagination to work with knowledge gained, so that they pursue reading inside and outside the classroom and become regular readers.  ...

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A fellow Christian of Pope Francis who distributed food and blankets to remote villages in the Andean mountains of Peru driving his white pickup truck is the man chosen to lead the Catholic Church in the third decade of the 21st century. He is Robert Francis of Chicago, an American who first came to an Augustinian mission in Peru near the Ecuador border in 1985. In 1988 he returned to Peru, this time to the Augustinian seminary in Trujillo, Peru, where he taught canon law and was a judge in the regional ecclesiastical court. He spent 13 years in Peru before returning to the US in 1998. He was appointed by Pope Francis of Buenos Aires, Argentina, as apostolic administrator of Chiclayo in 1998, then Bishop in 2023 and Cardinal in 2024. In his speech from the Vatican Pope Leo XIV- Robert Francis- switched to Spanish in the middle of his speech. We now have not one but two popes from different parts of Latin America from the Atlantic coast Buenos Aires to the Andes mountains of Peru, knowing that Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Brazil ar Catholic countries, so is Central America and part of the US that is Irish and Italian, Spanish and French. It includes Spanish colonies in Asia such as the Philippines, and Portuguese settlements in Africa. ...

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Taghreed's account in the NYT of a wounded surgeon caught in the crossfire in a Gaza City neighborhood, with his wife and child cut to pieces in an exchange of fire between suicidal fighters and an overpowering army on the other side. A reminder that the civilian side of the story in every war that goes on way beyond its time, the 60th year for Palestine, the 61st year for Kashmir, the 30th year in Afghanistan, is the story that is told less often and takes less print and television space than coverage of the hostilities and the war rhetoric. This continues to be the case even after fatigue sets in among the people from many years of conflict, casualties and the poverty that wars cause.

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About 14 million people are in poverty or slipping below the poverty line according to Paritatische Wohlfahrtsverband, umbrella organization for welfare organizations. German per capita wealth is about 52,000 euros but there is growing inequality in wealth and incomes.  A household with 2 parents and 2 children is at the poverty line at 2410 euros a month or about 29000 euros a year. Social safety net under Hartz IV does little to help because it is set at 449 euros a month with 285 to 376 euros for each child. This is expected to go up to 503 euros a month per person in 2023. Even though experts say at least 650 euros are needed per month to live  with dignity. Under this system only 5 euros per day is set by Hartz IV for food, says DW.com, which is shocking. It means food of lesser quality or less food goes to the less well off. About 2 million people use food banks. Prices are up 12% in 2022 for basics such as bread, vegetables, milk and cheese. One study shows old age poverty is likely to affect 20% of Germans by 2036. The situation is bad for elderly, students and women. Women have worked part time reducing their income.  A student with federal funding gets 934 euros a month which is well below the poverty line. A new program for 200 billion euros is planned by German government to protect against inflation for households. Minimum wage is 12 euros per hour so that someone who works 40 hours a week makes 1480 per month in net income. After inflation this is close to the poverty line. Such is the situation for Germans today even after decades of growth and being seen as an export powerhouse. Compare this to the situation in India where the food program of the Modi administration continues to support food supplies that are adequate for feeding a family right through the pandemic for 800 million people and one sees that the idea of what is a rich or poor country is turned on its head. It is simply the will of the culture of a people and a country and its leadership that makes its limited or larger national wealth available to all its citizens, for the basics to fulfill the idea that "all men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with some inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," enshrined in the minds of Asia borrowed from America. ...

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With 7 caps for Germany and winning the Bundesliga title for Bayern in 2005, Tobias Rau retired in 2009 after injuries. His next career- teaching sports and biology at the peter August Gasemschule in northwest Germany.

Gheerbrant of The Times of London talks to soccer players who decide to take the road not taken and branch out into different things. 

Rau says as a child he was lucky to have good teachers, and school was a part of life he really loved. With a wife and two small children he likes living in a small town. Werther the home town he came back to to teach at a Gasemschule.( a comprehensive with real mix of abilities and qualifications). He likes that he gets to spend quality time with his children, and does not have to deal with the high of adrenaline of competitive sports which can tax the body and system. He was 27 when he retired, quite young so that helps, as he could get back to university easily at that age. 

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Some key takeaways from the Biden State of the Union- Biden has a vision for the future and the way forward for the US to a new frontier and new progress, where his predecessor really has none or has shown none. On China under his predecessor the US was shown as being behind and the US did little to sending of advanced US technologies to China. Today the US is growing and has the strongest economy of the G-7 and China is falling behind, flow of advanced technologies to China is stopped. On investing in the US. It is there plain for everyone to see. If the US has fair taxes the US can rebuild its infrastructure, modernize, invest in education and the working people of the country, and yet cut the deficit by large amounts. The thousand billionaires in the US pay only 8.2% in taxes. At 25% tax what a firefighter or policeman or teacher pays this would cut the deficit by $500 billion over 10 years. The oil companies and other corporations are similarly only paying less than what ordinary Americans are paying. This at fair tax rate of a minimum of 21% instead of 15% would further cut the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars after investing in the infrastructure and modernization of the economy that his predecessor has no plans for and instead given a tax cut to the corporations which studies show was really not paid for. Negotiating drug prices for Medicare with drug companies would save the country hundreds of billions of dollars. This could be reinvested in cutting child poverty, in free preschool education, in raising teachers wages. Sitting next to Jill Biden the First Lady was the prime minister of Sweden. What it told the US was that countries like Sweden and Finland in NATO had strengthened the alliance and it was for mere political reasons that Ukraine aid was prevented by his predecessor from being passed in the House after passage in the Senate by 70-30 with bipartisan support that also exists in the House. ...

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The 2016 Republican platform is written to express the ideas in the Republican Party for family values, child rearing using the Bible and traditional values, calling pornography a "public health crisis."  The Family Research Council and tradition or family focussed groups played an important role in writing it, with Mr. Trump playing less of a role. Instead of "physical barrier" with Mexico, it says "a wall"  should be built in a taking up Trump's idea, but in general it is a clear expressing of traditional family values that Republicans have supported for years and expressed frustration with the movement of social lives in an opposite direction. The same sex marraige decision by the Supreme Court and transgender debate were not present in 2012 election, so in that sense the Republicans see the country as moving in a different direction. More of the pendulum having swung too far in another direction is how Republicans perceive it, and their response is to go back to how things used to be and the world they knew, based on what they see as positive outcomes for the whole of society. Hence language that encourages teaching of the Bible in public schools, condemning pornography as a menace particularly for children, and insisting on "man made laws being consistent with God given natural rights." A good understanding of the Bible is considered "indispensable for the development of an educated citizenry."   Amendments opposing gay and transgender are being added. ...

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Compared to 2008 Hillary Clinton is now very clear that she will stand up for woman's issues openly- "it is about no ceilings, no limits, for any of us." About playing the women's card she says "deal me in." One of the paradoxes of this election season is that white women registered voters 35 to 64 years of age have shown less enthusiasm for Hillary, around 34-36 percent in polls such as the NBC-WSJ poll. Interestingly the figure climbs to 66 percent for ages 18-34, and to 56 percent for ages over 64, for all women. Experts attribute this to the fact that women over 35 are facing fewer barriers than the women over 64 who remember the hard won battles for women's rights when it was hard for women to get a credit card or run for office, or be promoted in business. Traditional career choices were being teachers or nurses. A lot has changed in the last 20 years, and this has left some women who are no longer facing such barriers turning to other issues to choose their candidate such as happened in their enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders. Overall for all women registered voters  Hillary gets 52 percent support, Trump 37 percent, according to a July 2016 NBC/WSJ poll.   ...

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A few events in the last 50 years are rewriting the rules for business, finance and economics, says the WSJ in this analysis. The admitting of China to the World Trade Organization under president Clinton in 2001 was one, another was the global financial crisis in 2009 with the selling of bad mortgages by the financial industry, the euro currency financial crisis with the bad accounting, real estate industry speculation, and lack of financial oversight in countries such as Greece, Ireland, Spain. The coronavirus pandemic is one more addition to this string of crises and events that have made the working class and middle class in US and Europe poorer and in worse shape after the recovery following World War II.  The changes indicated here are some of the surface changes- such as the shift to the suburbs for cleaner air and better living, the work at home as a serious option, the new focus on health care, wellness, exercise, nutrition and mental health, remote learning and community college as a realistic option to high tuition costs by the education industry, and a pharmaceutical industry refocused on public health and vaccines as it was in its early years before its shift into a simply profit driven industry. The underlying thread for all these changes on the surface is a deeper change in the public mind- a change that redefines what the people believe in just as happened after World War II. Rebuilding the devastated economies of Europe, America and Asia required a new vision at the time after World War II. And reconstruction could only happen with all the people involved and working for the public interest.  This also created a new hope for the future. President Biden's vision is for a new set of priorities that make child care, women's position in the economy, community college education as a right for all as a first step to opening the access to education that existed after the war in 1945. Investment in infrastructure, in building new roads, bridges and rail, water, internet connections, public services in transport, better layout of urban areas, better lives for retirees, are all part of an effort to improve quality and ease of living for all parts of society, not just those who can afford it.  This is uppermost on people's minds and administrations or governments that fail to deliver or simply talk with no action, will not have the support of ordinary working men and women in all countries. This is true for countries and regions as varied in their level of development as the US, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Japan, India, Brazil and Mexico, and African nations. Democracy, government adminstration, technology and business structures exist for the people, to improve the ease of living, quality of life, through better health, education and public services.  ...

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Neelman, who founded airline Jet Blue, is now starting an airline in the country where he grew up as achild of Mormon missionaries. The country Brazil is vast with a rickety transportation network, and he feels ideally suited to alow cost airline. At this time 85% of traffic in the air is controlled by 2 airlines which have no incentive to reduce prices. With 12 Embraer planes and the name Azul, Neelman is off to a start, and prices on some routes are lower than acomparable bus fare. The same approach worked to link up cities with low fares in India by pioneer Jet Airlines, though some of those fares in India are up from where they used to be with the losses in the Indian airline industry.

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The rapidly changing demographics as the U.S. becomes more of a multicultural society. For the first time minority babies formed a majority in 2011 with 50.4% of new babies, according to the Census Bureau. The median age of the non-Hispanic White population is 42 compared to 28 for Hispanics. Hispanics are right at the child bearing age. This also raises the issue of how the U.S. will educate the minority population. Today 13% of Hispanics have college degrees, 18% of Blacks and 31% of Whites. High school graduation rates in places like New York City for Hispanics are lagging far behind other groups. The economic downturn after the 2008 financial crisis has worsened the educational prospects for Hispanics and other minorities. The education of minority children is essential to improve the competitiveness of the U.S. in a global economy, as the educational levels in emerging markets accelerates with more opportunities.

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Sheryl Sandberg offers some advice based on experience on raising kids after the loss of a spouse. She points to this concept called "mattering" in sociology, that is important in helping children build resilience. It begins with the parent showing that the child matters and is important, and creating a nurturing environment where the child feels that she is important for the world around her, that she matters, and that people care for him or her, and also rely on the child. Children feel emotions while growing up and in daily interactions at school and social life, and this includes negative emotions that can bring them down. It is important to have these coping skills and feel strong at that time to deal with these emotions and situations that give rise to a range of emotions, some even with destructive tendencies. The coping also includes keeping memories of the missing parent alive through videos and audio with memories of the missing parent.

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This exceptional report on Hillary Clinton shows how difficult it has become to know Hillary Clinton through media accounts because it has been so distorted. Part of the distortion is from bits and pieces of her life being known, not the complete person. This comes from election campaigns dating back to Bill Clinton's second campaign for governor against Gay White, in which the fact that she had not changed her name and did not mix well with Arkansas's conservative society and manners, made this aspiring Northerner not looked at positively. Bill Clinton lost that election and came back to win in the next election for Governor. For that to happen Hillary had to change her name and the way she dressed to fit into Arkansas culture. Continually throughout Bill's career including the presidential campaigns Hillary Clinton had to change or adapt her persona as "Hillary" the person in politics as a candidate's wife, to fit in with what the public wanted to see.  Another facet of Hillary is her strong sense of privacy, not to reveal too much of herself, partly from her mother's ordeal as a child, partly from her Methodist upbringing not to speak too much about oneself. Her bookish nature as a person who studied policy, made this more evident. Political campaigns use some details about how a candidate or his wife is perceived, and Hillary herself said in 1995, telling the Washington Post that "I don't think you can know anybody else," because of what she called the crude mechanisms that only take bits and pieces of a person's life, not the whole person. Her own campaign for president suffered from this distortion as Mark Penn, her campaign strategist, pushed for her experience and hard work to be the basis of her campaign against Obama. Obama had his own focus groups in New Hampshire and Iowa show him that he could could do well as a story teller for change and a movement. It was not till the second presidential run in 2016 that the idea of a woman's movement was what Hillary was clearly put forward as. Throughout all this and all the years the woman Hillary Clinton has been essentially the same, adaption does not mean that you are less of what you are, however great the belittling in the media's version of life and events. And this is the Hillary Clinton, not the "Hillary," America is facing in October 2016, as the country ponders its on future, following some of the most denigration of women in any presidential campaign of the last two hundred years. ...

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This report in the WSJ points to president Biden's speech to a joint session of the US Congress that providing two years of free community college would "change the dynamic" for education in America taking the first step to correct a dangerous drop in college enrollment for young men in America and ensuring working class families have access to college education. The last thirty years of skewed wealth distribution, loss of manufacturing in America, have created alarming distortions in  the access to college education for working class families. Mrs. Biden is a fervent advocate for community college access in today's America, as a community college teacher for 30 years. Biden's $45.5 billion 5 year plan would waive tution for 2 years of public community college. States would have to opt-in to participate, and federal government would provide 100% funding in the first year, decreasing contribution by 5% each subsequent year, with states picking up rest of the cost. It is quite shocking that this is being dropped from the Biden $3.6 trillion Families and Workers Plan that is now being whittled down to $2 trillion. Not because it is not badly needed for American economic competitiveness, and helping workers and families. But because following narrow parochial interests the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities opposes it. And because the US Congress is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans 50-50 in the Senate. The Association of Independent Colleges sees a shift to community colleges and a sharp drop in its enrollment. Community colleges saw a dangerous drop in enrollment of 12% to 4.5 million students in 2020 from the spring of 2019, according to National Student Research Center. Never was a program more badly needed, as American men are alarmingly falling behind in enrollment. Here are some responses to the failure to take even the first steps to broaden college access so that America can return to economic competitiveness. "What kind of world do we want to live in?" Martha Kanter, College Promise. "That's kind of a devil's choice, isn't it? The whole system has to work from infant care all the way through." Senator Tina Smith, Democrat of Minnesota. This is because child care and children's education will be funded yet a struggling generation of college students will be left out. US Chamber of Commerce opposes a $45 billion program that is critical to American competitiveness with China and other countries. US Congress drops a program that at $45 billion is only about 2% of the $2 trillion package and which is critical to economic competitiveness. Former Republican Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee supports community college access as a pillar of economic development and it passed the supermajority in 2014. Mike Krause, Republican former director of the state higher education commission says- "I have been surprised by the lack of enthusiasm for what is really a massive workforce development concept that also provides a path to the middle class. You'd think that would hold some appeal for Republicans and Democrats." The lack of clarity and concentration, lack of unity of purpose to get all vaccinated,  is visible in America's vaccination drive. That same lack of clarity and concentration, lack of unity of purpose, is visible in America's faltering efforts at correcting serious and alarming problems for access to college and American competitiveness in the world. Julie Bykowicz and Douglas Belkins wrote this article in the WSJ.   ...

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A 1000 mile windswept coastline and 300 days of sunshine make the southern African nation of Namibia an attractive location for green hydrogen projects. Green hydrogen is produced using wind and solar energy. There is a 50 fold increase in green hydrogen projects in just the last 12 months globally. The costly technology needs many projects to get to lower costs through technological advances. Germany is doing a pilot project in Luderitz, Namibia. Luderitz will need a deep water project to ship the fuel out.   Renewable wind and solar energy is used to distil the hydrogen atoms in water, as opposed to the currently used method to maky hydrogen from fossil fuels, known as gray hydrogen, or blue hydrogen if the emissions from fossil fuels are captured. Namibia is chosen as its natural advantages could bring the costs down faster. Other locations being adopted are Morocco, Australia, and Chile. The two sites in Namibia had bids from Africa's Sasol, Australia's Fortescu, Germany's Enertrag and Hyphen Hydrogen.  Hyphen Hydrogen won the bid for the two sites. It says the $9.4 billion project is targeting 300,000 metric tons of green hydrogen production a year from 5 gigawatts of renewable energy generation capacity by 2030. "Now all of a sudden the desert has become valuable," says Namibia's finance minister Mr. Shiimi. Additional asset for Namibia is that it ranks highest after Cape Verde in Africa for transparency, creating ease of doing business. It is ranked 57 in Transparency International rank of transparency for countries in 2020. China is 78, India 86 in rank. Namibia is putting up $45 million for the feasibility study on the project with the sesert scrub land an hour from Luderitz, once a diamond mining town on a rocky Atlantic coastline in 1900. Two sites are located in the area each 675 square miles. South Africa is severely short of energy supplies and a pipeline is being considered to take the Namibian hydrogen to South Africa. The African region is expanding in renewable energy. Lake Turkana Wind Power Project in Kenya provides 17% of installed electricity capacity in Kenya with 365 wind turbines.     ...

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Andrew Jacobs provides this exceptional account of the tense atmosphere in Brazil, and the split between supporters of the government and the opposition, in April 2016 with the impeachment effort against president Rousseff.

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Buddhism gives people the opportunity follow a path to spiritual life and peace of mind without getting involved in politics. Here NYT provides a look at Buddhism in China as it is practiced to get people to set better moral standards to rejuvenate China. The founder was a small child traveling across China with his mother searching for their father after the Japanese invasion of China. He joined a monastery they passed by. After the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949 and during the years of the Cultural Revolution he was active in a missionary movement for Buddhism and Buddhist culture in Taiwan.  Chinese president Xi Jinping has met with him 4 times and supports the movement in China as part of an effort to rejuvenate China and improve moral standards lost during the rush to modernization and industrialization. At one point even telling him "I have read all the books you have sent me Master."  For this movement to revive Buddhist culture and ethics the politics is secondary, what matters is the quality of people's lives and their finding fulfillment by living lives that honor the values of a good society that is caring for fellow beings, and practicing good moral standards.  Imagine a 100 acre facility that holds 2 million books in Yangzhou, including 100,000 volume collection of Buddhist scriptures. Built in two valleys of bamboo forest the temple in Yixing  is special, the atmosphere quiet and reflective, and with reading rooms, rooms for calligraphy, for tea. It was started in 2006 and is active with many people visiting the temple. In Buddhist countries such as Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, wherever Buddhism has got entangled with politics the purity and purpose of Buddhism has suffered. Putting Buddhist culture, learning, and quality of living first is essentially the way the Buddha had meant it to be. In a rare and profound way both Mr. Xi and the founder of this Buddhist group have made a unique and lasting connection to rejuvenate China after 100 years of tumult, war, and strife that started with the wars at Chinese ports in the 1850's, and 50 years of rush to industrialize that made weary and weakened the soul of a nation. During the period post coronavirus pandemic China and the Chinese people may find in Buddhist culture much that can enhance the quality of life just as the European nations France, Britain and Germany look back to their own culture and tradition for rejuvenation and renewal. In this sense even as China faces a West determined to protect its industry and technology, and returns to its roots, China can find a way to its own roots, confident that the period of European domination can no longer torment its soul. ...

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The struggles and triumphs over adversity and difficulties of Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine. Daughter of immigrant parents- a father who is a Greek immigrant and a mother who is a child of immigrants- Olympia is raised by an aunt who works at a textile mill in Maine in the 1950's, after losing both parents by the age of 10. She goes to the University of Maine where she studies political science. She marries a member of the House of Representatives from Maine, but her husband is killed in a car accident by the time she is 26. She decides to run for the Maine House of Representatives, and follows this by being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1978. In 1994 she is elected to the U.S. Senate. Here she describes this experience of meeting personal tragedy with courage and faith.

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How the French health care system works. France comes in first and the USA 37th in aWHO health care ranking. THe difference in deaths from respiratory disease is half that in the USA, and lower rates of death from heart disease and diabetes. IT has more hospital beds and doctors per capita than the USA. 65% of French people are satisfied with their health system compared to 40% in the USA, and yet France spends 10.7% of GDP on health care and the USA spends 16% for poorer results. THe French system is more generous to its seniors. Unlike Medicare there are no deductibles, just modest co-payments that are often dismissed for chronically ill. And diabetes and critical surgeries are covered 100%. French also buy supplemental insurance like Medigap for extra expenses like dental and eyglasses. Cancer patients are treated free of charge. Avastin treatments costing $48,000 a year are provided at no charge. France's PMI or Protection Maternelle et Infantile, is rated highly. It is anetwork of thousands of healthcare facilities, that ensure that every mother and child in the country receives basic preventive care. Mothers even receive afinancial incentive for attending their pre and post natal visits. France makes this care affordable by reibursing doctors at a much lower rate. The average yearly net income for doctors is around $55,000, about athird of what doctors in the USA make. But French doctors don't have to pay back huge student loans as medical school is paid for by the state and malpractice insurance premiums are only a tiny fraction of that in the USA. And again the French government pays two thirds of the social security tax for most French physicians- which is typically 40% of income. So the $55,000, is more like $92,000 taking that into account and more like $110,000 when student loans and malpractice is taken into account at US levels. Specialists who have 4 or more years experience can charge what they want, but as one gastroenterologist says, there in an unspoken and undefined limit to what you can cahrge or what is socially acceptable. Yet even in France there is inflation in health care costs that the government deals with through price controls and more spending. The French national insurance system is running increased deficits each year and this is now $13.5 billion, and it has led to higher taxes for employers and workers. ...

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With more women getting higher education and pursuing careers, young Chinese women now prefer to be independent and postpone marraige. This has important consequences including smaller households and lower demand for some products. Women now make up more than half of all undergraduate students and half of graduate students in China. Beyond pursuing a career many women also see the importance of a loving relationship before marraige as opposed to being introduced to someone and finding a partner to go through life.