LyrArc Article Gist
Queen Elizabeth talks in virtual format with members of the Royal Navy on duty on ships near Curacao in South America, and members of the Royal Air Force and Army. One member RAF gunner Shanwayne Stephens is a member of the Jamaican bobsleigh team.

LyrArc Article Gist
The steady calming effect of trees and gardens during the pandemic. Trees have a lot to teach us, their resiliency in winter and blooming again in spring, writes Elizabeth Bernstein in WSJ. They offer a pathway to healing and renewal during the pandemic. Quieting mental chatter, friendship with trees and plants- it is real. 

LyrArc Article Gist
BBC News looks at the situation in Bordeaux, France, after the Front Populaire wins the election. The NFP has a seasoned candidate in this parliamentary seat who can greet people by name. The RN candidate is 18 years old and is new to campaigning, showing that the RN of Le Pen had to field candidates with very little time for preparation in a snap election. People in Bordeaux and NFP supporters say 2025 and 2026 are years in which the Front Populaire has to deliver on cost of living actions to improve the lives of people struggling to make a living. For this to happen Macron has to give the NFP the chance to govern in the interests of the people of France and not obstruct actions needed to tackle cost of living. The Socialist parties have the experience to govern and obstruction would only further reduce the popularity of the Les Republicains and Macron's party.

LyrArc Article Gist
Failure to invest in housing and transport leading to this becoming an issue in the 2024 Irish elections. Ireland has a surplus of $25 billion.

LyrArc Article Gist
Adam Bryant interviews Steve Case, founder of AOL online, on the lessons learned from the failure of the AOL Time Warner merger and failures in execution.

LyrArc Article Gist
India and Vietnam are key countries for reinvention of the supply chain to cover home production in the US with supplies from friendly nations. After the G20 meetings in New Delhi president Biden will go to Hanoi, Vietnam. Vietnam also maintains trade relationship with China as it depends on China for its manufacturing exports. China and Vietnam are both socialist nations, yet after a border war in 1979 Vietnam is building a stronger relationship with the US. It also has a trade relationship with Japan and Vietnamese workers help meet worker shortages in Japan.

LyrArc Article Gist
The London Stock Exchange will buy $2.8 billion of Microsoft products over the next 10 years including its Azure cloud service. Microsoft will in turn take a 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange. In this way the tech and financial companies will come together. It brings one having a growing batch of financial data together with another company that has cloud computing and financial software. 

LyrArc Article Gist
16.3 million acres wildfires in Canadian West burn in August 2025- the smoke reaches midwest and northeastern US. Wildfires in San Luis Obispo County in California 2025 bring smoke to Los Angeles.

The Air Quality Index in Detroit, Montreal and Toronto reaches levels of 147, 144, and 158, it reaches. On August 4, Cairo was 122, Dubai 107, Kolkata 112. It shows how these fires are affecting air quality in the US and Canadian cities. Northeast New York Boston will be affected by Aug 8 Fri as it eases up with winds in Detroit, Toronto by Aug  6 Wed.

LyrArc Article Gist
The local police station in Japan is a friendly place called koban. Most lost items are returned here. It is most unusual for something lost like a wallet or a iphone not to be returned.

LyrArc Article Gist
The election in Catalonia leaves the region as divided as before. The pro independence parties won 47.5% of the vote and the parties opposed to independence won 43.5% of the vote, so that only 4 percentage points separates the pro and anti independence parties. By seats in the Catalan parliament the vote showed pro independence parties with 70 seats, a loss of 2 seats from the previous parliament. The party of Mr. Puigdemont won most votes by a small margin within the pro- independence parties. On the other side the Ciudadanos party which is strongly opposed to independence won about 25% of the vote. About 80% of 5.3 million voters cast ballots. Prime minister Rajoy hoped for a better result to preserve Spanish unity. Most Spaniards support a unified Spain. Pro union Spaniards are strongly opposed because they see the efforts of Mr Puigdemont for independence coming at a time when Spain was just recovering from a deep recession with millions unemployed. This is affecting the economy of Barcelona and the Catalan region. Unemployment is higher and tourist flow has slowed. Because the pro independence parties are themselves divided on how to proceed, and with the anti independence parties also winning a significant share of the vote, the negotiations between the Catalan regional government and Madrid will be protracted. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
China's response to the delta variant of coronavirus and the difficulties it is facing.

LyrArc Article Gist
Beijing residents say they began to relax in wearing masks or not wearing them, not wearing masks properly, after 8 weeks with no cases. A vegetable and fruits wholesale market in Beijing, in southwestern district of Fengtai,  which supplies 80% of the fruits and vegetables to Beijing's 21 million people is now seen by health authorites in Beijing as the source of a new outbreak. 79 new cases are traced back to this market on June 15.  In Beijing restaurants and shops had reopened. Primary schools and other schools had reopened. Public health experts are looking at the possibility that the source is a cutting board for frozen salmon imported from overseas possibly Europe-. because of the DNA sequencing of the virus experts say. Contaminated seafood or meat is suspected as a source. China's CDC says the virus can survive on frozen meat or seafood for 3 months. Just when this new cluster was detected in Beijing, the city of Wuhan the origin city of the virus is permitting indoor sports and entertainment facilities reopen, and this WSJ report says Wuhan is making masks no longer mandatory outdoors. Beijing authorites have responded with mass testing, and contact tracing through neighborhood committees. About 100,000 people are organized by neighborhood committees to visit the city's 7000 residential compounds for contact tracing to identify people who visited the market and get them to test for coronavirus. This is the typical response in China to get large numbers of low level officials, workers and volunteers mobilized for contact tracing and testing. By June 14 about 76,000 people were tested - of this 13,000 are from the 29,000 who visited the market since May 30, according to Beijing government statistics. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
What is in the biggest climate bill in history, the Biden $369 billion Climate Bill, also called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022? The WSJ looks at the bill that passed the US Senate and now heads for passage in the House of Representatives this weekend. 

LyrArc Article Gist
The supplies of natural gas are making a huge improvement in 2023 over 2022 when the war with Ukraine led to the European Union scrambling to replace Russian supplies with LNG imports. The higher temperatures this past winter in the US and Europe have left ample supplies in storage with the unused natural gas adding to supply. The result prices are now half of what they were last summer bringing relief to people for higher energy prices. Summer prices for natural gas are expected to be about $2.84 per million BTU's.

LyrArc Article Gist
 Americans in the southern states forget that president Kennedy made the famous statement about "a rising tide lifts all boats" in Arkansas, a poor southern state, saying that America must invest in all regions in people in all parts not just in well off northeastern states. In a handful of southern states expanding Medicaid to about $43,000 or 138% of the federal poverty level for a family of four is now being taken up by Republican leaders who show new openness- in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. Noah Weiland -of NYT looks at one particular battle -between Democrat Governor Laura Kelly in Kansas and Republican Speaker Hawkins- in Topeka, Kansas, where the fight goes on. Hawkins calling it the greatest Ponzi scheme devised and Kelly telling this reporter that she has included a work requirement so there is no excuse for not doing this. Republicans are coming around and so are states in other places. Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, states that lie next to Kansas have approved this through ballot initiatives. The point here is that in the years as America comes out of the pandemic there is and should rightly be a realization that this is different, that the children of low income families deserve as equal a chance as their higher income fellow Americans, that depriving them of good medical care makes America a weaker country. As Jerome Powell of the US Fed said in Stanford today about Kennedy's expression of "lifting all boats," it is just this that is needed today. It will be the No.1 election issue in Kansas in 2024, says Governor Kelly. The Republicans are also having second thoughts and are now just face saving. Consider that the Kansas Health Institute a research group, says 70% of the people becoming eligible for Medicaid expansion are working. Many are restaurant business workers who cannot provide proper medical care to children who form the next generation of America. And hiring in rural hospitals would expand for health workers instead of layoffs in southern states lifting financial strain on rural healthcare with additional Medicaid funds. This helps rural America when it needs it most. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Some economists at Global Insight and at the UAW, Gault at Global Insight and Blackwell at the UAW do not share Fed governor Fisher's view that labor has the bargaining power to raise wages as prices of food and fuel increase. With unemployment up and more workers pushed into part time work from full time this bargaining power is seriously eroded.

LyrArc Article Gist
PM Narendra Modi addressed a World Bank organized "Making it Personal: How behavioural change can tackle climate change" conference. Modi called it part of democratising the battle against climate change. "Simple acts in daily lives are powerful, there will be a very positive impact on the environment. The people of India have done a lot in this matter in the last few years." "People driven efforts improved the sex ratio in many parts of India. It was the people who led a massive cleanliness drive. Be it rivers, beaches or roads, they are ensuring public places are free of litter. And it was the people who made the switch to LED bulbs a success. Nearly 370 million LED bulbs have been sold in India. This helps in avoiding 39 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year." The Mission Life Modi introduced with the Secretary General of the United Nations has achieved much in India- "The farmers of India ensured the coverage of nearly seven hundred thousand hectares of farmland by micro-irrigation. Fulfilling the mantra of 'Per Drop More Crop', this has saved a huge amount of water. Under Mission Life our efforts are spread across many domains such as: Making local bodies environment-friendly, saving water, saving energy, reducing waste, and e-waste, adopting healthy lifestyles, adoption of natural farming, promotion of millets." ...

LyrArc Article Gist
The effect of a sudden health crisis such as cancer on the finances of Americans leading to capsizing and losing everything is shown here in the WSJ. In 2024 this comes after the pandemic has already affected finances of working people. 

LyrArc Article Gist
The DW.com's Christoph Strack says its a good sign that chancellor Merkel of Germany is opening up and showing emotions. She was decisive in the way she presented herself and what she has learned in the past 12 months since the refugee crisis erupted in summer 2015. She expressed her sense that she had "an absolutely sure feeling" that Germany will emerge out of all this better "than when we went into it." The remarks at Konrad-Adenauer-Haus for thirteen minutes were unusual and open in sharing how she felt. She said she is "fully committed" to making sure that the situation of 2015 never happens again. Don't count Merkel out, says Strack, she is down but not out, because she is going through the weaknesses in her policy, weakness in communication, and reflecting on her mistakes. And she has shown defiance and resolve, as she prepares for 2017, and its for everything she believes in.

LyrArc Article Gist
The Dutch election as elsewhere in Europe marks a significant shift away from the migration issue to the urgent problems of housing and cost of living, infrastructure, that were neglected as the migrant issue moved up in importance. Housing shortages with need for 400,000 new apartments and homes in Netherlands is a major issue in Dutch elections. Migration is not the major issue it was in 2023-2024 and Geert Wilders Freedom party lost 12 seats in the new parliament . D66 Centrist party gained 18 seats, and its leader Rob Jetten 38 years says this is a shift to cooperation as the new style in government. He told NOS in an interview- “In the coming years, we will do everything we can to show all Dutch people … that politics and the government can be there for them again." Jetten says he had noticed during the election campaign that voters liked his positive approach to “say goodbye to the Wilders era and truly seek the cooperation to move the country forward.” The Wilders era with participation of the Freedom party in Dutch government 2023-2025 led to much infighting in the Dutch government leading to neglect of major issues such as housing shortages and cost of living.    ...

LyrArc Article Gist
The US is sending the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System to Ukraine to counter Russian artillery and long range rocket attacks in the eastern Donbas region. This is part of a new $700 million 11th military aid package to Ukraine. Germany will provide its IRIS-T system to Ukraine with radar to track Russian artillery, so that entire cities can be protected from Russian artillery attacks. The US has obtained assurances from Mr. Zelensky that the HIMARS US system will only be used on Ukrainian territory and not into Russian territory. Ukraine currently lacks this type of system that reaches for 45 miles for its midrange system, and it is seen as crucial for defending Ukraine, as Ukrainians are being forced back with Russian artillery attacks. Mr. Biden in an article in the New York Times said the US goal was simply to see "a democratic, independent, sovereign Ukraine," not to oust Mr. Putin, or seek a broader conflict with Moscow. Mr. Biden said that this aid will make a diplomatic settlement more likely, as it will strengthen Ukraine's negotiating position. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
International aid arrives from the UK, France, US, and the European Union, as India faces a surge of the coronavirus in April 2021. A flight with oxygen and ventilators arrives from the UK. The EU is pooling resources, France is preparing flights with equipment. The United States Biden administration says it will release some of the 60 million doses of Astra Zeneca vaccine to India that remain unused in the US to address vaccine shortages.

LyrArc Article Gist
In this video DW.com looks at China with its CO2 emissions making up 30% of the global total and addition of coal power capacity. Yet China is also the country with a huge effort to build solar energy and is at the forefront in electric cars. What does this mean and how does it affect the search for reaching a limit to the use of fossil fuels? DW.com's Christian Pricelius takes a look.

LyrArc Article Gist
This article in the Guardian points out that Britain did not just wake up one morning and find itself in a strange predicament of leaving the European Union. This was happening over two decades as leaders appealed to immigration fears on the right to win voters and the leaders of the Labor party failed to protect their traditional working class base. Voter turnout declined and it points out that Cameron of the Conservative party won the election in 2015 with only 24 percent of the eligible voters, as the hold of the Conservatives and Labor parties declined with each successive election on their voter base as they desperately tried to shore up support by appealing to voters fears even as they literally abandoned their traditional voter base and appeared elitist to less educated, poor workers. The economic crisis and austerity policies created a new voter group of disaffected voters who turned to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Scottish National Party (SNP). The referendum offered by Cameron in 2015 on the EU against the advice of coalition partner Vince Cable and the Liberal Party, without an understanding of the situation in the country after years of austerity policies was only one of a long series of developments that unfolded over two decades unraveling years of work building a better Britain following 1945. ...