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On the occasion of the start of the Indo-Pacific Framework economic alliance setting a path to a new supply chain for the US and European Union, this account of how Mohandas Gandhi was treated as one of their own by the workers of Europe serves as a reminder from the past. The only foundation that is sound in principle and deserves our support for the new supply chain that is to be forged for EU, US and India and the countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa, is one that will support American and European workers and families as well as workers and families of the partners in the Free World such as India and other countries.  The Davies family were Quakers and Socialists, who owned a textile mill in Darwen, Lancashire. In 1931 when Mohandas Gandhi visited England for a Round Table Conference to discuss self-rule he was invited by the Davies family to Darwen. The enthusiasm of the workers in Lancashire for Gandhi can be seen in this report in the BBC about that visit. Gandhi's sympathy for the workers and the common feeling of support can be seen from this account of the visit by Darwen's local historian Mr. Heys. Gustan Green was 10 years old in 1931 when she met Gandhi. She said "My father said I want you to see Gandhi, then in the future you can say that you witnessed that brave man. I stood by this door into the works that was my first sighting of Gandhi. He looked down at me, stroked my hair, grinned and walked away. He never said a single word." Gandhi's sympathies were with the workers. Gandhi said "They treated me as one of their own. I shall never forget that." ...

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After winning the Nation's League final over Netherlands next we will see her playing soccer in the Olympics. Aitana Bonmati talks about her life and experiences. Bonmati has given a boost to women's soccer with her talents, hard work and resilience, and by reaching out to fans all over Europe and the world. Alex Ibaceta interviews Spain's Bonmati in The Guardian. She started out playing with the boys because there were no girls to play with. She signs up for the town's football team Club Depotiu Ribes and Club de Football Cubelles playing with boys. As a cadete (14-15 years) she had to switch to playing on women's teams. This was a change at first as she had to learn to interact with girls. She says we had worse general conditions in life simply for being girls and even more in football. These were years when there was no professional women's soccer. She thought she wold play for a few years and then go to the US for studies, considering the University of Oregon. This is when she gets called to the women's first team. Bonmati talks about her mentality, not just the talent and hard work, but the mentality of sacrifice, resilience, fight and want to be better every day. To every young girl trying out a new sport, she describes this- it is a journey that is not pretty at times, there are bad moments, but these bad moments are what make you better as you learn to keep improving and know how to keep getting better. And to take on difficulties as opportunities. When she was goinghome from training with her father, they would use public transport and get home at 1 am. Looking back to where she is now idolized by young girls , what she has been able to accomplish she says it was not down to luck but all the hard work throughout the years. ...

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Biden gives a rousing call to the Nation, on what he has achieved for America and its workers and families, for the people of 51 states, and what the tasks are for the future to 2035. It surpasses the State of the Union address 2024 in the vigor and importance of his message, 76 days before a national election to decide the future of the Nation and the World. Key parts of the speech selected by Lyrarc, on Infrastructure above and Manufacturing here with 800,000 new Manufacturing jobs created. "Because of you and so many electeds out there, American manufacturing is back. Where the hell does it say we wouldn’t lead the world in manufacturing. Eight-hundred-thousand new manufacturing jobs. Our Republican friends and others made sure they’d go abroad to get the cheapest labor. We used to import products and export jobs. Now we export American products and create American jobs, right here in America, where jobs belong. With every new job, with every new factory, pride and hope is being brought back to communities throughout the country that were left behind. You know you’re from it, many of you. You know what it’s like when that factory closed where your mother, your father, your grandmother, grandfather worked. And now you’re back, providing once again, proving that Wall Street didn’t build America, the middle class built America, and unions—unions—built the middle class.  It’s been my view since I came to the Senate and that’s why I’m proud to have been the first President to walk a picket line and be labeled the most pro-union President in history. And I accept it. That’s a fact. Because when unions do well, we all do well.  ...

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Swiatek is 24 years old and has already won 3 titles consecutive years in the French Open. She goes into the Wimbledon finals against Anisimova of US on July 12, 2025. Her game incudes a sports psychologist which helps her with the toughness needed in the game, and she has supported athletes for Mental Health Day. She is a keen reader which helps her relax, listens to some music to get her going before games, and likes polish recipe pasta with strawberries. She lives in Raszyn, a suburb of Warsaw. Her entry into the sport of tennis was for following her older sister who retired after injuries at the age of 15.  Her father is a rower who competed in the 1988 Seoul Olympics and wanted his daughters to join an individual sport, and her mother an orthodontist.

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RFK Jr. is confirmed as Health Secretary by Senate vote 52 to 48. RFK Jr. now takes up the fight against obesity and poor health in America to Make America Healthy Again. He called for the banning of drug ads on television and said the health agencies were broken with FDA and other agencies too cosy with the drug industry and the food industry. He has also called for the banning of chemical additives including dyes in food.  There is nationwide support from Moms and parents who are concerned about the deterioration in health in America. Many see him as fighting entrenched interests in the food and drug industry on behalf of parents and children. During the Senate hearings it became apparent that only someone like RFK Jr. with decades of experience as environmental lawyer and fight with entrenched lobbies and industries could tackle the fight needed to get America Healthy Again. RFK reminded viewers about his father Robert Kennedy telling him as a boy of 13 years to keep a fierce skepticism. ...

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Mahathir Mohamed 92, wins the 2018 general elections in Malaysia with a commanding majority, leading to the fall of the government of prime minister Najib Razak. Razak led the United Malay National Organization UMNO after Mahathir Mohamed's departure from politics.  Unlike Mahathir, Najib was not fluent in Malay, was educated at top British schools and unable to connect freely with the Malay popular base. His main connnection was through his father Tun Abdul Razak who was the second prime minister of Malaysia. The United Malay National Organization serves the interests of the Malay people in the country. After decades in government the party has deteriorated and is now steeped in patronage, with the corruption in the Najib government leading to the 1MDB money laundering scandal. This led to the return of Mahathir Mohamed to politics to cleanup the government.  For several years the Najib government was seen as acting with impunity following the 1MDB revelations of corruption which were investigated by prosecutors in Malaysia and the Justice Department in the U.S. The Attorney General of Malaysia was fired for his investigation by Najib Razak, leading to the return of Mahathir Mohamed to politics and the elections of 2018. The investigations into the 1MDB scandal are now likely to proceed as this has aroused popular sentiment in Malaysia for clean government. ...

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Harold Meyerson compares the continuing inhumanity of separating parents from children that president Obama has to face with the choice presented to Lt. Colonel Jager at the Berlin Wall in 1989. Jager decided to let both parents visiting West Germany to return to East Germany to their children, even though the father had a stamp on his passport banning a return. He says the Republican control of Congress could last till 2023 by which time current law would have separated millions of parents and children. In 2012 about 13% of schoolchildren in California and Texas had an undocumented immigrant as a parent, according to the Pew Research Center. And for the last 6 years of the Obama administration deportations have reached 400,000 a year, leading to a lot of broken families.

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American folk singer continued the folk song tradition set by Woody Guthrie with songs such as "Good Night Irene." He came from a family deeply committed to music, with his father a music teacher and mother a concert violinist. His own career spanned the period from the 1940's when he toured with Guthrie as part of the Almanac Singers, all the way to 2009 when he sang "This Land is Your Land," with Bruce Springsteen at the Lincoln Memorial. The key to the future said Seeger is to find the optimistic stories and let them be known. He lived in a wood cabin on 17 acres near the Hudson River in New York, and was the inspiration for other contemporary singers like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

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Studies by Professors who are co-directors of immgration studies at NYU show that the 16 million children of immigrant families are having hard times because of difficulties faced by their families including long periods of separation leading to depression, poverty, isolation. The absent parent being commonly the father. Most of these children are from Hispanic families. Immigrant children were crowded in the lower ranks for English language skills. The professors Marcelo and Carola Suarez-Orozco have studied immigrant children for over 20 years. This NYT editorial says the children are going to be part of a new generation of Americans and are th human capital of the future even as they are tangled up in the messy immigration debate that ends up treating many of these families poorly.

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Jean-Marie Le Clezio is hailed as "author of new departures, explorer of humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization," by the Swedish Academy. This Frenchman loved to explore foreign cultures from North African immigrants in France to native Indians in Mexico and islanders in the Indian ocean. He wins the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2008. His novels include "Desert," about a Sahara woman and her encounters with European civilization, the "Prospector," and others. Le Clezio's novel "Onitsha," is based in Nigeria during the British colonial period. His father was a British doctor with connections to Mauritius where he also lived. He was born in Nice and studied at Bristol university in the UK and spent a year in Nigeria. He now spends time between Nice, Mauritius, and Albuquerque.

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The Irish prime minister Varadkar says it is time to move on. When he assumed office he was the first from an ethnic minority background to lead Ireland, the son of an Irish mother and an Indian immigrant father. He took Ireland through the crises of coronavirus pandemic, Brexit, and improved unemployment and budget shortfalls. Recently he accepted defeat on a referendum intended to remove language in the Irish Constitution on a clause about "a woman's life within the home." Disagreements over the language of the referendum led to its not getting approved on International Women's Day by about 70% of the vote with 44% of people voting. It suggest there was no enthusiasm and its relevance at this time was not understood. It is not clear why there was a need for this referendum in the first place to remove one text of the constitution that respects the role of family and mother's contributions in the home. During the pandemic for instance women played a major role, and sometimes took on a greater share of the burden. Efforts to have women's participation as shown in Japan and India does not require constitutional wording to be changed. Japan has done remarkably well and India is about to do this. And removing the wording about women's role at home, instead of encouraging or adding wording about women actively participating in the workforce and actions to make that possible, accomplishes little. Coupling this with a wording that includes gay families in the definition of family while removing the role of women in the family language seemed to be making changes that had little to do with each other. ...

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Jerry Brown is likely to get a fourth term as Governor of California. Brown's focus is on a Water initiative, Proposition 1, and an initiative for a rainy day fund, Proposition 2, for the state. His campaign spending of only $500,000 suggests that he prefers to make his legacy with the right actions for the state. Proposition 1 addresses the water problems in the state which is facing a long drought. It is a water bond that will invest $7.1 billion on water storage and recycling, watershed management and loans to regional water management projects. Proposition 2 addresses the second major problem in the state of California- the failure to build enough reserves to tide over periods of economic downturn. It requires the state to set aside 1.5% of general fund revenue and a larger percentage of capital gains taxes till the rainy day fund reaches 10% of the state general fund or $15 billion for 2014. Brown is unique among the nation's governors for his ability to stay away from politics and ideologies to take a common sense approach to the state's major problems. As a former governor he returned to office decades later with experience that few governors have, enabling him to carry on the legacy of his father, a former governor, to make a huge contribution to the state. Fed chairman Volcker has started an initiative to encourage public service in the U.S., Jerry Brown has shown how it is done. Bringing the experience, the courage for needed action, coupled with the humility of outstanding public servants....

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Folk singer Pete Seeger is the most popular folk singer in the U.S. since the 50's, and continues a tradition of folk songs started by Woody Guthrie in the 30's. He was able to bond with the public by having them sing along with him popular folk songs, including such tunes as "This Land is Your Land," "Michael Row the Boat Ashore," "So Long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh," "On Top of Old Smoky," "Turn, Turn, Turn," "If I Had a Hammer." The tradition of music and dissent ran in his family with his father being a music scholar who taught the first musicology course in the U.S. and a conscientious objector in World War I, his mother a professional composer and violinist. He attended Harvard but lost interest during the Depression years and dropped out.

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Shinzo Abe and the LDP won a landslide victory in Japan's Dec. 2012 elections. Shinzo Abe was the first prime minister of Japan born during the post war period when he became prime minister in 2006. He is less influenced by the legacy of the pre-war period and war period. Abe is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, Commerce and Industry minister during the war, and prime minister when Japan signed the security treaty with the U.S. in 1960. His father was foreign minister, making him one of the rare politicians with a deep family history in Japan's government. Their views also influenced his own. Kishi is committed to changing Article 9 in Japan's constitution which limits the role of the military, and renounces the right to wage war. His 2006 book "Toward a Beautiful Nation," describes some of his views.

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Here the NYT answers questions about the Panama Papers- what they are, who is shown to have used the tax havens to avoid taxes, and what this all means. Politburo members in China, relatives of president Xi Jinping, close associates of Mr. Putin of Russia, prime minister Cameron's father, the new head of FIFA, the head of Transparency Chile, president Mauricio Macri of Argentina, prime minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, are some of the figures mentioned by the NYT. An unnamed source tapped into the files of offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca in Panama to collect 2.6 terabytes of data or 11.5 million documents that contain this information, and gave it to a German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung about a year ago. These papers were then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and 100 news agencies including The Guardian.

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Joachim Gauck, the new president of Germany, is a pastor from East Germany who led the struggle against the Communist regime in the former German Democratic Republic from his hometown of Rostock. His father was a dissident who went to prison under the former communist GDR. After reunification he headed the agency in charge of handling the files of the former GDR spy agency, the Stasi. He did this so well and without rancor that it is now called the Gauck Authority. He was elected by an overwhelming vote of the German parliament and had the support of all major parties. Germany now has two East Germans running the country, one the daughter of a pastor, and the other a pastor. The moral authority that Germany needs as it faces the uncertain and difficult task of sorting out the finances of the eurozone, is something the country badly needs.

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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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Joshua Wong of the group Scholarism is 17 years old and just entering college. His arrest and detention of 40 hours for stepping into a government building area led to increased protests. In 2012 Wong was part of protests that led to the withdrawal of a "patriotic classes" plan for Hong Kong schools. Asked what Hong Kong would be like in 10 years, he says, "there will be universal suffrage." The age of the protesters is one remarkable aspect of these protests, as they are not just young, but very young. And this should give Beijing pause, as this is China's next generation. And what seemed right in your own day may not be right around the corner as time passes, as Mr. Jinping and his revolutionary veteran father experienced, struggled with, and overcame in their own lives because of the tolerance of others.

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Osipova and Castle provide details about the personal life of Theresa May, the new British prime minister. May was only 25 when her father died in a car crash and her mother died soon after from multiple sclerosis. This has made her come closer to her husband Philip whom she met at Oxford, where they bonded over a love of cricket and debates at the university. She was interested in Tory politics from a young age, but has her own style of hard work and dislikes the chumocracy in British Conservative Party politics that prevailed under David Cameron. Unlike Cameron who was brash and confident to the point of making bold moves such as the decision to call a referendum as election year politics and did not consider carefully the impact of the austerity programs on Britain's working class; May is thoughtful and has been critical of the long period of deficit cutting austerity under Cameron and Osborne. She loves cooking and has a library of over 100 cookbooks, loves clothes and is carefully dressed for each event. Her matter of fact way to get on with it also has to do with her response to diabetes, with 4 injections a day her thought is "to just deal with it." She and her husband worked in investment banking, before her election as MP from Maidenhead, a constituency near London, on the third attempt. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph she has described the woman she is often compared to, Angela Merkel of Germany, as someone who doesn't get enough appreciaton. For May Merkel has actually achieved something significant by "steering Germany through a difficult time," and with her negotiation abilities during the eurozone crisis proved her resourcefulness, "hats off to her," says May. ...

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The solitary side of Obama's nature, which leads to an insular presidency, without the frequent contact with other political leaders and the public. Kornblut calls it the schmooze deficit. One Democratic leader says Obama is daisdainful of things that make people feel connected to him. In numerous interviews lawmakers from both parties complained of arms-length treatment. Earlier reports also show a leader who does not go outside his close inner circle to understand what is happening in the country. Obama is not known for making social encounters outside the ones scheduled or to make spontaneous calls. Some of this solitary nature comes across in this autobiography, "Dreams From My Father." In that memoir Obama writes that if the talk began to wander, or cross the border into familiarity, he would soon find reason to excuse himself. And that he had grown too comfortable in his solitude, the safest place he knew.

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Lawrence Downes makes a road trip with singer Linda Ronstadt to her Sonoran roots in Southern Arizona and northern Mexico. They go to Tucson where Linda grew up and visit Naco, Canelo, and Banamichi. Her great grand father was a German immigrant in the 1950's who settled in Banamichi, as a mining engineer and a colonel in the Mexican army. The group including Ronstadt's friends spends several nights in the midst of cactus, agave and open blue desert skies. Beginning with a visit to the mission San Javier del Bac, Linda's spiritual center, Downes attends mass with Linda at the Church of our Lady Loreto. A colorful description of the journey, Ronstadt and friends, which shows Linda's early inspirational roots, and where her 1987 album Canciones de mi Padre comes from. The anguish bordering on tears in her Sonoran voice held back and then the release, has a deep Mexican quality abut it.

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Clint Eastwood talks about stuff in politics, real people, in a way that is humorous, and is asked about his various roles in movies he has made that show relations between countries and races. He recalls the time playing golf with the president and another real estate billionaire, when both told him within earshot of the other that all the real estate deals that the other was making would go bad. This he says was funny. In all this he was always the lone guy, as in the movies. This guy is 89 and he has still got stuff for some interesting movies, and he has ideas about the country and what it needs.  Mr Eastwood was mayor of a little town in coastal California in 1986 for 2 years. And yes he did not like all the regulation in the state. He tells about his removing one in the city that banned the public sale of ice cream, besides drinking a lot of tea and chatting with everyday folks. Most have forgotten and others simply from a new generation. The 2008 movie Gran Torino is one in which a Korean War veteran faces up to immigrants from Laos in an inner Detroit suburb. And what happens? Eastwood says people liked this one that grossed $270 million because it showed how someone with views at one extreme could learn more and shift to the other extreme just from seeing and talking to different people who you have not encountered before. Eastwood portrayed the American male when it was a kind of manliness unabashed. The thing about Eastwood is  that he he is sensitive to all that this meant in an intelligent thoughtful way that takes us by surprise. Some of these characters he played did not have the niceties, abrupt he calls it or that gruffness of masculineness, even a bit dumb. Talking about relations between countries and of race Eastwood had some ideas to make the Japanese language "Letters from Iwo Jima" - to give the view of what it was like for a Japanese soldier sent out from the islands to Iwo Jima. The famous battle was one he did from the American point of view in "Flags of Our Fathers." About that Japanese soldier he is sent out and told that he wasn't ever coming back. It won Japan's equivalent of an Academy Award. The interview in the WSJ with Varadarajan closes with Eastwood feeling  for the genteel ways, not calling names out loud, of an older time, without the masculinity that he himself portrayed, or only appeared to be that way when in reality he was intelligent and sensitive to other people and their ways. Perhaps that former mayor of New York, says Eastwood, offering his own idea of a switch back to older genteel ways for the country.   ...