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Visionary physicist Charles Townes conducted the breakthrough research that led to the development of the laser in a long career that spanned several decades of work as a professor at Columbia University, a researcher at Bell Labs, and at MIT and UC Berkeley.

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Microsoft's share price declined by 9% on Jan 27, 2014, with the release of its earnings and outlook, after going up about 30% under CEO Nadella.

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Britain's GDP growth was at an annualized pace of 2.0% for the fourth quarter of 2014, with full year 2014 growth at 2.6%, according to the Office of National Statistics. This was the highest annual growth rate since 2007.

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A professor at the University of Texas, Yannis Varoufakis returned to Greece in 2014 to run for parliament at the request of Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras. He is the new minister of finance in 2015. Three professors lead the key enlarged economics ministry, foreign affairs, and finance.

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Yannis Palaiologos of Katherimini newspaper in Greece gives a failing grade to Pasok and the New Democratic party in Greece for letting Greece get into the debt crisis and not taking the action needed in tax collection to protect the interests of the upper classes. Palaiologos says the burden of servicing the huge debt has fallen disproportionately on the lower and working classes, which is the reason for the rapid rise of Syriza in Greece and its decisive win of the popular vote.

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Greece's new Syriza government plans to put a bill through parliament on the minimum wage as one of its first steps. It will reverse plans to sell the government's 67% stake in the port of Piraeus, and a planned sale of the state controlled utility will be held back. Sigmar Gabriel, the Social Democratic leader in the coalition government in Germany says Germany is ready to show solidarity with the Greek people, and says the new government has the opportunity to take better action against corruption and tax evasion in Greece than previous governments. Previous governments including governments of the Pasok and New Democracy parties which make up the ruling political elite in Greece failed to make the serious changes in tax collection needed in Greece whereby the upper class in Greece pay the fair amount of taxes due. The IMF's Lagarde also emphasized the tax collection, and separated it from austerity issues where most of European and American opinion believes growth oriented policies are the right path....

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Mitch Daniels, former 2 term governor of Indiana, and president of Purdue University, describes the damage done to hope for the future by putting so many people in so much debt- with estimates by WSJ-Experian showing 70% of recent graduates as borrowers and the average borrower graduating with $33,000 in debt. 40 million young people are affected, as they postpone marraige, postpone childbearing, postpone buying a new home, stay away from starting a new business. Daniels put his own social and moral obligation to the test as he brought the cost of an education at Purdue for 2 successive years- with a 3 year freeze on tution and cuts in room and board, textbook costs. Purdue student borrowings have dropped by 18% since 2012, adding a new metric in evaluating the delivery of quality education for the country, and a moral and social obligation for all the leaders in our society.

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China's Finance Ministry is having a difficult time controlling local governments using local government financing vehicles to invest in more infrastructure, airports roads and subways. One such city is Wuhan which plans six subway lines, three bridges over the Yangste river and a new airport. Much of the money comes from land sales. The Finance Ministry in a 2013 report pointed to the unreliability of land sales for future borrowing as the property market is slowing, and because it is highly unpopular to requisition land for land sales. This matters because the IMF says debt is growing faster in China than when Japan, South Korea and the U.S. fell into deep recessions at different times between the late 1980's and 2009. Local government debt accounts for one fourth of the increase in China's domestic debt since 2008. New rules by China's bond agency in Dec. 2014 prevents investors from using low grade debt to borrow cash. In the past local governments found a way around the central governments effort to curb growth of debt by restructuring the local government vehicles or some other way, as Wuhan has done. Wuhan Urban is the local government financing vehicle for Wuhan and its debt increased by 20% in 2013. Wuhan's mayor, Tang Liangzhi, is pushing construction to the point where he is known as Mr. Dig, Dig. One reason for China's slowing growth below 6-7% is the need to control the growth of debt. Local government debt in China reached 36% of GDP in 2013, double the figure in 2008, and will increase to 52% of GDP in 2019, according to the IMF. And the increase is not proportionally delivering the same results as before. JP Morgan estimates that over 4 units of borrowing are needed in 2015 for every unit of investment, compared to less than 2 units of borrowing for every unit of investment in 2007. PRC Macro Advisors of Hong Kong says half of the borrowing by financing vehicles goes to pay interest on existing debt in 2014. There are 8000 such local government financing vehicles in China today each competing to build infrastructure in its neighborhood, in the case of Wuhan to build a computing back office for financial companies and as transportation hub, even though its uncertain whether this will be realized or not. The problem is that alternative investments as an opportunity cost are being neglected, the hospital not being built as China's population ages with underinvestment in health care, and the private company with better returns that is unable to find financing. A classic example of crowding out of better return investments as a glut of housing and road/bridge/ airport infrastructure gets built. The central government is wary but faced with slowing growth pushes problems down the road, what experts call a Japan syndrome....

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Germany's news and culture broadcasting service Deutsche Welle for listeners overseas was started in 1953. Its charter is to promote "democratic values," and "free exchange between peoples." It broadcasts in 30 languages and reaches 100 million people. The German government has increased its budget by 9.3% to 294 million euros, with new bureau in Kiev and planned expansion of the English news service. A new multimedia English language service DWNews will be launched in April 2015. The German language service faces uncertainty as it is not part of the expanded service, and Deutsche Welle has seen shrinking budgets for the last 15 years.

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No other nation has such an amazing diviersity of languages, and equally amazing is the vitality of the free press in 11 major languages- Punjabi, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Assamese, Oriya, in the north, and Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Karnataki in the south.