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Situations in school reopening where students take virtual classes in classrooms where teachers are exposed to coronavirus. Many schools are having teachers work remotely in these situations.

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Orange juice from Brazil, copper from Chile, electronics and pharma from India, and aircraft from EU, are part of broad exemptions in US tariffs plans. The exemptions are designed to give flexibility to US negotiators where it helps the US economy to import these items. 

This month negotiating teams from Japan, EU, South Korea and othere countries are trying to get exemptions for other items. BMW is seeking export rebates for exports of SUV's to EU from its US factories. And VW is seeking to use investments it says it will make in the US manufacturing as a way to get exemptions in tariffs or lower tariff rate similar to the way Apple has negotiated a tariff exemption for its Chinese exports to the US by saying it will invest $100 billion in the US manufacturing. US negotiators have to get the firm guarantees that these investments are going to be made.

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Do you ever wonder how Japan keeps it streets so clean. There are no litter bins or street sweepers to be seen. This report in the BBC News looks at Japan's cleanliness ethic starting from school days for children growing up with the idea that clean is what you make happen with your own two hands and a broom. That is all it takes and a sense of personal responsibility infused into the culture from school days as children.  For 12 years of school life from elementary school to high school cleaning the school is part of the school routine for students. The social consciousness was developed in this way and children as they grow up learn to take pride in their cleanliness and in the cleanliness of their surroundings. This carries over to cleaning up the neighborhood.  In India's Swachh Clean India campaign their are street clean sweepers in addition to people themselves taking on the job of cleaning. This is ok for public facilities like railway stations underbridges and other public facilities, but for neighborhoods and schools making cleaning a part of the routine in schools is a good idea that needs to be universally adopted as part of Swachh India, Clean India campaign. This also holds true for all Asian and Latin American, African nations which could learn from the keeping the country clean efforts of Japan and more recently India. As India shows not having done this well before is no reason for discouragement, getting started and keeping it going, building public awareness and support is the key. This is particularly true for developing countries because it is easier to prevent illness and disease by increasing levels of hygiene and sanitation, saving hundreds of millions of dollars for large countries like India and Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, for days and productivity lost. It also pushes countries to the next stage of development faster through infrastructure development and quality of public services, quality of life.    ...

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The Wall Street Journal's reporting in Sept, 2011, on France's bank BNP Paribas. Contributor Nicolas Lecaussin quoted a BNP Paribas executive saying the bank no longer had access to dollar funding. There is a loss of dollar funding to French banks from U.S. money market funds as the funds reduce exposure and shorten maturities. Analysts point to the French banks having one of the lowest ratios of liquid assets to short term funding needs in Europe. This reporting was questioned by BNP Paribas and French government officials. This happened as central banks including the U.S. Fed intervened in markets in September 2011, to ensure full availability of dollar funding to French banks.

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Fitch ratings firm changed Turkey's credit rating for long term foreign currency debt to investment grade by upgrading it from double B plus to triple B minus. Turkey still has junk status from Moody's and Standard & Poor's ratings firms. At the same time Fitch says the situation in Turkey is volatile, saying a financial shock and recession are likely "at some point." Moody's described Turkey in October 2012 as having "substantial external vulnerabilities," and large short term financing needs. S&P's credit rating for Turkey is two notches below investment grade and Finansbank AS in Istanbul chief economist, Inan Demir, says it does not look like the other ratings firms support Fitch's asessment.

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This exceptional and detailed WPost report by Rosenwald, Boorstein and Clement on Pope Francis's popularity, also shows that on other aspects of the Catholic community's openness in the pews change is slow and gradual. In the parishes and on the pews for practicing Catholics there are not many signs of change. And Catholics who do not go to church are not coming back to the pews in increasing numbers. A slight surge under Pope John Paul II after his visit in 1993 for World Youth Day faded out, and this time the situation with Pope Francis's visit looks to be no different. About 1 in 8 Americans consider themselves former Catholics, according to the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Survey. The Post-ABC poll of September 7-10, 2015 shows 45% of self-identified Catholics saying they attend Mass about once a week or more frequently, 19% attending monthly, and 35% saying they attend less frequently or never. There is a large gap between Pope Francis's popularity among Catholics with about 75% holding strongly favorable views, compared to 47% strongly favorable for the Catholic Church. Kathleen Cummings of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, says the difference is because Pope Francis has accentuated the positive. The Pope's own roots in Argentina and his practice of a more humble Catholicism as a bishop, his intermingling with people in the subways in Buenos Aires and in poorer neigborhoods of the city, not only affirms the original teachings of the Church, but also affirms this at a time when the bishops and the Church have drifted away from the original message, in a period of increasing social disparities in the Western World, Latin America and Asia. The Pope has called for helping immigrants, migrants, refugees, the poor, and the environment. Most people in the U.S. are comfortable with the Pope's activism on social issues and saying this before a joint session of Congress in the U.S. on September 25, 2015. To shake up the lethargy in the Church hierarchy Pope Francis described the bishops of the church in the Christmas 2014 message as "lords of the manor, superior to everyone and everything," and having "spiritual Alzheimer's." The extent of support for the Pope's activism shows how the public now views the need for someone of the Pope's stature to speak out on issues of social, economic and environmental change. Only 14% of Americans in the September 2015 Post/ABC poll say Pope Francis should be less active. 30% of Catholics say more active is better, and 50% say continue the way he is. And over half of non-Catholics want him to continue to speak out. Issues of the role of women in the church, abortion and same-sex marraige continue to create differences. By focussing on the original teachings of the church for humility, a humble church, and serving the poor and less fortunate, the Pope has reached the hearts of most Americans and people around the world, in a way unimaginable only a few years before....

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Comey sends another letter to Congressional committees on Nov. 6, just 2 days before the election, saying that "based on our review we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton." Just 9 days prior to the election Comey had written to Congress that the FBI was looking into emails found on the computer of Mr Weiner, estranged husband of Clinton aide Abedin. By doing this Comey had inserted himself and the FBI into the election in a way that was not proper said leaders of both parties. The heavy criticism continued with Vice presidential candidate Kaine, president Obama and Secretary Clinton, seeing this as a blatant political move by Comey, who is a Republican. It is likely to remain a subject of criticism long after the election, say experts.

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Perceived average savings needed for retirement in the US shown in surveys are 20% higher in 2022 over 2021. Americans believed about average $1.25 million would be needed for retirement. This varies by state and the cost of living by state, and whether they would be supporting older parents, grownup children.

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US trade with Germany now exceeds China's trade with Germany. With the change in supply chains, slower German economy leading to lower imports and a slowing Chinese economy, this is likely to lead to US and Germany having increasing trade relations and two way trade from now on.

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US District Judge Lewis Kaplan cites messages saying the goal of donations from Sam Bankman Fried to political parties were for the purpose of weeding out people who had advised vigilance and prudence in crypto currency, as he sentences FTX's Ryan Salame to seven and half years.

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A wind farm out at sea to start in 3 years, small renovation projects across France and Germany, a couple of billion dollars from the French government for home renovations- this kind of approach is considered completely unrealistic say EU legislators. One Danish legislator asks what is more unrealistic? Setting serious targets for conversion to renewable energy or depending on Putin's gas and oil?  These EU legislators are calling for aggressive action now. The European Commission set a 9% goal for energy savings by 2030, this has now been moved up to 13%. EU legislators are calling for 23% in savings by 2030. And even this may not be enough to meet the goals for climate change to prevent the disaster from climate change with fires and floods and heat waves that hurt agriculture and food supplies. A savings target of 19% is about the gas that runs 40% of the cars and trucks on American roads in 2021 or 214 million metric tons of oil. The French government has set aside 3 billion euros for comprehensive renovations of homes to save energy with a target of 300,000 homes in 2022. This is completely inadequate as it will cost 23 billion euros say experts on the Paris city council. Renovations are only running at 60,000 a year. A big part of the conversion in Europe is converting from gas heating to electric heating. France is boosting subsidies for new electric heat pump installations.   ...

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Shabana Mahmood, new UK Home Secretary in September 2025 says -"Will do whatever it takes to secure our borders. I am not the kind of person who just hangs around."

About Shabana Mahmood it has been said- “She prides herself on not being woke. She prides herself on having normal-person instincts and understanding where the electorate is.”

The Times says this may be just what Labour Party and Starmer needs right now.

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Income of $63,000 a year is what an average full time worker makes in the US and $140,000 what it takes to build a middle class life in the US in 2025. It is unlike the days of their parents say young people when most people could afford to buy a home if they worked full time. In 2025 engineers making $90,000 say they cannot make room for a down payment at that salary, or afford the cost of having one or two children. 

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The former UK Home Secretary for Tories under Sunak and Truss, Suella Braverman, joins the Reform UK party and appears at Reform UK event with Nigel Farage. She says the Conservatives saying they would have UK withdraw from ECHR (European Convention for Human Rights), which makes it difficult to conduct a rational commonsense policy on migrants because it was poorly designed or ECHR writers lost their way on common sense, is a lie. For example there is no ECHR type rules for migrants entering China or India or any major country in the world, one that says nations have to take in migrants from anywhere in the world, and provide benefits costing billions of dollars that cannot go into services for the local population. And where migrants can pose a risk for women hesitant to go out in their own neighborhoods- something chancellor Merz of Germany has spoken about recently after incidents in Germany. ECHR has somehow got it wrong.  Labour and Conservatives have pondered this but not acted quickly enough in becoming trapped in a cultural guilt for the colonial era, when ordinary Britons simply want to get on with their lives in their neighborhoods as they did before migrants, and as did their parents and grandparents in Britain. For most of British history colonial policy was decided by a small upper class and the India Office, colonies policy by the Colonial Office, and the lives of working people in Manchester's cotton mills went on with no connection with the Empire. A fact even India's Mohandas Gandhiji quickly recognized and grasped, and whose support Gandhi sought against the India Office of the Empire. ...

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Jake Sullivan cites JFK and what this means for the vision that "the Biden Administration must and will fight to achieve." Here at the Brookings Institution Jake Sullivan articulates Biden's vision for America and the Way Forward. "Let me close with this. President Kennedy was fond of saying that a rising tide lifts all boats. Over the years, advocates of trickle-down economics appropriated this phrase for their own uses. But President Kennedy wasn't saying what's good for the wealthy is good for the working class. He was saying, we're all in this together. And look at what he said next. If one section of the country is standing still, then sooner or later, a dropping tide drops all boats. That's true for our country. That's true for our world. Economically, over time, we are going to rise or fall together. And that goes for the strength of our democracies, as well as for the strength of our economies. As we pursue this strategy at home and abroad, there will be reasonable debate. And this is going to take time. The international order that emerged after the end of the Second World War and then the Cold War were not built overnight. Neither will this one. But together, we can work to lift up all of America's people, communities, and industries. And we can do the same with our friends and partners everywhere around the globe as well. This is a vision the Biden administration must and will fight to achieve." "This is what is guiding us as we make our policy decisions at the intersection of economics, national security, and democracy. And this is the work that we will do, not just as a government, but with every element of the United States and with the support and help of partners, both in government and out of government around the world." ...

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Experts say CEO's have constituencies in the form of employees, shareholders and customers. This has affected CEO's as they responded to president Trump's comments on the Charlottesville attack.  Even the cautious optimism that CEO's maintained during the early months of the Trump administration- as they sought not to miss out on representation on advisory councils- has now faded. Most CEO's have decided that it is not worth having this voice in advisory councils when they have to be seen as supporting positions on racism and culture they cannot support. One by one the actions by Trump on the travel ban, climate change agreement withdrawal, Charlottesville attack,  has led to a shrinking of support. From non-involvement in Trump's campaign but cautious optimism, to a sense that it is not possible to work with the president without violating deeply held beliefs. Gini Rometty of IBM told employees that dialogue was critical to progress, but that " this group can no longer serve the purpose for which it was formed."  A sense that not much would be accomplished, and the reputational cost for business was too high to make it worth the effort. In the span of 3 days three advisory councils to the president were disbanded. ...

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NYT says DJT ratings have been resilient and stable around 43% in September similar to April 2025. Shows slight improvement on the economy and slight drop on immigration. DJT gets higher approval in fighting crime 48% supporting, 51% saying government was deporting mostly those needing to be deported, and 54% favoring deporting of illegal migrants. On the major issues of the economy, illegal immigration, the support is fairly resilient and stable says the NYT. Even the groups that say the biggest problem is the other side Democrats saying that of Republicans and vice versa, is only about 15%, or what has been seen in polarized periods in American history such as with Jefferson and Adams, Andrew Jackson after British wars,  Abraham Lincoln and Southerners before Civil War, Hoover and FDR as Depression progressed, and Harry Truman and Wendell Wilkie/Eisenhower periods of this history. The current polarization is not something new even though it is seen as unsettling to an onlooker. On immigration Eisenhower led Operation Wetback in the 1950's similar to today's effort to reverse illegal migration. Efforts to bring Common Prayer or Christian prayer to schools is part of America's history and Prayer existed in American schools throughout most of America's history, so that this is also nothing new. ...

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Can OpenAI pay? Does it have $300 billion? These are the questions analysts are asking. Remaining Performance Obligations is RPO's which refer to a company meeting probable targets which are not certain. Oracle stock went up 36% in one day because it was saying it would get thei $300 billion from OpenAI. Now as analysts look carefully at Oracle surge they are saying wait a minute who has this $300 billion. This report in the WSJ says RPO's for Oracle are now up to $523 billion. Oracle stock is now down 43%. Analysts are questioning these outlandish claims. Another claim is from the "circularity" in the AI sector, which means A is connected to B is connected to C. OpenAI expects $100 billion in investment from Nvidia which makes advanced chips, but is it definite? Nvidia says in it's latest quarterly report that "there is no assurance that any investment will be completed, on expected terms, it at all." Note that OpenAI makes hardly any money today and is in fundraising stage- it has expectation to make $20 billion. And the $300 billion where does all this come from? When most people in the Nation are living from paycheck to paycheck there is this wild speculation and mania in the AI sector.   ...

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The 4% rule for retirement spending was devised by financial planner Bill Bengen in 1994. It forms the basis for retirement spending for many years with variation between 3 and 4% for income to last about 30 years from a portfolio of savings. WSJ looks at the 4% rule at a time of high inflation.

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This editorial in the WSJ tackles the issue of Russian hacking during the U.S. presidential election by saying that this should not be seen as a move by Democrats after the election defeat, and yet at the same time supports the Republican Congress's efforts to hold an inquiry into the hacking during the election. 

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Under Ford's common platform strategy basic parts for the Ford Escape would go into 1.9 million vehicles by 2016. This would enable Ford to create savings in every facet of development and production.

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Israeli prime minister Netanyahu retracts his statement about rejecting a two state solution in an interview with Andrea Mitchell of NBC News. He says he meant that it was not possible under the current conditions with terrorism in the Middle East, Iran pursuing a nuclear weapon, and the Palestinian Authority having an alliance with the militant Hamas movement. In 2009 Netanyahu said he supported a two state solution in a speech at Bar-Ilan University, and the statement before the election was meant to bring out larger number of right wing votes. He also clarified his comments about Israeli Arabs "voting in droves," as meant to bring out large numbers of his own voters to vote, saying Israeli Arabs voting was "sacrosanct." The White House response was to say that it was free to support a two state solution at the United Nations, and U.S. president Obama discussed the comments on Israeli Arabs- seen widely as racist baiting- with Netanyahu in a phone conversation. The rift between the two leaders is now seen as irreparable and bigger than ever....

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Professor Yann LeCunn of the Sorbonne University, France, is a pioneer in the field of AI.  He is now focusing his work on Advanced Artificial Intelligence AAI, saying that the large language models which are being developed in a surge of data center spending of $400 billion in 2025 alone are not the way AI will develop in the future. AAI is based on visual learning similar to how an infant learns, and not by consuming large amounts of data as under large language models.

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While Italy's budget deficit of 5.3% of GDP in 2009 is relatively healthy, its public debt as a percentage of GDP is rising and forecast to be 118%. The growth in tax revenues is negligible because Italy has seen only 0.54% annual average growth in GDP in the past decade, so its much harder to manage the debt. As the interest on debt exceeds the rate of growth, debt keeps rising all the time, say experts. This makes it harder for Italy to borrow in capital markets, a 9.5 billion bond offer in April 2010 drew onlly 9.78 billion euros in bids. The debt financing is helped by the Italian households having a high savings rate of 15%, and holding 25% of Italy's bonds.

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Citadel, a large hedge fund headed by Kenneth Griffin is having problems, with its flagship fund down 35% this year. And the rumor mill saying some of its funds are down 60% and Fed Reserve officials are visiting the fund. Citadel is leveraged 3 to 1 and this is down from higher levels . Ironically Griffin has been known for buying other companies assets for pennies on the dollar, including E Trade and hedge funds Sowood Capital. And where did Griffin get started? He started trading in his dorm room at Harvard in the eighties. The hedge fund $1.7 trillion industry is facing a shakeout. It has already lost $180 billion in the August-October 2008 period and some hedge funds face collapse.