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Kagan argues that the U.S should hold Iraq responsible for continuing free elections and democratic process after the American withdrawal, and efforts to prevent sectarian strife and promote reconciliation between the different religious groups and factions. He cites Iraq's lack of aircraft to maintain air sovereignty, and the challenges facing Iraq in preventing use of its territory by terrorist groups and countering Iranian influence. Similiar concerns are expressed by Lt. Gen. Frank Helmick, deputy commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.

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The deal for buyout of Alitalia by Air France-KLM values Alitalia at0.10 euros a share about 80% below its closing share price of 0.53 euros per share last week. Air France-KLM will give one of its shares for 160 shares of Al Italia and will take on the airlines 1.3 billion euros in debt and losses of a millon euros a day. This values Alitalia at 139 million euros. The Italian Government has put in 4.3 billion euros in the last 5 years to keep Alitalia running till the European Comission ruled out any further help. Alitalia's market share in Italy has dropped to discount airlines like Air One Easyjet and Ryanairdropping from 80% to 30% in the last ten years. The new deal will drop Milan's airport considered to be one of the worst in Europe as a hub and use the airport in Rome ast he third hub after Paris and Amsterdam. It will also retain the Alitalia name. The fire sale of Al Italia shows how the new economic climate is affecting Europe and how a recession in the US could affect the market. At the time Al Italia was also running out of cash with only 282 million euros of cash left at the end of Jan 2008....

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Brazil held the Olympics and the World Soccer Cup, building new stadiums and living off the boom in oil and metals prices under previous governments. Today not only is there a lack of funding for infrastructure, healthcare, education and transportation.   This is now leading to lack of investment in healthcare services in a shocking way. The first full blown epidemic of yellow fever is hitting Brazil's cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Officials fear that it will spread in an area that has 23 million people if it hits the slums where A.aegyoti mosquitoes are to be found in swarms. Rio and Sao Paulo are trying to tackle it by vaccinating 23 million people. Yellow fever kills about 3-8% of people affected. The economic crisis with lack of funds, and the political crisis that has affected Brazil with corruption scandals has led to a delayed response, according to experts at UCLA infectious disease center.  The disease is traced to loggers and monkeys in the Amazon region which usually remains contained in that region. SInce 2016 the lack of a strong official response has led to the crisis where monkeys carry it a mile a day all the way south to the Rio and Sao Paulo region. A effective government response would have included the use of media to educate people on the need for vaccination for all except newborns and pregnant mothers. Instead social media Facebook and You Tube spread the idea that the vaccination was dangerous, anti vaccine persons who normally got no audience trashed the vaccine. So that today public health authorites have to deal with this problem. The vaccination is highly effective and invented in the 1930's, was not started till November 2016, even though the spread southward from the Amazon region started in 2016. In fact says Dr Marquez, an expert at the University of Pittsburgh, only one in 100,000 gets a reaction and one in a million dies. He says compared to this 6% of 30 million people in the region affected could lose their lives, or  2 million deaths. ...

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Abut 3 million homeowners are expected to default on their mortgages in the 30 months ending in mid 2009, and two thirds of this or 2 million will go into foreclosure, according to Moody's Economy.com. So what led to all this which eventually hit the financial markets in the U.S., and also to a lesser degree in Europe, through the opacity of the mortgage securities created from bad mortgages with falsely tagged triple AAA ratings that ended up in the assets of banks and investment firms? The motivations of each group were perverted as things unfolded. When the packagers of securties were not responsible for what they were doing they pursued profit before ethical behaviour and all sorts of securities were created. As these packagers were allowed to shop for ratings the ratings companies gradually lowered their standards to attract business. Politicians failed in the free market atmosphere of the Republican Bush administration and Republican led Congress. Senator Bachus and Congressman Frank introduced legislation during the later period of the bubble but failed to draw support to curb the bad lending. Republicans blocked a new antipredatory lending law in North Carolina from being enacted for the country from 1999 onwards. And Bush without realizing the ramifications prodded HUD to push Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to require higher percentage of loans to go to low income borrowers. Fannie and Freddie in turn met this requirement by increasing the demand for these subprime loans by buying the mortgage securities, which the packagers of these securities backed by subprime mortgage loans and incorrectly rated AAA by conniving ratings agencies were happy to supply. It was a sad situation with a happy -everyone could say the were bringing home ownership and the American dream to low income people, and business was signing up for this ride with short term gain in mind. And in all this financial innovation lost its legs as packaging these securities and constructing new investment vehicles like the conduits were being used in perverse ways. The basics of labeling something correctly was torn apart. You could not turn a subprime loan to low income borrowers or a loan without documentation to flippers and speculators into something different by simply labeling it as AAA. What the confidence in financial innovation in the American system did was help spread these securities all over the globe, where they were held with confidence by towns in remote parts of the Scandinavian north country as well as financial centres in Europe and Asia. At the state level politicians in California saw this as one of the state's star industries and protected it from legislation to curb bad lending, as most of the big lenders were based in California. Due to a strange set of affairs the Department of Corporations was left with the tasks of oversight of mortgage lenders in the state. It was concerned more with issues like protecting senior citizens from financial scams and was not staffed to meet the supervisory role of a huge mortgage lending business. When it comes to the Fed's role Greenspan also took the laissez fairre stand of not interfering with free markets, even when a lot of the bad lending was obvious and one Fed Governor Gramlich was pushing for better lending standards. The Fed supervisory role was over banks and banks were required to follow lending standards, but most of this lending had shifted to mortgage brokers and financial companies which were beyond the supervision of the Fed. Had the Fed extended its supervision to mortgage affiliates of the banks this could have increased the level of supervision and made a difference. But state regulation mechanisms in California by Department of Corporations show that the regulatory mechanism did not take into account the realities of mortgage lending and how it had changed. ...

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This Times editorial questions whether Mayor Bloomberg did the right thing in the manner in which he ousted protestors from Zucotti park in the financial district of New York city. Now that the protestors have been forcibly removed from the park, it is the responsibility of the Mayor to keep his promise to let the demonstrators continue their protest against income inequality, says the editorial. The concern is that the end of the protests at Zucotti park could end up quashing the entire protest movement, which serves to draw attention to serious issues in a democracy.

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Easy steps to happiness are to conquer negative thinking, be easy on yourself and forgive lapses that happened in the past to focus on the present, finding real satisfaction in work, and not focussing on money as the way to happiness beyond a point that is needed for financial stability.

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Filled Bundesliga stadiums are a big problem, says DW.com Sports Editor, Sarah Wiertz. Germany faces a crisis with hospitalizations and in ICU's in November 2021. Borussia Dortmund stadium has lowest permitted capacity rate of all of 82%- this is still 67,000 spectators. She says this is not normality at last, it is absurd. Union Berlin applied for full capacity if it only admitted vaccinated and recovered spectators in the game against Hertha Berlin this week and got it approved. It is not good enough to say German Football League Association has 94% of its players, coaches and staff vaccinated.  With the alarming situation at German hospitals, many breakthrough infections, crowding in the stadiums is not responsible behaviour of Bundesliga clubs and fans. This is how the first wave hit Italy hard in 2020 March when soccer stadiums were filled to capacity, not a situation to be forgotten so quickly. ...

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Hospitals across Paris are stockpiling drugs and protective equipment to tackle a second wave of coronavirus. About 163 deaths were reported in France on October 20, up 50% from the 100 deaths average the previous week. During early April the deaths in France were about 400 to 600 a day.  Spain is drawing "elasticity plans" to add more beds for coronavirus. In Lombardy region of Italy hit for the second time similar plans are being made as Italy records 70 deaths a day. 

The head of the Delafontaine hospital ICU unit in Saint Denis suburb of Paris says the first wave left the staff exhausted and he finds it hard to imagine having to go through it all once again. ICU beds in Liverpool England are 95% occupied, in Madrid 39%, in Paris about 50%. Poland and Czech Republic are being hit hard in the second wave after avoiding the worst of the first wave.

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Everything one needs to know about Brexit. Most questions are answered here during the last minute negotiations on December 14, 2020, in a desperate effort by both sides knowing that no one is going to budge. The effort now is to say look this is going to hurt both sides during a pandemic, the public is going to be angry with the politicians one more time, which will hurt all sides. Britain joined the European Union in 1973 with Ireland and Denmark.

Britain has left the EU legally and politically. It is in a transition period till Jan 1, 2021 by which time the remaining questions on trade, on economic relations and security need to be resolved. This covers $800 billion in trade between Britain and the EU. If nothing happens to settle these issues Britain after Jan. 1 will no longer be part of the EU single market or its customs union. 

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Nimsdal Purja leads a team of Nepalese climbers to the top of K2 the world's second largest mountain. Purja's equipment and supplies were blown away January 12 on the mountain. Yet the team put together a second effort  and successfully reached the top.

Purja first learned to climb at age 29. He is now at 38 years a climber with the unique achievement of climbing all the world's mountains 5 miles long. K2 was the toughest because unlike Mt. Everest it has no flat sections, a pyramid that goes straight up. Unlike Sherpa climbers Purja was born in the lowlands of Nepal, born in a Gurkha family and settled in Hampshire, England.

For Nepal this is a singular achievement as Tenzing aspired to climb K2 after making it to the top of Everest in 1953 with Edmund Hillary.

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As jobs grow even with repeated increases in interest rates in 2023, inflation slows to 2.6%, unemployment rate at 3.7%, consumer sentiment is up 29% in 2 months in a UMich survey highest since 1991.US jobs growth of 353,000 in January 2024 the best in a year, twice what experts had predicted. The December figures were also revised upward by the Labor Department from 216,000 to 333,000. Unemployment rate held steady at 3.7%. Wages increased by 4.5%. Job gains in 2023 were mostly in government, healthcare, hotels and restaurants. In January growth was healthy across all private sector industries. The Fed's preferred inflation rate guage was 2.6% in December. Even with repeated increases in the interest rate by the Fed, growth is strong. Much of it could be attributed to the strong investment in infrastructure, and in manufacturing, US technologies by the Biden administration with help of bipartisan support in Congress.

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Henrik Bohme says in DW.com that the German government may have to step in to rescue Deutsche Bank after the $14 billion legal settlement with the U.S. Justice Department for the bank's practices before the financial crisis of 2008. He points out that there are other legal settlements that are expected, including one for money laundering charges. In all he says there are 7,800 legal challenges the bank faces. The share price has dropped by 90% to 10 euros by September 2016. The market capitalization is low at 14 billion euros, and it was dropped from the Eurostoxx 50 index because of this. It has 1.7 trillion in assets under management, is a systemically important bank, which means the German government has no alternative but to step in and rescue the bank. Issuing new shares with so many legal challenges is not an option as there would be few buyers.

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Coca Cola has a mix of brands from orange juice to soda drinks. Sugary drinks increase obesity which leads to other diseases. The pandemic has shown the increased risks of obesity with studies showing obesity doubles the risk of being hospitalized for coronavirus 200% and increases risk of ending up in intensive care unit by 74%. UK prime minister Boris Johnson learned this the hard way and has changed all his eating and exercizing habits, and urges others to do the same. 

China, India, Mexico, Vietnam have much more to do to increase awareness of the risks of obesity from sugary drinks. The influence of Yoga, Ayurveda and traditional herbal foods and drinks is increasing awareness in India. This is not the same in China, Vietnam and other Communist countries where the dangers of smoking and sugary drinks are not part of the education put forward by the government.