LyrArc Article Gist
Barnaby Joyce, Australia's deputy prime minister is a New Zealander by descent. Australia's foreign minister, Julie Bishop, says New Zealand's Labour Party revealed this information to undermine the government, that it was contacted by the Australian Labour party which is the opposition in parliament. The Australian constitution does not allow a dual citizen to be member of parliament. If Joyce steps down the Australian government of Malcolm Turnbull could lose its one seat majority in parliament. 

LyrArc Article Gist
Britain's National Health Service IT initiative failed because of a top down emphasis and focus on procurement. The project was started by Labor in 2002 and budgeted for 12 billion pounds. Lohr talks with Dr. David Brailer, and Dr. David Blumenthal, who headed the program for health IT in the Bush and Obama administrations, and with Richard Alvarez of Canada Health Infoway, which is the nonprofit corporation setup for conversion to electronic health records in Canada. Dr Brailer says the program in the UK was forced top down on doctors and nurses, and seen as a procurement program, ignoring the human aspects related to doctor preferences. Dr. Blumenthal empasized the need for collaborative effort all the way with doctors and nurses in a program of this kind. The confrontation that resulted from the lack of participation by health care professionals led to failure. Britain's new Cameron government ended the program.

LyrArc Article Gist
Britain's chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, tells parliament it will be difficult for Britain to avoid a recession if Europe goes into a recession in 2012-2013. He also told parliament that British debt reduction will take longer than planned because of the economic slowdown. This means the British public will have to go through two more years of austerity than previously planned, now upto 2017. Britain will need to borrow an additional 111 billion British pounds through 2015. Britain's Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts economic growth at 0.9% in 2011, and 0.7% in 2012. Debt as a share of GDP will peak at 78% in 2015, instead of the 71% expected earlier. With strong opposition from the unions and a major strike planned by about 2 million workers on Nov. 30, 2011, the Cameron government plans to go ahead with its austerity measures. This includes eliminating 600,000 public sector jobs, and limiting pay increases for public sector workers to 1% for two years after the end of the current pay freeze....

LyrArc Article Gist
According to preliminary estimates of the UK Office for National Statistics, gross domestic product fell 0.5% in October through December 2010, after expanding 0.7% in the third quarter of 2010. The UK inflation rate increased to 3.7%. At the same time the money the UK needed to borrow in December 2010 came in at 16.8 billion pounds, down from the 21 billion pounds in December 2009, showing an improvement in public finances. The two main drivers of UK growth are now set to slow down. Consumption spending down because of higher unemployment and inflation, and tax increases equivalent to 8% of GDP over 4 years. And government spending cuts leading to a reduction in spending for the 2011 fiscal year of 23 billion pounds. UK economic growth is 2010 is 1.4%, after contractions of 4.9% in 2009 and 0.1% in 2008. The UK Treasury chief George Osborne said the government will "not be blown off course by bad weather." Central bank governor Mervyn King pointed to the choppy recovery. Referring to the austerity policies King said, "the right course has been set and it is important to maintain it."...

LyrArc Article Gist
The UK Office for National Statistics shows Britain's GDP declined by 0.2% in the last quarter of 2011, compared to the prior quarter. The figures showed a drop in business investment. Polls by ComRes, show 51% of people in Britain see the government austerity cuts as having an adverse effect on the economy, with cuts being larger and coming too quickly.

LyrArc Article Gist
EU Competition Commissioner, Margarethe Vestager, on a trip to the U.S. to meet FTC and Justice Department officials, says the situation in Europe is different from that in the U.S. In Europe Google has a dominant position with over 90% market share, much more than in the U.S. where Yahoo and Microsoft are competitors in general Internet search. She said about Google following the filing of formal antitrust charges by the EU against the company- "is a successful company because they have good products. But the compliments, they stop when you get the suspicion that there may be an abuse of this very strong and dominant position." In earlier statements Vestager has said that the dominant position in all its ramifications poses "societal challenges." Complaints to the EU Commission originated with Microsoft and smaller companies affected by Google. News Corp, publisher of the WSJ, has joined a group of companies in filing new formal complaints in April 2015 with the EU Commission about Google practices. Google now has 10 weeks to respond to the charges. In the U.S. the FTC also had concerns, with FTC staffers favoring filing formal charges. In the end the FTC decided to rely on Google making voluntary changes to three practices taken up by the FTC- including complaints about "scraping" of content from rival websites, and its restrictions on the ability of advertisers to use competing platforms. Vestager sees the need to get the process moving, as it has dragged on for about 5 years, saying "it is important for us to be more speedy in getting the question out, to be able for Google, for competitors, but most of all for consumers to see our concern." The EU Commission charges about Google favoring its own comaprison shopping service are a way for Vestager to establish a broader precedent, as it looks into other ways Google's uses its dominant position to favor its own products and services....

LyrArc Article Gist
Japan's new prime minister runs into difficulties in improving public finances by cutting some of the pork-barrel spending and making chages such as abolishing the gasoline tax to put more money in the hands of consumers. Cuts of wasteful spending came to less than a fourth of the target of $33 billion. The Finance Minister said that tax receipts for the year ending March 2010 would come in at $400 billion, about $100 billion less than estimated earlier, and this is less than the deficit for the current fiscal year of $590 billon.

LyrArc Article Gist
Chancellor Merkel of Germany proposed bilateral or trilateral deals between smaller groups of countries as a temporary solution till some agreement can be reached on immigration. She said "The European Council will not yet provide an overall solution to the migration problem." Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic which have opposed a quota system for asylum seekers did not attend.  Austria, Denmark, and Italy with the new government openly opposing immigration, attended the summit. Merkel said  a "lot of goodwill" was created, and leaders agreed that borders need to be better protected to prevent people from entering illegally, and reducing immigration at its source points in Africa. The migration problem has persisted as an issue long after the huge surge in immigration in 2015 has diminished to a trickle, and after chancellor Merkel has accomodated critics with new policies strictly limiting new immigration. New governments in Denmark, Austria and Italy, and the government in Hungary under Viktor Orban, have kept the issue alive by running on anti-immigration platforms. The European summit in 2018 was used by Merkel to reduce disagreement on this issue by allowing different countries to express their views and working in smaller groups for mutual benefit. It also reduces tension inside her CDP-CSU coalition after Bavaria based CSU decided to run in 2018 state elections on a platform calling for securing borders. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer says Britain plans to introduce laws by 2015 to separate investment banking from retail banking. As proposed by the Independent Commission on Banking, led by John Vickers, the investment banking and retail banking would be separate legal entities and would be financed separately.

LyrArc Article Gist
A law professor at George Washington University, who also comes from an Sicilian Italian American family, writes about his encounters with Scalia showing passionate opinion and steadfastness. Scalia was educated at Xavier Jesuit high school, and Georgetown University. He remained true to his conservative beliefs about the the law over three decades since his appointment by president Reagan in 1986, and an originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as the framers in the eighteenth century had intended. He is the first Italian American Supreme Court Justice, a fact that enabled him to win approval in the Senate 98-0.

LyrArc Article Gist
Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, is critical of the British government's cuts in annual rent subsidies by 8%, or $3.2 billon, by 2014-15. London Councils, the umbrella group for London's 33 local authorites, says that 82,000 households in London will become homeless as a result of these cuts. Johnson told the BBC that the cuts will push renters to the suburbs- as has happened in Paris- and he will not tolerate a Kosovo-style cleansing of London. A labor party lawmaker in Leeds says that 15,000 families in Leeds will be affected by rising rents.

LyrArc Article Gist
Pessimism about the pace of democratization in China with the continued dominance of the Communist party in the business and economc structures of the country. The interrelationships of the party with state owned companies and the role of its 80 million members in running all aspects of life in China. Experts in China say the 18th party Conress showed no signs of change in the party's control and no sign of experimentation to allow for change comng from within the system so that China could establish a constitutional democracy with the rule of law. Experts in China say the new leaders Jinping and Keqiang may not be able to make changes even if they wanted to, because of the party's control and the earlier presidents and prime ministers from the last two decades who still retain a strong influence on the direction of the country.