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Scientist Kim Mishra at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has come up with a method to make chocolate not just from the cocoa seeds discarding the pulp, husk and juice as is done today. This is wasteful. The new method uses the cocoa pulp, the husk and the juice as a way to make chocolate without sugar and use the whole fruit. This will reduce the impact on the climate with more chocolate production and less deforestation for new cocoa planted in South American countries as an addition to production in African countries like Ghana. It will also benefit cocoa farmers in Africa and Guatemala by increasing their income. This report looks at the colonial past of chocolate production by companies such as Lindt as Swiss producers worked with French and British colonies to expand production in the late 19th century.

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India's Reliance ADA Group and CBS are planning to setup a 50-50 joint venture, to be operational in 2010 or early 2011. CBS would initially use American programming for the Indian television audience, and in the next phase work with Reliance ADA to develop local programming. Disney, News Corp., Time Warner and Viacom already have a presence in India. The market is getting crowded in India with News Corporation's Star Plus, a leader in soap operas and movies. Viacom's channel "Colors" is creating local versions of reality shows. The new venture would try to compete with more thoughtful programming and good marketing. The size of the market and growth is large, growing from $5.7 billon in 2009 to estimated $11.3 billion in 2014 according to KPMG. Only 58% of the households in India currently watch television. The programming is growing quickly with 460 channels in 2009 from 120 in 2003.

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About 43 million Americans owe about $1.53 trillion in student loans to the U.S. government. The CBO says the U.S. government will forgive $207 billion in student debt for Americans taking out student loans in the next decade. Most of the debt forgiveness will go to graduate and professional students.

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BT Group PLC acquired mobile company EE from Deutsche Telekom of Germany and Orange SA of France for 12.5 billion pounds in cash and stock. EE is the UK's largest mobile company and BT Group the largest fixed line telecom company. With this acquisition BT Group can now bundle fixed line, mobile lines, and television services, to increase subscriber revenue. Deutsche Telekom with a 12% stake is now the largest shareholder in BT Group. Orange will have a 4% stake. The acquisition provides BT Group with a faster 4G network and 30 million EE customers, 24.5 million direct mobile and 834,000 broadband.

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Mr. Rodrigo Maia, the 49 year old son of the former Mayor of Rio De Janeiro, Cesar Maia, is uniting Congressmen from all parties in Brazil's parliament to get things done and restore lost confidence, such as the recently passed pension reform. Brazil's pension system sucks up most of the money in the budget with overly generous benefits, leaving little to pay for essential public services such as sanitation and transportation. Shockingly sanitation has suffered as only 50% of the sewage is treated in Brazil.  Polls show confidence in parliament after corruption scandals and lack of work to help the people of Brazil with essential public services has fallen to an abysmal low of 7%. Only 50% of Brazil's sanitation is treated and the rest flows as untreated sewage and rubbish into the rivers. To bring some sanity to pensions the Brazilian parliament, with the organizing skills of Mr. Maia to bring parties together around the reform, has cut $240 billion over 10 years from pensions and introduced 65 years for men and 62 years for women as minimum retirement age.  Brazil has 33 parties and Mr. Maia's is with the centre right DEM party. How did this happen. This WSJ story says Rodrigo Maia, 49 years, was born in Santiago, Chile in 1970 during the days of Brazilian military dictatorship. His father was in exile in Chile. The election of a  far right figure Jair Bolsonaro who supported the military dictatorships record as president in the recent election was a warning sign for the different parties in Brazil on the centre right and the centre left that corruption scandals and a do-little spirit was wiping out their influence and destoroying their credibility with ordinary Brazilians. The pension cut reform was their response to gain some of the lost goodwill from the Brazilian people. In the past Brazil's members of the Chambers of Deputies were people of power and influence who held positions for long periods and passed on these positions to people in their families or in their close circle. The elections and democratic governments following years of dictatorship brought in a new class from centre right and centre left that mismanaged public finances and excluded new ideas. The Car Wash scandal and scandals at the state petroleum company under Da Silva's Workers Party led to loss of confidence not only in the centre left party government of Da Silva and the Workers Party, but also in a do-little parliament. The large state spending from the government was possible during the commodities boom from China with Brazilian iron ore and other products getting high prices. WIth the collapse of the commodities boom and lower prices the entire system of state spending has unraveled revealing how much generous pension system is damaging the financing of  basic public services.  Corruption is prevalent in many countries in Asia including India but nowhere has the spending on essential public services such as sanitation suffered as in Brazil. And nowhere was parliament and the government able to get away with staging Olympics, World Cup and building many stadiums, handing out generous benefits to gain public support as in Brazil when basic sanitation and health services were neglected in a shocking way. The health system was weakened to a great extent when it lacked the resources to tackle an outbreak of yellow fever in 2018 as it moved south from the Amazon region towards Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Protests against the lack of investment in public services such as transportation and bus systems resulted in the public protests in big cities that led to the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in an effort to bring new administration to tackle the problem of financing for infrastructure, public services, health and education.    ...

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Obama is looking at alarge tax cut as part of the stimulus. A tax cut of about $300 billion for firms and individuals. With businesses getting inducements to forgo layoffs and make new hires, and to make new investments. There also provisions for companies to write off huge losses incurred in 20008 and 2009 and retroactively reduce tax bills dating back 5 years. It accelerates these writeoffs because of the tight credit situation facing business. A one year tax credit for companies to forgo layoffs or make new hires would be worth $40 or $50 billion. It also lets the companies write off a broad range of expenditures at ahigher level of $250,000 for 2008 and 2009.

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Modi refers to an ecosystem that continuously shrinks the pool of capital from government revenues, revenues intended to fund development roads, bridges and other infrastructure illegally siphoned away, that stalled and suffocated rapid development in India for 75 years. Without foreign investment there can be no rapid development in India. Without strong and efficient institutions foreign investment has not come to India in the last 30 years in the way it has come to China. These institutions of good governance that prevent such siphoning away of revenues enable 100% of every dollar or rupee of taxes to go into development essential for funding infrastructure, climate infrastructure, logistics and the other inputs of capital, labor, energy and land to build manufacturing capabilities. An ever widening pool of the inputs of capital, labor and land year after year- a process that Japan, then South Korea, then China has accomplished is possible. I It is only now taking place in India. What Mohandas Gandhi, Nehru and Sardar Patel failed to grasp in the 30's, 40's and 50's is that it was possible to have an independent India and still remain a backward undeveloped nation for a staggering period of 75 years or almost half of the period the British ruled India. What Mao failed to grasp in China and which was corrected by other leaders to make China an advanced economy able to fulfill the aspirations of the Chinese people, is also the situation that prevailed in India. Post independence leaders in China and India both isolated their economies, both limited human potential, both let institutions fail in good governance.  It is only now moving India into the process of developing an advanced developed economy by 2040, able to fulfill the aspirations of a youthful population of 1.2 billion people. ...

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More than 240 hours or 40% of ICE training time cut to speed up training for more officers. ICE training  for hands on practice and scenarios cut from ICE training program, Washington Post 2026. 900 ICE officers completed the basic training by Jan. 1, 2026, which is 3 times the number in the previous year 12 months before August 2025. The concern is about ICE quality standards in the future, so that the rush to train officers does not shortchange their needed education in all aspects of training materials and assuring a complete grasp of the content .

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This report says the 1.5 million barrels a day is actually a 1.16 million barrels a day cut as Nigeria, Venezuela and Angola may just not cut production by their 341,000 barrels a day. To that Iran also has to cut its 200,000 barels a day. So the Saudis may end up having to do the cuts of about a million barrels a day with the Emirates and Kuwait. And Deutsche Bank says that it takes about 15 months for oil prices to stabilize after these cuts. So prices could keep falling well into 2009 as the recession deepens worldwide. Some anaysts say the Saudis ended up contributing to the global crisis through their minimal efforts to restrain oil prices or divert some of the petro dollars to new exploration, rather than to cheap liquidity that fueled the housing bubble.

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Saudi price cut in November 2014 to reverse market share decline in the U.S. The Saudi share of total U.S. oil consumption declined to 4.6% in August 2014 from 7% in August 2013, according to EIA. This brought NYMEX price to below $80 in early Nov. 2014.

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A clean break from commissions of every sort is needed in India, without that Mohandas Gandhi's work and legacy is lost, the opportunity of modernization of India and the economy on a scale surpassing China using the latest technology and huge investments in infrastructure is lost.  Lyrarc has a pledge in India -The Way Forward for every young person in India to take. The future of infrastructure building, ease of living, modernization of a nation of 1.4 billion depends entirely on this. Every penny, every cent, every rupee goes into infrastructure building to create a modernized nation and economy similar to the US and Europe. The situation with "40% commission" in Karnataka and its impact on the recent outcome in the southern Indian state of Karnataka is shown in the Indian Express. Indian Express analysis shows that the ruling party did well in coastal Karnataka and poorly across the rest of the state in comparison to 2019. It happened even in Gujarat but was corrected in time by Mr. Modi.  This analysis in Indian Express says the reason the vote share of 36% led to 104 seats in 2019 and only 66 seats in 2023 is that a lot of the votes were concentrated not all over Karnataka as in 2019 but only in Old Mysore and in Bengaluru, and also in south Karnataka where it cut into JDS party votes without winning seats. Divine providence offers an opportunity for everyone to reject commissions 100%. Gandhi's Hind Swaraj 1910 needs that kind of committment today to surpass that made in 1931 during the Salt March against British rule, to build a modern nation and modern economy by 2035 comparable to the best in the US and Europe. ...

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The ECB and the Bank of England cut interest rates to near zero.

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To get a right grasp of the situation as a whole from the bigger picture than the headlines, is to know that even in the current chaotic immigration handling of both parties, the US comes out a winner in long term by 2034. That it gives for the younger generation a better future. Congress's Budget Office economic report shows GDP higher by 2% from the higher immigration of 5.2 million added to the US workforce by 2034. US productivity higher by 0.2% and residential investment including construction up by a whopping 10%. The younger profile of immigrants will help the US compete with India's younger population, and as China ages to have what it and Europe is aspiring to have- a younger population. The best way to look at the immigration issue is for the short term- manage it better by organized method of immigration without chaotic border crossings by allowing potential immigrants to apply from their home country, a step taken by the Biden administration. What it or any Republican administration could not control is the immigration that happens from countries the US is at war with or in conflict with. It is important to recognize that this is what happened with Venezuela the largest component of the immigration border crossings in 2023. It was made worse by actions of both parties Democrats and Republicans and made worse in 2017 by more severe sanctions on Venezuela under the Trump administration.  Also part of the problem is Venezuelan mismanagement- providing oil at pennies a gallon, hurting imports and spiralling inflation that only worsened under US sanctions after 2017. Long term- To reflect that US sanctions on top of mismanagement by Venezuela is a warning for all developing countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and for the US. It meant 7 million refugees a staggering quarter of Venezuela's population fleeing the country, that burdened neighbors Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile. By 2022-2023 many of these refugees were making their way up the Darien Gap to the US. Yet within this tragic situation for Venezuelan people how could the US best respond is to close the border as president Biden has proposed with McConnell and the Lankford effort in the Senate, which was blocked by the House under Mike Johnson. This gives time to assess the situation, correct US laws on asylum and parole that allowed this chaotic way to proceed under actions of both parties.And not let this destabilize the US by understanding that while Venezuela has suffered for its role in the crisis the US will ultimately have come out a winner, as pointed out by the Congressional Budget Office projections. CBO projections of this immigration impact by 2034 of increasing the workforce population by 5.2 million will provide higher GDP, more tax revenues, and higher productivity than without this group of Venezuelan and other immigrants in this special situation of 2022-2023. For the Immigration projections discussion given by Phillip Swagel, Director of the Congressional Budget Office see page 51 of the Budget and Economic Outlook 2024 to 2034. For this search for term Congressional Budget Office or CBO which brings up the report on PDF and turn to page 51 or just click on Original Article on Lyrarc.   ...