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Karen Elliott House, who has reported extensively from Saudi Arabia for a long time, says the Saudi succession to a younger generation is established, yet the different strains on the fabric of Saudi society continue. The parts of the society that are Islamic fundamentalist see the monarchy as too worldly compared to a militant Islamic State, and the western educated class sees the monarchy and religious clerics as not making enough room for modern ideas, for women and a free press. Inside the kingdom the very dichotomy that allowed the Saudi state to flourish from its beginnings in the feudal period of the late eighteenth century with Wahhabbi given the role of religious authority in exchange for guaranteeing political legitimacy of the monarchy now creates tensions in a modern state. Outside the kingdom Iran is seen as a rival state in the region, and the Saudi monarchy is seeking the support of the U.S. to fight Islamic State. Ibn Saud, described as a skilled statesman by John Foster Dulles, carefully strengthened the monarchy's role in the region for the first half of the twentieth century in his dealings with Britain and the U.S., and successors including King Abdullah continued his policies. Saudi Arabia now is in a new period of radicalism, and conflicts in the region, with an aging leadership in transition, a house divided against itself, as Karen Elliott House who as observed the kingdom for so long points out....

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Karen Eliott House was a former publisher of the WSJ. Now with WSJ in Murdoch's News Corporation's hands, she is a fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center. Here she points to the diverging situation between the USA and Saudi Arabia. She thinks the US cannot protect the Saudi monarchy (which dates back to Abdul Aziz and his support from President Roosevelt first by recognition of the new state of Saudi Arabia in 1932 and support during the war), from its domestic challenges. One of these domestic challenges is changing demographics as the young or people below 15 years age make up 40% of the population, rising unemployment, and pressures for modernization which the monarchy has done little to respond to, and the lack of democratic forms which would give people a chance to vent their feelings. For the U.S. the frustration is that the Saudis have done little or can do little for the USA in the way of moderating oil prices as they move still higher, because of speculative trends, decline of production in its own maturing oil fields, and needs to finance huge new plants and cities to provide employment to a growing population. In fact Libyan oil officials has been more of a moderating influence recently than the Saudi oil officials. So it appears that what Karen is saying is that the Saudis are pursuing their own interests in their region and the wider region that includes South Asia and Northern Africa, and the US is pursuing its own interests, which at this time are not as clearly defined, except securing oil supplies and protecting Israel. The 2 countries USA and Saudi Arabia are going their diverging and different ways in a way that is irreversible....

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The WSJ's Joyu Wang looks at the life and political career of Taiwan's new president Lai Ching-Te. Lai has a completely different background from his mentor Tsai the DDP leader who led Taiwan for two terms. In contrast to Tsai who was from an affluent family and worked in the ministries, Lai is from a family with 6 children in northern Taiwan. His father was a coal miner who died in a work accident when he was a few months old. He studied medicine at Cheng Kung University medical school, before leaving medicine for politics at the urging of his teachers. Taiwan was in the middle of a pro democracy movement as the Koumintang party lost its grip on government in the 1980's. The DPP was in its early days and Lai was elected to the National Assembly in 1994. In 2010 he was elected mayor of Tainan. In 2014 by 72% of the vote he is reelected and 2017 the DPP's Tsai serving a first term as president brings Lai in as premier. People who know him say he shows great empathy with working people yet can be slow to change once he has made up his mind. This WSJ report says compared to Tsai Lai is less predictable as he believes in Taiwanese independence and does not hesitate to say this. He once having said he would like to walk into the White House to talk with the US president. This means he is less predictable than Tsai for both China and the US who seek to keep the relationship with Taiwan stable so that US-China business and other relations can be stable -without the distraction of a Chinese response to every move by Taiwan towards independent policies. Lai built a new science park in the city of Tainan, a new art museum and a new flood management system. ...

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The emergence of a national party in India is the subject of this editorial in The Hindustan Times. The Indian National Congress led by Mohandas Gandhi led the way to transitional home rule in the 1930's under the British, independence in 1947, with the party running India till 1962 under Mr. Nehru, one of Gandhi's assistants. This was followed by a breakup of the party into different factions with one faction led by Nehru family forming governments under Indira Gandhi, and her son Rajiv Gandhi. This faction then lost its popularity in the Hindi speaking heartland of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and became a regional party with presence only in a few states of India and very little in the south. By 2014 a new party the Bharatiya Janata Party had emerged that had a strong presence in the Hindi speaking heartland of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and in the northeast of the country. It still lacked a strong presence in the south. This has happened in the 2020 Telengana elections, says Hindustan Times. By getting a strong performance in the Hyderabad region the BJP now has a strong presence in Telengana, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka where Bangalore is located. Only Kerala and the Tamilnadu region around Madras, have their own regional parties in government. In the east the Bihar elections showed BJP as the leading party to form government to push the development agenda in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. It is now well positioned to take this theme of rapid development to West Bengal state around the Kolakata (Calcutta) area, a state that has lagged far behind in development under a regional party that was an offshoot of the Indira Gandhi faction of the Congress party. As is common in India national political parties split into factional parties with infighting that split again into purely regional parties. This has further undermined the them of development through failed governance in India. The BJP under the current prime minister is now the exception to this because of its themes of health, governance and development, with Development at the top of the triangle supported by Health and Governance at the base of the triangle. The BJP which started out as a small business oriented upper caste party also changed its image under prime minister Modi. The slogan "Sab Ka Vikas, Sab Ke Saath," (Development for all, with all) has given the BJP support of the lower castes, the Scheduled class and the backward castes in India. This make it a truly national party with support across all socioeconomic and demographic groups. The prime minister's own background growing up working in his father's tea shop near a railway station in Gujarat has also given the party a new image of being with the working classes and the average man. His experience in Gujarat delivering on development projects and infrastructure, energy, has also given the word "development" new meaning for a modern India, very distant from the period when poor governance failed to deliver on development and modernization. Bold moves have cleared the way for a nationwide approach to development, yet decentralized, with rapid development based on accumulation of technologies, human skills, land and capital. A singular focus on the needs of the ordinary people is evident when the prime minister talks about the effect of firewood burning stoves used in cooking by hundreds of millions of rural women for their families. He says the smoke from burning this firewood in the home has the effect of smoking 400 cigarettes for each woman. Rarely has this happened since Mohandas Gandhi took up the situation of village women in the backcountry and lack of clothing in the period under the British.   ...

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Nelson Schwartz provides an exceptional indepth account on the changing leadership role of James Gorman at Morgan Stanley. Gorman is from Melbourne, Australia. He studied law before joining Columbia Business School. Consulting with McKinsey was followed with a job at Merrill Lynch. He joined Morgan Stanley in 2006 before the collapse of Merrill. Compared to his predecessor John Mack in the CEO role, James Gorman is a quiet type who prefers to stay out of the limelight.

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Ms. Lopez from Guatemala and her three children living in Brooklyn, New York.

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The Obama administration's Small Business Jobs Act of Sept 2010 set aside $30 billion to stimulate lending to small business. Only 7% of 7700 U.S. lenders have signed up for the program so far. The deadline to sign up to participate has been extended from March 31 to May 16, 2011, by the Treasury Department. Banks have been hesitant to sign up for various reasons: banks say they see a stigma to taking these loans, and need additional staff to handle the extra paperwork. Banks say there isn't enough demand for loans from small business, or that there is enough capital already to handle larger better collateralized borrowers with the others considered too risky anyway.

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Recruiting in the Afghan army from predominantly Pastun areas in the south and southeast is way down, almost nonexistent. For Kandahar, Helmand, Oruzgan, Zabul, Paktika, and Ghazni provinves with largely Pashtun people, the numbers show they make up 17% of the population and contributed only 1.5% of new recruits to the army since 2009. Kandahar and Helmand with 2 millon people contributed about 1200 recruits, or less 1% of 173,000 new recrutis since 2009. The northern provinces make up a large number of the new recruits, with Kunduz having a population of 900,000 and contributing 16,500 recruits. There are about 42% Pastuns in the population and a similiar number of Pastuns in the Afghan army, but most are from the northern or northeastern provinces where the insurgency has been weaker. One third are from one northeastern province- Nangarhar. The reason for this is fear of the Taliban finding out that that a young man has enlisted in the south and retaliation against the enlistee or his family. The lack of a southern Pastun presence in the army makes the army more of a northern institution. With withdrawal of American and NATO forces by 2014, this leaves Afghanistan deeply divided between the northern and southern regions. The southern region Pastuns have a significant presence across the border in the northern part of Pakistan, and the southern Pastuns draw support and resources from this region. Removing the foreign presence shifts the balance towards the southern Pastuns and Pakistani Pastuns in the largely mountainous country of this region. This is why the project in Afghanistan requires the support of all factions and ethnic communities in the South Asian region to succeed, setting aside differences and animosities of the past. D. Mahmood Khan, a member of parliament in Kandahar says ordinary Afghans in Kandahar see the Afghan government of Karzai collapsing in a week or two without foreign support and sense a much stronger Taliban....

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Izzo looks at the diverging picture presented by two Labor Department surveys of unemployment in the U.S. for July 2012- an increase of 163,000 jobs or 195,000 fewer people working. One, the Household Survey is based on survey of individual households counts people and the other the Establishment Survey based on a survey of employers counts jobs. If one person holds two jobs he would be counted twice in the Establishment Survey and once in the Household Survey. If a person is a unincorporated self employed person, a family employee who isn't paid, a farm worker who is employed but not paid he is counted in the Household Survey, but left out in the Establishment Survey. The Labor Department prepares a third measure of the number of people working by adjusting for multple jobholders and for workers not counted in the survey of businesses. By this third measure the U.S. economy added 108,000 jobs in July, which is far less than the 163,000 jobs shown added in the Establishment Survey. Because of the increase in parttime work it is likely that more people are doing multiple jobs which may explain some of this difference. Another reason could be the severe drought in the U.S. that may be reducing the opportunities for work for freelance construction maintenance and day laborers because of restrictions on water use. This shows that it takes several months of data to get some sense of where unemployment is headed, adjusting the numbers for unusual events or weather, and looking behind the numbers to the sectors generating jobs. In the first quarter of 2012 more jobs were generated in the U.S. because of a mild winter, followed by fewer jobs in the second quarter, which required looking at the two quarters together to get a better picture. Adjusting for the long term unemployed who have quit looking is also necessary to get a correct reading of U.S. unemployment levels....

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Tata Sons, the holding company for Tata Group companies, is looking for a successor to Ratan Tata. The Tata Group of companies cover a whole range of products from steel and cars, to information technology and consumer products. This includes India's second largest automobile company and India's second largest IT outsourcing company. Tata has in all 98 firms. It made acquisitions of Corus, a British and Dutch steel producer for $12 billion, and of Jaguar and Land Rover for $2.3 billion. Ratan Tata did much of the reorganization of the old Tata Group over the last 2 decades. The company started during the Victorian era as a maker of textiles. It was founded by Jamshedji Tata. His vision was to establish Tata as a steel maker and to invest in education and research institutes for India's technological revolution. The Tata companies also set their own high business standards based on the founder's concepts. And unique in India, Tata Sons was setup so that two thirds of the company is owned by charitable trusts. Jamshedji spent time in Britain during the Victorian period, admired Gladstone, was a forward looking visionary believing in and providing inspiration for India's future technological development. During the early ears after independence the company was run by JRD Tata who maintained the legacy, but it was Ratan Tata his successor from the same Parsi family, who reorganized and established Tata as the company it is today. The Tata Nano was a result of Ratan Tata's vision of a car that would cost one lakh rupees, and be an affordable car for millions of people in India who now drive motorcycles. With the magnitude of the responsibility, the search for Ratan Tata's successor, is being closely watched in India. This time the Tata Group is looking at outsiders and searching for the right person. Now 65% of Tata Group's revenues of $70.8 billion come from overseas, which would suggest the value of international experience. In fact British Prime Minister Cameron cited Tata Sons as being Britain's largest manufacturer. ...

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Iran's new president is a moderate cleric Hassan Rohani. He won the presidential election in June 2013 with 18 million votes, or 50.7% of the votes cast. The second runnerup received only 16% of the vote, making Rohani the overwhelming choice of Iranian voters discontented after years of international sanctions over the nuclear development issue and the confrontational stance of the previous president Mr. Ahmadinejad. In a televised debate before the election Rohani summed up this discontent with the economic situation: "It's nice for the centrifuges to run but people's livelihoods have also to run, our factories have also to run." He contrasted the situation when he was the chief nuclear negotiator for Iran under president Mohamad Khatami, another moderate, when Iran avoided international sanctions, with the current situation. Currently even essential aircraft parts for Iran's national airline are difficult to source. Mr. Khamanei called Rohani "the people's choice." Khamanei and Rohani met to discuss the new government, which observers in Tehran say offers an opportunity for national reconciliation. The Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders also offered their support to Rohani. The Green Movement, Khatami and Rafsanjani supported Rohani before the elections. Rohani is known for his ability to reach out to all parties. He comes from a working class family in a small town in the province of Semnan, entered theological seminary later apprenticing himself to clerics at Qom, the main home of leaders of the Shiite religion. He then attended law school at Tehran University, becoming a student activist during the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Later Rohani studied in Scotland getting master's and doctorate degrees in law, which gives him a unique insight into concepts such as the rule of law for an Iranian cleric. He was member of parliament, deputy speaker of parliament and head of the management committee of the national broadcast service, and a member of the National Security Council....

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43% of children under 5 are underweight in India, according to nutrition experts. This compares with 5% for China. China made its biggest strides in combatting malnutrition between 1990 and 2002, say experts by reducing malnutrion for children by two thirds. This suggest that malnutrition must have been much higher than 21% in China in 1990. And during the period between 1949 and 1980 China had focussed under Mao and his successors on the bread bowl, making sure that hunger was no longer a problem. This suggests the Indian middle class that thinks of the poor as there but not so worse off as to require a sense of urgency, or feeling slighted by the comparison with China need to do some thinking. From the perspective of progress the economy can only do well if rural and poorer areas are also part of development and share in the benefits of development. The other aspect of this is that the government can setup a program, and other countries like Brazil are also faced with the similiar problem and are tackling it aggressively. This is already takng place with a Right to Food Act in the Indian Parliament. Drafts of this Act call for a government subsidized minimum of 25 kilograms of food grain per family per month. But atttitudes in India need to go through a big change to take this problem seriously and with the urgency it requires from a developmental point of view, not only a moral point of view. What good is demographic devidend that many Indian leaders in many fields talk about if that demographic dividend is stunted by malnutrition, is the question all have to answer. Even software leader, Infosys's Nilekhani, in his book Imagining India talks about the large changes affecting India in the rural areas, the economic and technological progress, but fails to mention this aspect of malnutrition....

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When Manmohan Singh and Wen of India and China said in Beijing that the people of both countries were united in their aspirations for the future this was very real and sincerely stated. Geopolitics is somebody's game who does not know his own country, people and history in these long neglected parts of Asia. Here in India or China in different ways its these aspirations that matter. India is desperately trying now to improve schooling after years of neglect for the country's rural poor, where the quality of government schools is startlingly poor. The figures are dismal. In general only 1 in 10 college age Indians go to college. But its worst at the lower poorer parts of society. Among the poorest 20% of Indian men half are illiterate and only about 2% graduate from high school. For the top 20% of Indian people only 2% are illiterate and 50% are high school graduates. The problems even as the government pans to triple spending in the next 5 years run deep. There is no motivation among school teachers because for years the schools have been neglected and there is no education culture in poor villages, teachers are poorly trained if at all, they are late or absent and there islittle discipline and education ethic. Parents are very poor and do not understand the value of education and want to pull children out of school to earn wages for the family as migrant labor. The parents are illiterate or poorly educated so there is very little help at home. And there is corruption as some of the money to be invested in school buildings, equipment, lunches, teachers, etc is stolen or goes to bribes. There are some dedicated people but they get washed out in the midst of so much apathy, lack of conviction, corruption and lack of motivation among teachers parents and village officials....

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Geely's plans for Volvo are to build a presence for Volvo in China. This includes plans for additional local manufacturing facilities. One near Shanghai, another in Chengdu, and another being considered for Daqing. Each plant would produce 100,000 cars, with the Chengdu plant nearly complete and the others still to be built. Geely has received $444 million and $148 million respectively from the municipal governments of Daqing and Shanghai. Geely executives pointed to the need to upgrade Volvo's S80 sedan to compete with the likes of Mercedes Benz S-Class and BMW 7 series. Volvo hopes to sell additional cars to the Chinese government and state run companies. Risks associated with expanding car manufacturing were cited by Chen Bin, senior official of the China National Developmet and Reform Commission, at an auto industry conference recently. He said the combined capacity to build cars in China for all companies willl reach 31.24 million vehicles by 2015, up from the 13.95 million vehicles at end of 2009. ...

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Consumer buying habits at Walmart in the last 6 months since the sharp downturn in the economy hit in October 2008. Executives in merchandising at Walmart, Target and other stores discuss trends with the WSJ. There is adisciplined shopper with less browsing on the aisles. FOod is up on the list. Private label groceries at lower cost are selling well. At Walmart sales are up for refrigerated pizza,lower grades of meat. Ground beef and chicken sell way better than steak and beef. And carbohydrates are doing better than protein foods, so that pasta is doing well. Staying at home and entertaining at home is the trend says Fleming of Walmart, from the take and bake pizza at $5 to the movie and popcorn. Which is why the luggage section and trvel is slow, and flat screen tv's are selling well. Vitamins, herbs and plants for vegetable gardens are up as customers try to plant their own vegetable gardens. Car maintenance and repair is big, sales of motor oil, filters and tires. are some of Walmarts big sellers. Whatever makes the car last longer is considered attractive by customers. And home repair items are selling well at Home Depot....

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David Cameron's standing with the British public is hurt by the phone hacking scandal and his close ties with News International's Coulson and Rebecca Brooks. This has boosted the standing of Labor party leader Ed Miliband. Miliband said in an intervew with the Observer newspaper: "I think that we've got to look at the situation whereby one person can own more than 20% of the newspaper market, the Sky platform and Sky News. I think it's unhealthy because that amount of power in one person's hands has clearly led to abuses of power within his organization." Miliband has called for the breakup of Rupert Murdoch's media holdings, saying News Corporation "has too much power over British public life." He told the Observer he would work to get a cross-party agreement on new rules governing media ownership that would reduce market share of News Corporation.

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Wen Jiabao reflects on his ten years as prime minister of China- of plans fulfilled and unfulfilled, of expectations lived up to and expectations not lived up to.