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U.S. president Nixon's lawyer John Dean who testified against Mr. Nixon writes in the NYT about the parallels between his testimony and the testimony given this week by Mr. Trump's lawyer  Michael Cohen. 37% said Dean's testimony was credible and 35% said Cohen's was credible in polls.

Dean says the number of people who surfaced supporting his account increased and it is likely to grow for Mr. Cohen's account. 

John Dean says he found one line in the Cohen testimony worth remembering from Cohen's closing statement. It refers to the authoritarian type of presidency he says he finds in the Trump presidency. It said that Cohen thought that if Mr. Trump loses the election in 2020 there would not be a peaceful transition. 

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Oil prices are forecast to remain above $100 a barrel in 2012 because of higher social spending in Saudi Arabia, Iran and other countries after the democracy protests, and the threat of retaliation by Iran in the Straits of Hormuz. Iranian threats of retaliation for increased sanctions has embedded a $10-$20 premium in oil prices say some experts.

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President Trump's failure to followup on his decision to shut down all flights to China on January 29 with speedy action on preparing for the coronavirus as suggested by some of his advisors is the subject of this article in the NYT.  There were two distractions one was the trade deal with China that was being negotiated, and then the impeachment trial in the U.S. Congress that was set in motion by Democrats. Another problem was the lack of good information about the extent of the virus spread in China and infected case numbers. As it turns out no one really knows the real scale of infections in China. If is was known that there were as many cases in China as there are in the U.S. today this would have resulted in shaking up any complacency in the Trump administration and in the states. Considering the experience of Europe and the U.S. it could be that China had the same number of infected cases as the U.S. does today for a population three times the size. China had a strict quarantine but it also did not realize what it was up against in the first weeks of the crisis in January. It appears now that China, Europe and the U.S. all lost some time from 2-4 weeks before realizing the severe consequences facing each region. This report says one of the vital pieces of information that was learned about infected people in China, was learned as late as the end of February by leaders of a government team looking at the coronavirus threat. It was that seemingly normal healthy people without symptoms but infected by the virus could spread the virus. This meant that this was very, very contagious. The lack of good information played a significant part, adding to the level of complacency in states such as New York and in the Trump administration. Politics such as the impeachment trial and political infighting added an unnecessary distraction. ...

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A large increase in fuel efficiency as planned by new EPA rules creates a different environment for electric cars. Current average fuel economy is 26. New rules that raise the average fuel economy to higher than 47 mpg will result in cars that conserve gasoline, reduce emissions, and make these vehicles more attractive to operate than electric cars on a cost basis, without sacrificing too much in conservation and emissions. A new study shows that achieving the increase to 47 mpg with new technologies will cost automakers about $2000 per vehicle. At $4.50 a gallon for gasoline it takes six years for a hybrid to be more cost effective than a 47 mpg car, according to this study. For a plug-in it would take 7 years and a pure electric vehicle 8 years. This suggests gasoline would have to cost more than $4.50 for electric cars to get an economic advantage. Technological breakthroughs and new technologies in electric cars which are a nascent industry at this time are not worked into these calculations. This could result in a different situation and favor the companies doing the pioneering effort to learn these technologies and develop cost effective solutions....

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Studies at the University of Padova in Italy and by France's research agency INSERM show higher risks of dementia from retiring early. The INSERM study shows that for every additional year worked we reduce the risk of dementia by 3.2 percent. Retiring at age 50 is considered very, very poor decision, and before 60 very poor decision, as cognitive development, mood, and active engagement with work offering complexity, all relate to good mental health. Countries like U.S. and Denmark where people tend to work for longer than in France and Austria are shown to be doing significantly better in cognitive performance in a 2010 study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. The Italian study shows the longer you spend in retirement the higher the risks of cognitive decline.

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Tom Brokaw is perplexed by the absence of the war in Afghanistan as a campaign issue in 2010 US elections. Especially because the war is in its 9th year, has caused 5000 dead, 30,000 wounded, and cost over $1 trillion dollars. He reasons that this is because the vast majority of Americans can opt out of fighting the war on the ground. The all volunteer service draws from 1% of the population, with the majority from working class or middle class backgrounds. This has an unintended effect in making the costs of the war less visible, when actually it is taking a toll in other ways. The US is short of funds to build much needed infrastructure or update infrastructure. States and local governments are laying off teachers because of budget shortfalls, and the national budget deficit makes less money available for solving pressing problems in carbon emissions, energy, and infrastructure. Only recently New Jersey Governor Christie put on hold a new tunnel into New York City because of a lack funds. Pressing infrastructure issues elsewhere will be postponed in this manner. And the outlook for the next 20 years, according to Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, is not going to be better with slower growth at an average of 1.5%, leaving less money for the kinds of projects that defined America from the Erie canal to interstate highways. Brokaw says, the country would benefit from an effort to discuss what happens next, in the continued expenditure of blood and treasure. A discussion of what happens next in this effort to deal with Islamic rage....

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Interview with Bill Gates on the Gates foundation's educational activities and his thoughts on the budget cuts in education. The Gates Foundation launches an effort to improve education in selected school districts- Memphis, Tennessee, Hillsborough, Florida, Pittsburgh, and a charter consortium in California. The foundation has awarded $290 million for this effort to improve teacher effectiveness and set up new personnel systems. The idea is to raise the average level of quality in these schools through teacher effectiveness using a system designed by the foundation. Gates sees the need for more targeted investment in schools and close cooperation with teachers, principals, superintendents and administrative people. For this reason he sees the current budget atmosphere as counterproductive, as it will cut spending on education and act as a distraction from the hard work that needs to get done. On education spending Gates points out that one has to be careful as a society not to neglect the young as one uses resources to support the elderly. He points out that the only way to get this whole thing to work is for some increases in taxes and putting a lid on increases in medical costs, so that education in America does not get shortchanged. Recent polls show preference for some increase in taxes when it comes to supporting education spending....

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This condensed adaptation of the book by McNish and Silcoff on the collapse of Blackberry with the launch of the iPhone, tells a story of complacency at Research in Motion. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis once said that complacency was like all the seven sins rolled into one. In the smartphone industry the results were lethal. RIM founders Lazaridis and Balsillie responded to the iPhone launch believing this would not affect Blackberry. The founders rationalized that what would determine success in the business was security, battery life, ability to type, and using less capacity so as not to strain networks, areas in which RIM was strong and on which it had built its market presence. Design, using mobile to offer broad access to internet content, and the touch screen, were not seen as changing the very nature of the phone market. During the summer of 2007 many users shifted to the iPhone, and it cultivated a cult following using strategies Apple had honed on earlier product launches, reaching 1 million in sales. RIM was completely unprepared and could offer Verizon Communications a prototype called the Storm, which was launched hastily with product glitches still remaining. This happened in November 2008 and turned out to be complete disaster- initial sales were great selling 1 million units in 2 months of 2008, but reversed when almost all of the units were returned because the browser was slow and the clickable screen did not respond well. Nokia, another competitor, is also caught unawares sticking to its formula of success, when all the rules were being rewritten by Apple by showing what the new possiblilities were with the right technology in what one could do with a smartphone. Blackberry introduced a smartphone in 2012 by putting together a patchwork of licensed technologies. By this time Apple, Samsung and other competitors had captured significant market share, and the smartphone flopped. The successor Z10 also flopped in 2013. Nokia faced another problem- the inability to convert R&D, at times larger than Google and Apple, into new products, and the failure of management to grasp the potential of new technologies. According to a former employee, Nokia management turned down a internet ready phone with touch screen developed by its engineers in 2004....

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During a trip to Italy for a G-7 foreign ministers meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson makes a symbolic stop at a memorial in Lucca, where 560 men, women and children were massacred by the Nazis in World War II. Tillerson said at the memorial that "we rededicate ourselves to holding to account any and all who commit crimes against the innocents anywhere in the world." Also present at the memorial were Frederica Mogherini, the European Union's chief of foreign policy, and Susanne Wasum-Rainer, German ambassador to Italy. British foreign secretary Boris Johnson said Europe supported the U.S. A meeting on Syria is being added to the G-7 meetings which includes the foreign ministers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, United Arab Emirates.

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This article by General James Jones is the second from the highest ranks of the Obama administration, saying the entire Middle East policy of U.S. president Obama was flawed and could lead to dangerous consequences. Gen. Jones, former National Security Advisor to Obama 2009-2010, says the situation today is worse than in 1991 when the U.S. launched Operation Provide Comfort to protect Kurdish refugees in Northern Iraq from Saddam Hussein, with an engagement of about 5 years and 25,000 Allied troops. Jones says the crisis in Iraq and Syria is of an order several times worse than 1991 and at any time since the 2003 invasion, as it involves the setup of a terrorist ISIS state in the heart of the Middle East. What went wrong? Jones says all the warnings from other Middle East nations about Maliki's corrupt policy and sectarianism used to stay in power turned to be true. Even Maliki's own advisors and colleagues say in a separate report by Matt Bradley that Maliki battled not for the Iraqi state but only to preserve his own power. Jones calls the U.S. president's decision not to act in Syria when the "red line" of use of chemical weapons was crossed, the failure to maintain a limited military training presence in Iraq after 2011, and not insisting that Mr. Maliki arm the Kurds, as having gravely aggravated the problem in 2014. Jones calls for arming the Kurds directly with sufficient weaponry for defending their region and providing immediate expanded aid to the Abadi government, appointment of a special envoy to ensure direct and immediate communications with Baghdad and with Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite leaders. He calls also for close air support of Iraqi and Kurdish operations, and an aggressive diplomatic effort to unify the Middle Eastern nations to remove ISIS from the region. Jones says this is the right thing to do in the name of all the Iraqi people yearning for peace, for the U.S. service personnel who made sacrifices in Iraq for 23 years, and for U.S. national security....

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The UN security council document does not have sanctions against Iran's largest banks and is a watered down document after disagreements between members especially after the release of intelligence report from the USA that Iran gave up pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003. The goal appears to be to keep Iran on the right path even as direct negotiations take place.

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The Saudis fear a blowback from a military push by the US against the Taliban. Pakistan sees a push by the USA leading to Taliban concentrating in the Baluchistan part of Pakistan.

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Melloan says President Bush is rightly offering Eisenhower's proposal for peaceful use of electrical energy as a friendly gesture to India. Ike made the "atoms-for-peace" proposal to the United Nations in Dec 1953, saying: "A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy to power-starved areas of the world." This also helps in other ways- 1. Takes pressure off gas prices with rising demand in India met by nuclear energy. 2. Gives American exporters a big market for nuclear energy equipment (companies like GE). 3. Improves prospects for other American exporters and businesses in India as the economic relationship grows larger. India is not receiving anywhere near the foreign investment China is receiving, actually minscule in comparison. This gets the whole relationship rolling. 4. Nuclear energy is an attractive option for India as it has few oil resources, and reduces dependence on coal from the standpoint of global warming and greenhouse gas emissions.

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A $250 millon award by a jury to a group of employees of Novartis AG. The jury agreed that Novartis had discriminated against women in its sales force for pay and promotions, and discriminated against pregnant women.

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Low price Wuling vans in China sell for under $3500 and are used mostly for agricultural purposes. The vans will be exported to other countries by GM, a partner in the GM Wuling Automobile Company in China.

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Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist of the Romney campaign points to the Romney campaign's success in getting a majority of votes of people making over $50,000, a majority of white voters under 30 by a 7 point margin, winning the votes of a majority of America's middle class, and falling short of a win of the Electoral College by 320,000 votes. He says Obama turned Democratic party weaknesses of being too liberal and too dependent on minorities into advantages. The Pew Research Center and other expert opinion cited as the principal reaon for the defeat, Romneys failure to empathize with voters. He appeared callous in his image with Hispanic voters with his self-deportation stand, and similiarly his position on the auto bailout was shown as callous in a barrage of political ads by the Obama campaign in the midwestern states, the remark about the 47% dependent on government help simply reinforced this notion of being insensitive to concerns of the less affluent. The candidate never succeeded in shaking off impressions in the minds of voters of being a private equity executive who could not empathize with weaker sections of the community, which were reinforced by heavy negative advertising in the 2012 election. Stevens says nothing about the short sightedness of a callous immigration policy of self-deportation adopted by a former governor of Massachusetts, in the face of Census statistics showing more children of minorities, especially Hispanics, born each year than children of any other demographic group in the U.S. The changing demographics may have made a crucial difference in many states....

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France is moving quickly with spending on the $37 billion stimulus. Public buildings, museums, cathedrals and historical sites are being renovated in 2009. About 50 chateaus, and 75 cathedrals are part of 100 million euros for cultural centres. About 75% of France's stimulus money will be spent in 2009, in contrast to the slow work in the USA.

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This WSJ editorial says the U.S. Federal Reserve needs a chairman who is politically independent, especially since the Fed has not been politically independent since 2008. It calls Ben Bernanke a political sidekick of Timothy Geithner at Treasury since 2008. A Summers Fed would have become too much influenced by the White House, which would not serve the country well, as new policies will be needed to wind down the loose monetary and fiscal policies, says the editorial.

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Jakarta is sinking with 40% of the city and most of North Jakarta under sea level. By 2030 the city is likely to be under water at the pace with which it is sinking into the Java Sea. Jakarta's problem comes from years of overbuilding, migration from rural areas, with no adequate system for supplying piped water. Many of the wells illegally built by developers, with 97% of the city in concrete preventing resupply of aquifers from heavy rains, have aggravated the sinking. The aquifers acted as a kind of foundation for Jakarta. Climate change is another factor adding to the problem. As a result a city that gets heavy rains and rivers coming in from the mountains with water, is now flooded frequently, unlike an earlier period when the Dutch used canals and dikes to manage the water flow. Efforts to prevent developers from draining the aquifers on which Jakarta rests have failed. North Jakarta is the worst affected and this area has many of the poor slum areas of the city. Evicting the tenants living there to clear the debris and clean up the canals and rivers has failed. The former governor of Jakarta, Mr Purnama known as Ahok, of ethnic Chinese origin, lost the election to Islamic parties and their allies following his efforts to clean up the area and take action to replenish the aquifiers. This NYT report is based on interviews with residents of the kampungs or settlements of people from rural areas within North Jakarta. A Dutch hydrologist Mr Brinkman is a expert on Jakarta's water systems. He says eviction is not the answer by itself but some effort to move people is needed and North Jakarta needs to be restored to its original mangrove situation, which would allow replenishing of underground water. Giving Jakarta a more stable foundation. About 30 million people live in this fast growing city and a lot depends on how Indonesians can prevent the city from sinking further into the Java Sea. ...

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Father Hesburgh became president of Notre Dame in 1952, at the age of 35, when Notre Dame was a small university known for football and theological studies. He greatly increased the size of the university, hiring new faculty, increasing the endowment fund from $9 million to $350 million, and changed polcies so that women were admitted in 1972. The endowment fund is now $9 billion. Father Hesburgh played a prominent role in the U.S. and was close to presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, Carter and Clinton. By the time he retired in 1986 after 35 years as president of Notre Dame, he was considered the most effective university president in the country, and the most influential priest in the U.S. He fought for civil rights, for peaceful protest on campus, and brought lay control through a secular board to run Notre Dame. In all these issues he stood up for his progressive views when faced by opposition from the Vatican and the U.S. government. Following the Second Vatican Council of the mid 1960's, Father Hesburgh initiated greater involvement of lay Catholics in the Mass and practices of the Church. At a meeting in Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin, 1967, a group of Catholic educators led by Hesburgh put forward the position that the pursuit of truth should be the ultimate aim of Catholic higher education in the U.S., not religious indoctrination. In this way Father Hesburgh created a new level of credibility and respect for Catholic based education in the U.S. Ironically Father Hesburgh was not a big football fan and refused to pose for a picture of him with a football, insisting that collegiate sports not influence higher education. His passion from his early years was to be a chaplain in the U.S. Navy. In fact he had to be dissuaded from going to the Navy as a chaplain in 1943, to stay on campus at Notre Dame to train naval officers during the war. Hesburgh was born in Syracuse in 1917 to an executive at Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, and studied at the seminary on Notre Dame campus and in Rome for advanced degrees in philosophy and theology. He died in 2015 at the age of 97, having placed a large imprint on the shape of American higher education in the twentieth century. ...

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Feldstein points out that Obama economic plans missed the real target, which was on the home front where it came down to addressing the problems of 15 million homeowners under water- with mortgages exceeding the value of their homes- and lack of solutions to deal with the $1.5 trillion in troubled commercial real estate loans. Administration plans really did not help more than a couple of hundred thousand homeowners to reduce their monthly mortgage payments. Getting banks to start lending again by selling impaired loans to nonbank investors, also failed to work, as banks were reluctant to do so and reduce their accounting capital. Health care legislation simply distracted attention from the real problems. See the links to Feldstein's repeated insistence that the new administration (and even during the late stages of the Bush administration) focus on these problems. Health care legislation that passed simply would not control the increase in health care spending, that the public correctly perceived as the real problem if the other health care issues were to be resolved. Instead Obama's health care legislation offered to increase the deficit to unsustainable levels, with no solutions to more pressing home front problems in sight. Feldstein, is one of the most eminent US economists....

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Jeff Flake, U.S. Senator from Arizona tells Republican candidates, "Distance yourself from Trump," and Flake is thinking not just of 2016, but of elections to come.  In the West generally it is not just about minorities, but also the educated white collar professionals in cities such as Salt Lake City, Denver and Phoenix. The percentage of registered Republicans in Colorado dropped by 4 percentage points since 2012, and now Democrats have the same share of registered voters. In Arizona Hillary Clinton has invested resources to register more Hispanics and minorities. The distancing from Trump by Romney and the shift of the Mormon vote is making Utah also a place where Clinton is catching up in polls. As a result most of the West now looks very different. The remaining western states of Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and Alaska, say experts have a total of 13 of the 538 Electoral College votes. With Utah this is 19. 

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Exchange of remarks between Ben Bernanke of the Fed and James Dimon of JP Morgan Chase Bank on regulation and new capital reserve requirements for large U.S. banks. Fed governor Tarullo has proposed a 14% requirement of capital reserves for banks that are "too big to fail."

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The small segment of society in Pakistan that controls business, has large agricultural holdings, and the politicians in parliament, all benefit from a system in which they pay very little in taxes. These groups draw the maximum benefit from their privileged position. According to a transparency promotion organization in Pakistan, the average member of parliament in Pakistan has net worth of over $900,000 and pays little in taxes. A senior tax offical says the tax revenues in 2009 were the lowest in the country's history. According to Pakistan's tax rules income taxes are owed by anyone making more than $3,488 a year. Analysts estimate that of the 10 million who should be paying taxes only 2.5 million are actually paying taxes. And the tax collection is extremely poor, so that less than 2% of the population of 170 million pay taxes, with tax collection as a percent of GDP among the lowest in the world. Pakistan's laws do not allow questioning of money transferred from abroad, so a lot of money can be channeled to Dubai and brought back into Pakistan. This is important becuase the burden of this falls on the poor, in the appalling quality of infrastructure and public services, and the widening gap in the quality of life of most people in the country compared to the affluent few. ...

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The Russian economy has proved stronger than other emerging markets in a similar situation. The ruble has declined from 35 to the dollar before the Ukraine crisis and sanctions in 2014 to 86 to the dollar in Jan. 2016. Foreign currency reserves dropped from $600 billion to $385 billion in 2009, when Russia with memories of 1997 when the ruble collapsed, decided to prop up the ruble. In Nov. 2014 Russia's central bank let the ruble float, this time responding in a different way following western sanctions over Ukraine and a emerging markets crisis. Interest rates were increased to tackle inflation.A key rate was raised to 17% in Dec. 2014, dropping by Jan 2016 to 11%. Inflation was 12.9% in Dec. 2015, the target for 2017 is 4%. The economy has contracted by 3.7% in 2015, and expected to contract by 1% in 2016, according to the IMF. Alexsei Kudrin, former finance minister, expects modest growth in 2017.