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The OPEC meeting in Doha in April 2016 fails to lead to an agreement to freeze oil production at Jan. 2016 levels, with Iran staying away from the meeting.

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Senators Lankford (R- Oklahoma) Murphy (D-Conn), and Sinema (I- Arizona) are working hard to negotiate a deal which combines aid to Ukraine with an agreement to tighten border security. This report in The Washington Post shows how hard it is to reach a deal on intricate details and how it might not take place till January 2024. It is important to reach a deal as migrant push across the border has happened under both parties and a common solution is needed. 

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"What did it do in Green County?" this is the question voters are asking in counties across Wisconsin, and also in Michigan and Pennsylvania. These are states with lower number of minority voters and a higher number of white working class voters without college degrees. Even in rural areas around Madison voters remember their fathers and mothers voted for Kennedy, grandfathers and grandmothers voted for Roosevelt. The Washington Post looks at the white voters without college degrees in Wisconsin . How does one take the visionary actions in the Biden bipartisan Infrastructure laws and show what happens at the micro level? Lyrarc.com shows how the laws are changing America bit by bit every week in the Movement for Renewal of America as covered in NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, and other media.

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Hillary Clinton is diagnosed by her physician as having pneumonia on September 11, 2016. Her physician Lisa Bardack, says she "has been experiencing a cough related to allergies." She was put on antibiotics  when the cough was diagnosed as pneumonia, and told to rest and modify her schedule for a few days.

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Martin Feldstein looks at Bowles-Simpson Deficit Commission proposals and says the deficit reduction does not come soon enough. He points out that the Bowles-Simpson proposals still leave the national debt in 2020 at the level it is today- at 60% of GDP, and not reach the level of 40% of GDP that we had 2 years ago till 2035. The mere prospect of persistently high deficits, he says, jeopardizes the recovery by creating the expectation that tax and interest rates will eventually rise substantially. He says the Bowles-Simpson spending reductions by reforming the tax code that subsidizes mortgage payments, local government spending, health insurance and other items at an annual cost of $1 trillion, are the best approach. He differs with Bowles-Simpson in how this money would be used. Whereas Bowles-Simpson would use it to lower tax rates, leaving only $80 billion a year for deficit reduction, Feldstein would finance major deficit reductions. Feldstein recommends additional universal savings accounts to supplement Social Security. And he supports the Bowles-Simpson proposal for limiting the growth of government health-care spending to 1% more than the growth of GDP. He says the President needs to scale back the tax and spending proposals in the budget presented in the early part of 2010....

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The 800 foot Chinese ocean carrier Zhen Hua 29 sails into Kingston, Jamaica, from Shanghai on the long route with 5 cranes in epic 3 months voyage through the Indian Ocean around Mozambique- the last of the globalization voyages. As globalization dims these are the last of these voyages. US policy is for its control of the Panama Canal, the Monroe Doctrine in the western hemisphere, pushing out a globalization that hurt American industry and jobs in the USA. China continues on with its surplus capacity make for export policy, the US wants out from these imports, and the EU is wary of imports dependence.  Gemany's Foreign ministry under Wadephul is forming a commission to investigate German dependence on China made products. This is the last of the globalization that started with Clinton, and went on with Bush and Obama, wrecking huge parts of the American industrial base. Cranes- no longer made in the USA, one by one, including ships- no longer made in the USA. The great shipyards of Britain and the US languishing in disrepair! ...

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The euro approaches parity with the U.S. dollar by November 2016, with the surge in the dollar following the U.S. presidential election of 2016. The euro closed at $1.058 on Nov 17, 2016. It was down 4% following the election. The euro was down in early 2015. This time it is chiefly down against the dollar. This time both monetary and fiscal policy is expected to diverge with the EU, and inflation expectations are up in the U.S. Analysts expect parity to be reached in 2017. 

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Hilary Mantel describes a year spent teaching English and Shakespeare in Botswana when she was 25. Here she gives a description of a year teaching in a secondary school in Botswana, while living there with her geologist husband in 1978. This is an exceptional and vivid account of what it is like for someone with the rich imagination and empathy she posseses to reach out to African teenagers 12-15 who come to life in a classroom. It is a very human account of the potential and joy for these teenagers in a remote corner of Africa in her classroom, in the midst of apathy and cynicism about learning around them.

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The White House is expecting the half of the 2.2 million federal government workers who do not work out of their government offices to show up at offices and use them with "enhanced flexibilities." A GAO report shows that 17 out of 24 federal agency headquarters buildings in Washington D.C. had an utilization rate of 25%.

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Stephen Friedman's positions at Goldman Sachs and the New York Federal Reserve.

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BBC video on the handshake between the two presidents in Anchorage, Alaska, in neighborly style, that restored some of the trust that had diminished over the years. Alaska is where US and Russia meet with the Bering Strait only 57 miles of sea separating the two nations.

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U.S. Secretary of State Clinton and Turkey's foreign minister Davutoglu met in early August 2012 and agreed to set up intensive operational planning and coordination of the two countries efforts on Syria to end the Assad regime. The two foreign ministers said a unified task force with intelligence, military and political leaders would be set up immediately and will look at all options including direct assistance to the democracy movement and forces fighting the Assad regime.

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Representative Thadeus McCotter represents Livonia, an area west of Detroit, that has suffered shuttered auto and auto supplier plants and high unemployment. He gets a lot of questions these days about his vote against the Stmulus Plan. Says the Speaker of the Michigan State House, State Representative Andy Dillon, whose district overlaps McCotter's, "they are betting the farm, if this works, I think people will remember they were not on board. Democrats are targeting McCotter and 11 other Republicans in competitive districts in harder-hit states, saying they opposed the stimulus package's tax cuts, and generation of new jobs or preservation of jobs at the local government level, as well as extended unemployment benefits. Independent polls are reporting wide public support for the stimulus package.

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This report in NYT shows a young woman pedaling a bicycle to power a generator that keeps the Christmas lights on in a tree on in Ukraine.

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The question remains why the defamation law has remained a part of the Indian Constitutional law and the Indian  Supreme Court has upheld it. Under Britain there must be the sense that this would have put the unified subcontinental government at risk. Under India post independence this could be seen as an effort to keep the unified country India that emerged from the British Indian rule together as one nation. It may not be individual to individual defamation that underlies the spirit of this law. Its spirit may lie in keeping together as one nation a country with many languages and people after centuries of foreign rule by not letting the spirit that keeps it together be undermined in any way or form. Gandhi and the independence movement before Gandhi created the spirit for a new nation from many peoples and languages, this has now taken the form of timely delivery of the services and infrastructure that these peoples are entitled without any dilution of any sort, after all the hard work, sacrifices and aspirational effort of an earlier generation of leaders. ...