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After 5 years of construction the new Daxing international airport opens in Beijing. It cost 61 billion dollars. It has 4 runways, and is likely to handle 72 million passengers a year by 2025. The new airport is twice the distance from the city centre than the earlier airport. China's aviation sector has a reputation for delays from overcapacity and from military use of airspace. The new airport is expected to provide an improvement in travel.

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Not only have directors at companies like Washington Mutual, Countrywide Financial and Fannie Mae not taken responsibility for the crisis. They have simply moved on to other boardrooms says Gretchen Morgenson of the NYT. These direcotrs did little when these companies were leveraged and made dubious loans or risky investments. Says Paul Hodgson of the Corporate Library, "these directors have avoided the corporate limelight as far as blame is concerned." Companies like Sunoco, the oil company, Paccar, a truck manufacturer, and Tetra Tech each have directors from these failed companies. Thomas Gerrity, a professor of managemet at Wharton is one of the outside directors at Fannie Mae who is now at Sunoco. Robert Parry, a former president of the Federal reserve bank of San Francisco, was adirector at Countrywide from 2004 to 2008. Parry is on the board at Paccar. Says Frederick Rowe, president of Invesotrs for Director Accountability, a nonprofit shareholder advocacy group, the board member gets $475,000 a year, he plays golf with the CEO, he is apersonal friend, goes to nice places for board meetings, and he is just not going to one word that would jeopardize his position on the board. In the case of GM the board held together in one voice right up to the bankruptcy with a director who was a former CEO of Eastman Kodak and the lead person on the board, insisting that management had done everything right, all the way up to the end. These directors had to be fired once the government took an ownership interest in GM, and before this they survived just about everything, including tens of thousands of jobs lost in Michigan, and the devastation of communities and people around the state. Gretchen points out that the director dysfunction is because its almost impossible to have adirector fired for sleepwalking through the job or simply rubberstamping the maagement's decisions. Shareholders have to launch an expensive proxy fight to oust a director. Currently proposed changes by the SEC to allow those who have at least a stake of 1% in a big company to put up their own nomiees are not effective steps say shareholder advocates. John Gillespie, co-author of "Money for Nothing," a forthcoming book on board failures with David Zweig, says the problem lies in the culture of the boards which determines how directors behave. Solutions he suggests are instituting term limits for directors and separating the positions of board chairman and chief executive....

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Alan Mulally talks to Charlie Rose about cost competitiveness, negotiations with the UAW, creating jobs, and the repayment of $20 billion of the $23.5 billion borrowed in 2006. Mullaly points out that 70% of R&D is connected with design and manufacturing- all the technology that goes into designing and building and the associated R&D.

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The US Air Force plans to order 100 planes of the B21 Stealth Bomber at $700 million each. This aircraft is made at Plant 21 in Palmdale, California. The development of this plane was kept hidden for seven years even to families with someone working at the plant. It is made by Northrop Grumman. The previous version of the plane was the B2 Spirit of which only 21 were made leading to a high cost of $2 billon per plane. These planes last for many years. The B52 bombers of the Vietnam era are still in use. Their cost is prohibitive for most countries. During the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union investment in these bombers declined. With new risks emerging for NATO in Europe and in Asia this aircraft is seen as an American deterrent.

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President Biden visits the Polish town of Rzeszow close to the Polish border with Ukraine. It serves as the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division and Us operations to supply weapons and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. The Russian offensive met with stiff resistance and incurred high casualties in Ukraine with this WSJ report showing 40,000 casualties in the 150,000 Russian invasion force, making it less effective. 
Russia appears to have scaled down its objectives to focus on the separatist Donbass region in the east. The offensive on Kviv, Odessa and Kharkiv is stalled with stiff resistance. About 10 million people have been uprooted.  3.7 million people fled Ukraine, with 2.2 million crossing into Poland.

The US has warned that it would respond if Russia attempted to use chemical weapons. 

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A Japanese scientist at Princeton University has done work since the 1960's to show that increased level of carbon dioxide lead to increased temperatures on the surface of the earth. Syukuro Manabe at Princeton was honored for this work with the Nobel Prize in Physics. Also honored is a German scientist Hasselmann who showed the connection between weather and climate with his own model. His research shows methods for attributing various impacts on climate of human activity and natural phenomena. Also honored is Italian scientist Parisi for his work on complex systems uncovering patterns in disordered complex materials.

Today's understanding of how the use of coal and other fossil fuels at the scale done in China, Europe, US and India is affecting the climate comes from the work of these three scientists.

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Arizona, Utah and South Carolina are 3 states that are cited by the US Labor Department for not adopting any portion of the Occupational and Health Safety Emergency Standard for health care workers. The Labor Department says that by not adopting these standards for social distancing, mask use and paid time off for vaccination, these states are risking the health and safety of health care workers. OSHA sent letters to these states revoking the states abilities to run their own occupational health safety programs.

Texas is one of the states where governors are opposing the Biden vaccine mandate. Airlines based in Texas, both Southwest Airlines and American Airlines, say they will follow the Biden vaccine mandate for federal contractors, as they are required by law to abide by the president's order.

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The Oxford vaccine is to be combined with a dose of Russia's Sputnik vaccine in a study to determine if this will provide improved results. The idea is to test whether two doses combined of Oxford and Sputnik vaccine can provide better protection than two doses of the same vaccine. Trials will begin by the end of 2020. This is being done under the concept of heterologous prime boost which has been adopted in  vaccination programmes against other diseases.

,Both the Russian and the Oxford vaccine use a modified version of adenovirus, a common cold virus. This is stripped of disease causing genes and given genetic instructions that make the coronavirus cause a spike in the protein when it passes it to the human cells. This then triggers an immune response.

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A chaotic return of school children to school in September 2021 in most of Europe and America, because of a lack of clear statement on the rules to be followed for mask use, social distancing, and testing. Most children are also returning to school without vaccination.  It is also happening at this time in September when the Delta variant is spreading. US president Biden's decision for vaccine mandate for 100 million or two thirds of American workers comes at this time of uncertainty in schools about the future and coronavirus variant. In the US rules are being set school district by school district, at a time when vaccines are not approved for children under 12 years. One leading school administrator in the US says "it's as chaotic as you can get."

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Without hydropower and the clean energy from dams estimates are for 10% more use of burning fossil fuels. China and Brazil have added 12.5 gigawatts of power from hydropower, 50% of this in the world for 2017. Africa added 1.9 gigawatts in this period and 6 countries depend on hydro for 90% of electricity production.  The entry of private capital and the financing from the government in the case of China and India is replacing the role of the World Bank. 

The effect of lack of electricity in India and Africa is underestimated in how it affects people's lives in these regions with lack of water supplies, and lack of electricity severely hurting people in large numbers who are marginalized or forgotten because they never had access to lighting at night before.

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John Fetterman Democrat of Pennsylvania has maintained a friendship with Katie Britt, Republican freshman from Alabama, and even turned up in Congress to show Britt's son around the House and Senate buildings. It shows how some senators in the US Congress are taking stances independent of their parties different factions and staying true to their authentic selves about what they see as right. For example Fetterman and Britt are introducing legislation requiring children to be 13 years of age to use social media platforms. Texas Senator Cornyn and other Republicans are at ease talking to John Fetterman. It is the kind of bipartisanship that is emerging in 2024 in the US. Fetterman says he is behind president Biden and is campaigning in 7 states calling Biden "a decent, good guy," and a tough guy.

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The fight against cancer cannot be done only on the finding a cure,  it is also about returning to the time when ingredients such as titanium dioxide and others were not added to food and when people did not consume processed foods. This report says the FDA spokesperson says contact the manufacturer. After the EU has banned titanium dioxide for causing the inflammation that causes cancer, the FDA should have banned it. See the recent article in The Washington Post on the microplastics that release nanoparticles that cause cancer. The culture in the US has developed a tolerance for behaviours and actions that harm the health and mental health of the American people making it necessary to change this so that microplastics and ingredients such as titanium dioxide are removed from the widespread use that is happening.

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US naval blockade of Iran in Arabian Sea starts April 13 2026. US destroyed Iran's larger ships 158 of them, yet Iran also has a fleet of smaller attack boats which it plans to use in Hormuz. These are harder to detect and can be hidden in coves along the Iranian coast and used against ships. The US with its naval blockade is now prepared to do what it has done also in Venezuela, stop and interdict fast drug boats on the Venezuelan side in the Atlantic ocean. By blockading Venezuela in the ocean US is using its strengths, and stopping drug boats its ability to pinpoint traffic on the ocean. Similar capabilities are well suited to Arabian Sea and Red Sea on the open oceans and away from narrow Hormuz playing to US strengths and capabilities. Aircraft carriers and destroyers and the US Air Force is in a position to do what it does best control open seas like the British did in their heyday of the Royal Navy for most of 1750-1920. This avoids options of Hormuz itself with its narrow 15 mile gap of water between Oman and Iran too close to mountainous terrain on either side, and of the Kharg Island option which would require special forces to be backed up with more ground forces. This is the most viable option and the interlude of couple of weeks has given the president an opportunity to make a better choice for positioning the US forces where the US has its strongest points. What is lacking is the individual powers of Britain and France whose leaders Starmer and Macron have popularity below 20%. Yet the US is better off making good choices and not having these nations alongside. The posturing by European nations is limited to France and UK, as Germany and Italy are in sync with the US position. Much of the media operates as if the goal of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to the Middle East is not important for long term peace for nations such as China and India with about 3 billion people and the billions of people of Asia, Latin America and Africa. For the first time in 400 years since 1600 as Asian civilizations began a long decline China and India have emerged in 2000-2030 into the kind of modern economies and societies that exist in Europe and the US. The last thing they need is the risk of destroying the Modern World with nuclear proliferation when it took centuries to get to the right opportunity after 1950 to modernize China and India. Xi's and Modi's generation are the first to experience modernization in Asia after Japan's experience. ...

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Dana Goldstein of the NYT looks at the big problem in education today- the failure to teach reading and writing skills to students in American schools. Goldstein cites two alarming statistics. About 40% of students who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lack the reading and writing skills to pass a college level composition class in English. 8th and 12th grade classes in the U.S. have 75% of the students lacking writing skills proficiency, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Of the 1204 comments to this article in the NYT, many of the 17 selected by NYT say the problem is that students lack reading skills. Other problems shown here are the handicaps created by technology, yes technology. Mobile phone use is common and this is done quickly with the least attention to write good sentences, little attention to punctuation, spelling or grammar. Half or incomplete sentences are easier to type on mobile, so a new generation grows up thinking that this is normal. As a result a whole generation of kids have not learned to read or write well, constructing sentences with limited vocabulary. Steve Jobs and Apple may say that iPads and iPhones, smartphones and other tech devices have advanced reading with the beautiful display technology screens, but this is not what is really happening. Google may say that its search helps people access good reading materials, and this too is not what is really happening.  Equally alarming is that there is no clear agreement on how to tackle this problem. The No Child Left Behind 2002 law set a program emphasizing reading and use of multiple choice questions to test reading skills. This was followed by the Common Core standards now implemented in schools for 6 years that shift the focus to writing. Yet the results are still the same, showing little progress. Goodman cites as examples of disagreement, the Writing Revolution project which focusses on grammar and other writing skills, and the Long Island Writing Project that focusses on students finding their own voice by freewriting. A student in the freewriting class which encourages finding your own voice, expresses her frustration by saying she doesn't hear a voice- what voice, she asks.  One of the problems is that teachers themselves lack writing skills. A look at 2400 teacher preparation programs shows little attention paid to teaching writing. The head of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University's Teachers College, says Common Core failed in implementation of massive teacher training, which is required to address the problem. As a result remediation programs are needed badly in colleges to fix literacy skills, when better teaching would have prevented the problem in the first place. Little understood or debated is that every generation has to learn about the country's democratic institutions, every generation has to make its own effort to gain civic literacy- it is not something that can be taken for granted or handed down from one generation to the next. Without reading and learning about how these institutions function, young people lack the skills for participating in our democracy and in the global economy. ...

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Kristof says social ills- the lack of stable marraiges, drug use, poor day care resources- compound the problems of lack of education beyond high school in America's white underclass. The lack of good manufacturing jobs and lower wages have hit people with only a high school education the hardest. Two decades of decline in good manufacturing jobs with globalization have hit this part of the population in the U.S. hard creating increasing inequality in America. He sounds a Moynihan type call to the plight of America's poorest white communities.

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Cheng provides the basics of cloud computing and how best to use cloud services.

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How reading to children works with the use of the iPad or other tablet.

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The WSJ Editorial Board speaking for the business community traditional Republican groups finally takes up the election on issues of policy difference between Trump run Republican party and Harris run Democratic Party which it should have from Day One. The former president says something that has never happened in the last hundred years- policy will be decided after the election depending on what he decides to do. Cost of Living action is No 1 on voter priorities. "Drill, Baby Drill," is the whole Republican party platform for cost of living action. What is the Harris Democrats policy plan for cost of living action? WSJ says it is spending blowouts that caused inflation, the Green New Deal, entitlement expansions and student loan forgiveness.The real reason for the increase in cost of living comes from the overconcentration of supply chain by American business in China, on which every president Bush, Obama, Trump, did little or nothing. The lack of an effective vaccination program and ineffective vaccines in China by 2021 and 2022 led to the loss of the supplies from China leading to shortages for automobiles parts and other supplies and surge in prices in 2021-2023. Powell and the US central bank correctly raised rates but cautiously and waited for this to correct, president Biden brought manufacturing home through huge investments called the "spending blowout" that brought down the inflation from 9% to 3%. Some of that "spending blowout" went to chips and science to correct the errors of American Business and Reagan-Friedman theory of the Republican party that created this problem with a culture of utter  indifference to the ultimate costs of who makes what and where. The Inflation Reduction Act also tackled higher health and other costs paid by American workers and families, and invested in public services and in repairing the dilapidated crumbling American infrastructure. Are Republicans saying let the roads, bridges, airports, built in the 1940-1960's heyday of American industrialization as China and India's is now, let them crumble? What do the educated minds of the WSJ Board say about coal in China and India and their effects on their massive use multiple times that of US and EU in history, is it not damaging to the environment and why the Chinese realized the health in North China with coal winter use was worse than in South China cut their coal use. Are they saying lets burn fossil fuels and ignore, and if investment has to be made in solar who is going to do it? Is it Ok for Republicans thet we just import from China all our solar panels indefinitely into the future. "Green New Deal" is just a perjorative term, policy has to be made thoughtfully and without prejudice or bias of any sort for the best that we can do for the American people, ignoring so called "right" or "left." Doing what is right, what makes sense, is a lot harder.     ...

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Google's head of operations in India, Rajan Anandan, cites estimates of 200 million new internet users in India by 2014. An estimated 100 millon Indians were online in 2010. The surge in internet use is expected with the roll out of high speed internet technology and expected sales of low cost smartphones using Android software. Most of the Indian advertising dollars go to print and television advertising. As a result online advertising spending is only about 200 million dollars. One aspect of Indian user behaviour is the preference for the internet as the first source for research when it comes to buying cars or other products. Google has 63 million Indian users for its search service, according to ViziSense, an Indian web metrics firm. Anandan says Indian advertisers could benefit from an Internet first strategy to reach affluent urban consumers.

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DW.com looks at the summit of international leaders in Beijing, from 40 countries as China promotes the Belt and Road Initiative to use the skills it has gained in building infrastructure in China to build much needed infrastructure in Asia and Africa. The Belt and Road Initiative is now part of the Chinese Constitution since 2017. Projects in Africa are part of providing a much needed building of infrastructure to meet the needs of a jump in population in Africa that would add a billion people by 2025. Better terms were promised including forgiveness of interest for Ethiopia, and more transparency set as the Belt and Road Initiative addresses concerns in the host countries.

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To limit global warming to increase in temperatures by 1.5 degree centigrade by 2030 requires 2019 global emissions of 52 billion metric tons to come down to 25 billion by 2030. If China continues to use coal the way it now does till 2030 as is expected today it will continue to have the 2019 carbon emissions of 14 million metric tons or more than half of global carbon emissions from about 27% today. Vice premier Han Zheng China's top climate and energy official has reversed course from his earlier admonition in September to "curb resolutely the blind development" of high emissions coal projects. After wide blackouts in Chinese cities and power cuts to factories in the past couple of weeks the new priority Zheng says is "increase coal supplies by any means necessary." Coal provides power to 56% of China's heavy industry. Chinese localities have 104 gigawatts of top priority coal power capacity planned more than what is installed in Japan and Russia. ...

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Israel remains a laboratory for the rest of the world in tackling coronavirus. During the beginning of 2021 Israel was the first country to push ahead with Pfizer vaccines for the over 18 population in a country of 10 million people. As winter approaches Israel has given a third booster shot to 50% of the population and is able to conduct normal life with a green pass system and the use of masks indoors. Each time a major surge has been prevented. The green pass in Israel is now for people who have had a third shot or booster shot. By thinking one step ahead, making decisions rapidly, and coordinating action early between the government and other organizations to vaccinate everyone, Israel provides lessons for the rest of the world. Not that there are no unvaccinated -about 700,000 people do not believe in vaccination and are unvaccinated. They are a vocal group but only about 8% of the population, and the vast majority of Israelis are in favor of vaccination and the green pass system. ...

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The GM restructuring plan of the Obama administration, as GM enters bankruptcy, was designed so that the UAW plays a constructive role in building the new GM. There is a wage freeze, and a no-strike clause until 2015. The union gets a 17.5% ownership of GM, which helps to align the union's interests in improving the share price. At the same time the unions health fund's shares are novoting, so that the union does not make decisions for the company. At Chrysler even though the union has 55% ownership shares, it has only one person on the Board. In the same way the union has a limited role in running GM. The idea is to get the union out of the us vs. they habits of the last 50 years.

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Dubai airport had 67.3 million passengers in the 12 month period through Feb. 2014, according to Airports Council International. Emiraes airline is based in Dubai. It was setup in 1985 using a $10 millon grant from the government of Dubai and 2 Boeing 727 planes. The precipitating factor was a cutback in flights by Gulf Air between UAE and Pakistan. Emirates benefitted from a business friendly environment in Dubai and open skies policies that helped the aviation sector grow. Another factor helping rapid growth is that the CEO of Emirates, Sheikh Ahmed bin al-Maktoum, is chairman of Dubai Airports and Dubai Civil Aviation Authority, chairman of the low cost carrier Flydubai, and is the uncle of Dubai's ruling king Sheikh Rashid al-Maktoum.

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Whirlpool has negotiated an agreement with Suning Appliance Company in China to use its distribution network.