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Greg Ip of WSJ points out that DJT's tariffs are not fully understood. DJT did not use tariffs in the way he is doing now in his first term. Today Congress understands that it is a negotiating tactic when the US is at a disadvantage with other nations using non tariff and hidden barriers. Mostly all countries except China will accept the tariffs and it generates $240 billion a year to finance US resurgence. In the past US spent years of negotiating to get agreements with recalcitrant countries like Japan or China or the EU. The US just doesn't have that kind of time when it has lost its manufacturing, its shipbuilding, its shipping and ports. The average tariff under Biden was 3%. It now is about 13.4%. DJT strategy is to simply hit all imports with a 10-15% tariff across the board as price for access to the US market and for its defense and military protection- this means EU, Japan, South Korea,Taiwan, India cannot retaliate.  ...

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Saudi Arabian deputy defense minister Prince Khalid says polls show Saudis younger than 30 years old favor improved relations with Israel. As a first step Israeli planes would be allowed to fly over Saudi Arabia and control over two islands in the region would be handed over to the Saudis.  President Biden as a candidate had concerns about human rights in Saudi Arabia. Following the war with Ukraine and improving Saudi Israel relations it now appears likely that this will have an impact in improving US relations with the Saudis. Prince Khalid visited Washington and William Burns has also visited the Middle East for the Biden administration as it seeks to get Saudi Arabia to increase oil production following the EU oil embargo on Russian oil.  Saudis under Prince Salman who heads the administration are pushing to modernize Saudi Arabia and build ties for a broader relationship with the world than the traditional ties in the Middle East of Arab countries.The Saudis are improving relations with India and India was the first country to ship vaccines to Saudi Arabia. UAE and Qatar have also improved relations with the Modi administration in India. With China  engaged in trade and technology friction with the US after US investment and aid to China during the last 2 decades and the long period of aid to China during the Japanese invasion, the US is building new relationships in Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East. The new Saudi US relationship would be different from that of the old Saudi relationship as Saudi remains a monarchy but under the new administration and a younger generation of Saudis sees itself as a modernizing influence in the region. Biden sees these new factors as it looks to rebuild relationships in Asia.   ...

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Black Rock's collection of $10 trillion in passive assets or shares in firms that it manages for investors, including pension funds, brings with it voting rights for these shares. About 45% of investors have now expressed interest in doing the voting themselves. The voting provides Black Rock and other passive index tracking funds enormous leverage over thousands of American companies.

This voting rights power it can use to support Black Rock's stance on social issues. Recently Republican senators introduced a bill calling for individual investors in passive funds to have the option of voting their own shares instead of Black Rock or some passive index tracking fund doing it for them. 

Black Rock has responded with a voting choice platform that now has $520 billion of the $10 trillion it manages for investors.

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The 7 Priorities listed in India's Budget for April 2023 to March 2024 provide a roadmap for the next 25 years to 2047 when India marks 100 years as an independent nation. These are-Inclusive Development Reaching the last mile, Infrastructure and investment, Unleashing the potential Green growth, Youth power, Financial sector

Reaching the last mile- Gandhi's idea- "Ask yourself if the step you contemplate is of any use to him or her (the poorest and weakest man or woman you have seen), will he or she gain anything by it? Will it restore to him (or her) control of their life and destiny."

A fund will be setup for Agri-startups. A National Digital Library will be set up for children and adolescents and States will be encouraged to setup physical libraries at panchayat and ward levels.

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The US Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland file the second lawsuit against Google seeking the breakup of Google. It is joined by 8 states in this lawsuit including the states of New York and California. The lawsuit seeks the divestiture of Double Click and other acquisitions that helped Google establish its monopoly in online advertising. It covers the ad brokering business that makes up 12% of Google revenues. 

In filing the lawsuit Attorney General Merrick Garland said:

"For 15 years Google has pursued a course of anticompetitive conduct that has allowed it to halt the rise of rival technologies, manipulate auction mechanics, insulate itself from competition, and forced advertisers and publishers to use its tools.

Google has engaged in exclusionary conduct that has severely weakened if not destroyed competition in the ad-tech industry." 

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The French under Macron commit to build a new aircraft carrier to come into service in 2038. This will be nuclear powered like the Charles De Gaulle, France's current aircraft carrier. U.S. carriers are also nuclear powered to reduce port stops for fuel. 

French and U.S. ships use American suppliers for some of the flight systems on carriers so that French aircraft and American aircraft can operate off of each others ships. For France it preserves "strategic autonomy" a policy France has pursued since Mr. De Gaulle. It also means tighter U.S. French cooperation with France being America's key ally in Europe. France has plans to increase defense spending by 4.5% and spends over 2% of GDP on defense like the U.S. 

India, Britain, China and Russia are the only other countries with aircraft carriers.

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Since the beginning of the $9 euros ticket for travel on the German rail system Deutsche Bahn on June 1, 2022 52 million tickets were sold. The ticket allows anyone to travel for 1 month in the months of June, July and August. It has saved 1.8 million tons of emissions because 20% of ticket users do not normally use public transport. A similar result in emissions savings can be achieved by lowering the speed limit on highways. A typical passenger emits about 4.6 tons of carbon a year in automobiles.

Also popular is the simplicity of the scheme. It also brings more people from different regions together in Germany by encouraging travel and relieves some of the stress of the pandemic. Overall it has an effect in lowering inflation and making travel easily accessible to all people in the country.

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President Biden visits Nevada and calls for a 5% cap on rent increases by corporate landlords with over 50 rental units. The WSJ report July 15 shows 25% of people renting apartments in the US pay over 50% of their income just to pay rent leaving little for food and transport, education and healthcare. This is a severe problem in Nevada and in the US across all 51 states. The president is closely following mortgage rates that went up from 3% to 8%, creating affordability issues for prospective homeowners. Another proposal of the president that he can act on as it does not require Congressional action is to use federally underused land and repurpose it for building 15,000 affordable housing units in Nevada. Such proposals across the 51 states are needed today to address acute rental housing shortage and price increases of about 20% by landlords.

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Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco say that manufacturers of PFAS forever chemicals are using a strategy to discredit good research that detail risks from carcinogens. They says that these manufacturers suppress unfavorable research and distort public discourse. Former EPA researcher Dourson is shown here with a company that gets half its funding from chemical companies. He pushes for allowing many times the permissible level of carcinogens set by the EPA, and supports use of forever chemicals, in this report in the WSJ. President Trump appointed him head of the chemcial safety unit at EPA, but Doursen withdrew when there was bipartisan criticism of ties to industry. Critics say he uses biased science that looks at cherry picked data. His company is called Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment, which he founded after taking a buyout of $25,000 from EPA, according to WSJ.

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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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Like Jill Biden Gwen Walz is a teacher. Jill teaching community college and Gwen high school students. Minnesota governor Tim Walz is also a high school teacher. They met in Nebraska where Gwen taught English, and Tim taught social studies. Gwen told Minnesota Public Radio that they shared a classroom  with a divider right down the middle.In Minnesota they taught at the same school in Mankato. 

As part of prison reform she advocated educational opportunities to permanently alter lives. She has also been strong advocate for background checks and a red flag law to limit gun use. To get senators in Minnesota legislature to act she told them at a 2019 rally- “If they do not put it up for a vote, there are seven senators sitting in seats where Tim Walz won — and we are coming,”

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Note the reference to the embarrassment the Jobs Bank is causing for the UAW and the UAW moving away from it. How this opens up the way to worker acceptance of the buyout plan. See also the link to Korea, how fast the Korean operations are growing and the link to GM in China and the rest of the world where GM's operations are growing. The picture it presents of a shift to becoming a globalized company with global manufacturing and global vision.

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Private equity firm 3G Capital Partners of Brazil innovates its way in cost reduction with the use of 'zero based budgeting' tool to have managers justify budgets each year from scratch. The firm hopes to use these skills in bringing down costs in the merged Heinz-Kraft Foods company. Shifting consumer preferences from packaged foods to fresher foods are pressuring sales and margins in the packaged foods industry, creating the need for new ways to run these companies to improve financial performance.

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This piece in 2009 was written after the Apple iPhone touch screen was already in everyday use. The touch screen on PC's was next. Wildstrom describes the first efforts at making this work on PC's. Much of the credit for backing these innovations goes to Steve Jobs of Apple. He pioneered the use of the new technologies behind these innovations by concentrating capital and engineering talent on just these areas that would bring the PC closer to our everyday lives.

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Gen. Keane and Pletka say action by the U.S. is needed in 2013 to render ineffective the airdefense system and runways used by warplanes of the Assad regime. They emphasize that the U.S. has the technology and capacity to do this even with the Russian systems added in Syria. The lack of a U.S. response in the face of the Assad regime's attacks on civilian populations and use of chemical weapons, the support to the U.S. from the Arab world and Turkey, and the huge refugee problems in Jordan and Turkey, say Keane and Pletka, will lead to creating a worse situation than the relatively small risks of destroying the runways for Assad's warplanes and the airdefense system.

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Bill Keller of the NYT points out that getting Syria right means getting over the obsession over what went wrong in Iraq and looking objectively at the situation in Syria. He points to the failure of president Obama in grasping what the Assad regime has done to Syria, the refugees in Jordan, the use of artillery and air raids on civilian population, and inviting the support by fundmentalist Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia in the absence of U.S. and European support, making delay after delay by president Obama leading to a paralysis in response. Leaving the question for the future which was a worse U.S. response- the hasty action in Iraq or the paralysis in Syria?

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The Economist points out that AI and Deep Learning have flaws in that they replicate how the human brain works in what importance is given to what piece of information in the form of bits of code imitating information neurons. The problem is that once this process is underway and it gets progressively more complex it is hard to track and understand what is happening withing this code, as to why a particular decision is reached. Making this process transparent is therefore critical to wider use of AI.

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The 8000 mile Pacific Light underwater sea cable for internet goes from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. After review by the U.S. Justice Department the conduit connecting to Taiwan and Philippines will be used. leaving the internet link to Hong Kong offline. The U.S. is wary of connection to Hong Kong, and its use as a data hub, after the long public protests in Hong Kong. Perception earlier was of Hong Kong as a separate region from China, with its own distinct identity. This is now changing following the protests.

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Pete Pyhrr is interviewed by the WSJ's David Kesmodel 40 years after his zero based budgeting method became popular in the Carter administration. Pyhrr developed the method as a controller at Texas Instruments in the 1970's, and says it is a great tool in difficult economic times or periods of rapid technological change to make cost reductions. WIth zero based budgeting budget figures are not simply adjusted upwards or downwards from last years numbers, but the budget is developed from scratch to reflect purposes served in the current environment. It brings costs and benefits of each expenditure into focus, so that more profitable projects can be financed over less profitable projects. Pyhrr published "Zero-Based Budgeting: A Practical Management Tool for Evaluating Expenses," in 1977. It was used by President Carter in managing the budget process in the state of Georgia and in the Carter administration, but fell out of favor in the Reagan administration. Pyhrr says he sees the need for using the method in today's budget cost reductions for government agencies to help taxpayers. As with TQC under Deming, which came back to the U.S. following Japan's use of quality control methods developed decades earlier in the U.S., zero based budgeting is coming back to the U.S. through its use by private equity firm 3G Capital Partners of Brazil in its Heinz operation....

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NYT reporter Chivers reports from Marea, Syria, on the use of cluster bombs on civilians by the Assad regime.

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China is rapidly moving away from the use of cash in everyday transactions with the popularity of smartphone payment options using WeChat and Alipay apps.

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P.T. Usha chairs the upper house of the Indian parliament at the request of vice president Dhankar. She tells Sansad TV in an interview that she was nervous and thought to herself how could a sportsperson handle such an assignment. After chairing the session she now says she feels grateful for the experience given to her, one that will now enable her to take up issues of encouraging sports in the country. During the early days she says she use to run along the rail tracks on the sea shore in Kerala as there were no running tracks as there are today. She wants to see India compete effectively in sports at the Olympics as the head of the Indian Olympic Committee.

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The world's larges vaccine supplier Serum Institute of India syas it will not be able to meet its target production of 2 billion doses for 2021. It says vaccines will not be available for export from the Institute till the end of the year. The Indian government has initiated an effort to diversify its vaccine production by distributing it among many suppliers in India's large pharmaceutical industry so that constraints at any one supplier would not affect the overall supply for use inside India and the production that can be sent overseas.

Another setback was seen in the US as 100 million doses of J&J one dose vaccine at a Baltimore plant are being checked for contamination.

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The amazing story of 15 million tons of clothing coming to Ghana each week with 40% of this ending up in landfills and in water, polluting ecosystems, because of the poor quality of clothing, is shown in DW.com's Science section. Even a relatively developed country with awareness about ecology faces such a problem today. The good intentions of western consumers are not working, with more rags ending up in landfills causing environmental damage in Africa. A recent report showed this ending up as far away as the Atacama desert in Chile. When this stuff ends up on beaches and in the water it causes damage the way the indiscriminate use of plastics has already done.

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China's GDP growth accelerated slightly to 6.9 percent in the 1st quarter of 2017, after five consecutive quarters of GDP growth at 6.7-6.8%, according to government data. This reflected larger use of steel in the construction industry and more mortgages issued by the state controlled banking sector. Government officials say productivity is improving helping GDP growth, with closing of less efficient manufacturing plants. Industrial production increased 7.6% in March 2017, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The government is trying to control higher lending and reduce the backlog of bad loans at banks. Higher growth helps to reduce the bad loans at banks from the earlier period after 2008 financial crisis, improving financial stability.