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RICO prosecutions in Georgia for racketeering use a broader definition of the term. Mr. Trump's intent matters and Attorney General Barr's telling Trump that there was no substance to fraud claims.  WSJ says the state RICO law is broadly written giving the state prosecutors more latitude than federal prosecutors when pursuing alleged criminal enterprises.The Georgia RICO law on racketeering say defense lawyers is unconstitutionally vague and overbroad. Yet the state's highest court has upheld the law and cases have been filed and successfully prosecuted in Georgia. Most recently by prosecutor DA Fanni Willis against 35 school officials and teachers for a test cheating scandal. Of 12 charged in that case 11 were convicted, one acquitted.

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Pedro Sanchez is seen as pulling off a surprise in the recent Spanish snap election by increasing his Socialist workers party votes to 31.5% soon after losses in local elections. The Guardian looks at Pedro Sanchez and his career in leading the Socialist Workers Party since 2014. He is prime minister since 2018 and formed a coalition with Podemos which resulted in policies that gave Spaniards a welcome respite from inflation and the cost of living which is down to 1.9% in Spain. Spaniards were provided with monetary support and free public transportation during the pandemic years lessening the effects of that period and the cost of living crisis in Europe.

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The Spanish election produced a better than expected result for the Sanchez government. This report in CSIS shows that after a brief period Spain is returning to dominance of the Party Popular or the Socialist Party, the two governing parties in Spain, with smaller parties doing poorly. Both the PP and the Socialist Party are vying for support of a majority of 176 seats with the help of smaller parties. The VOX did not do as well as expected and a PP VOX party government looks less likely says this report. Even if a government with Partido Popular is formed it will continue most of Spain's foreign policy of supporting NATO and the EU. Mr. Sanchez formed a new government in 2020.

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In rural districts remote teachers are becoming a permanent part of classrooms because of a teacher shortage. WSJ looks at a remote classroom in Prescott Valley, a desert town in Arizona. Spanish teacher Jessica Paloma is in her home in North Carolina as she talks to students. Many are full time teachers who want to work flexible hours or retirees who want to work for a shorter time. School districts can spend over $1 million a year for virtual teacher contracts.

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Ten walking trips in places such as the Camino Francais on the way to Santiago de Compostela, the Welsh countryside, the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico, coast to coast in northern England, in the Dolomite Alps of northern Italy, are shown here by Neil King in the WSJ.

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Mr. Trump proposes a 10% tariff on all goods imported into the US at Columbia, South Carolina, says this report in WSJ. A universal tariff of this type is similar to Herbert Hoover's Smoot Hawley that brought on the Great Depression in the 1930's in outright beggar thy neighbor policies which don't work, says WSJ. This opinion describes the impact of such a tariff in failing to reverse the trade deficit which is $951 billion in 2022, but fails to point to the lack of effectiveness of tariffs alone in bringing back American manufacturing jobs. As president Biden has pointed out the Trump administration made much talk about returning American jobs but did not accomplish much for American manufacturing to lead the world in the way the Biden administration has done. To do this the Biden administration passed laws to fund a entire new electric car industry, renewable energy industry, and promoting other industries in advanced technologies, including aerospace, to bring back America's leadership in manufacturing of most of the twentieth century with a bold vision for the future. Mr. Trump lacks the experience on this issue and is simply playing the rhetoric to his base without any plan to deliver the goods to sections of the American public that have already suffered the most from decades of neglect of manufacturing by Republicans going back to Reagan and Bush, Democrats Clinton and Obama. ...

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Media networks express views of their billionaire owners at social media networks such as Elon Musk's X (Twitter) and Fox News in the way the issues facing the country are framed and by the moderators such as Bret Baier and Carlson leaving many major issues such as infrastructure, education, incomes and jobs unaddressed. Musk's X social media network formerly Twitter shows a taped interview of Mr. Trump by Tucker Carlson just when Republican candidates including Mike Pence and Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, were in a televised debate on Fox News network on August 23. Mr. Trump said of Fox News network that the network was not particularly friendly to me, and said he avoided the debate to not be harassed by the other candidates. The 12 million viewers on Fox News compares with impressions on the social media network which had 690,000 likes and 180,000 reposts, fragmenting what the Republican party base would see and offering no real delving into the real economic issues facing the country. ...

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The US  braces for an unprecedented election year in 2024 where the court proceedings take place in the time when the Republican primaries happen and America heads into the presidential vote for 2024. Of the four indictments, the one in Georgia remains different.

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Workers in remote work show no deep connection to their companies, says this report in WSJ.

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Nathaniel Tapin says about China's debt laden economy and struggling property developers that this has been seen before. What matters most is the confidence household borrowers have in the country to buy homes and spend versus putting more money into savings. And this confidence that that has been the strength of the economy for three decades is fading. About 12 million jobs in the internet platform economy were lost in 2020-2022. This absorbed a fourth of the Chinese graduating from colleges each year. The manufacturing sector is affected by declining demand overseas and cannot pick up for this. Much of this is a result of Xi's government efforts to tamp down debt of housing developers, to reduce housing speculation, to limit the power of internet companies, and develop a fairer economy, and these were policy decisions not easily reversed. A pervasive pessimism is leading to a disinclination to spend or buy a house. Surveys of Bank of China show inclination to save increased by 15 percentage points to 58% in second quarter 2023. In the past Chinese put money in homes as a way to deposit money in a savings account, homes were sold even before they were built. This cash was passed on to property developers and in turn the local governments benefited by selling the land to property developers. After property developers could not pay interest on debt and collapsed the households decided to pay down their mortgages and $28 billion went to pay down residential mortgage debt in first 6 months of 2023.  ...

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The next mission for ISRO is the one next year, a joint space flight with NASA to the International Space Station. This will take Indian astronauts into space for the first time. Following this there will be a followup to Chandrayan 3 called LUPEX with the Japanese Space Agency JAXA in 2024-2025 for lunar exploration of the dark side of the moon that does not face the sun. For this the lander will be from ISRO, the Rover and spacecraft from JAXA. Gangayan mission will put Indian astronauts in space on Indian spacecraft next. The sample return mission is next in the Chandrayan missions similar to Chang'e 5 for China in 2020 bringing a sample of lunar rocks back to the earth.

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Just 2 weeks before president Xi's arrival in New Delhi for a G-20 Summit, Xi meets prime minister Modi at the Johannesburg BRICS summit. Modi and Xi agree on an expeditious disengagement of forces at the Line of Actual Control after Modi tells Xi that maintaining peace and tranquility in the border areas and respecting the LAC is essential for a normal India China relationship.  

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Wide gaps in learning persist for the British population. This analysis of GCSE, General Certificate of Secondary Education results in The Guardian shows 28% of grades awarded to students in London were at Grade 7 or above, in the northeast of England this drops to 18%, with gaps widening in 2023. GCSE is the part of the National Curriculum taught to students ages 14 to 16 years in years 10 and 11. The Grading system gives more attention to A's with three Grade 9,8 and 7 for A's and only Grade 6 for B's, and in this way puts more emphasis on one extreme top section of students than the middle to upper, which may be a mistake.

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On the idea that America is losing faith when it is losing churchgoing people it should be said that during the Second Awakening in the 1850's America was struggling against the sin of slavery. The country and Evangelicals rallied around Lincoln who had an unconventional idea of Christian beliefs coming directly from reading the bible not churchgoing.   Lincoln was denied the Whig nomination for Congress in 1843 and faced Evangelical opposition in the 1846 Congressional election which he won against an evangelist Cartwright, because of his unconventional views on Christianity coming from reading the Bible. The Lincoln Association of Springfield reports that during the dark days of 1862 Miner tells Lincoln that Christians are praying for you as they have never prayed before, and Lincoln replies "If I were not sustained by the prayers of God's people I could not endure this constant pressure. I would give up hoping for success."   Americans are less church going today than at previous times in history about 40 million Americans have stopped going to church in the last 25 years. This is evident among Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Southern Baptists. White and Black congregations are affected in the same way, though less for Hispanics. Pew reports 63% of people in America identify as Christians, down from 78% in 2007.  ...

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The Wall Street Journal offers this exceptional video that looks at what each of the indictments of Mr. Trump mean and how they affect his campaign, and how the campaign strategy of playing to public opinion may or may not work. It is possible that all the four trials could take place during the campaign season and Mr. Trump would have to defend in court as well as conduct his election campaign at the same time, says this video. 

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For years the US shunned artisanal mining by small operators using children with no safety equipmentn for cobalt supplies. With China restricting the supply, the US AID agency has a $20 million program to integrate these small operators into the global supply chain. The US is coming to terms with the "inconvenient truth" that is there when it involves mining in the Congo for cobalt, a precious metal that is needed for renewable energy and lithium ion batteries in electric cars. Don't forget that 70% of the world's cobalt comes from the Congo and a third of this is dug up in small mines dug up in an in formal sector where children also work and there is no safety equipment. 

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The opposition in China and South Korea to Japan's release of slightly radioactive water into the sea stems from a distrust of Japanese data that supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency says the discharge does not affect public health. By next March 2% of the accumulated water will be released. In all 1.2 million tons are planned to be released over 30 years starting August 24, 2023. That water contains small quantities of radioactive tritium which Japan says is less than what Chinese nuclear plants release into the sea. TEPCO which manages the Fukushima plant decommissioning says it will post the data on release and level of radioactive material on its website with comparison to the levels seen as not affecting health that WHO has set.

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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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Did you know 7% of all carbon emissions today come from cement production. In the cement production process 90% of the carbon emissions come from using fossil fuels to heat up the limestone and clay to 2700 degrees to produce clinker. Cemex is workoing with Swiss company Synhelion to use solar energy to do this by 20230.  Heidelberg Materials is working to  add carbon capture to the process at its Brevik, Norway plant, then store it in the seabed near Bergen in liquefied CO2 form. This will absorb the carbon emissions to meet a goal of 8% of carbon emissions to be stored globally by 2030. 

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South Korean public opinion shows 80% of the public opposed to the release of slightly radioactive Fukushima water into the sea by Japan. Japanese public opinion is accepting this as unavoidable. This is weakening the position of South Korean president Yoon in coming elections. Yoon is a prosecutor who joined politics only a few years back and has seen his popularity drop by 7 percentage points to 35%. Yoon is known for his effort to bring South Korea and Japan closer together with the US in dealing with North Korea and China. Biden met with Kishida and Yoon at the White House only recently, and Yoon made a state visit to the US before India's Modi. Because Yoon is an outsider to politics he has been able to get South Koreans to accept the idea of settling past disputes with Japan tracing back to the colonial era and World War II, yet the Fukushima water release is opposed by the vast majority of South Koreans.

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Much of the economic debate by economists in the US takes place separated by walls from the reality of huge inequalities in the country such as half of retirees having zero savings, the cost of living surge, job insecurity, and two third of children in 4th grade no able to pass the ACT test for reading comprehension. Here economists at the US Fed are cited in a discussion about ultra low interest rates that hurt savers and in particular retirees who number 57 million. Ultra low interest rates lead to wasteful use of capital and misallocation of capital in the US, and were largely a result of the effort to correct for the mistakes of the financial industry causing the crisis of 2009. The US was the leading economy in th world and the standards of living in the US were higher during the post war period 1950-1990 that covered the Kennedy-LBJ, Reagan administrations when inflation was accepted at 4% and interest rates were for the most part around 5-8% on average. As Krugman points in a recent NYT column in August 2023 Fed research has been wrong in estimating the right inflation rate for the economy. The best rate for the economy requires knowledge of and careful judgement about the situation of different parts of the American population, of workers and families that are struggling with the cost of living, and half of retirees with no savings. ...