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A UN Report shows that opium poopy cultivation is growing in Afghanistan and an enormous crop close to last year's record harvest is expected this year. 90% of the world's opium is grown in Afghanistan but it gets so little media attention compared to daily reports of injuries in the war such as on CBC for Canadian soldiers in the war zones and in other reports in American media. Of this about 52% of Afghan opium is grown in Helmand province which is largely controlled by the Taliban who finance their war with tax revenues from the opium farmers. The UN report also shows that most of the increased cultivation is happening in the south and west of the country worst hit by the insurgents. Areas where there is poor security or where there is not much help with seeds irrigation and other help for farming, are the ones that are mostly engaged in increased opium cultivation and areas where there is security and help with seeds and irrigation are the ones that don't cultivate opium. Looking at this state of affairs one would think that Western Europe and the USA which the UN report says must brace themselves for huge influx of this stuff, would rather than families and schools dealing with the problem at home in very difficult circumstances with high teenage use, would find it easier to finance seeds, fertilizer and irrigation and building of infrastructure in the country. However this shift to other farming would be possible if there is security and this requires a new policy in South Asia which reverses decades of policy that aggravated tensions in the region by not having a clear unambiguous direction of supporting peaceful economic development in the region which includes Pakistan and India and Afghanistan and Iran. Policy changed somewhat but a definite steering moving decisively in that direction needed to take place as first British policy in the pre1947 era and then American and British policy in the post 1947 period supported increased tensions in the area. Afghanistan thus ceased to exist as a country devoted to its own economic development but a place where the western powers engaged the soviet union, and then a place where Pakistan's military's policy of strategic depth against India led to the creation and support of the Taliban. By reversing this policy decisively and with direction as clear as daylight the western countries would instead of fighting these insurgents have Indians and Pakistanis work together alongside western country economic experts and agricultural experts to bring the infrastructure, electricity, irrigation, seeds, and fertilizer to these farmers across the whole of Afghanistan. Security would be mainly the responsibility of Indians, Pakistanis and Afghanis, and local leaders and people from the villages as westerners are easy targets of hostile action in a country used to fighting foreigners especially Europeans. That this may ventually happen but is slow to happen today can be attributed to how slow the process of sensible change is, how most people accept the way things are, which itself is a result of earlier policies which are themselves a result of still earlier policies. Thus pre-1947 British policy for Hindu and Muslim areas, is followed by America's Dulles policies turning India and Pakistan into aspects of the Cold War, followed by Reagan policy turning Afghanistan into aspects of the Cold War in reaction to Brezhnev's soviet policy in Kabuli affairs as a tit for tat, and this followed by the Bush policy reacting to the emergence of Saudi discontented volunteers in the Reagan supported Afghan war after Bin Laden's 9/11 attack in New York City. In the background a series of Indian leaders and Pakistan military leaders gave up any sensible steering in the direction of economic development by falling into the Cold war between 2 western factions or into a religious Hindu-Muslim strife war legacy from the earlier periods. What it means is that its hard in the human world we live in to to do anything but react, or be caught in a trap of thinking just the way we have been taught to think, or have accepted things as they are without thinking, with its resultant misery and ignorance and for south asia entrenched poverty. Its only with some grace and the right conditions and after a great deal of suffering which is true for Afghanistan war ruined countryside, Pakistan's poor economic conditions, and India's huge number of poor and economically depressed majority of the population and true also for westerners facing failed policy and failure of vision as economic conditions deteriorate at home....

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It is hard to imagine that one is even writing about this, as shocking as it is- the 4 or 5 minutes between a decision to launch nuclear weapons and the end of life on this planet earth as we know it. Here Sam Nunn, a U.S. senator who was part of the negotiations for arms control and who is the leading American in this field talks about the unimaginable danger. He says the strategy from the Cold War where Russia and the U.S. put their nuclear forces in a position to be launched within minutes, 4 to 5 minutes, is outdated and needs to be changed. Hillary Clinton described the issue in the television debate. Yet this was not discussed because of the nature of the 2016 presidential election with lack of serious discussion.  And both Nunn and Clinton emphasize that once the missiles are in the air they cannot be ordered to go back. Accidental error, judgemental error, informational error in which one side thinks the other has launched a missile, a firing by mistake, are possible. In this situation Nunn says Trump is temperamentally unfit, and Clinton is fit to take on the responsibility. Yet the question this raises is as Nunn signals- is anyone but God fit to make this decision to launch nuclear weapons. Nunn says it is outdated and wrong to have only a few minutes, as such a decision cannot be made in a few hours or days, much less in 5 minutes. Nunn brings up a discussion he had in Moscow when he brought this up with Russians and president Putin. Russian president Putin told Nunn that he was fully aware of this. Putin's response was- "Senator Nunn, at some point it becomes automatic."  Nunn does not clarify what this means, or what Putin means to say. For people on the planet it is not enough to have Reagan, Gorbachev, Clinton, as Nunn mentions being responsible people for a nuclear decision. The current state of affairs is simply shocking and the lack of attention to this is also shocking. Equally dangerous is that 20 countries have weapons usable nuclear material, and sophisticated hacking of command and control processes is another danger.       ...

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What is the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and what does it mean for the US in the current protests? The Muslim Brotherhood was started in Egypt in 1928, in the colonial days, by an imam and schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. The intent was to act as a grassroots organization to promote the reform of Egyptian society through a greater adherence to Islam, by preaching and social services. Scott Shane talks with Reidel of the Brookings Institution and Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Quatar Center about the Brotherhood and Israel. Reidel was the Egypt desk officer at the CIA when Mubarak came to power in 1981, and is an experienced observer of the Muslim world at Brookings. Reidel says if we want democracy in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is going to be a big part of this, and we should be engaging and talking to them now. Hamid responds to a question about terrorism by pointing out that the Al Quaeda hates the Brotherhood and the Brotherhood hates Al Quaeda, that for counterterrorism engaging with the Brotherhood would be helpful to the US. On Israel, Hamid says years of accomodation to the real world has brought a knowledge that the Brotherhood has to live in the real world and the geopolitics of the Middle East. Carrie Wickham, a political scientist at Emory University, is author of "Mobilizing Islam," a 2002 book on Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood. Carrie says it was analogous to evangelical Christians and their goal of sharing the word of God, but Banna also referred to Jihad as a struggle against colonialism and Zionism. Some leaders such as Sayyid Qutb, who was imprisoned by the Egyptian government and executed in 1966, advocated violent jihad, but after the 1970's the Brotherhoods formally renounced violence as a means of achieving power. In 1984 the Brotherhood reached another point in its evolution when it competed in parliamentary elections. And estimates of its actual support begin at about 20% of the electorate. Another development is the relative youthfulness of the April 6th and other movements in Egypt, where two thirds of the people are under 30 years age. The Muslim Brotherhood leaders are much older and hesitated to join the popular movement in its early stages. On the question of the Brotherhood's future evolution and winning a large role in a future government, Carrie says that a system of checks and balances has to be established to ensure that the Brotherhood operates as a democratic party committed to the democratic process. The Wall Street Journal in an editorial on February 4, 2011, emphasizes the need for institutional checks and balances. Carrie says rewriting the constitution and electoral process to ensure that this happens and no one party can take abslute control is crucial. ...

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China Investment Corporation, China's sovereign wealth fund is expected to issue upto 28 billion in bonds to help recapitalize China's state owned banks. These banks face the prospect of increasing bad loans as a result of the hectic pace of bank lending in 2009-2010. Loans guaranteed by muncipal governments are estimated at 7.7 trillion yuan, or 17% of overall lending, about 50% of these loans face uncertainty in the event of falling housing prices, and 25% are bad loans. The recent IPO of Agricultural Bank of China raised funds, but the environment for raising money in this way does not look good, as information is spreading that these banks face large loan losses. The bonds from CIC would be picked up by state controlled companies. Yet these state controlled companies are engaging in the real estate speculation, as reported by David Barboza of the New York Times and Peter Coy of Business Week. In a down cycle things could get much worse as a state sovereign fund is selling bonds, state controlled companies would buy these bonds, and state controlled banks are expected to be recapitalized making a complete circle....

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The minimum non-negotiable "breakout window" for 2015 nuclear negotiations of the EU, the U.S. and other nations with Iran, is a period of 12 months. The term "breakout window" refers to the period in which Iran decides to breakout of a signed nuclear agreement and rushes to develop nuclear weapons. It should take at least 12 months for Iran to be able to develop a weapon so that there is time to develop an effective response to the threat to world peace.

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This WSJ editorial raises serious concerns about the outlines of the nuclear deal with Iran- the AP Protocol does not provide for any time, any place inspections of nuclear facilities, could Iran evade inspections by developing a new facility such as it did with the Fordo complex underground after 2006. After all it reminds readers that Iran signed nuclear protocol agreements in 2003, but failed to observe them, and set them aside altogether after 2006. And Iran is not like reaching an agreement with Costa Rica or Netherlands, says WSJ, it could look good on paper, but with monitoring weak and the Iranian intentions not clear, a lot can go wrong. One of the principal concerns says the WSJ, is the nuclear weapons technologies spreading in the Middle East to other countries as Iran gets a weapon, leading to a disastrous war a decade from now. It says this is why president Obama's response to criticism that its this or war is not enough. A lot of the details says WSJ, have still to be worked out....

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China's NDRC targets for pollution control are to cut sulfur dioxide emissions by 2% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 5% in 2014. The NDRC says it will reduce energy consumption per unit of GDP in China by 3.9% and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 4% in 2014.

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The NYT editorial in April 2013 supporting a cautious response in Syria as it reports the use of chemical weapons by the Assad government.

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David Barboza of NYT describes the hidden subsidies China gives to Foxconn for its plant in Zhengzhou, in a poor region of China. The factory there makes about half a million iPhones a day. These subsidies include incentive packages, infrastructure building, local government help of about $1.5 billion. As a result Apple has high margins. For a 32 gigabyte iPhone 7 that costs $400 to make, the retail price is about $649 in the U.S.  The hidden subsidies is why Apple can maintain dominance as profits are reinvested. And the result is that with only 12% of the smartphone market Apple can take in 90% of the profit, according to Strategy Analytics. Barboza looks back at Apple before co-founder Steve Jobs left in 1985 as focussing on manufacturing at plants in Colorado and California. By 2001 with iPod sales soaring the move to China under Cook, who previously worked for Compaq, was underway. With the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, the move to China for manufacturing accelerated. The reason: only China offered the kind of subsidies, the speed of approval and building of infrastructure facilities, the local government support, the hundreds of thousands of workers, and the best tooling engineers, to produce in huge volumes with speed, and maintaining quality levels. Earlier plants including one in Colorado Springs that this Lyrarc editor was invited to visit just prior to Jobs rejoining Apple had many quality problems, so much so that Apple had a large part of the manufactured personal computers set aside for rework. The quality levels were dismal, defects were unbelievably high. This is the Apple manufacturing process and plant that Jobs must have seen when he returned, and which he hired Cook to fix. Not only were costs higher in the U.S., (subsidies in China came later) when Jobs looked at the manufacturing quality and the inability to get the quality he needed from American workers and engineers at that time in the 1990's, only then did he turn to China- and the more he saw what was possible to accomplish there he sensed an unusual opportunity to finally put the ghosts of memories from competition with Microsoft at rest, and to surpass everything that had been done in Silicon Valley. The result one of the most ingenious and large manufacturing networks in the world, huge profits for an American company, except for one thing- it would not do much for American workers. ...

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Friedman describes how the farmers who left the rural areas in search of work and settled outside Aleppo and other towns after a severe drought were radicalized by the lack of help from the Assad regime. About 800,000 people migrated from their farms in the countryside to cities in Syria, and settled outside the cities without help and basic services from the Assad regime. When the call for democracy came they were the first to join the protests.

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Tom Friedman of the NYT talks with retiring Israeli defense minister, and former prime minister, Ehud Barak, in Tel Aviv. Barak makes the case for seizing opportunities as they arise in a difficult situation, which might be lost if Israel adopts a permanently pessimstic state of mind about the prospect of peace with Arab countries. Barak and Friedman suggest the approach of the Israeli government of prime minister Netanyahu has risks of highlighting the dangers to Israel at its borders, to the point where Israel could lose the ability to make wise and sensible judgements as these opportunities arise, and the Middle East itself changes. Because of the political struggles and conflict in the Middle East this may obscure the newly emerging Middle East, which needs economic advancement to support the aspirations of the overwhelmingly young populations in these countries. This has the potential for a new dynamic that could see the Middle East move beyond Israel to seizing the opportunities presented by economic and technical progress. Similiar to the other nations of Asia, including the Muslim nations of Turkey and Indonesia. ...

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The dangers to Turkey from external short term borrowings to finance its current account deficit. Turkey's current account deficit reached 10% of GDP in 2011. It is 8% in 2012 and is considered high by experts. The problem is short term borrowing from overseas which is sent through its banks for increasing levels of personal and housing loans. Were this flow to dry up because of a sharp downturn in the Eurozone economies it would damage Turkey's financial position. Bank short term external debt has doubled in 2011-2012 to $70.3 billion, or 9% of GDP, according to Capital Economics. The U.S. Fed and the ECB have eased global liquidity concerns, but risks are high as long as Turkey relies on short term borrowing. An escalation of the conflict with Syria also poses risks with fears of scaring away investors.

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U.S. Defense Secretary Panetta says the U.S. will hand over provinces to Afghan government forces and complete the transition to a training role in 2013. This is part of the withdrawal of NATO forces and comes after France's president Sarkozy proposed reducing France's committment in Afghanistan. Panetta said he would tell NATO partners- "We all went in together and we will go out together." This also fits in with the changing picture in the region, poor relations with Pakistan, sentiment in the U.S. and Europe focussed on the economic crisis, and direct talks with the Taliban for a post-NATO settlement of the conflict.