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Washington Post Analysis and details of Census Bureau trade information in September 2025 -showing the country by country and product tariffs by US and which tariffs are waiting for final trade agreements. China, India and Switzerland, Mexico face high tariffs. UK, EU, South Korea, Japan have made trade agreements with the US, China, India Swiss are still to finalize trade agreements leading to the uncertainty. The North American Trade Agreement is being renegotiated leading to uncertainty for Mexico and Canada which have both benefitted from trade with the US to detriment of US manufacturers.  China has huge surpluses that keep growing over time to $1 trillion ($992 billion) a year in 2024.  DJT Tariffs are designed as a bold step to remake the international trading system so that it does not work to the benefit of other nations gaming the system over decades as US administrations Clinton, Bush, Obama, paid no attention. Trade Deficits and the National Debt are a problem not just the National Debt. On the National Debt Republicans have pushed through cuts in parts of the budget where costs had escalated tremendously. ...

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Indian PM Modi at G-7 Talks in Kananaskis Alberta, Canada June 15-17, 2025. Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand will meet Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar at the talks with Canadian prime minister Carney. Who is Anita Anand? It is said about her grandfather V.A. Sundaram that he passionately fought the British Empire but had a strong interest in English culture and literature. He sent his children to British Universities while helping build with his mentor Mandan Mohan Malaviya, the Banaras Hindu University, and working with Gandhiji for Indian Independence during the Round Table Conference of 1931 in London. Sundaram's son immigrated to Nova Scotia, and his granddaughter is now the Foreign Minister of Canada after having held posts of head of the Treasury Board, Internal Trade, Defense, Procurement during Covid, and is Member of Parliament from Oakville, Ontario. There are 2 million Canadians of Indian descent in Canada, and some like Geeta Anand have connections to the India's and Gandhiji's struggle for Independence against the British Empire. India today with Britain leads the British Commonwealth of Nations.  ...

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Indian oil minister Hardeep Singh Puri says India has diversified its sourcing of oil supplies to avoid dependence on the Straits of Hormuz. It has weeks of reserves. Saudis have 5 million barrel a day pipeline to bypass Hormuz waterway and UAE 1.5 million barrel a day pipeline to bypass Hormuz waterway, so that 6.5 million barrels a day could be added to meet Asian oil demand, in addition to convoys escorted by US warships  in Hormuz waterway to meet demand from China, India and Japan. This would mean China is itself dependent on American seapower to maintain it's oil supplies, a third of which come through the Hormuz waterway and keep important sealanes of navigation open. China, India, Japan, and other World are critical for the world economy manufacturing sector and comprise 3.5  billion or about half of the world's population. In addition Latin America and Africa are dependent on oil supplies and prices.  New pipelines, renewable energy, will become more important in the years ahead, and figure more in planner's minds after this Hormuz episode. ...

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A country smaller than the US state of Connecticut will host the first World Cup Soccer games in the Arab world from November 21 to December 18. England will play US , the day after Thanksgiving.

Group A  Netherlands with Qatar, Ecuador, Senegal

Group B   England with Iran, US, Wales or Scotland/Ukraine

Group C.  Argentina with Saudi, Mexico, Poland

Group D   France with Peru, Australia/United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Tunisia

Group E  Spain, Germany, Japan with Costa Rica or New Zealand

Group F  Belgium with Canada, Morocco, Croatia

Group G.  Brazil with Serbia, Switzerland, Cameroon

Group H   Portugal with Ghana, Uruguay, South Korea 

Defending champion France has it better in its group. 

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Chloe Kelly, English soccer player Interview in The Times- Kelly scored the winning penalty against Spain in 2025. She also scored the decider against Germany in Euro Cup 2022. She whopped off her shirt to celebrate in a Nike Sports bra, says The Times about the event in 2022.  

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After a general debacle the Congress party gains ony 44 seats in India's parliament, the lowest since independence in 1947. The BJP party under Modi gains 282 seats and sweeps the north, centre and west of the country, and parts of the south and east. Younger voters in overwhelming numbers voted against inept governance and corruption under the Congress led government of Manmohan Singh and party leader Sonia Gandhi.

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Appeals Court says US president DJT National Guard deployment in Washington DC is legal. The court said that "the district of Columbia is a federal district created by Congress," that the president as head of the DC National Guard has the right to it's deployment in DC. It was done by DJT to reduce the crime and lawlessness behavior in the Nation's capital. DC is a much safer place today. 

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Jimmy Kimmel on ABC Disney- makes a joke that is not a joke. "This is something beyond the pale Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC" posted on Monday afternoon by the president on Truth Social. The president calls it a "call to violence." Just days later an attempt at assassination of the president at the White House Correspondents dinner at the Washington Hilton in DC.

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Meditation HRV and the parasympathetic nervous system. Meditation helps calm the system and build resilience. Health conditions, fatigue, worry, illness, exercise, travel, and also cold, political disruption, deadlines, perception of loss of some sort, annoyances, disruptions,  accidents, other events cause the heart rate variations and the two systems to react in different ways, the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic system calms us down and meditation is one of the effective ways to get this process to work smoothly.

 

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Professor Yann LeCunn of the Sorbonne University, France, is a pioneer in the field of AI.  He is now focusing his work on Advanced Artificial Intelligence AAI, saying that the large language models which are being developed in a surge of data center spending of $400 billion in 2025 alone are not the way AI will develop in the future. AAI is based on visual learning similar to how an infant learns, and not by consuming large amounts of data as under large language models.

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Supreme Court of US decision Nov 10, 2025 not to review gay marriage ruling called the Obergefell ruling. 

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Who is the oldest Nobel prize winner in history? John Goodenough, a Nobel at age 97 years, who invented the lithium ion battery at a Lab in Oxford in 1974. John Goodenough is a good example for Joe and Jill Biden's idea of an America that puts more emphasis on the public good, and of the Christian (and Buddhist) virtues that life can only be well lived without greed and delusion.  He was an Episcopalian- what the Church of England is called in America.  He received no royalties for the lithium ion battery invention, only 6 decades of salary at Oxford, MIT and UT Austin. Goodenough persevered through a difficult childhood, studied mathematics at Yale because of his dyslexia, and physics at the University of Chicago under scientists Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi, getting a doctorate in 1952. 

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The US Senate races in 2024. See if you can connect the names to the state in US where the contest is being decided November 5. Bob Casey Jon Tester Tammy Baldwin Angela Alsobrooks Jacky Rosen Ruben Gallego Colin Allred Which is the big upset race? Who are the Independent Senators who retired? Answers- Casey- Pennsylvania, Tester- Montana, Baldwin- Wisconsin, Alsobrooks-Maryland,  Rosen- Nevada, Gallego- Arizona Colin Allred- Texas The big upset US Senate race in Texas, Colin Allred to unseat Republican Ted Cruz. Independent Senators retiring Joe Manchin- West Virginia, Krysten Sinema-Arizona. With their support Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act, other major legislation to invest in the renewal of America's infrastructure, American manufacturing,  CHIPS and Science.   ...

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Conflict of interest and the role money has played in creating a collusion of diverse interests which were supposed to be kept separate, if the system was to work properly. The way these collusions of interest worked to create crises that range from the financial crisis to the BP Gulf Oil Spill.

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Days after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore's outer harbor, a key part of the industrial and jobs infrastructure in Maryland, this WSJ report shows 8 other bridges in the same dilapidated condition and at risk of collapsing. The eight bridges are- The Verrazano Narrows Bridge  NY-NJ,             The George Washington Bridge NY-NJ, The Golden Gate Bridge and the Oakland- San Francisco Bridge in California, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state,  the Lewis and Clark Bridge and the St. Johns Bridge in Oregon. Note that all but one are older than Scott Key built in 1977, and all have "fracture critical" elements according to their WSJ report, meaning that even the failure of one steel component in tension could cause a collapse. Jennifer Homendy, chair of NTSB safety authority doing the investigation into Scott Key says that there are 17,000 bridges in the US that are fracture critical, showing how much of US infrastructure is aging and in need of investment that is today being sucked up in mad sprees of venture capital investing in startups, and in misallocation of capital, that contribute little to the ease of living, to jobs and essential infrastructure for the American people.                  ...

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Moody's Ratings company downgraded banks in the U.S. and Europe on June 21, 2012. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup were downgraded two notches. Morgan Stanley managed to stave off a three notch downgrade. Credit Suisse was downgraded three notches. Bank of America was down one notch, and Wells Fargo which has only a small trading operation was not reviewed. This is the first time since 2007 that Moody's has conducted a sweeping downgrade of banks. About 100 banks were reviewed by Moody's. Banks being downgraded have large trading operations or investment banking business that is subject to higher risks. Greg Bauer, a managing director of global banking at Moody's said in his statement: All of the banks affected by today's actions have significant exposure to the volatility and risk of outsized losses inherent to capital-markets activities." For Moody's the main issue was that the capital bases of banks are maintained, considering that government support is less likely than before, according to Mr. Wassenberg, Moody's managing director for European banks. The impact on banks will be fewer opportunities for trading revenues for some banks, and will raise borrowing costs for banks. Moody's also cut the ratings of large European banks with significant trading operations. This includes Deutsche Bank, Barclays, HSBC, RBS, BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, Societe Generale, UBS, and Royal Bank of Canada....

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What was once seen as a debacle on CNBC and Wall Street in 2015- the decision of CEO McMillon at Walmart to raise wages from 7.25 an hour to $9.00 an hour with share price drop of 10% turns into a big win by 2025. Mcmillon did not hestitate to show slides at NYSE for Earnings per share drop of 12% instead of 6%, $2.7 billion investment. Pay is now about $18 an hour in 2025 and this is only one metric as the benefits include free college and technical education, parental leave, more job training, job promotions, cleaner better stores. The remarkable thing is that it spread to other stores Target and TJ Maxx, and over time to a broad swath of American companies. Cost of living is an issue today for Americans in 2025, imagine what things would be like if leaders from the University of Arkansas with deep connections to the Bentonville region had not taken a decision independent of ideas on Wall Street and NYSE, CNBC. As McMillon retires the new CEO is also from the University of Arkansas with deep connections to the Bentonville area- John Furner, the current CEO of America region. ...

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On his first day Jan 18, 2023, Josh Shapiro, Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, signed an executive order that eliminated the requirement of a college degree for 92% of jobs in the state government, 62,000 jobs. Utah and Maryland made similar changes last year with Republican Governors. The Editorial Board of NYT says- for far too long, too many Americans see  society and economy as unfairly skewed to serve the needs of well connected elites, and people with a college education, looking down and excluding the rest.

 

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 A look up close at US Foreign Trade Representative Katherine Tai, focused on a trade policy that is fair to American workers and workers families. She says "I'm a bicultural kid." One of two children of immigrants in the Biden cabinet, the other Kamala Harris.  With Jake Sullivan and Biden doing everything so that American trade and supply chains are based on pillars of resilience, fairness, respect for American workers and families, to support climate change action and build infrastructure. She has been with the US Office of the Trade Representative and in trade related positions in US Congress since 2007. Tai says what helps is bringing a very disciplined approach, as she deals with the PRC to stay on the message, on what the problem is. As she goes about her work the spirit from her dad carries her everyday- "to go out and win it" for America, for the common people of America. ...

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US trade deficit of $46 billion with India and DJT call to buy oil and gas from the US, to shift away from purchases of $50 billion of oil from Russia, of 2 million barrels a day. India only imported $1 billion of oil from Russia in 2020 and this is a call from the US to India to stop financing Russia's increasing air attacks on Ukraine in August 2025. For India this oil came at $70 a barrel when prices were around $90-$100 a barrel in 2022-2024. In 2025 oil prices are at $60 a barrel, and even if prices increase to $70 a barrel India can make the shift. US and Germany, the EU, Britain which seek negotiated end to the war in Ukraine will continue to pressure India in 2025. Russia could shift some of the oil to other places but the huge demand from a country India's size will not then be seen as a factor in prolonging the war. India needs to think ahead for the next 20 years and its goal of modernization by 2047 like China has done in 2000-2020. And not get into a nationalistic mode that may not be in the best interests of the Indian people seeing that this may serve the interests of all nations including Russia to phase out this European war. ...

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No man steps into the same river twice, says Jack Shafer in Politico. Mr. Trump is not the same person, and Twitter under Musk is not the same site. Much has changed since 2016. Many of the debates of 2016 are a thing of the past, as the nation has learned from that period and is moving ahead in a new direction under the Biden economic plan- for an economy that works for working people and families. This is critical for the task of building an America that reduces the huge disparities in America that have built up after decades of outshoring factories and jobs. The task that Mr. Biden has taken up with federal investment with business in key industries, cost of living actions, building a modern infrastructure for the US, and efforts to raise income and wages of workers and their families.