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Ashraf Khalil describes the history of relations between the Muslim Brotherhood leadership and the leaders of secular parties with prescient remarks on how this creates problems in Egypt's transition to democratic government. The mistake made by the Muslim Brotherhood leaders, says Khalil, is to insist on a quick move to elections in November 2011, with the Brotherhood hoping to gain advantage in seats with its organization already in place compared to the secular parties which need more time to stage an organized effort. If this results in a lopsided result with the Muslim Brotherhood gaining more seats than its real strength, and the secular parties feeling left out in a revolution to set up democratic government that they led, Egypt's transition to democracy will remain flawed. This is now the stuation as the military which sets the rules and the Muslim Brotherhood have agreed on immediate elections. The Muslim Brotherhood's leaders have spent years being suppressed by the Mubarak regime, and lack the experience needed for such a difficult transition as Egypt faces, even with the best of intentions. Compressing the transition into a short time frame makes it even more difficult. Errors of judgement by Muslim Brotherhood leaders in not developing a consensus, and the uncertain role of the post-Mubarak military and police, compound the difficulties and risks....

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GM executive Mark Hogan had candid discussions with Akio Toyoda when Hogan began a second five year stint at NUMMI in 1997, and Akio was executive vice president at NUMMI in 1998. NUMMI was a joint venture between Toyota and GM. He now joins the Board of Directors at Toyota, the first outside board member, and only the second foreigner to do so after Jim Press. His role is to help counteract the insular culture at Toyota based in Nagoya, Japan, where most decisions end up coming to Nagoya. This was a problem that led to poor handling of the recall crisis in 2010, when Akio Toyoda brought Hogan in as an advisor to Toyota. He will listen to voices outside Japan and have direct access to Akio Toyoda. Hogan told the media: "I see my role as listening to global voices outside of Japan and then sharing insights that will help Toyota to respond more quickly to changes in society." His role also includes looking at Toyota's Brazilian operations, where Toyota has only 5.2% of the market and lags far behind Fiat, VW, and other competitors. Hogan headed GM's Brazilian operations in the 1990's and says he would kid Akio about Toyota's underperormance in Brazil. In 1994 Hogan left GM to become president of Magna International, a Canadian auto parts maker....

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Adam Bryant talks to 4 women executives about the problems women face in taking up higher management positions. One of the problems addressed directly and at length by the head of Pfizer Nutrition, Amy Schulman, is what she calls "the dutiful daughter," doing what is expected of you. This is also described as a serious problem for women executives in Asia by Riva Gold, where women not having 100% of the skills for a higher management job will step back, whereas men with only 50% of the skills step forward. Schulman says women have to be well prepared and have a good grasp of the subject matter, have acquired experience, and having done that they need to make their voice heard. Any anxieties about not getting it just right, or asking the question about whether "she belongs" need to be left behind. The leaders of companies need to create the environment in which biases and assumptions about women in the workplace do not hinder getting a mix of different voices in the corporation, which can only benefit from that diversity of people and styles. Another point she makes is that women have to spend their political capital, to stand up for colleagues and the team where appropriate, for principles that are significant, to be build credibility and win credit. ...

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The basic outlines of new health care legislation takes shape as Senators Dodd and Kenedy come up with a plan that scales down subsidies to low-income people to buy insurance. Attached to their revised outline is a budget office analysis thatprojects the plan costing $611 billion over 10 years and with expected changes from the Senate Finance Committee would cover 97 percent of all Americans. And earlier plan received much criticism because the Congressional Budget Office estimated its cost at $1 trillion over 10 years and left 37 million Americans uninsured. In addition there is the revised Medicaid expansions for aid to the poor that would add a couple of humndred billion dollars to the total tab. The administration's goal is to keep the cost down to $1 trillion over 10 years. The legislation as it stands includes the public option which is designed to control insurance costs. Mr. Obama said this week that "the public option would keep insurance companies honest." Employer mandated insurance is part of the Kennedy-Dodd legislation proposal. Employers with 25 or more workerswould have to provide coverage or pay the government an annual fee of $750 for each full-time worker and $375 for each part-time worker. The government pays the startup costs for the public insurance option as a loan to be repaid, and premiums would make the option self-sufficient....

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The WSJ cites polls in Italy Feb. 8, before the two week blackout prior to elections on Feb 24-25. The polls cited show the Centre left PD coalition of Luigi Bersani at 35% of the vote, the coalition of Silvio Berlusconi at 28%, the centrist Monti parties at around 10%, and the surging Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo in a range around 20%. The Monti centrist parties are facing difficulty because of the austerity measures taken by Monti's government in 2012. The Economist cites higher figures for the Monti centrist parties at 14% and puts Grillo's party at about 15%, showing the variations in poll figures. WSJ cites figures showing undecided vote at about 20% of voters, about 5 million voters being undecided. Voter turnout is also a factor, with less than the 80% voter turnout of 2008 expected in the current vote. The regional vote which determines the composition of the Senate shows Grillo likely to lead in Sicily, and the vote divided evenly between the PD party and Berlusconi's coalition in Lombardy. The best outcome for the eurozone is one in which the PD party wins, but not with a majority large enough for it not to need the support of the Monti centrist party, which is supported by Italy's business community and favored by the EU and Germany. ...

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To see the changes in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall one has to go beyond the larger cities like Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin. One has to go to the smaller towns, which are rapidly losing population as young people leave for jobs in the western part of Germany. The government says the gap is closing between the western and eastern parts of Germany. It says $60 billion was spent on infrastructure and to support businesses in 2006-2008. ANd economic activity per person is now up to 71% of western part of Germany from 67% in this last decade. But look at the smaller towns in the east and you see young people leaving, the average of the people going way up, the population dropping, and with this unneeded or abandoned apartment buildings have to be bulldozed. Unemployment is double that in the west. In some areas the number of women between 20and 30 has dropped 30%. About 1.7 million people or 12% of the population has left East Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. About 2000 schools have closed because of ascarcity of children. The demographics were such in the early years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that for a number of years East Germans stopped having children, says the Director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development....

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Comparative effectiveness research will be conducted to evaluate what is the best treatment for any ailment or disease or health problem under the $1.1 billion allocated for this in the Stimulus Plan. What are the alternative methods of treatment, what is the effectiveness of each treatment, what are the comparative costs and so on. Is it better to treat neck pain with surgery or acombination ofphysical therapy, exercize and medications? If there is ablockage of arteries in the lower leg and leg pain, how does drugs and watchful waiting compare with surgery? For chronic heart failure how does home monitoring of blood pressure and weight and exercise in addition to medications provide an alternative route as opposed to just medications. Dr Fisher of Dartmouth Medical School cites these as examples of questions that can be asked in comparitive effectiveness research. The money will be available to the Health and Human Services Department and will be used over several years. About 15 federal employees will form a council to coordinate the research and advise President Obama and Congress on how to use the money. In 2007 the US spent $2.2 trillion, or 16% of GDP, on health care, and the Congressional Budget Office says it will grow to 25% of GDP at the rate its growing by 2025 if left to its own devices. ...

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An hour by hour, day by day account of how Thain and Fuld, two men at the top of Merrill and Lehman, handled the crisis facing their firm. Also an account of how both men acted in the year and the months before the climactic week when Lehman filed for bankruptcy and Merrill Thain arranged for Bank of America to buyout Merrill. How Thain did it and how Fuld failed to save his firm, their background and personalities offer a striking contrast to different approaches to the crisis one facing reality and taking actions one after the other palatable or not, and the other too complacent and missing opportunites to save the firm even after the collapse of Bear Stearns left Lehman exposed to the next crisis of confidence. For example while Lehman failed to raise capital and get rid of undesirable or toxic assets, Thain sold $31.1 billion in toxic assets to a investment company Lone Star for 22 cents on the dollar, even financing 75% of the sale. It raised $8.8 billion in a deal that diluted Merrill's shareholders severely, and announced Merrill would sell its stake in Bloomberg for $4.4 billion. Lehman and Merrill were both heavily leveraged. So are Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs at this time in a financial market that is coming down hard on these highly leveraged investment banks....

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The third pick of songs by chancellor Merkel for a farewell ceremony at the Defense Ministry, after her first pick of a Christian hymn from the 18th century "Holy God we praise thy name," is one that was on East German pop charts in 1974. It is "You forgot the color film," by Nina Hagen. The song is an angry lament that admonishes Hagen's boyfriend Michael, for not bringing the color film during their visit on holiday to Hiddensee Island. As a result she sings "no one will believe how beautiful it was here." The lyrics were written by Edward Demmler and it was sung by Nina Hagen in conventional schlager style. Merkel spent much of these 16 years seen on television sticking to strict austerity measures for European Union countries. Not investing in childcare, education, retirees, healthcare, and the infrastructure for broadband, roads and bridges, leaving Germany and with it the European Union in stagnation. Only in her last years was she persuaded by her vice chancellor Scholz of the SDP of the need to invest heavily in Germany and the European Union to fight the coronavirus pandemic with aid to the people of Germany and European Union. As she leaves she ponders the lessons both of the GDR in the east and the Federal Republic in the west, both had their flaws and their potential and both could learn from what was missing in the other. An opportunity for reflection and understanding. It is to Scholz and the Greens that is left the task of making the Federal Republic what it could be, to reaching as much of its potential for the good of Germany and the good of the European Union. Even though the singer became a punk artist after moving to the west following the fall of the Berlin Wall, she was a conventional. schlager style singer before that. So that 16 years after trying out the free market version of capitalism Merkel who grew up as a young East German teenager in the former German Democratic Republic realizes that this period after the fall of the Berlin Wall was not all that it was made out to be. As the Guardian puts it this embrace of her East German identity is no characteristic of Merkel as during these 16 years she rarely brought up her growing up years in East Germany. ...

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WSJ's Monica Langley provides an exceptional report with a close look at the first woman CEO at a large corporation in the cusp of great change. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is remaking IBM by moving out of existing businesses and shifting to new growth areas such as analytics, cloud computing, new R&D advances. She sees her job as building the IBM of the future, and this includes divestments and phasing out of some businesses, acquisitions, and building some businesses such as the Watson Heath Care business from scratch. In some fast growing areas such as cloud computing this means competing with other established competitors, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Rometty's job is tough because of the size of IBM with 380,000 people in 170 countries, a culture that lacks the agilityof younger companies, and the older businesses which continue to slow IBM's progress, and where divestments reduce revenues. IBM sales are down for 12 consecutive quarters from the year earlier quarter. IBM's share price is down about 10% since Rometty became CEO in Jan. 2012, resulting in investor dissatisfaction with results. Rometty's goal is for 40% of IBM's revenues to come from corporate markets in analytics, cloud computing, cybersecurity, social networking, and mobile technologies, increasing it from 27% of about $93 billion in sales in 2014, and 15% of $105 billion in sales in 2013. Sold off and divested are low end servers, IBM's chip maker, and other hardware businesses. It is so extensive that whats left of the mainframe business is focussed on new technologies for mobile. Rometty setup a partnership with Apple for the corporate mobile market, and started Watson Health as a new venture in analytics for healthcare using its Watson Computer technology. Rometty grew up in Chicago, one of 3 daughters raised by a single mom, who says she was taught to be "fearless" by her mother. She graduated from Northwestern University with majors in electrical engineering and computer science, joining IBM as a systems engineer in 1981. She carries a backpack, school size notebooks, on her frequent trips to see customers in person and is constantly prodding employees at IBM to go faster. Rometty has a passion for scuba diving in her spare time and always carries the gear with her. Christine Lagarde at the IMF is one of the few women heading large organizations that have the same level of energy. Lagarde's passion is swimming having competed in sychronized swimming, and both Rometty and Lagarde describe the loss of a parent in different ways as a significant impact in their life. ...

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After delaying taking a loan from the IMF, a multilateral lender known for setting austerity conditions for its loans, Pakistan finally accepts a IMF loan of $6 billion over 3 years. In August 2018 Pakistan turned to Saudi Arabia for $3 billion loan and deferring oil payments of a similar amount, UAE for $3 billion, and China adding another $2.2 billion. A sharp drop in the country's currency reserves left Pakistan little choice. Other problems were a overvalued exchange rate that hurt exporters under the previous government and fiscal spending on needed infrastructure that could not be matched with changes in tax collection. Pakistan has some of the poorest tax collection in Asia, depriving the government of the funds needed to finance infrastructure.  The IMF loan is a smaller loan so that Pakistan would feel less compelled to comply with the difficult conditions often imposed by the IMF that has made it unpopular in developing countries, particularly in Latin America. This is the 21st IMF loan to Pakistan. Only Argentina has had to turn to the IMF for 21 loans. For example the IMF conditions to Pakistan require increasing the electricity and gas prices. Under the IMF plan Pakistan must cut its budget deficit before debt service to 0.6% of GDP next fiscal year starting in July 2019 from the deficit of 1.7% expected this year.  To do this tax breaks of 350 billion rupees or $2.5 billion next year have to be removed. The central bank autonomy was also promised and with this 2 former Pakistani IMF officials now head the central bank. Because widening the tax collection base and better tax collection are promises made in the past to IMF which have not happened, this report in the Economist magazine says implementation in this IMF plan will also be lax, more so as the IMF loan is small and supplemented with funds from other countries. A cartoon in one magazine critical of the IMF shows the IMF officials from Pakistan negotiating for the Pakistan central bank with the IMF head Christine Lagarde. Increasing the Pakistan tax base is essential for Pakistan's development to invest in infrastructure similar to what is happening in India. Releasing funds for infrastructure, roads and railways, hospitals and education, requires a larger tax base in all South Asian countries. Without this internal capital and showing results of spending -with successful infrastructure implementation with least or no corruption or overspending- countries risk falling behind.  ...

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A CNN story on Senate investigators looking into a meeting between Anthony Scaramucci, a member of Trump's transition team, and an executive of a Russian investment fund, is retracted. Three CNN employees resigned, including Harris its investigations editor, as the story could not be reliably verified. The errors in reporting are a result of intense pressure to come up with new breaking news stories, as CNN competes with other news providers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times. Paul Farhi cites other errors at CNN. CNN.com shows the work of the CNN investigative team of about 30 thirty journalists. It has come up with other stories on Russia and the U.S. election of 2016 which have been verified. Farhi points out that the stories have led to record ratings and profits for CNN. On of the journalists who resigned was Eric Lichtblau, a veteran reporter who worked earlier for the New York Times.

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Business as usual says the Detroit Free ress editorial will not work now. The Big Three are in stormy seas, roiling waters, approaching the Bermuda Triangle, and not much time left before March 31st. By that date if viable future is not established and things are the same the loans are automatically due to the government.

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Biden's address to Congress after three years of the pandemic marks a turning point for America like Lincoln in 1962 and FDR in 1933. As Biden surveys the damage done to the country not just by Covid loss of 1 million lives, he sees the closing of factories and abandoning of communities that depended on them all over America, abandoned by administrations of either party. Which has led to a loss of faith in the fairness of the system and of democracy itself.  "And two years ago democracy faced its greatest threat since the Civil War. And today though bruised, it remains unbowed and unbroken. . . That's always been my vision for this country, and I know its many of yours. To restore the soul of this nation. To rebuild the backbone of America, America's middle class." Biden sees a complete rebuilding of America to bring back manufacturing, restore American leadership in manufacturing. And invest three hundred billion dollars for the effort that will create jobs and new opportunities.  "For decades, the middle class has been hollowing out, and more than- and no one administration, but for a long time. Too many good paying manufacturing jobs moved overseas. Factories closed down. Once thriving cities and towns that many of you represent became shadows of what they used to be. And along the way, something else we lost. Pride, our sense of self-worth. I ran for president to fundamentally change things, to make sure our economy works for everyone so we can all feel that pride in what we do. To build an economy from the bottom up, not from the top down. Because when the middle class does well, the poor have a ladder up, and the wealthy still do very well. We all do well." "Folks I've been criticized for saying this, but I am not changing my view. We're going to make sure the supply chain for America begins in America. The supply chain begins in America." "And when we do these projects- and again I get criticized for it but I am making no excuses for it- we're going to buy American. We're going to buy American. Folks, and it's totally consistent with international trade rules. Buy American has been the rule since 1933. But for too long, past administrations, Democratic and Republican, have fought to get around it. Not anymore. . . Folks my economic plan is about investing in places and people that have been forgotten. So many of you listening to me tonight, I know you feel it. So many of you felt simply that you've been forgotten. Amid the economic upheaval of the last four decades, too many people have been left behind and treated like they're invisible."   ...

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Indian Finance Minister Sitharaman gives the following remarks in parliament on the White Paper presented to the 18th Lok Sabha in January 2024, describing the dire condition of the Indian economy by 2013 with mismanagement and "big ticket" corruption. India's Finance Minister Sitharaman describes the situation in three key areas by 2013 that left the economy of India in a fragile state, with projects stalled, development delayed, and capital investment not taking place. She gives as 3 main points of focus- the state of affairs at Defense Ministry, at the Environment Ministry, and for Energy supplies. At the outset she says PM Modi had suggested the need for such White Paper by 2015 so that future generations would know what had happened in India that failed the country at a time when China had already joined the community of developed nations. The issues go back to the coal scandal when coal auctions had to be cancelled by the Supreme Court for irregularities, the misuse of state owned banks leading to a large increase in non performing loans, and the mismanaged Commonwealth Games under government before 2014.  Sitharaman told parliament this had the effect of national security being compromised, Environment as a Ministry becoming a bottleneck, and the leadership failing the country. In the military there was a critical shortage of ammunition and equipment. She cites the Defense Minister at the time having the attitude that independent India has had a policy for many years not to develop the border areas, as an undeveloped border was better than a developed border. She also says Ministry stated that 92% of the Defense Budget was used up and major acquisitions have to wait for the military. Following this Sitharaman cited the scandals of that period and leakages of funds that weakend the country and failed its people. She compared capital expenditures today of 6.22 lakh crores in 2024 thre times the number in 2013 of 2.53 crores. HAL now makes Tejas jets and helicopters in Made in India production. At the Environment Ministry the delays that were 86 days reached a high of 316 days by 2013 for approval of development projects, with 355 projects pending, the nation brought to a standstill with the effects of the coal supplies to thermal power plants being wholly inadequate and Coal India in poor shape. The root of this was said Sitharaman- what everyone in Indian business knew, the term "genteel facts," as the cost of business going up. She cites the changes since then of aiming for Balance and Development- Transparency, Online Green Clearance, Standardized Environment Impact Studies, A new Department of Climate change, International Solar Alliance 2015, Mission Life 2022, Green Hydrogen, Namami Gange, Rooftop Solar. India set ambitious goals at the last Climate change Conference.    ...

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“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA." European perceptions of recent happenings in the Ukraine war and the war's progression from the beginnings over three years will matter in 2025 as Europe, as Germany, France and Britain take on the role of bringing a fair peace to Europe that closes the war and does the reconstituting of defense architecture of Europe under new institutions that needed to be taken up in the 1990's after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Republicans and DJT's perception of Europe as 27 states is likely to be false. Germany and France in the 21st century may just be stepping into a role that was prepared since the formation of the European community in the 1950's with Germany and France at the core of Europe. It may surprise many that Europe just steps into this role. And with it a reconstituting of the defense architecture of Europe that needed to be done after the fall of the Berlin Wall and not left to the vagaries of free market capitalism that have created the present situation. “It was not a spontaneous reaction to interventions by Zelenskyy, but obviously a manufactured escalation,” Merz of Germany has said recently of recent White House happenings.  “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” Germany's Merz says and means it even if it confounds the US, China and other nations. ...

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Annalena Baerbock, 44 years, of the Greens is Germany's nominee for president of UN General Assembly in 2025. She was nominated by chancellor Scholz. As a leader of the Greens and in the coalition government of chancellor Scholz she has tried to show that Germany is a modernizing nation and innovative more than is seen in its political class. As one of the youngest politicians she has presented Germany in a new way as a young face for Europe. DW.com shows the evolution of the Greens as a party since the 1980's. Baerbock joined the Greens at age 25, four years later in 2010 she was head of the Brandenburg state section of the party, becoming a board member of the European Green party. She is still only 44 years old. She studied public law and political science in Hamburg, and gained a Masters degree in international law at the London School of Economics, one of Germany's first leading politicians to study in Britain. She started studies for a Doctorate at the Free University of Berlin, which she left in 2013 as she was elected to the Bundestag. By 2021 Annalena Baerbock was with Robert Habeck co-leader of the party heading into the general election. At one point the Greens were polling 5 months before the 2021 election at 27% with Annalena Baerbock running for chancellor against Armin Laschet of CDU and ahead of the CDU by 3 points in Sonntag poll. The Greens came in at 15% of the vote in 2021 dropping slightly to 12% in 2025. This time the Greens will sit in the parliamentary opposition headed by Robert Habeck. ...

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Gerald Seib, executive editor of of the WSJ, attributes the divisions in America both on the left and the right to a deep skepticism among people about the intentions of the U.S. political and financial establishment to conduct the country's affairs in a way that benefits all people. Both the traditional Democratic and Republican establishments, the Bush-Reagan, Clinton-Obama politicians and the financial community were seen as self-serving and looking after their own interests. The right of center supply side economics and the the tolerance for immigration levels of 30% rise in the last decade were discredited. A much larger recovery program was seen as needed from the deeply bruising effects of the financial crisis of 2008, started by the reckless financial establishment behaviours, than either the Reagan supply siders or the Obama people had understood or planned. This opened the way for Mr. Trump to take up the cause of ordinary Americans with a message of ambitious infrastructure development, confronting China's use of trade adversely affecting American workers, and slowing down immigration. And within the Democratic party the emergence of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders with programs for a wealth tax that would finance Medicare for All and college education supported by the federal government. Both the traditional Republicans under Bush and Democrats under Clinton Obama were seen not upto the task, after the 2008 financial and economic crisis created deeper scars than were imagined possible. The lack of effective policies under Bush or Obama simply aggravating the situation further. The culture wars have split Americans down the middle with a breakdown of the traditional American family and social structures creating deep anxieties in America. Obama's comments unsettled people in the heartland when he said that economic decline in the Rust Belt had made people there to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them."   The trillions of dollars spent in wars in Asia and the Middle East were seen by Mr. Trump as an enormous waste when much needed investment was deprived of attention at home. Mr. Trump hammered this point home till today it is well accepted across America.  Even as political divisions persist they are now on how to tackle the redevelopment and growth of the U.S. The new focus of agreement has shifted with agreement across the country that infrastructure development in the U.S. and defending workers rights to jobs and opportunities is the top priority. That trade relations need to be reshaped keeping this priority ever present in negotiations. As a result all parties could agree on infrastructure and the recently concluded agreement for trade with Mexico and Canada and phase 1 of negotiated agreement with China. In overseas affairs the U.S. under Trump seeks cost sharing with a 2% of GDP defense spending by other nations so that money can be diverted to use at home. In this sense the debate has already shifted in the U.S. and the UK to how to address the problems of uneven development and growth across the two countries and better allocation of scarce resources to needs at home. Which is for the U.S. a good thing in the middle of all the perception of divisions.      ...

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Mr. Acton and Mr. Koum, co-founders of Whats App messaging service have left the company after disagreements with Mr. Zuckerberg of Facebook. They say they had no intention of seeing Whats App turning into a clearing house for ads. Initially following the acquisition there was an agreement that advertising would not be the focus for Whats App, and the Whats App founders were given a large degree of autonomy. This has changed as Facebook uses data it collects to target audiences for ads on its services.

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This report in WSJ points out that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu faces a real challenge in 2019 snap elections- with the economic difficulties in Israel, the tense situation in Gaza, and corruption probes he faces. According to OECD figures Israel has one of the highest cost of living in the developed world, and food, electricity prices are expected to increase further in 2019. A  number of challengers for a centre left or centre right combination of military and civilian leaders is emerging and shown here.

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Two Citigroup bankers Sossidis and Partridge-Hicks left Citigroup to start Gordian Knot Ltd a company specializing in a new kind of fund called structured investment vehicles or S.I.V. It has now run into trouble. An account of the history of SIV's and how they evolved to where they are now and becoming a threat to the safety of the banking system.

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The Adventures of Amir Hamza is a story much like the Odyssey but set in the Persian, Central Asia Islamic world. It was born as far back as the 9th century. It has a South Asian version since the epic is retold in different settings and has a oral tradition of being recited by dastangos who used to recite these myths and legends . Amir Hamza is supposedly the uncle of the prophet Mohammed. Its South Asian version is in the Hamzanama that was commisssioned with painted manuscripts by the Mughal emperor Akbar. It has 1400 illustrations and formed the basis of Mughal art which was a fusion of the artistic worlds of Hindu India and Islamic Persia and Central Asia. In those times the Persian speaking world extended from Tabriz to Hyderabad in south of India and the Hamza Adventures were told around campfires and in the outdoors. The Hamzanama paintings commissioned by Akbar were shown at the Sackler Gallery around the time of the Iraq invasion in the summer of 2002 and show a world long forgotten. The Saudi type of Wahhabi Islam and religious zealotry is a far cry from this more open world of art and legend and life in central, south and western Asia, of commerce, trade and ways of life intermingled and flow of people across a large region in Asia. What it may suggest is that the current wave of religious zealotry is a kind of phase that like a passing wind comes and then is dispersed, maybe its a reaction to western interventions, maybe a failed response of tradition with modernization, maybe something else, a clinging to old outmoded patterns in areas that are most left behind by change, with ethnic and other strife mixed in with it. No single or simple response to it makes sense and a lot of patience is needed. Conflict of civilizations talk and the like may simply be overdone and way oversimplified things....

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Hillary Clinton narrowly loses the Michigan primary to Bernie Sanders in March 2016, as the Sanders campaign focusses on Clinton's support for trade agreements that hurt American workers and lead to loss of manufacturing jobs. About three fifths of voters in the Michigan primary considered this a major issue. Many less educated younger workers see their job prospects diminish and wages drop with free trade that hurts American manufacturing jobs. Bill Clinton signed the NAFTA agreement with Mexico, and as a member of the Obama administration Clinton supported the Trans Pacific Trade Agreement, later opposing TPP when she left the cabinet. Sentiment against trade that hurts manufacturing jobs in the U.S. is strongest in midwestern states such as Michigan, Ohio and Illinois. This was also a major issue benefitting the Liberals under Justin Trudeau who won in Canada's industrial Ontario province which has suffered hollowing out and loss of manufacturing jobs under the Conservative Harper administration. In the U.S. the issue goes back to the Clinton Administration for two decades. New jobs created by Apple, Google, and other tech companies pale in comparison with the industrial jobs created in another era that benefitted working class families. This issue and high unemployment or under employment, lower wages for working class families, was a major issue in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. Widening wealth disparities, and lack of upward mobility, high tution and healthcare costs for ordinary families, dominated the campaign in the U.S....

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Lt. General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the new defense minister appointed by President Morsi in Egypt, has close ties with U.S. officials. His ties to the U.S. go back to the basic infantry training course he took at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1981. This marks a shift to a younger generation in the military from the aging military leaders of the Mubarak period, and was achieved by consensus so that the military could continue to maintain its privileges and the elected President Morsi could assume control of running the country. This was peceded by the visit of U.S. Defense Secretary Panetta to Cairo, in which he mediated between the different factions to ensure a peaceful and normal transition to democratically elected leaders. It also comes as the U.S. and European allies and Sunni nations in the Middle East are focussing their attention on Iran and the civil war in Syria. For the military in Egypt the situation in Syria could be one more reason to arrive at a rapprochement with the elected civilian government, and Secretary Panetta is likely to have pointed this out to Gen. Tantawi and leaders in the SCAF military body. It shows the considerable diplomatic and leadership skills of Secretary Panetta in helping to bring all sides together on a mutually agreed arrangement. The initiative was left to President Morsi because it was important that this be seen as a return to normal democratic processes by an elected president....