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Trade Agreement talks will begin in December between India and Sri Lanka as Sri Lanka looks for ways to bring back growth following a 9.2% contraction in the economy in 2022 and estimated 4.2% in 2023. Mr. Weerasinghe at the International Trade Office setup under the presidential secretariat will represent Sri Lanka. Engaging in trade with India and China and regional countries is part of the plan to restore growth. Sri Lanka's exports to India were about $980 million in 2021 and imports $4.74 billion. This time Weerasinghe says we must avoid taking rigid inflexible positions and strive for a win-win for both sides.

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Modi's personal campaigning helps the BJP party win 80% majority in his home state Gujarat's assembly elections.

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Rebecca Long-Bailey, a Labour MP describes labour's program to end in-work poverty in the UK over 5 years. About 5 million people face in-work poverty in the UK which has become worse during the pandemic with little help from the Tories.

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Clicking on the light bulb shaped icon at the bottom of Amazon's app takes one to a feed that shows short videos on products buyers can purchase. This type of short video format is becoming popular on Amazon and Google in 2022-2023.

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The failure of the SEC under Gary Gensler to protect ordinary Americans who are mistakenly trusting their savings to cryptocurrency firms is seen as a major flaw in his running of the agency by former SEC officials and other SEC experts. The gaps in SEC enforcement and this weakness is the subject of this report in the WSJ. The cryptocurrency firms are not registered with the SEC and do not follow SEC rules hurting ordinary Americans putting money there. Mr. Gensler was made head of the SEC in 2021, and the SEC has been looking at crypto firms since 2017 but failed to come up with a regulatory model in 5 years.

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48 storey Rittenhouse and 47 storey Arthaus are new condo development high rises in downtown Philadelphia. Highs in storefront occupancy, hotel occupancy, return to work pushed by Comcast and other companies are giving a new resurgence to the city center in Philadelphia. It shows that the city centers that have locals living in the area are doing better than city centers dependent mostly on commuters for activity. One advantage of Center City, Philadelphia is that there are 70,000 residents compared to mostly commuters in midtown Manhattan, Boston Financial District, Chicago Loop downtown areas. This means that even with remote work people are up and about in the city. 7000 workers for Comcast in office towers in Center City are also encouraged to come to the office.

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The struggle for the Donbas region is now centred around the town of Bakhmut with about 50-70 casualties a day and an effort by Russian infantry to advance to the once tree lined town of 70,000. The Ukraine war drags on into the cold winter of 2022.

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High levels of covid and RSV in the US are leading to health authorites saying wearing masks is needed to prevent it from spreading. Los Angles is likely to introduce a mask requirement for indoors by the end of December 2022. Carrying hand sanitizer and keeping wipes with you is a good idea because RSV spreads through touching infected surfaces. Vaccination for flu and covid is also a key prevention action. As most people are no longer wearing masks in the US the practice of wearing masks is becoming a good idea once again.

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Huge transfers of wealth and income were taking place in the US in the last 10 years leading to some of the glaring wealth gaps and unequal distribution of wealth and income in the US. This has threatened the social fabric of American society when combined with other factors such as unjustifiably high healthcare costs, and the shipping of American manufacturing overseas. This WSJ report looks at the transfer of wealth to the financial industry of at least $600 billion but much more than this since 2014 from interest rates of near zero. As over half of the population in the US concentrated at the lower end of the income and wealth spectrum does not invest in stock markets the policy at central banks designed by economists and the financial industry has engineered outcomes that have damaged the social fabric of American society. Distributed throughout the lower income groups, along with Made in America manufacturing, and other policies that takes working families and quality of living into account would have prevented the hugely unequal distribution of wealth and income in society. The pandemic marks a watershed period that has revealed this glaring weakness from long supply chains, to policies that were not good for working families, the impact on climate change, leading to the kinds of changes and investments in working families that are being made by the Biden administration today. ...

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Apple is introducing end to end encryption or Advanced Data Protection. It expects iPhone buyers to set up recovery contacts, recovery key, and to turn on this feature of Advanced Data Protection. Joanna Stern talks to Apple's head of Software Engineering  Craig Federighi in this video that shows how this works. Stern asks why this took so long.

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Closer economic cooperation between the Saudis and China expected after this weeks visit by president Xi to Riyadh. 20 initial agreements worth $29 billion will be signed.

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US housing prices are seeing a decline in 2022 as a result of the Fed's interest rate increases even though there is no extra supply of housing. Renters are staying away from high mortgage payments at the higher rates, and families with a 3% mortgage are staying put rather than risk making larger mortgage payments for a new home. Fed's Jerome Powell has this to say- "You had housing markets go up at very unsustainable levels and overheating. Now the housing market is going through the other side of that and hopefully coming out at abetter place." This is more like the drop in demand for housing in 1979 which revived in 1983 after the Fed eased up on increasing rates, says the WSJ.