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Bipin Rawat says the best approach to security for India is one of dissuasive deterrance. For the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean region a multilateral presence with the U.S. Australia, and Japan is seen as the most effective way to maintain open seas.

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Mr. Trump's failure to set out the agenda for a second term is the subject of this editorial in the WSJ. The upsurge in the coronavirus in the south and west is also affecting the prospects of a V shaped recovery.

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The return of sound money is good for the US economy and US savers among the common people. The end of tech excess valuations and profits is also good for the US economy. Joe Davis of Vanguard talks about ways in which the policies of the Biden administration and the US federal Reserve's Jay Powell are benefiting the US and the American people including millions of savers after the excesses of Tech and the financial sector since 2009. The return to a more stable long run economy is now facing the US, says Davis.

The rest of us other than them, other than the Tech sector and others who benefitted from negative rates, we will benefit from this change. By Vanguard calculations ten year return forecasts will increase by 2% percentage points annualized for equities and for fixed income since last year. This is a good thing for America.

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A small rise in interest rates of 1% can add about $7 billion to revenues for Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase banks, according to estimates cited in WSJ. This is because short term loans which predominate today can reprice quickly for banks and rates for depositors at banks do not change much. This is a more reliable source of revenue and one on which the banks have depended for much of the past 100 years. The use of complex instruments and shady instruments such as the mortgages devised in the 2009 mortgage financial crisis did little for banks and instead caused a major financial crisis in the shape of economic depression with income and job losses for families and workers in the US and in the rest of the world. Complexity meant less transparency in this context, more chances of messing up finances, and bad news for America and the world.

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The idea here of promoting biodioversity by turning backyard lawns into places of biodiversity. Bringing back natural backyards where biodiversity takes root. A movement to encourage private owners of backyard plots and lawns to corporate campuses to create homegrown national parks. It envisions turning over 40 million acres of lawns in the US to imperiled native plants and trees. The idea is that of a land ethic- we abuse land because we think of it as something we own, not something we share with the rest of humanity just for a while. This way we treat it with the love and respect the land deserves. One way to do this is to design native landscapes as formal gardens so that they do not look so biodiversity plots not look messy. Intentionaly designed elements delineate larger messy wilderness in such biodiversity inclined garden spaces. Do this one small patch of land at a time.

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The origins of Covid in a lab leak is now gaining credibility says this report in the NYT. Prior to this politics played a large part in shaping views on the origins of Covid. Each country presented its own version of events. Research in China was financed by the US according to the reports, was China unaware of the risks involved, what would have been the correct role of the US. Could China have provided the immediate cooperation to fight Covid in a concerted way. These questions remain unanswered and each country trying to present the situation in a public relations way overlooks the fact that both US, China and the rest of the world incurred significant once in a century loss of life with a pandemic. Solutions are meant to protect all the world's people, excluding none, including all, so that all countries benefit from this and benefit from the introspection of understanding where errors were made.

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Better management of the economy has sustained Russian economic growth in past crises such as in 2008 when oil prices collapsed. Russian central bank chief Nabiullina has helped steer the economy holding US dollar reserves to just 11% the rest of $600 billion reserves in renminbi, euros and gold. Yet the war in Ukraine has introduced limits. With labor shortages and the technological isolation the war in Ukraine is setting new limits on economic growth, says the WSJ. Going forward the limit is about 0.9% economic growth a year. Before 2008 the Russian economy growth was at 7% growth a year, it dropped to 3.5% after the invasion of Crimea in 2014. With China facing deflationary trends, little recovery in growth, this shows that geopolitical tensions are changing the prospects of important economies. With globalization dimming the prospects of Singapore and UK have suffered. The US is investing in growth, and Germany is following the US model.

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The US imported $1 billion in enriched uranium from Russia in 2022, about one third of the enriched uranium used in the US. Most of the rest is imported from Europe. Senator Joe Manchin has a bill that would provide subsidies to develop America's nuclear enrichment industry. It was privatized in the nineteen nineties. Under a 1993 agreement seen as a de-escalatory gesture the US turned to depend on Russia for its enriched uranium. Russia had developed technologies for cheaper production. The de-escalatory gesture called Megatons to Megawatts turned over the industry to Russia in a way that the US transferred its manufacturing capacity in chip production to China. Plants in Wyoming and Ohio remain empty as a result, and the Biden administration is being urged to move forward with investments in US enriched uranium production for its non-fossil fuel energy production.

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Professors Arum of UC Davis and Steven of Stanford show in a color graph visual how selective race based admissions called affirmative action apply only to a small number of schools, only 6% of college students in the US go to schools that select 25% or less of their applicant pool. The rest including all state universities and many colleges in the UC system in California are not affected. Another development is that these selective schools are not that much better than the others that cost a fraction of the money. A smart decision today is to study in a state system at a fraction of the inflated cost of all schools that is an aberration in itself, and make the discipline and effort to get the most out of that education, and make an effort to learn outside of the classroom through spirit of inquiry.

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Israeli prime minister Netanyahu meets President Obama in Washington D.C. the day after Obama called for Israel to return to pre-1967 borders in a negotiated settlement. Netanyahu rejected Israel's return to pre-1967 borders, calling these borders "indefensible" and also "unrealistic" because of the large Israeli settlements inside the West Bank. He told Obama "this does not take into account certain demographic changes that have taken place on the ground over 44 years." Netanyahu is looking for clarification from Obama on a critical issue for Israel- keeping forces in the Jordan Valley, its eastern boundary with the proposed Palestine state, because of Israel's small territory which is narrow in the middle. Obama had called for a "full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces" from the West Bank.

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Delta, Southwest rank at the top of airlines in America for the least canceled flights and mishandled baggage. The lowest ranking from the Transportation Department was for American and United.