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Entergy is one of the largest energy companies. Its CEO for nine years, Wayne Leonard, talks to Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal. Its the No.2 generator of nuclear power in the USA, and uses coal for only 7% of its energy. He has made his name in nuclear energy, and here he talks about the government's cap and trade program and nuclear energy. He points to today's technology as far superior to the technology that was used in the Failed Three Mile plant, that put back nuclear energy plants in the USA for decades. He believes that price signals are needed for CO2, and the cap and trade program helps to do this, so he supports the cap and trade program. He admits that self interest colors perception of Entergy, compared to coal using utility producers like Duke Energy and American Electric Power. With coal only 7% in its portfolio of plants, and big in nuclear energy, it stands to gains from a cap and trade program, whereby Congress will set a ceiling on emissions, then allows businesses to sell any of its extra allowances that stand for the right to make emissions. And in doing so creating the largest commodity market, in carbon backed securiites. He and the government agree on the point that the allowances should be auctioned off, rather than given away as the companies with many coal plants believe. And the billions in new revenue from these allowances would be returned to the public. He understands that the view of companies like Duke and AEP, that use coal and would have to increase rates, and face the anger of ratepayers as they pay more for the allowances. He also thinks the bill should be written with a fine pen, so that if Congress mandates 20% of energy come from renewables. That it should specify replacing coal not natural gas as what this replaces, to get rid of the most polluting sources. He points to the real need for looking at things globally, as doing things locally, even to show responsible leadership in the world community, can lead to no progress in the global picture. The reason is that China is going ahead with the rapid construction of conventional coal plants. It has surpassed USA coal capacity, and is on track to double it sometime in the next decade. If the USA closed down every single coal plant, and all the time new coal plants are going up in China and India, then we would have ruined our economy, and it was'nt making much difference globally. And he says, if we just say lets lead and people will follow us, "its silly", because China isn't going to follow us, especially when they have $2 trillion invested in their coal plants, and they still aren't feeding feeding all their people. So how to deal with this? Develop the new technology for carbon capture for existing conventional coal plants, and help the Chinese with retrofit technology to curb emissions in a realistic manner. At this time most current funding is devoted to technology for second generation systems, that are still 10-20 years away....

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With so much coverage of other aspects of China,  to really understand China and Xi Jinping one has to understand the rural urban situation in China. Xi's long experience as a teenager in the cultural revolution of Mao was in rural areas, the 8 years he spent there till the age of 22, as this report by James Areddy with help of Yijun, Cheng and Qi aptly shows. It traces the shift and mass migration to cities starting with Deng's modernization drive in 1979. This shift of labor to city and town factories as the U.S. and Europe shifted factories and production to China is the story of our times. How it has both helped and hurt China and how it has become the dominant issue of our times, and a lesson for India in the middle of its own modernization and shift of labor to cities. It has helped China modernize with the shift during 1979 to 2016 and run into a road block with president Trump leading a movement in the U.S. of people most hurt by the outsourcing of factories and production to China. It was not meant to be this way. Yet the shift also led to ripping up the fabric of communities and towns with loss of factories across America over three decades. Because China is a large country the impact was huge decade after decade, leading to a backlash against lost jobs in the U.S. and in Europe.  Xi Jinping has romantic view of rural China as he spent 7 years in Shanxi province rural areas during the cultural revolution under Mao. During this period he toiled as part of farm labor alongside villagers which allowed him to get to know villagers and farmers in the countryside well, and formed his view of the world around him. As it is described in a description of the man in Chinese sources- "He arrived at the village as a slightly lost teenager and left as a 22 year old man determined to do something for the people."  China's system separated migrants from city dwellers not  giving same rights to better education, to schools and housing, and official documents separating the two, city dwellers and migrant populations from rural areas. As a result as China modernized and population shifted -shown here in excellent graphic charts over four decades- in 1979 from about 80% in rural areas and 20% in urban the shift goes to 50-50 by 2001. Today it is 40-60 with 60% in rural areas but a population of 40% suffering from severe inequalities and  low incomes. So that GDP per capita of $10,000 for China is deceiving. The real incomes in average disposable income is about $4300 in urban and $1700 in rural area, according to National Bureau of Statistics. High school education is hard enough to get in rural areas, medical care is very basic and the $1700 would hardly get a room in low income housing in a large town in China, says premier Li Keqiang. Keqiang did his masters thesis on urbanization and has studied this shift from his college days. Just as in Gandhi's India, Mao's China is the story of the villages, with 128,000 villages for 600 million people in Mr. Xi Jinping's anti-poverty drive. Hong Kong other issues have to be understood in the context of these concerns of China's leadership today- the sense that strong central leadership alone can keep the country together and bring a decent life to the people in the villages and in the countryside outside the cities.  Modernization of cities still set in the context of China's vast rural population and essential to its full uplift and progress. Xi has allocated $80 billion each year to bring roads, schools, medical facilities, and other amenities including electricity and modern heating. The idea now is to shift people back to the villages, find opportunities for jobs and livelihoods in farming, tourism with guesthouse facilities, and other occupations in the villages. The villages are being turned into attractive places to live one by one in this party drive and providing new enthusiasm and support for the party's efforts. India can learn from this experience in China. The western nations of the U.S. and Europe can no longer and will no longer undertake the wholesale shift of factories with loss of jobs to China or India to offer the prospect of bringing these countries to the kind of urbanization and overall prosperity of small nations like Japan and South Korea, which are a tiny fraction of the population of China and India+ Pakistan + Bangladesh. As a result China is changing strategy now with a return to some aspects of the informal economy in Chengdu with street peddlers and tiny retail, and return of migrants back to better built and improved villages in the countryside. A better life than in cities is possible this view says for people from these rural areas, if the rural areas are given modern facilities and construction and resources are allocated, job creation locally tackled. The villages can offer better air quality, better quality of life where villagers who earlier migrated to cities with ownership of land, when they are modernized with better roads and have better facilities for education, housing and healthcare, better amenities. The new approach is to strike a good balance for urbanization, by modernizing and investing in villages and small towns, so that cities can cope and overall life can be better than with mass migration and wholesale urbanization. It is also a balance that works well for the U.S. and Europe which can redirect manufacturing to their home regions as part of a better distributed and balanced supply chain than the one that was unwittingly built over the last three decades.    ...

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Japan has accomplished a remarkable transformation of its workforce and its economy even as the working age population is declining. For years Japan was seen as a stagnant economy with a rapidly aging population. In recent years Japan has shown how a change in policy can work. Since 2012 working age population declined by 4.7 million, yet the number of people working increased by 4.4 million. The proportion of the population in the workforce rose sharply since 2012. To do this Japan turned to three underutilized parts of its workforce and population- the elderly, women and new immigrants. Japan has pursued an active policy of reviving the economy by bringing women into the workforce and breaking taboos on new immigrants. In 2004 Japan raised retirement age from 60 to 65, and then made it mandatory for companies to raise or abolish the retirement age, or introduce a system for re-employing workers who retire. This has changed Japan a lot with Japanese men working well into their 60's and 70's. In the west coast city of Kanagawa which now has a bullet train to Tokyo, out migration was a big problem that added to a declining workforce. The head of Ohara, a family owned company that makes desserts tried a novel method of advertising to seniors in apartment blocks and starting attracting seniors to fill worker shortages. It found that seniors came to work on time, performed even tedious tasks, and brought a great deal of experience. Since then the regional government has started programs to get more retirees and women into the workforce. The special programs teach small companies to adapt to the needs of retiree workers who can work in shorter shifts of few hours and do less physical jobs. Women need predictable hours to pickup children from school and shorter work weeks, for which the regional government program helps companies adapt by sending in specialists to guide the companies. As a result female participation in the workforce, for very long a big handicap is no longer so. Female participation has jumped to 63%, higher even than that in the OECD where the average is 62 years.  Japanese women had a M curve that meant they worked most in their 20's. less in the 30's with children, and more in the 50's. First the government tried to correct this with extended parental leave, increased childcare, and rewarding companies with good work-life balance. Then in 2009 the effort accelerated with employers required to offer 6 hour days if a worker asked for this. Under prime minister Abe's "womenomics" effort child care was significantly expanded- by 2015 Tokyo went from 28 to 38 spots open for every 100 two year olds. Alongside these efforts the Abe government tried to get companies to rethink their assumptions about quantity of work and overtime as productive effort. One could work shorter hours and be productive, and the old notions were seen as resulting in lower productivity. As fathers with parental leave took on more responsibility the changes transformed the attitudes for women at work. Most remarkable is the quiet change in immigration policy. The government allowed foreign construction workers to address shortages for work on the 2020 Olympics. It introduced a 3-5 year visas program for nursing care workers. Two new categories of visas will add 340,000 additional blue collar workers over next 5 years. The total foreign born workers in Japan doubled from 2012 to 2017 to 1.3 million. ...

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Brinkmauer and Pfister of the German magazine Der Spiegel interview German Chancellor Angela Merkel in September 2017. The interview covers a range of topics from whether Merkel is addicted to power, why she chose to run for a fourth term, revolving door for CDU politicians as lobbyists for the automobile industry, the AfD right wing party, the refugee crisis and the CDU's historic policy of controlled immigration, and whether democracy is losing strength.  In characteristic Merkel fashion the chancellor takes up the idea of her addiction to power by saying she is careful not to let this happen to her by reading critical articles in the press and having her staff bring critical reports. Her discussion with her constituents in her electoral district are also frank and open, more so in 2017. About the idea that Helmut Kohl's fourth term as chancellor being not good for Germany and for the CDU, Merkel responds that she has given it considerable thought. She found that she still has the intellectual curiosity to learn new things, understands that she has much to learn about how the country and the world is changing. This has been decisive in her decision to run.  Merkel believes that someone who has worked in politics should be able to work in private industry following historic practice in Germany. On the government links with the automobile industry Merkel says her approach has been to look at what was best for an industry employing 800,000 people in Germany, yet deplores the diesel emissions cheating at VW. Has democracy lost momentum after the U.S. elections and the refugee crisis? Merkel says democracy is still strong, and that she will do everything to strengthen democracy in Germany and other parts of the world.  Merkel's view is that it is important that there be counterweights in democratic systems. In this way democracy is strong in America, and also in Poland and Hungary. The chancellor cites high voter turnout of 82% in 1998, 79% in 2002, 78% in 2009. Since then she says in 2009 it dropped to 71% and 2013  72%, yet  expects that with the issues in this election people will come out to vote in larger numbers.  For many years Merkel is seen as co-opting the issues of the left parties and the SPD, being careful to move to the centre. Der Spiegel puts this idea forward to the chancellor by asking her if she is the best SPD chancellor Germany ever had.  In her matter of fact style Merkel responds that voters do not think of it this way, simply expect her to her job as best as she can possibly do it.       ...

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Romania, one of the poorest nations in the EU, has per capita GDP half the EU average. Years of large spending before the financial crisis hit in 2008 have led to high debt levels and turning to the IMF for assistance. The IMF and the EU arranged a loan of $26 billion in 2009 with conditions for spending cuts. GDP declined by 7% in 2009. In 2011 GDP increased by 2.5% and in 2012 about 1.5-2% growth is expected. The spending cuts included cutting 200,000 government jobs since 2009, with another 100,000 jobs to be cut in 2012. Wage cuts of 25% were made. Other actions include raising the retirement age, removing special pensions for the military and police, raising the value added tax and cuttting subsidies including heating help. The result is that polls now show the centre right government of Emil Bloc has support from only 20% of people polled compared to 50% for the main opposition party. Emil Bloc resigned after weeks of protest on February 7, 2012.

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Problems that may be unfixable for the Afghan national army, and for which no increase in foreign trainers could make a difference. About 3% of the army recruits are from the Pushtun south, the main part of the country, where the Taliban are strongest. Officers from the northern areas have to use translators in the Pushtun south, a bad sign. And there is a shortage of officer talent. Gereral Caldwell who is working on training the army, says he was appalled at the emphasis on quantity not quality- the Afghan army has reached 134,000 in numbers. The ratio of instructors to recruits ranges from 1 to 80 to 1 to 466. It will cost $11 billion to maintain compared to an estimated $1 million per American soldier each year. Even if training problems are fixed, having 3% of recruits from the major Pushtun part of the country where the fighting is being done, simply makes the overall problem unfixable. See the group - Defense Department biannual report on Afghanistan, for related insight.

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Ukraine president Poroshenko tells a news conference in Kiev in September 2014 - "the doors of the E.U. are open to us; I am absolutely convinced of this. Events in Kiev and Brussels gave us a firm hope, a belief, that we will soon get the prospect of E.U. membership." Poroshenko plans to repeal a 2010 law barring Ukraine from membership in any military or political alliance, so that it can apply to join NATO. Clearly Mr. Putin's remark to EU president Barroso that Russia could reach Kiev in 2 weeks has stiffened resolve all over Eastern Europe from Lithuania to Poland, and changed perception in Germany and France about Mr. Putin. The German response from Merkel was to have "a consistent presence" in the Baltic Republics, so that the consequences of threats in Eastern Europe would be made clear to Mr. Putin. Poroshenko says he is in constant communication with Putin about settlement of the situation in eastern Ukraine, showing the costs recognized by all sides to prolonging the conflict....

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Walmart opens its first store in Amritsar, India, as part of a long term expansion in India. It is a 50,000 square foot Best Price store, a rarity in India. Walmart and its Indian partner Bharti Enterprises plan to open 15 stores in India in the next 3 years. Mike Duke former head of Walmart's international operation is now the new CEO. He has recruited local managers who understand and grasp how to market in India. Walmart India CEO, Raj Jain, has worked for 20 years with Unilever and Whirlpool in India. Unilever India, has a strong local presence in India for decades. Big wholesalers can be a poltically sensitive issue in India, where the retail industry serving 1.1 billion people is mostly an estimated 10 million mom and pop stores, who fear being overrun by these large wholesalers. Walmart operates as a wholesale store selling to local merchants, a cash and carry business selling 10,000 products to licensed store owners, schools, hospitals, hotels and other institutions. Even now under Indian rules governing foreign retailers, this Walmart venture cannot sell directly to consumers....

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Uncertainty about inflation in China, is it a longer term situation or is it temporary na d will moderate, and is it mainly for food or will it spread to other items besides food. And how long can the government subsidize the cost of fuel and let the power and oil producers suffer losses by restricitng passthrough of increased costs for Petrochina and Sinopec. If inflation continues to be a problem at about 8% per year then it would affect consumption and possibly tightening measures by the central bank that would slow down growth, and bring some moderation to the demand side of the equation in oil prices which some estimates put as high as $200 citing increased Chinese and other demand.

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Declan Walsh describes the role of the military in Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan which has marginalized political parties and democratic process. The shift in Pakistan towards a democratic state shows the limits of the military's role in politics. Throughout Asia and Latin America, beyond just the Arab world, S. Korea, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, the movement is towards democratic processes of government. As political parties mature a more centrist position was adopted in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Islamist parties in Turkey, a similar trend is likely in the rest of the Muslim world as political parties are able to mature and deliver in economic terms and improving living conditions. The Saudis and UAE may be able to deliver in economic terms because of oil prices and supplies, each country and the people in the region has to determine how it will tackle its economic problems and move forward or fall behind in a rapidly developing global economy. Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey and India are no exception....

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Night trains are making a comeback in Europe. Nostalgic ideas of travel from way back are when trains were the main forms of transportation. In 2017 European transport emissions were 28% above 1990 levels. The European Green Deal sees cutting these emissions as a priority for meeting climate change. Rail is critical for achieving this. For EU CO2 emissions road transport is largest contributor (73%), aviation (13%) and maritime (11%).Austria's OBB rail system is launching night sleeper trains from Vienna to Brussels and Vienna to Amsterdam.  Competition will increase in rail. Italy's Trenitalia  has applied to EU Agency for Railways (ERA) to operate in France. French SNCF and Trenitalia will enter Spain in June 2020. Critical are capital investments in rail per person for each country. Austria and Switzerland lead, and Germany is 140 euros per person target as part of the 86 billion euro plan in capital investments  for rail over the next ten years. Technical standardization is an important goal- as a stop in Aachen for Austrian railways night train from Vienna to Brussels for 30 minutes because of changing a locomotive and the train driver having to be Flemish. Freight movement by rail is another goal as it is stuck at 17% for years.  The Green Deal in transport in Europe is likely to have an impact around the world as rail makes a comeback for sustainable tourism. ...

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This article by General James Jones is the second from the highest ranks of the Obama administration, saying the entire Middle East policy of U.S. president Obama was flawed and could lead to dangerous consequences. Gen. Jones, former National Security Advisor to Obama 2009-2010, says the situation today is worse than in 1991 when the U.S. launched Operation Provide Comfort to protect Kurdish refugees in Northern Iraq from Saddam Hussein, with an engagement of about 5 years and 25,000 Allied troops. Jones says the crisis in Iraq and Syria is of an order several times worse than 1991 and at any time since the 2003 invasion, as it involves the setup of a terrorist ISIS state in the heart of the Middle East. What went wrong? Jones says all the warnings from other Middle East nations about Maliki's corrupt policy and sectarianism used to stay in power turned to be true. Even Maliki's own advisors and colleagues say in a separate report by Matt Bradley that Maliki battled not for the Iraqi state but only to preserve his own power. Jones calls the U.S. president's decision not to act in Syria when the "red line" of use of chemical weapons was crossed, the failure to maintain a limited military training presence in Iraq after 2011, and not insisting that Mr. Maliki arm the Kurds, as having gravely aggravated the problem in 2014. Jones calls for arming the Kurds directly with sufficient weaponry for defending their region and providing immediate expanded aid to the Abadi government, appointment of a special envoy to ensure direct and immediate communications with Baghdad and with Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite leaders. He calls also for close air support of Iraqi and Kurdish operations, and an aggressive diplomatic effort to unify the Middle Eastern nations to remove ISIS from the region. Jones says this is the right thing to do in the name of all the Iraqi people yearning for peace, for the U.S. service personnel who made sacrifices in Iraq for 23 years, and for U.S. national security....

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Marina Force of the WSJ gives this excellent report on Carles Puidgdemont, head of the Catalan party that is holding a referendum for independence from Spain in October 2017. The referendum is to be held on Oct. 1, 2017, and will be held in a tense region divided by pro and anti independence supporters, with the central government of Spain declaring the referendum illegal, and police obstructing voters. This has pushed Spain into a major crisis, as Puigdemont says he will declare independence after the vote, and the possibility that many voters may not have voted at all in this tense atmosphere. Here Marina describes the recent history of Spain that dates back to the period under General Franco's dictatorship when state rights in the Basque region, in Catalan region and in the northern region in Galicia, as well as other regions, were suppressed. Today there is regional autonomy and the languages in the regions such as Catalan are used in the autonomous regions. Prime minister Rajoy is from the Galicia region. His family suffered under Franco's dictatorship as he points out in his book- Mariano Rajoy, En confianza, Mi vida y mi proyecto de cambio para Espana. As a result Catalan leader Arturo Mas and other Spanish leaders including Rajoy from Galicia worked hard to establish autonomy for all the regions in Spain, including use of the local language in Valencia, Catalonia and the Basque region, a variation of Spanish. As in Scotland for most of the period after the end of the Franco dictatorship in the nineties, this focus on regional autonomy was seen as a big step forward. Puigdemont is journalist who was editor in chief of a Catalan newspaper in the 1980's. In 2006 he was elected to the Catalan parliament. In 2013 he was elected mayor of Girona, a city just north of Barcelona. It was in this period that the movement for Catalan independence moved forward setting the stage for the 2014 referendum with 81% voting for independence. In 2016 pro-independence parties won a majority in the Catalan parliament. This set the stage for a confrontation with the central government in Madrid that is now taking place. ...

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Dugan and Spector of the WSJ take readers through efforts to push self driving technology to its limits at electric car maker Tesla. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is pushing the technology and plans to get a self driving car go from Los Angeles to New York by the end of 2017. Problems faced by Tesla include a car crash involving a driver who took his hands off the wheel of a Tesla automobile, leading to a crash with an eighteen wheeler truck. This led to an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Board and a decision by Tesla to make driver's hands on the steering wheel required for autopilot to operate. Earlier in 2015 Tesla engineers confirmed that the Tesla cars were not ready for autonomous driving because of near crashes when the reliance was placed entirely on the technology. Ten engineers and two managers resigned from Tesla according to this report by WSJ, with problems relating to deadlines and marketing decisions. Sterling Anderson, the head of the Autopilot program at Tesla resigned to start his own company with the head of the autonomous driving unit at Google, saying he was going to do it the right way, citing concerns that Musk was going ahead with the technology without making it failure proof. The tricky thing about auto pilot driving is the behavioural factors involved, where drivers may take their hands off the steering wheel and not be prepared to act as a backup should the technology fail or something go wrong. Another aspect of this is the tendency of drivers not to pay attention to the road and rely completely on the auto pilot to do everything, more than its capabilities today. Toyota and other auto companies are including some elements of collision free driving, and reliable aspects of the new technology into cars. For Tesla the driverless technology is part of its marketing appeal, and CEO Musk has moved faster in this respect than his own engineering team, according to this WSJ report. ...

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Mario Draghi faces his first test as head of the European Central Bank as Italian bond yields approach 8%. Draghi has limited purchases of bonds of troubled EU countries to 5-10 billion euros each week. This has been sufficient to keep Italian bond yields from going out of control, but high enough to keep pressure on governments in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece to make necessary changes. France, Germany and other countries in the EU are working on new rules for making strict budget discipline legally binding, with enforcement sanctions by a EU budgetary authority. Germany is pushing for the new rules. France's Sarkozy with a legacy of Gaullist reluctance to surrender sovereignty in such matters had resisted such calls in the past, but is moving in the direction of convergence of fiscal policies as the only way to preserve the euro currency and the EU idea alive. Draghi is taking a flexible stance on inflation and lowering rates compared to his predecessor, Trichet. He sees signs of slowing manufacturing activity and credit tightening in Europe as signs that inflation will come down from above 3% to something closer to the 3% target set by the ECB. Economists expect him to lower interest rates for the eurozone to 1% from 1.25%, when the ECB meets in a week. The manufacturing purchasing manager's index went down to 46.4 in November, below the breakeven point of 50, which signals a contraction. Output and orders were down across all of Europe, including Germany. Economists say Draghi has left open the possibility of larger bond purchases if the new rules are made legally binding on eurozone members....

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Meet Pvt Hunter 80 years, and Pvt. Patrick 70 years of Canada's Rangers, an army reserve unit that acts as the eyes and ears of Canada's regular army for the vast region in the north, and conducts night rescue missions. Alistair Macdonald provides an exceptional account of an indigenous army reserve unit that sees age as no barrier as it brings together men past 70 years with younger men in their thirties and fifties, and patrols the vast Arctic region as well as northern Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.

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Prof. Leverett of Penn State University says the student protests at the time of the Shiite holy day day of Ashura, after the death of Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, do not represent the majority. He says it is unikely that there will be much change in the Iranian government and President Obama should work with the existing Iranian government. He goes on to say that vastly larger number of Iranians went to the streets on December 30, in demonstrations organized to support the current Islamic Republic government, even saying that these demonstrations could have numbered nearly 1 million people. As the Iranian student protests have generated much media interest and were covered widely, this article presents an entirely different picture of the situation. The question remains to what extent does student protests reflect wider sentiment throughout the country, and if Leverett is right why did the party represented by Ahmadinejad need to win the presidential election by practices that were questioned by the opposition and others. Or is there an urban-rural divide in Iranian politics where most of the urban and literate classes have turned against the government and support student protest and seek change, whereas the rural areas support the current government. ...

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New Sony CEO, Kazuo Hirai, plans to cut 10,000 jobs, about 6% of its total employees, over the next 2 fiscal years ending March 2014. Sony's television business has faced 8 years of losses, and the entire electronics business has faced 4 consecutive years of losses. The price competition and the high price of the yen has hurt Sony's sales and margins. This has affected the entire Japanese electronics industry, which has suffered consecutive years of losses, including Toshiba and Panasonic. Hirai is changing Sony's strategy in the television business. Instead of targeting a goal of 40 million in sales for television sets, he is cutting this in half to 20 million and reducing the size of its television sales operations. Sony's plan appears to be to focus on its strengths in new technologies and maufacturing, including the new 4 K technology, which would have to be adapted to mass market from its current specialized application. By doing this Sony would not have to compete on price in the manner it does today with Samsung and other Asian brands which have closed the gap in conventional technologies. Hirai's employee cuts follow the 16,000 job cuts made by Howard Stringer in 2008, during the global financial crisis. During March 2011 Sony had 168,200 employees....

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The PM of India is interviewed by Smitha Prakash of ANI before the April 2024 federal elections.  PM Modi describes his effort to bring transparency and remove the use of "black money" in elections and politics. He sees this use of "black money" as a constant danger to India's democratic process and to the development of the country. Electoral bonds was one idea he tried to do this, says Modi. About Enforcement Directorate on illicit activities PM Modi says it was the opposition Congress party that made the laws to prevent corruption of the democratic process yet never enforced the laws, in large part merely left them on the books. About the fears surrounding his party and the PM coming in for a third successive term Modi says there is no need to fear as he has devoted his life to the development aspirations of the young people of the country regardless of color, caste religion or region. He said the striking difference between him and the ranks of opposition parties in Maharashtra, Bihar, UP, Tamilnadu and West Bengal was the "parivar vadi" or dynastic spirit of the leaders who followed age old practices of promoting family members to lead, such being the case in the INC after Nehru for several generations, depriving the country of better leaders and stifling democratic processes. He did not say this yet Indians of all ages remember the leadership of Lal Bahadur Shastri who succeeded Nehru in 1964, his championing of farmers with the slogan Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan. Like JFK in the US his life was cut short  before he could put his mark on the period after 1964. Shastri was Parliamentary Secretary in the first Indian government in 1946 and served in every capacity for India at the state level in Uttar Pradesh India's heartland around the Ganges river, and at the federal level till 1966. During this interview PM Modi was asked about Tamilnadu and southern states, a north-south divide, Modi does not see India in "tukde tukde," piece and piece-even as Chief Minister of Gujarat he said he aspired to progress of India and Gujarat's progress and modernization as part of this Republic India.  ...

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Under Argentina's planned nationalization of oil company YPF, the government will take a 51% controlling stake in YPF. Of this stake the central government will take 51% and the provinces will take 49%. The bill is expected to be approved by Argentina's Congress. Spain's Repsol acquired a 57% stake during privatization efforts in the 1990's. YPF reserves constitute a large part of Repsol's reserves and 30% of its profits. Argentine oil production declined during the last ten years even as energy demand has increased in Argentina. The privatization of the 1990's is viewed badly in Argentina. Argentina now faces the challenge of increasing oil production and learning from efforts of Petrobras in Brazil.

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The 1953 coup that toppled the elected Mossadegh government was supported and attributed to planning by the CIA. During a cold war with the Soviet Union countries in the middle were considered expendable by either side. Added to this was the interest of big oil companies similiar to the Anglo-French response in the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. This still rankles with Iranians. In response to the election of President Obama and his offer for an open discussion the Iranian President Ahmedinejad calls for an apology for that coup and the toppling of an elected government. This led to replacing it with the Shah's monarchy which was overthrown in 1979 after 26 years.

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Crude oil reaches a high of $90.46 on the exchange pushed higher by sanctions by Bush on the Revolutionary Corps and some Banks in Iran, the threat to the oil pipelines from Kirkuk in Iraqi Kurdistan to Ceyhan in Turkey with its possible entry of Turkey into Iraqi Kurdistan, and statements to by the Secretary General of OPEC El-Badri that OPEC has no price band or target and is not worried by prices at $90 per barrel. Also aggravating the situation is lower oil inventories as winter approaches with IEA estimating a drop of 33 million barrels between June and September, contrasting with increases the past 5 years as Fall approaches.