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Mr. Vanderhei of Politico leaves to form a rival political coverage site called Axios, which has funding from Comcast Universal. The result of a rift between Mr Albritton, the owner, and the CEO, Mr. Vanderhei, is that many executives are now leaving Politico, putting it into a crisis. 

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The AFL-CIO union's view of Governor Walker's action in Wisconsin to limit collective bargaining rights and reduce benefits of public sector workers.

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Security is at the heart of India's foreign policy. S. Jaishankar points this out at Thiruvanathapuram. He says this was true of the effort at Balakot and even in the midst of Covid at the Line of Actual Control with China when India sent up enormous numbers of troops to defend the border. This is also behind the stand with China that security and LAC comes first in all relations with China. Trade and exchanges all come in the context of LAC, settle the LAC issues first then we can proceed with better bilateral relations, this is what India is telling China.  There are good reasons for this. India has a large border in the most formidable terrain of the Himalayas which is also close to the plains of India in the LAC with China. Any difficulties at the border would weaken India's secuerity and weaken development efforts in the same way that Japan sought to weaken Chinese development through invasion in the 1930's. Tibet looms out of the past. When China invaded Tibet Nehru's couple of pages in Discovery of India on China show that he had no idea of the China that had emerged with Mao and the CCP in its historical struggle against Japanese nationalists and imperialists. He had an idea of China that came from the Buddhist period and India's links from the past. The ruthless Japanese invasion that China confronted on its soil, and British colonial incursions before that, had already transformed the China of the past, which now under Mao in 1948 may have sought more defensible borders by extending them to Tibet as a buffer state. Historically the British had never tolerated Russian or other European or Japanese interference in the border states such as Tibet. There was also the question of capacity. By the time of the invasion of Tibet in the early 1950's China had already fought the Korean War with the US. India's army and defense forces were just coming out of partition and ill equipped for the task of defending the borders in Tibet region. Current governments in a more normal setting cannot change this part of history, yet can take full recognition of the facts that this has created. A strong defense has to be created for defending a border that extends for thousand of miles now that China has unlawfully occupied Tibet. On it also depends a strong and vigorous development effort that helps build the kind of modern defenses as the economy grows and absorbs new technologies rapidly. Both defense and development go together, one cannot have defense without rapid modernization and development, and one cannot have rapid modernization and development without defense. A weak defense would lead to distractions in development leading to the lack of rapid modernization and development as the intruding power interferes in insidious ways in the internal and external links of the country. This is the lesson of colonial interference of western powers in Asia. As Brendan Simms shows in his new book, Europe - Struggle for Supremacy 1500 to the Present, it is also the lesson of a different kind of colonialism inside Europe since 1500, where weaker states inside Europe fell behind with interference in turns by the imperial powers of France, UK, Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Russia. Poland, Finland, Czech Republic in the past and even Ukraine today are just some examples of what can happen when one loses sight of this principle. Poland and the Polish Commonwealth in the 19th century, Hungary right down to 1956, and China in the 1910-1930, India in the 18th and 19th century were weakened internally even after recognizing the problem, so that recognition of the problem is not an adequate condition to prevent countries from facing such foreign interference. ...

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Former World Bank chief Zoellick points to the need for investments in human capital and productivity improvements in emerging markets such as India, China and Brazil to overcome the problem of slow growth in 2013.

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Apple releases list of suppliers and results of audits of working conditions at plants in China. Many of the facilities show poor working conditions.

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How a major global readjustment may be taking place right before our eyes, not visible all at once but gradually taking place as growth in Europe and Asia outpaces that in the US and consumption overseas grows while the it falls off in the US from the levels seen for a decade. The weaker dollar will reduce imports increase exports and shrink the trade deficit with other countries. More expensive imports will add to the inflation in the US. The weaker dollar will lead to American companies gaining market share with higher exports and a more competitive position versus other countries. German and other European companies will complain about the higher euro. Vis a vis China and India this rebalancing will take place slowly because of the billion people in these countries rural areas that are just now becoming part of the larger global economy.

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Patent related profits for US publicly traded companies$9.3 billion in 1999 from $8.4 billion in 1997. Patent related litigation costs in the USA $16 billion in 1999 from $8 billion in 1997 (a 100 % increase in litigation costs in 2 years). What migt the figures be like in 2007? Note that two thirds of the profits went to chemical and pharmaceutical companies.

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Strengthening labor rights in Mexico is part of the effort by Democrats in Congress to amend the Trump agreement with Mexico and Canada. Democrats say the lack of worker protections inside Mexico hurts U.S. workers wages and prospects. Democrats say the USMCA agreement negotiated by president Trump lacks enforcement provisions needed to ensure Mexico lives up to the agreement. Differences with the Trump administration which says these changes can be placed in followup legislation could hold up the agreement till after the 2020 elections in the U.S.

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This New Yorker has resilence in his roots in the Scottish Hebrides islands. No wonder he was able to take up the challenge of a US unable to extricate itself from  wars in the Middle East (Reagan, Bushes, Obama), and unfair trade with China, and an onslaught of unfavorable media attention. His name is DJT. According to the BBC in this story on Donald Trump's mother Mary Ann Mcleod, she was a regular churchgoer, well respected in the community, who visited her homeland in Scottish isle of Lewis, British Hebrides, frequently. Mary Ann McLeod is the youngest of 10 children of a Scottish family in the town of Tong in the Hebridean isle of Lewis in the North Sea, northwest of the Scotland mainland. Her father ran the local post office. The family was  relatively poor coming from Scottish people cleared of Highlanders during the Clearances and with fishing disasters in the family. Two hundred servicemen returning from the first world war to Tong lost their lives in a shipping disaster and the economy of the island was in poor shape. With no opportunities or future many immigrated to Canada. Mary Ann's sister Catherine immigrated to Canada and on a visit to Tong she took Mary back with her to New York in 1930. Mary worked as a nanny for a wealthy family in New York before meeting a socialite of German immigrants Fred Trump. Mary returned to Scotland in 1934 and by then she found a new life with Fred Trump whom she married. The couple lived in a wealthy area of Queens and Fred Trump ran a real estate business he had inherited with his mother. Donald Trump still has three cousins in Tong in the British Hebrides Scottish isles. His older sister Maryanne Trump Barry regularly visited Tong. Donald Trump visited Tong in 2008. Of this family a local who knows the cousins and the family John MacIver, a local councillor and friend of the cousins told BBC in 2017- "They are very nice, gentle people and I'm sure they don't want all the publicity that's around. I quite understand that they don't want to talk about it."   ...

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Nicolas Tenzer, who teaches at Sciences Po in Paris, says that the new relationship between U.S. president Trump  and the French president Macron, is a result of Macron having the capacity to react quickly and follow his intuition. He says there is even a bit of seduction in this for the younger Macron to bring the older Trump back into the circle, knowing that Europe needed someone who could talk to the American president in a way that others did not choose to or just could not. This includes chancellor Merkel of Germany. The relationship started out awkwardly with Macron expressing some disdain after the Trump decision to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement. Soon after the initial differences Macron's spokesperson Castaner said that it was an important task, that "of bringing the president of the United States back into the circle." It is an intelligent move and typical of Macron to move quickly and do things that make sense in the interest of the EU and America. On Bastille day the French are also honoring the U.S. for the sacrifices in two wars, and it made sense to bring the U.S. president in so that other differences could be set aside to work together on issues such as terrorism, mutual security, and trade. It is not uncommon to have seen such differences, and they were handled differently in the past. German chancellor Schmidt had a difficult relationship with president Jimmy Carter. Carter with his rural Georgia background as a peanut farmer was seen in the way Trump is seen in many parts of Europe. President Bush was also treated with skepticism in Germany, more for policies of going to war in Iraq.  For Macron it shows his uncanny ability to do things which for other people may not sound convincing. Being critical of the U.S. president may also have set the stage for a real relationship because it may have earned him the respect of being someone who had his views and was not hesitant to express them, just as he was on Algeria and other issues. And yet willing to have a friendly, open conversation with someone from a different background and with different views. At Lyrarc we singled out the Spiegel Macron interview on the fast train to Bordeaux, as something that showed him to be comfortable and calm  in unusual settings, and not affected by the magnitude of the task at hand or people's opinions. ...