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The growing risk of coronavirus delta variant from the filled soccer stadiums in places such as Budapest, Hungary, St. Petersburg, Russia, Copenhagen, Denmark. Where many were not wearing masks and social distancing of any sort was not done. Covid researchers say the risk is real and DW.com looks at what is happening at the games in many European cities and stadiums in summer 2021.

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Scientists have now found a cure for the deadly XDR strain of tuberculosis. A trial was run in South Africa recently. Of the 30,000 such cases most are in China, India and Russia. About 10 million people get tuberculosis each year making it the deadliest infectious disease. About 40 daily pills are taken for 2 years for the cure, which is now FDA approved.

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Rebuilding the Russian economy with the help of investment from the US and Europe was a key job for Elvira Nabiullina at the Russian central bank and Vladimir Putin as head of the administration during the 10 years after the Yeltsin government from 1998 to 2008. Much of these gains may now be lost with the invasion of Ukraine, and the miscalculations of both western leaders Merkel in Germany and Bush-Obama and Mr. Putin as shown in a recent WSJ report on the miscalculations of the last 20 years.

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Some Russians see the Helsinki Summit as having the unintended effect of reducing the chances U.S. relations with Russia can be improved. Mr. Bolton, Trump's National Security Adviser wanted to see Mr. Trump bring up the issue of meddling in the election and seek public guarantees that this would not happen again. Trump's deference to Mr. Putin may result these Russians say in the U.S. Congress, media and public opinion limiting any repair of U.S. Russia relations that have fallen to new lows. 

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78 year old president Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan steps down after 30 years in power. Presidential elections will be held with a caretaker who is Senate president in charge till then. He juggled the competing interests of China and Russia to attract investment in the energy industry. China has invested $30 billion in the country as a link in the Belt and Road Initiative in infrastructure, mining and financial sectors.  Russia is the largest trading partner. Since 2002 GDP per capita has increased six times according to the World Bank.

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Chancellor Merkel visits Latvia in August 2014 and calls for a "persistent NATO presence" in the Baltic states. Merkel also visits Ukraine for talks with Ukrainian leaders. Germany is also mediating in the crisis and helped to arrange a meeting between Russian president Putin and Ukraine president Poroshenko in Belarus.

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Viktor Orban's defeat in the Hungarian election in April 2026 comes after decades of his blocking policies that emerged from the European Union in Brussels and is a relief for the European Union and Germany as it takes on the responsibility of leading continental Europe in its stance of opposition to Russia in the war in Ukraine with help of France and Britain. Peter Magyar who is staunchly pro European Union wins Hungary's 2026 election in a landslide with 137 seats to 57 with 77% of electorate voting as Viktor Orban concedes. Magyar's Tisza party gets 57% of the votes to 40% for Orban. Peter Magyar 45 years was part of the Orban Fidesz party before he formed his own party with dissatisfaction about the extent of corruption under Fidesz. Orban as head of the Fidesz was prime minister 1998-2002 then again in 2010 to 2026 for a period of 20 years spanning the first quarter of the 21st century. Magyar is not a progressive or so called liberal and shares many of the same views on social issues of Orban but he is pro-European Union and reflects the views of the Hungarian nation as independent in Eastern Europe and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in an uprising against Soviet rule. In the period before the two world wars from 1600 Hungary was the place where in addition to Austria and Vienna, the Hapsburgs and other European armies pushed back the Ottoman Empire's expansion into Europe. Hungary was a key part of the Hapsburg Empire which ruled from Vienna, Austria, over most of Eastern Europe for 1600-1918. The Hapsburg Empire collapsed in World War I on the side of the Germans and a new nation Hungary emerged by 1921 but was much smaller than Hungary of the Hapsburg era. Today Hungary is a nation of 10 million with its capital on the Budapest on the Danube river in the heart of Central Europe. ...

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There is a price for a socialist state run society adopting capitalism without understanding it. Russia experienced this in the 1990's as the Soviet system collapsed and the capitalist system took its place by 1990 with flagrant abuses. Only to be stabilized in the Putin years till the war in Ukraine affected the Russian economy. China avoided this fate by continuing its accelerated path to industrialization till the 2009 financial crisis. But hidden in its seemingly successful modernization effort was the role of LGFV's and selling of land to support the LGFV's. Local governments did not take on debt themselves, they passed on the debt to Local Government Financing Vehicles LGFV's- about 8 trillion dollars of debt 80%-90% not serviceable for interest payments, zombie status requiring borrowing for annual spending.  Most city councils or mayors did not understand these vehicles were debt and some even asked "do we have to pay it back?" LGFV's were not understood by mayors and city councils brought up under a socialist state run economy. They used it to follow the central government in Beijing's orders to come up with projects to boost growth year after year to rates of growth of 10% in the 1990's and 2000's, heedless of the risks because they never really understood the capitalist system and its pitfalls.  As long as land could be sold there was some revenue for local governments and room for shifting $8 trillion in debt to other LGFV's. Once the construction industry collapsed and companies went bankrupt their were few buyers for land. The central government cannot take on some of this $8 trillion in debt. As a result China is now facing what the Russians faced - a crisis from lack of grasp of the severe pitfalls of capitalism when its risks are not understood for economies that were in the 20th century experiencing upheavals, wars and then socialist state run economies. What this means is that the Chinese economy will slow, has no choice but to slow down for the next decade to find solutions to this debt overhang over its economy and industrial plans. It also means China's support for Russia in the Ukraine conflict is also problematic for China's internal growth to meet the aspirations of its people. As long as the administration in the US continues to pursue its own economic policies for growth as Biden has done by investing in the American economy, it will have the opportunity to lead the free world and be able to hold out hope for aspirations of countries and regions such as India, Africa and Latin America. ...

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New versions of what key individuals in the Trump campaign and president Trump knew and when about connections with Russia emerge as Special Counsel Mueller pursues an investigation of Michael Cohen, Trump adviser. This relates to plans for a Trump Tower in Moscow.

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This Economist opinion says even though some of the Mueller investigation findings are sensational, not much would happen unless 20 Republican Senators broke with the president. The final report from the Mueller investigation is not expected to be made public. And expectations of the impact may depend more on political facts in Congress and support for the president rather than the legal findings, says the Economist magazine. Views of many Republicans in Congress have not changed and many have figured out that their political future depends on publicly supporting the president.

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Is the Russian president only getting one sided information from his circle of advisers asks this report in the WSJ. 

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WSJ talk of "reverse Nixon" shift of Russia from China Feb 2025- reminscent of how China moving away from Russia in Mao's last years by 1971- with DJT overtures to Russia. This report does not say that Lt. Keith Kellogg has said clearly and many times the main reason- it is a senseless war that is costing an entire generation of young men from Russia and Ukraine with loss of about 1 million young people in war zones including civilians. All coming after a pandemic has taken away millions of people of an older generation from China, India, US and Russia. PM Modi has also described it in this way.

Europe sees this but has become so entrenched in a view that there will be a winner in this war when there are no winners. America as a beacon of hope in the world takes a position that is in the interests of India, China, EU, Russia and the US.

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The efforts of Senator Kyl to get committments of $4.1 billion in missile defense and nuclear warhead modernization from the Obama administration. This WSJ editorial sees the New START treaty with Russia as a footnote to the Cold War years, which does not confront the real world of today with nuclear proliferation to Iran, N. Korea and other states. It says this dangerous world requires not the largely irrelevant efforts of New Start, but more serious antiproliferation strategies and efforts. And anti-proliferation efforts that work, not the kind of effort that failed such as the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea.

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Arrest of attackers of Konstantin Fetisov, an environmmentalist protesting the building of a freeway connecting St Petersburg and Moscow through the Khimki forest. The city government of Khimki, a city bordering Moscow, was said by opposition political party Right Cause to be the instigator of the attack. Other incidents of attacks against journallists have ocurred in the same area.

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In a wide ranging interview with the WSJ Zelensky says China is a bigger and more powerful country than Russia that has a role in bringing about peace- "I would not want such a country to stand by and watch people die." He added that this is not a painting or a museum, this is a real war, with horrendous damage on all sides.

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The Biden administration is pushing ahead with a new supply chain at a virtual two day meeting of 17 countries. In addition to the US and the European Union trade and economy ministers of Australia, Japan, South Korea, India, Singapore, Indonesia, will attend. It is an effort to build an alternative to the existing supply chain because of its dangerous dependence on China and Russia.

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This BBC story of a LNG terminal at a Baltic seaport shows how Poland is coping with the cutoff of Russian gas supplies.

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Ukraine's advances in the Kharkiv region and the problems facing the Russian army are shown in this report in the WSJ.

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Chinese views on the India war of 1962 are shown at the Beijing Military Museum in a display effort "One Hundred Questions on the China-India Border Self-Defense Counterattack."  China's PLA on its 95th anniversary looks at the 33 day war and calls it a "counterattack." It also says China withdrew because its goals were accomplished of getting back the territory it lost since August 1959 to India, that on the Indian side "the decision making was in the hands of civilian officials who did not understand the military at all," and called it "chaotic." It also brings up the international situation that Russia supported both China and India in the conflict and India had the US on its side. It says PLA withdrew because of the difficulty of supplying the military in the Arunachal region at a great distance from China particularly after the famine that resulted from the Great Leap Forward. Today there is a clear chain of command and joint work by the Indian Air force and the Army, infrastructure to support mountain operations being built at rapid speed, and building of modern defense manufacturing capabilities for the airforce and army as shown at the Defense Expo in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, this week.  One of the first aspects of the border that one sees in the region is how close it is to large population cities and towns in India and how remote it is from large population towns and cities in China. In this sense China after the experience with Russian conflict before 1900, later a large Japanese invasion in 1931and 1937 appears to have responded to its period of semi-colonialism with an aggressive policy of extending its frontiers to regions that were throughout history acting as large buffers between India and China- such being the case of Tibet which was occupied in the 1950's leading to the war with India and a border dispute that had never existed before in history. Other aspects today are that in 1962 the PLA had fought the war against the Japanese and the war agains the Americans in Korea all within a 20 year period. In 2022 China has focused for 50 years on modernizing its economy. The supply chain in the Ukraine war showed shortcomings in the Russian army, and the difficulties of supplying forces at great distances. There is also the question of morale when it is about  miles of icy terrain at heights over 10,000 feet, thousands of miles away from major population cities and towns in China- for reasons of Russian and Japanese semicolonialism behaviour not to be found in regions that had never seen large armies in history such as Tibet or Arunachal or the Himalayan border regions. The distances tell much of the story- the distance from Shanghai, Shenzen or Beijing, to Tibet is over 4000 kilometers and the border region with India additional thousands of kilometers over some of the most rugged terrain on earth with only remote mountain communities existing in the most difficult environments.       ...

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Tomahawk missile transfer by the US to Ukraine would not change the war on the front lines in Ukraine as both sides are entrenched in their positions with not much progress. What it would do is provide capabilities for strikes on oil facilities that cause problems for the economy and standards of living. The idea is to get Russia to the table for serious talks knowing it will have to also make some concessions. US is thinking about how to do this to get to talks without turning this into an escalation. This is why the DJT meeting with Putin in Budapest is planned.