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Ben Van Heuvelen documents in the Washington Post what Ali Nabhan and Bradley pointed out in the WSJ in May 2009, that the officers in the Iraqi army lacked the training and discipline to act as an effective fighting force. These early indications proved correct and were ignored by the Iraqi government and the Obama administration till it was too late with the fall of Mosul and the ensuing chaos in Iraq.

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Trump rally for 100 Days in Warren, Michigan, at a community college gymnasium, April 29, 2025. DJT also visits Selfridge Air Force Base and says it will get 15 new F-16 jets to replace old jets.  DJT says we're "getting woke lunacy and transgender ideology the hell out of our government." Border crossings of 8400 in February 2025 and 7200 in March 2025 are the lowest since the 1960's, one of the lowest ever, compared to 140,000 in March 2024 under Biden. DJT says he is protecting the middle class and Main Street. The millions of jobs lost to China, DJT says he is bringing them back. He talks about creating manufacturing jobs and restoring the industrial base of America that was lost in the last 30 years.  Trump lists the cost of everything from eggs to gasoline at the pump. He says there are three states where gas at the pump is below $2.00 a gallon. He cites the 345,000 jobs created in 100 days and the lowering of inflation.   ...

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The CBO annual report on the budget and economic outlook shows a deficit of $1.1 trillion for the current fiscal year, a decline of $200 billion from the prior year. Health care spending is a key factor driving the deficit. Cost of spending on healthcare programs is expected to double in the next 10 years, increasing by 8% a year and reaching $1.8 trillion in 2022.

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New Zealand grows from 3.8 million to 5.3 million 2000 to 2025  (40%) bureaucracy from 30000 to 64000 (113%). New Zealand has 39 Departments, UK 24, USA 15. New Zealand Finance Minister Nicola Willis says there are 39 human resource departments that can be consolidated. Minister for Youth, Minister for children , Minister for child poverty reduction, many different ministries often overlapping. Public service jobs grew by three times the rate of increase inthe private sector jobs. The plan is to bring it down to 55,000 by 2029 about the same percentage as it was of the population in 2017. It would be achieved by productivity and AI, closing offices, simplifying operations, attrition in the first 3 years.

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The former UK Home Secretary for Tories under Sunak and Truss, Suella Braverman, joins the Reform UK party and appears at Reform UK event with Nigel Farage. She says the Conservatives saying they would have UK withdraw from ECHR (European Convention for Human Rights), which makes it difficult to conduct a rational commonsense policy on migrants because it was poorly designed or ECHR writers lost their way on common sense, is a lie. For example there is no ECHR type rules for migrants entering China or India or any major country in the world, one that says nations have to take in migrants from anywhere in the world, and provide benefits costing billions of dollars that cannot go into services for the local population. And where migrants can pose a risk for women hesitant to go out in their own neighborhoods- something chancellor Merz of Germany has spoken about recently after incidents in Germany. ECHR has somehow got it wrong.  Labour and Conservatives have pondered this but not acted quickly enough in becoming trapped in a cultural guilt for the colonial era, when ordinary Britons simply want to get on with their lives in their neighborhoods as they did before migrants, and as did their parents and grandparents in Britain. For most of British history colonial policy was decided by a small upper class and the India Office, colonies policy by the Colonial Office, and the lives of working people in Manchester's cotton mills went on with no connection with the Empire. A fact even India's Mohandas Gandhiji quickly recognized and grasped, and whose support Gandhi sought against the India Office of the Empire. ...

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All government workers are ordered to return to their offices full time by executive order of the president.

The Secretary of the Treasury says he will be in the office all days of the week and expects every worker at his agency to be in the office.

This will have some other consequences-

As workers return to offices it will increase the efficiency of government and its responsiveness to the people after the pandemic years.

It will set a model for the private sector to get people back to the office. As people return to offices this will reduce the demand for remote work travel that put upward pressure on prices of airline travel and hotel travel that increased the inflation in this area and sector of the economy.

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The New York Times reports from the comments of current and former members of the Chase Chief Investment Office (CIO), that risk officers at Chase were ignored when they raised issues about the complex trades made by trader Iksil. Iksil's trades had the support of his manager Mr. Macris, and Ms. Drew who was in charge of CIO. The comments also indicate that at one point Mr. Macris brought in a Risk Officer with whom he had worked closely for many years. Risk Officers are supposed to be independent and their concerns seriously heard, with the authority to halt trades that pose excessive risks. Which made this kind of cozy behaviour in the CIO trading offices in London cause for alarm. These reports also say Mr. Braunstein, the new CFO at JP Morgan Chase, did not strengthen controls after he assumed office in 2010. Bank officials disputed this. The New York offices did not fully grasp the complex trades being made in the CIO London offices, and upper management let the CIO operate pretty much on its own, especially with CEO Jamie Dimon's confidence in Ms. Drew's management of the CIO. This led to another gap in the process of risk management. Dimon had other priorities and distractions, from problem mortgages coming with the acquisition of Washington Mutual, pushing back aginst financial regulation after the 2008 crisis, stress tests and others. At the same time the U.S. Federal Reserve, regulators, and Treasury's coordinated effort to merge failing banks with other larger banks- because of the lack of the process of unwinding failed banks provided later under Dodd-Frank legislation- created mega financial banks. Unlike what the U.S. under Treasury Secretary Rubin pushed for in the case of S. Korea during a banking crisis in 1997, Treasury under Geithner and Fed officials did not push for unwinding of failed financial institutions such as Countrywide and Washington Mutual in 2008-2009 Chase's own portfolio of assets under the CIO, increased by an astounding amount from $76 billion in 2007 to $356 billion in 2011. Even if Ms Drew had managed CIO well before, managing a portfolio of this size is most likely to have presented a whole set of new challenges and problems for which the CIO office was not prepared. Similiar concerns were raised by other Fed officials such as Fed governors, Hoenig and Fisher, who raised the issue that such mega-banks posed unacceptable risks and were too big to manage. Pressures to increase investing profits, growing complacency, relaxing risk management controls, led to the situation where a single trader Mr. Iksil, who had only joined the bank in 2007 according to other reports, could create large losses. This follows a situation at UBSin 2011, where a novice trader made bets that resulted in large losses....

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Declan Walsh in another exceptional piece on the ground at customs offices in Torkham, Afghanistan, near the Khyber Pass bordering Pakistan in the southeast. He describes a network of corrupt officials that extends from border customs offices all the way to the central government in Kabul. It is so widespread that one minor customs official at the border paid $10,000 for a customs position where the salary is $150 a month, but money gained through unofficial payments and bribes is $4000 a month. At every step from the guard opening the gate for a truck to the border customs official, to the provincial department officials, to officials in the capital Kabul, there are payments involved for every truck entering Afghanistan. Upto two thirds of customs revenue is lost, and the $500 million of customs revenues collected amounts to 26% of the governments tax revenues.

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Very little is known about executives in AI who were till 2018 unknowns. Murati is from Albania, went to high school in British Columbia and on to a bachelors degree in mechanical engineering at Thayer School of Dartmouth in 2012. She worked at Tesla and a startup on augmented reality before joining OpenAI in 2018, according to Wikipedia. Much controversy was generated in 2024 with ouster of Sam Altman and reinstatement generating concern how AI is being used for profit by individuals without a role for government and leaders of major world nations and setting rules and guidance. The world of AI pioneers is fragmented with different views and it is not clear if the US, Europe, India, China or other countries can delegate such important technologies to a few individuals with little experience. The recent AI conference chaired by Macron of France and Modi of India was intended to bring leadership of major countries in advanced technology to take the lead in managing AI instead of leaving the field to unknown individual players.  ...