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This report shows how the H1-B visa system as it operated for many years till 2025 undercut wages of American workers in the computer and software engineering fields. Changes are being made to accomplish the original aims of such a program. More critical is the number of jobs over a span of years that are lost to US born citizens- in just 5 years 300,000 US born talented engineers and the 3 million workers they could train would simply not be there to power America's reindustrialization and re-modernization 2025-2030. The same is true for India as 300,000 India's talented engineers and the 3 million workers they could train would simply not be there to power India's industrialization and modernization 2025-2030. This hurts the modernization of the two of the most important economies of the world to the year 2030, which would be profoundly felt by 2035. As part of many actions taken by both the US and India this could lead to shrinking the development speed and development gap with China for the US and India to 2035. ...

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There is much uncertainty about the federal elections in Germany in 2025. Four years back in 2021 Olaf Scholz had 51% of people polled saying he would make a good chancellor. This is down to 26% in Feb 2025. Merz of CDU is at 32% and Habeck of Greens at 25%. The Greens are holding onto 14% similar to 2021 with the SPD Social Democrats of Scholz at a low of 18% down from 25% in 2021. CDU is at 32% compared to 24% in 2021. AFD moving from 11% in 2021 to 21%. The immigration issue and the weak economy with the Ukraine war has hit SPD hard. The Scholz coalition also failed to invest in the economy with the FDP of Finance Minister Lindner acting as a brake on needed investment in infrastructure. The result is that the German economy burdened with higher costs for energy and a faltering auto industry is showing zero growth. The most likely outcome is a CDU coalition with the Greens and the SPD with Merz as chancellor. There is athreshold for gettinginto parliament of 4%. At this time a breakaway faction of Left parties of Wagenknecht and the FDP are both polling below 4%. The AfD is at 21% and hoping to gain from the immigration issue. Much of the uncertaintly comes from 18% of voters not planning to vote, and the 13% of voters who have not made up their mind yet and will do so on election day. ...

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Matt Collins, the head gardener at the Garden Museum in London offers some tips for gardening for the month of May when a lot of gardening can be done to get started for the year.

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The WSJ tells Americans and people around the world that they should make themselves well informed about such research as it may be costly for their lives and future. 

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A growing consensus among experts that it is not so much surface contamination as the air we breathe in that is the problem. The longer you spend time with people talking in face to face interactions, or inhaling air aerosolized in the air from small droplets, the easier it is to get the virus. This means social distancing matters in a big way. Masks are a big way to cut the risk. The worst you can do then is to be in a crowded event, ot have closeup face to face interactions for long periods. Being where there is loud talking or singing is a bad idea. This is why actions such as plexiglass installed as barrier, requiring masks in stores, using good ventilations systems and keeping windows has an enormous impact. This means that people can do a lot of work, exercize and other activities outside if one takes the basic precautions to heart and practices seriously. Contact tracing and testing, and other measures can be targeted to keep the spots that have a surge under control. ...

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New German chancellor Merz's personal popularity is hitting new lows in April 2025 even before a new government takes charge in Germany. Merz speaks understandably 60%, trustworthy 21%, strong leader 40%, results of Stern magazine survey April 2025. In a fragmented scene for political parties Merz takes office as the Ukraine war continues, and new tariff challenges are raised by the US for German exports.

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A federal committee in the U.S. now recommends no more than 6% of calories come from daily sugar intake not the 10% that is is the current guideline. It is smart to be wary of guidelines set in a different period when Americans and people in other parts of the world were not enough health conscious as they should have been. Artificially high limits set in guidelines serve as a danger to health, particularly as experts say obesity is like pouring gasoline on fire in fighting the coronavirus. Take a look at mean consumption today and it is not even the 10%, it is 13% double of what it should be. Nearly two thirds of Americans aged 1 years or older consumed more than 10% of daily calories in added sugar. And 70% of U.S. adults over 20 years are obese or overweight according to 2015-2016 figures from CDC. Today the figures from Europe and Asia, Latin America are also alarmingly high for obesity rates. Added sugar comes from processed foods from soda and pasta sauce to cereal and yogurt, and honey, sugar itself. Sugar sweetened beverages are common and dangerous. A 16 ounce grande pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks has 50 grams of sugar or 10% of a 2000 calories diet. The committee in the U.S. wants to see people eat healthy diets and does not want to discourage healthy foods like fruit and milk which people are not eating enough. It wants to see a shift away from processed foods to foods that have good health outcomes such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean meat and poultry. The beverage producers such as Coca Cola and Pepsi are a major source of resistance , as are Confectioners association, and other producers that benefit from setting the guidelines at 10%. It is not that for 3 decades as the obesity levels rose to the shocking and dismal health levels of today that the ideas of what constitutes a healthy diet were not known. It was just that we as a people did not care enough to fight for what is safe and healthy against whatever resistance was put up by producers with their vested interests, just as we as a people did not care enough to to fight to keep local manufacturing in place and the jobs and healthy communities across our land. A gram of sugar equals 4 calories. For a 2000 calories a day diet that is 120 calories to stay within the 6% that we should not exceed. Make a habit of looking at each packaged product and add up the added sugar grams and calories. ...

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This report in DW.com shows pictures and podcasts from Africa's National Parks and Wildlife Centers. Africa's tourism industry brings in billions of dollars from international visitors with each traveler bringing in about $7000 to the local economy. Most affected are hotels, tour companies and small business. There is a sense that government could do more to protect small business in Uganda, Kenya,Tanzania, South Africa, Ghana and other countries. Also being considered is finding ways to shift focus from high paying foreign tourists to a a larger local visitor population in African countries. Today Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, Amboseli National Park in Kenya at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Kruger National Park in South Africa, Victoria Falls National Park in Zimbabwe, Sanganeb Marine National Park in Sudan, and Tassili n'Ajjer National Park in Algeria with Tuareg nomads in the desert deep in the Sahara, are some of the National Parks with few international visitors. Local are working in alternative occupations. There is a sense that a better focus would be to a less paying but dependable tourist influx from within African countries.  ...

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The source of a repeat infection is a mutated form of the virus. In one case the viral genome belonged to a different strain of the coronavirus the second time. Mutations are the likely cause of the new infections in Netherlands, Belgium, and Hong Kong.

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Is trying to impose one's views on a whole society through Class B voting shares family control consistent with the idea of government by, for and of the people? Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have chosen not to go with dual class shares. Of Apple largest 8.5% of shares owned by Vanguard, 6.7% by Black Rock. Google and Meta have chosen dual class for family control. With 14% of the shares in News Corp. Rupert Murdoch family has 41% of company votes. Starboard Value, activist investor, challenges this ownership structure in a proposal at the company's annual shareholder meeting. There are shares that have voting rights and other shares that have no voting rights. Starboard has 4.9% of voting shares, 3.7% non-voting shares. Dual class shares give families control of a company. Ford family with only 4% of company shares controls 41% of the voting shares. Meta owner Zuckerberg with 14% of shares controls 57% of the company. After 2021 companies going public still had 24% choosing dual class -Class A 10 votes per share, Class B 1 vote per share. Council of Institutional Investors on its site says sunset provisions after 7 years are gaining ground to phase this Class A out.  Institutional Shareholder Services another shareholder of New Corp. says- “Multi-class capital structure with unequal voting rights create a misalignment between economic interest and voting rights, which can disenfranchise shareholders holding stock with inferior voting rights." ...

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The euro providing a safe place for countries like Italy during the crisis. For Britain its very asymmetric shock with the collapse of property and markets, financial sector, and consumption, provides it asafety valve through a decline in the value of the pound and lower interest rates. For Greece, Portugal and Spain which saw large increases in wages by 10-20 percentage points, above the 14% rise in unit labor costs in the EU zone between 1999 and 2007 reported in recent ECB monthly Bulletin, the situation is different. In Spain this means the downturn is likely to be more severe as can be seen in unemployment that is already at 13% and expected to reach 15-18% in 2009 by some estimates.

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China is well positioned to cope with the cutoff of supplies of oil from the Middle East after decades of focus on building up its stocks of oil. China has made self sufficiency in energy a key goal for the economy. China uses 16 million barrels a day of oil, of which 12 million is imported, and production inside China is a little over 4 million barrels a day. It normally adds 1 million barrels a day to its stockpile inventory. This inventory stockpile is 1.2 billion barrels and is good for 100 days. China is able to make up for oil supplies by importing more from Russia. The Power of Siberia 2 pipeline for natural gas is being pushed forward for natural gas supplies from Russia to China. China has large supplies of coal for electricity. It also is increasing its capacity to make renewable energy, solar panels and wind turbines.

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The concerns that China was going to overtake the US and become the largest economy is a misconception of how countries have developed through industry and technology. Britain and the other countries of Europe, Germany and France, went through rapid development in the 1930's and 1960's then at some point after saturation were relatively stagnant. China for the first time in 250 years of the Industrial revolution began to develop rapidly and urbanize in the 1990's. China is at that same point of saturation and it's economy moving to relative stagnation with 4% annual growth in 2026-2030 and 2-3% annual growth beyond to 2047. India is taking place of China as parts of India (large states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra with population 500 million) can achieve 15-22% annual growth in 2026-2030. A quick idea of this can be seen here in the WSJ. China as a percentage of the global economy was 18.5% in 2021 and has since declined to 16.5% of the global economy in 2025. China was three fourth of the US economy when it peaked in 2021 and has since declined in 2025 to two thirds of the size of the US economy. As a percentage of the global economy China will go down to 12% over the next 5 years as India advances, and the population of US, Canada, Australia with their continental spaces continues to grow and with it GDP growth. This is validated from the Japanese experience of peaking at becoming 18% of the world economy by 1996 and then dropping by 2006 to about 11%, 2016 to 6% and 2025 to 4%. The combined effect is to reduce the size of China's economy as a percentage of the overall global economy at a point of time in the future 2030, 2040, 2050. Japan is a good example. There are other factors in play including technology and capital access as technology and capital shifts to other parts of the world where it can be better deployed and conditions are suited for rapid development as in India/Indonesia and in the US/Canada/Australia regions of 1.6 billion people and 450 million people from China (saturation overbuilding), the Middle East (wars and mismanagement). ...

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Shear of the NYT says president Trump is taking risks of losing support from low income people who supported him in the presidential election by making aggressive cuts in programs that help low income people. In his first budget plan deep cuts to social programs and increase of 10% in defense spending of $54 billion is planned. The new health care plan of the Republicans House and Speaker Ryan is seen by the Congressional Budget Office as increasing uninsured people by 14 million. Trump has left Social Security intact, but he sees other cuts as cuts to the "administrative state' and overreach on entitlements. The budget plan is titled "America First," and shrinks foreign aid, cuts state department budget by about a third, and cuts funding to PBS, other agencies, and cuts social program spending.

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12% for Americas 20% for the world and 46% for China- amount of oil imports coming through Straits of Hormuz. US is self sufficent in oil supplies. China gets 5 million barrels a day through the Straits of Hormuz out of about 16 million barrels a day it uses, about 30% of its total oil needs. Insurers are withdrawing from the market. How will this affect oil supplies and prices? US has offered its financial institutions to offer insurance to all ships going through the Straits of Hormuz and provide assurance with defense escorts for tanker ships navigating the Straits of Hormuz. US will be targeting Iran's capabilities to keep the Straits of Hormuz open so that oil tankers can operate bringing oil from UAE and Qatar to Asia and Europe.

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Ukraine's effort to neutralize the effect of oil price hikes by hitting export refineries in Russia- every $10 rise in prices brings in $1.6 billion more in tax revenues for Russia. One of these naval drones hit a target 900 kilometres away on the Russian oil refinery at Ust-Loga in the Baltic Sea, which exports 700,000 barrels a day of oil. At price of $120 compared to $70 this adds about $54 billion in tax revenues for Russia without drone attacks on Russian export refineries. Another approach taken by Ukraine is to propose cessation of attacks on Russian oil export infrastructure if Russia agrees not to target Ukraine energy infrastructure. Much of Ukraine experienced a cold winter with Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure and its apartment buildings.

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This is Zelensky's second visit to Germany, after the first visit in February 2022 just days before the Russian invasion. Meeting German president Steinbrenner is important as the SPD leaders Steinbrenner and Scholz were seen as closer to Russia during the Merkel period. Scholz visited Ukraine in June to see first hand the damage to civilians with Macron and Italian prime minister Draghi. A settlement to the war in Ukraine could depend on Ukraine making gains with its counteroffensive with German, UK and American military assistance. Germany UK and US have expanded their assistance to Ukraine. Before the trip to Germany Zelensky visited Pope Francis. China has also sent its top diplomat to France, Germany and Russia to come up with a solution.