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The failed June 2007 bombings planed and executed outside of the theater district in London and at the Glasgow airport terminal do not get as much media attention now but could have done a lot of damage and caused many deaths and injuries as well as panic in London and Glasgow. The terrorists were from Iraq and Jordan London and highly educated being doctors and part of the National Health Service. In the light of the Mumbai attacks it shows that the vulnerability of the UK from disaffected muslims.

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Poland says its President Lech Kaczynski, is not hit as hard as other countries in Eastern Europe, by which he may be referring to Hungary, and may achieve 2% growth in 2009, if things do not worsen considerably. The prime minister of Hungary had warned of a new Iron Curtain coming down over Europe, as a result of the economic downturn. Unemployment is rising, but nowhere near the high double digits of the 1990's, and exports are still holding up, and Polish banking sector is relatively healthy not having made the risky investments.

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A grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini runs for election in 2016 to the Assembly of Experts council which selects the next Ayatollah. Ruhollah Khomeini, a cleric, is seen as a moderate who supports prime minister Rouhani's efforts to forge closer ties with the U.S. and Europe.

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The WSJ's Paul Sonne gives this exceptional account of how Russians are coping in the economic crisis of 2015-2016, with the twin shocks of the collapse in the ruble and the collapse in oil prices. He does this by looking at the Kaluga region, a provincial city 110 miles south of Moscow that has benefitted from large foreign investment to meet the needs of 20 million consumers in the Moscow region. The governor of Kaluga since 2000, Anatoly Artamonov, worked hard to attract foreign investment that includes VW, Volvo AG, Continental AG, Lafarge, Samsung Electronics, General Electric, and other companies. He ran a collective in the Brezhnev era, and now is energetic in meeting needs of foreign investors. Karmanov says it is stupidity to not say he is talking to business people in other parts of the world because of the political climate in the country. About 42% of the industrial output in Kaluga comes from the foreign automobile plants, including VW. The automobile and light commercial vehicle production in Feb. 2015 dropped by about 39% compared to Feb. 2014, according to the Association of European Business estimate. Only 40% of autombile production cost from assembly lines is sourced locally, the rest is imported at the new value of the ruble which has fallen about 50%, leading to higher prices and slumping demand. Ordinary Russians are feeling the effects of the crisis with higher prices. Consumer price inflation in Feb. 2015 was at 16.7%, with 23.3% increase in food prices. High interest rates to prop up the ruble meant cutting off access to credit to finance consumer purchases. An 8% drop in real wages in Jan. 2015, according to Capital Economics, added to pressures on consumers. With the political and economic crisis following Russia's Ukraine intervention foreign investment in 2014 declined to $18.6 billion in 2014 compared to $61.5 billion in 2013, and the EBRD bank cut financing with the sanctions....

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Hanif describes the activist nature of Pakistan's judiciary. This is part of a tradition in Pakistan where the courts have played a role to check executive power in the form of military in the government or political parties in government affected by corruption in the system. Earlier in the last decade the courts acted as a check on the power of Gen. Musharraf. It is now acting as a check on the Sharif government, including a decision removing Sharif as head of the government and the ruling political party. This opinion reflects skepticism about this role. In Pakistan's system the way it has evolved the military, the party elected to government in free elections, and the judiciary, each act as a check on the other, particularly now that Pakistan has experienced for the first time a peaceful transition of power between opposition parties. This is also a  way combined with an an active media and new political parties such as the one formed by a former cricketer Imran Khan, to provide a sense of participation and empowerment for ordinary people. ...

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Contrary to earlier media reports of Mr Naimi the Saudi oil minister saying that the market was healthy and "well balanced" and that no cuts were expected, it turns out that after extensive debate the OPEC ministers agreed on a cut of 520,000 barrels a day or less than 1% of the world's oil supply. It would put OPEC production back to 32.7 million barrels a day same as the first 3 months of 2008. This was done to avert excess supply in the market but Algeria's oil minister said that this would not affect the downward trend in prices as buyer nations in USA and Europe had already built up supply inventories from weaker demand. Iran, Libya and Algeria argued that there was a supply glut or imbalance from reduced demand. OPEC President is Chakib Khelil of Algeria. Russia's top energy ministers and head of Roseft attended ths OPEC meeting. Sechin head of Rosneft Russia's largest oil company run by the government said tht Russia is preparing a memorandum of understanding for deeened cooperation with OPEC. At tis point OPEC supplie 40% of the world's energy, Russia supplies another 11%. ...

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The Adventures of Amir Hamza is a story much like the Odyssey but set in the Persian, Central Asia Islamic world. It was born as far back as the 9th century. It has a South Asian version since the epic is retold in different settings and has a oral tradition of being recited by dastangos who used to recite these myths and legends . Amir Hamza is supposedly the uncle of the prophet Mohammed. Its South Asian version is in the Hamzanama that was commisssioned with painted manuscripts by the Mughal emperor Akbar. It has 1400 illustrations and formed the basis of Mughal art which was a fusion of the artistic worlds of Hindu India and Islamic Persia and Central Asia. In those times the Persian speaking world extended from Tabriz to Hyderabad in south of India and the Hamza Adventures were told around campfires and in the outdoors. The Hamzanama paintings commissioned by Akbar were shown at the Sackler Gallery around the time of the Iraq invasion in the summer of 2002 and show a world long forgotten. The Saudi type of Wahhabi Islam and religious zealotry is a far cry from this more open world of art and legend and life in central, south and western Asia, of commerce, trade and ways of life intermingled and flow of people across a large region in Asia. What it may suggest is that the current wave of religious zealotry is a kind of phase that like a passing wind comes and then is dispersed, maybe its a reaction to western interventions, maybe a failed response of tradition with modernization, maybe something else, a clinging to old outmoded patterns in areas that are most left behind by change, with ethnic and other strife mixed in with it. No single or simple response to it makes sense and a lot of patience is needed. Conflict of civilizations talk and the like may simply be overdone and way oversimplified things....

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President George Bush said in 2005, that if someone wanted to get a glimpse of how he thinks on foreign policy, he should read Nathan Sharansky's book "The Case for Democracy." Sharansky was an aide to soviet physicist and human rights advocate Andrei Sakharov. Here he is interviewed by David Feith of the Wall Street Journal. His outspoken activism in favor of the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate got him 9 years in the Soviet Gulag. He was released from prison in 1986, with the strong support of President Reagan. He emigrated to Israel and served in ministerial posts and in the Israeli parliament. Sharansky says the recent protests in Egypt prove his fundamental points. That there are limits to how much you can control people through the use of fear, and that all people, regardless of religion and culture, desire and want freedom. This is a very human message, it showed its power when the Berlin Wall fell, and it is true today in the Arab world. He says the fear that this endangers the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty is not well founded. Over the last 30 years the border with Syria has been quiet, because it is really Israeli deterrance that is responsible for this and the quiet border with Egypt. He adds there is no justification for Mubarak remaining, as it only creates hostility in the Arab world against the US and Israel. And he says that Mubarak was no friend of the Jewish people, because even as he made peace with Israel, he continued to let anti-Semitism thrive and used Jews as the enemy to enhance his control. Sharansky says Gaza and Hamas control after the election was an unusual situation because of the corruption of the people around Arafat, so that even Christian villages supported Hamas. And he says the longer a dictatorship is in place the worse the situation becomes in creating more hostility to all those who support the dictatorship, including the US and Israel. For Sharansky, the Obama adminstration's response to the Iranian protests after what is seen as a stolen election in Iran, were one of the greatest betrayals of freedom in modern history. To prevent a one time, one person, one vote, Sharansky says the democratic institutions have to take root and this will take more than 8 months, so guarantees need to be put in place that this is not allowed to happen. Safeguards put in place to ensure that whoever is elected cannot survive if democratic institutions and reforms and democracy building does not occur. Dissidents like Mr Ibrahim and others should enjoy the ability to build trade unions and women's organizations. Sharansky says this is a real chance, a chance for the US and the free world to become a partner in change. In change that will help Egypt pass the town square test. Can people freely protest and express their grievances in the town square. And move from this fundamental change to establishing democratic processes and institutions. ...

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Sabrina Tavernise of NYT meets people of the intellectual class in Pakistan's city of Lahore. There is no clear consensus of what Pakistan is or should be. At the same time there is a feeling that a more tolerant Islam, confined to religious practice and not a state ideology, has strong historical basis and is the way out of this mess. A mess that resulted from turning Pakistan into an Islamic state in a modern world.

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Rising tensions in the Middle East after an American airstrike at Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. This happens at a time of public protests against government corruption and mismanagement in Iraq and Lebanon. 

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Pfizer shares fell by 2.5% as the deficit deal of August 2 was announced. The deal envisages cuts to Medicare. Pfizer CEO Ian Read says the pharmaceutical industry is not immune to the macroeconomic trends. Another trend he described in an interview is the shift in buying drugs- with high unemployment people either going without prescription drugs or switching to low cost generics.

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A NYT report on Donald Trump's long standing relationship with his lawyer Roy Cohn,  who was also an advisor to Senator Joseph McCarthy. The report says Roy Cohn used aggressive legal tactics in lawsuits and influenced Trump's style of doing business in his real estate dealings. It is a detailed report of Roy Cohn's influence on Trump, which the reporters say has influenced the way  Trump ran his 2016 election campaign. It shows Cohn as protecting Trump in lawsuits, and Cohn's sense that Trump would someday play a big role in New York's real estate business, as Cohn's first meeting with Trump started when Trump was beginning his career in the early 70's. 

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NYT's Thomas Edsall does a great service to America by pulling together different views on the causes of the alienation of the rural population in the US from the Democratic party. The situation in Wisconsin with Ron Johnson winning in that state on the back of resentment of the rural population is shown. It all started say experts with the the so called Third Way that turned out not to exist of Tony Blair in Britain and Bill Clinton in the US that quietly accepted the Reagan view of the world and moved the Democratic party in a different and unknown direction. Obama made things worse by embracing Tech and tech companies into the Democratic party, and ignored the concerns of rural and agricultural parts of the US. The Obama period continued the Clinton policies of letting China takeover America's position in manufacturing, and allowing the offshoring of much of American industry to China. By not closing the chapter of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq president Obama lost many critical years. Mr. Biden now has the extraordinary challenge of not meekly accepting what has happened knowing that it is not in the spirit of the party of FDR and Truman, that the Democratic party will stand or fall with the common man, that it will take some time to recover from these missteps, that it is in the interests of America and the American people, and for what America stands for in the world. It is all embodied in what Carl Sandburg once wrote- "The People, Yes!" ...

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New estimates of the coronavirus cases and deaths show Peru having twice as many than estimated before. Peru has the world's highest mortality rate per capita in the world. Most of the jobs were pushed into the informal sector in the last 2 decades. This is also true of Columbia and other Latin American countries. During the first and second wave of the coronavirus these people in informal jobs were the hardest hit having little access to health care. In Colombia the result of the stress from the pandemic and the other problems have led to street demonstrations and violence. The president Ivan Duque lacking public support faces violent street protests. Duque who is from former president Uribe's party won the electon in a runoff with a former leftist guerilla leader Gustav Petro who was Mayor of Bogota. Uribe and Duque had not supported the peace agreement with the rebel left movement in Colombia negotiated by presiddent Santos.  In Peru the election is between Mrs. Fujimori from the Fujimori family and a Marxist politician Castillo. The problems in the informal economy during the pandemic have led to the election of Castillo as the next president. Many of Latin America's problems from Brazil to neighboring countries remain unresolved even as Asian countries have moved forward, with lack of basic access to sanitation, tap water, health care and education, and lacking basic infrastructure. The pandemic has shown the weakness in decades of development in Latin America.   ...

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A NATO summit has tension and uncertainty with president Trump pushing forward his idea that Europe should take on a larger share of the burden for its own defense. Some of this goal was achieved with the jawboning style of Mr. Trump- NATO plans to increase military spending and increase EUropean governments share of defense spending. A European Defense Fund with 13 billion euros of funding is being set up to develop military capabilities. This is also what Mr. Trump hopes to accomplish by using this approach where other approaches were resisted by Germany in previous American administrations from Bush to Obama. It is also why Mr. Trump says he thinks NATO is now stronger than before, even though his approach throughout is unorthodox from Korea to NATO. Europeans see a divergence between the U.S. and EU on issues- such as Iran, Middle East and Israel, and Mr. Trump's efforts to maintain good ties with Russia meeting Mr. Putin after the Summit. This leads to a sense that the U.S. cannot be depended on in the face of threats to the EU. Mr. Trump's policy suggests the U.S. has no permanent friends or permanent enemies, will follow its own interests independently of its transatlantic partners, says one expert. At the root of the problem lies Trump's conviction that the European nations benefit economically by spending less on defense and thrusting more of the burden on the U.S. -even after 2 costly wars have diminished American desire to take on responsibility especially as other economies have prospered better than the U.S. ...

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Turkey's transition to democracy and a growing emerging market. Turkey's example provides a pathway for modernization in Egypt.

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What Handan Iron and Steel in Hebei Province 300 miles south of Beijing and ThyssenKrupp in Dortmund, Germany, have in common. The transplanting of Germany's aging defunct iron and steel furnaces and plant to Handan, boxed and crated away- its unreal that in 1998 Handan Iron and Steel bought and transferred an aging polluting plant to a city where the steel works are located in China which has 8.5 million residents. When years later the steel works were debated to be moved to a distance away from the city with Baoshan Steel, the decision was made to instead put a new plant there instead. The solution was to make pollution payments to residents of Handan. It was Mao's dream to build a steel industry in Hebei province ,which has large deposits of iron ore and coal and a rail line. Couple of questions come up to mind- one why did the first steel works go up right in Handan, and same is true of Dortmund, labor supply perhaps but couldn't homes be built nearby instead and these plants located away from cities. Second the deal for bringing the ThyssenKrupp plants was as recent as 1998, by this time China was already a big steel producer (producing more than the US by one estimate) and in a few years Chinese steel production was to exceed the US, Europe and Japan combined. With steel production already on the rise why didn't China move more carefully. Some of the Thyssen Krupp assets were built only a few years before 2000 and met stringent environmental control. China bought these.. Why didn't China pick out the best assets instead of old aging blast furnaces. The possible answers are that they were available at cut rate prices, but were they worth it. The second is that Hebei must be competing with other parts of China, and there wasn't a rational allocation of capital as would happen if a sophiticated company like a Mittal or a Tata Steel is involved. Is China operating on a outmoded concept- nationalism, competition between provinces with local government officials running the show? The other question is that in the case of the automobile industry a different pattern is seen, the most modern technology was selected , and in the case of Cherry, the most recent technology was selected for manufacturing cars, then why was this same pattern not adopted in the case of steel. In the end China has a surplus of steel mills, which makes this rush into steel production without carefully thinking through this appear to have been a mistake. The visual picture if one flies into Dortmund of manmade lakes, green park areas and residential housing and shopping from the $22 billion the EU and Germany are investing to turn the Ruhr valley region of Dortmund into a centre of education, technology and tourism now contrasts sharply with Handan in Hebei province. Can emerging countries do better, build manufacturing for jobs but keep living conditions in mind, be patient and work to achieve the best overall results, and build education, technology, appropriate for their own situation. ...

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Clean Energy and Manufacturing investments under Biden Inflation Reduction Act in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kansas, and other Republican states are leading to the Senate Republicans taking a position favoring keeping such investments in the DJT 3B Tax Cuts Bill. Republican states getting bulk of clean energy investments from Biden's IRA Act are working to keep the jobs and factories being built in their states. About $130 billion of $271 billion to 2032 has already been given out, the Senate 3B Tax Cuts Bill wants to keep these tax credits for renewables till 2027. North Carolina is an example which has $21 billion in such clean energy and manufacturing investments since 2022 when the Inflation Reduction Act of president Biden was passed. The IRA Act gave states $271 billion for such investments over a decade. Senator Thom Tillis is leading the Republican Senators group that wants to keep these projects that bring jobs to North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia as the biggest recipients.This means the Senate bill sent back to the House will try to come up with a moderate position on Clean Energy and Manufacturing investments that bring jobs to Republican states. ...