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Kashmiri shawl weavers were mostly women. Mechanization has pushed many from earning their livelihoods from the shawl industry. New ways are being found to revive the older shawl weaving methods and give Kashmiri women an opportunity to work and be financially independent. A lot can be learned from the French who have a thriving industry using hand weaving with new technology and marketing techniques for hand woven fabrics using new designs. Some of these French companies could actually collaborate with Kashmiri makers to relaunch this industry in a new way and employ many women in making shawls and other specialty fabric designs. This manufacture would also command higher prices in a niche market segment in India and in world markets.

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This excellent article by Peta Bee looks at how we can do anti-ageing efforts to keep our immune systems strong as we become older. She looks at work by an expert in immune cell biology, Janet Lord, who is head of the Institute for Inflammation and Ageing at Birmingham University. It is now proven that the link between ageing and immune systems can be guided in constructive ways. At sixty and seventy years age one can have the immune system of a 30 year old by doing a couple of simple things which are covered here from taking 10,000 steps a day, high intensity interval training on some days each month, occasional fasting on some days, high fibre diet and vitamin D. Walking, running or other forms of exercize affect a particular form of immune function called neutrophil movement in positive ways. Neutrophil movement because these cells are the main defense against the forms of bacteria that cause pneumonia. Neutrophils in older adults behaved in ways similar to that found in 30 year olds when doing 10,000 steps a day of exercize. Dr. Lord and other researchers have found. Dr. Jenna Macciochi, a lecturer in immunology at the University of Sussex, says about 70% of our immune system resides in our gut, making gut health very important for our immunity. Macciochi is the author of Immunity: The Science of Staying Well. Important for gut or gastrointestinal health is the eating of food that has prebiotic and probiotic effect. This helps reverse the decline of immunity coming with ageing.When we chew down on fibre in vegetables, fruit, beans or lentils we have beneficial byproducts called postbiotics that act as an interface between diet and immunity, that change the personalities of cells and circulate in our blood for regulation of immune system, says Dr. Macciochi. Postbiotics from eating dietary fibre tune up specific virus fighting cells that help us fight infections from flu and viruses, studies show says this report in The Times. Women in the UK get only 17g per day, men 20 mg per day of fibre. We need 30 mg per day of fibre and to do this we need to increase our intake of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, seeds and pulses. Also important is avoiding the inflammation that comes with ageing called inflammageing, says Dr. Macciochi. To do this do resistance training, weights, or using body weight such as lunges, push ups, squats. When our muscles move we produce hormones called myokines that help our immune cells function and keep inflammation down. She believes strength work is an absolute essential to rejuvenate our immune age. ...

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Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, says the allies and NATO can improve their response to Russian president Putin's intervention in Eastern Europe by developing better intelligence sharing capabilities, and getting partner nations to invest more in their military capabilities. In an interview with an Italian newspaper on a visit to Europe. Carter said ceasefire terms in Ukraine should be implemented, and that the U.S. should exert more pressure on Ukrainian officials whom he blamed for the breakdown. He said about "Operation Atlantic Resolve," military exercizes in Europe, conducted to support Eastern European allies through training, cooperation and increased presence since 2014- "Our exercize and training programs, which are tremendously successful, they're tremendously popular- we need to do more of that, get more allies involved."

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Two German military aircraft leave for India Wednesday May 5, with an oxygen plant that can make 400,000 litres of oxygen a day, says the Bundeswehr. Germany's ambassador says German aid is making a difference in saving lives. The central bank of India the RBI announces loans to hospitals, business, the economy and vaccine sector of $6.7 billion. See the video of German aid to India in DW.com. 

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This Politico report looks at the political career of Nikki Haley, 52 year old former governor of South Carolina. She comes across as a woman of resilience who did not at all let her situation as an immigrant's daughter in a southern state in the US faze her. Her parents come from highly educated background in India, and this may have given her that extra layer of resilience at home.

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The US is set to begin a humanitarian airdrop campaign to get aid to residents of Gaza. This did not happen earlier because airdrops would be less than what 250 trucks could bring into Gaza a day from neighboring countries. This happens a day after an incident yesterday of chaotic situations in Gaza involving convoys of aid trucks and civilians. A Jordanian airdrop has dropped tons of aid supplies. 

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Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City, is one of the defendants in the Georgia indictment of Mr. Trump under RICO racketeer laws. WSJ says in its Editorial Board opinion that the racketeer RICO laws were used by Mr. Giuliani in his days as a New York prosecutor to tackle business cases, and it is an irony that he is now the defendent in such a case.

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The BBC shows pictures of the blue supermoon from different parts of the world including Brazil, Israel, Japan, Russia, US, England. It is a unforgettable sight in the night sky that people all over world were able to see on August 30, 2023. This one is over an old fort in Israel. Other pictures show it with a flower in Srinagar, India, and spectacular over the ancient temple of Poseidon in Greece.

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Car repair costs surged 28% over the last 3 years from 2021 to 2024. A fender bender can end up costing a lot. Even a rear view miror can end up costing $1200 to $1500 for a 2020 car with the heating element and sensors on these cars. It compares to $200 to $400 on a 2013 car. The average repair cost in 2023 was $4700 for an insurance claim up 7.5%.

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A Brooklyn, New York resident who created his own job during the pandemic. A neighbor gave him a used bike she was getting rid of. He sold it online for $400. This gave him an idea- he now pulls bikes from garages and barns all over the U.S. and restores them to new. Because of the virus related manufacturing slowdowns for bicycles, and people preferring bikes to trains demand has jumped. U.S. bicycle sales at $2.6 billion up 81% and use of city bicycles up 141% in New York city for Citibike- with single trip pass buyer at 516,000. Mr. Van Scyvoc a 33 year old Brooklyn resident collects bikes around Cleveland where his father a retired firefighter lives and takes them by pickup truck to a bike stand he has at Fort Green park in Brooklyn. There he sells bikes bought for $80 to $250 for $300 to 500. First he has to have them washed clean and then serviced in Brooklyn by an IT engineer who now repairs bikes.

 

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Iran attributed the shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane at Tehran airport to an "unintentional human error." Of the 167 passengers 82 were Iranians, 57 Canadians, and 11 Ukrainians. The plane was on Tehran Kiev flight when it was mistaken for a hostile plane.

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Two realities are affecting exchanges. One is that trading commodities and derivatives is a $600 trillion business worldwide and is more profitable than trading in corporate shares. This shows in the value of ICE and NYSE in the stock market. In April 2011 ICE was valued at $1.5 billion less than NYSE, in Dec 2012 ICE was valued at $4 billion more that NYSE as it makes its bid to merge with NYSE. The other is that the Dodd-Frank financial system overhaul in the U.S. after the 2008 financial crisis has created a new model for derivatives trading providing advantages to regulated electronic exchanges and clearinghouses that handle derivatives trades with transparency. Jeffrey Sprecher, CEO of ICE, the IntercontinentalExchange, which handles derivatives trading through its clearinghouse operations, says: "For the past decade, our solutions made our markets increasingly electronic and increasingly clear. Today, financial reform is imposing that vision on many markets through a rule-making process." Bart Chilton, a member of the CFTC which regulates derivatives trading says Dodd-Frank legislation supports the business model of derivatives exchanges. This is especially true for Mr Sprecher and ICE. Sprecher has a good relationship with regulators with whom he talks directly, and is supportive of CFTC efforts to close loopholes as he is confident he can make money as long as the rules are clear. His confidence stems from his model which is technology based from day one, with its own clearinghouse and technology based transparency of the ICE data vault, information it shares with regulators. Sprecher stumbled upon this opportunity. He is an executive in the power industry. Working on developing power plants Sprecher found it was difficult for power firms to hedge investments in energy with financial contracts because there was no well organized, clear and transparent market for such contracts. This he set out to do by buying a little know exchange in Atlanta for buying and selling electricity, later getting the the backing of BP, and investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to form ICE in 2000. Banks liked the idea of a having an organized clear place to buy and sell derivatives in oil and other commodities, and having an alternative to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in futures trading. Swaps trading under Dodd Frank supervision is converting to old style futures contracts where there is less competition for ICE's futures trading creating new opportunity. ICE setup its own clearinghouse, and acquired the Clearing Corporation, which was the base for a derivative called credit-default swap. To make derivatives trading transparent and reduce systemic risk Dodd-Frank legislation required exchanges to provide information to data warehouses which would then share the information with regulators. ICE setup its own data warehouse to do this called ICE Trade Vault. Dood-Frank rules envisioned the formation of clearinghouses and exchange such a ICE to provide a clear process, transparency and reduce systemic risk in derivatives trading. ICE under Sprecher by making this vision its own and using technology has created new opportunity. ...

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The faulty intelligence reports on Iraq cast a shadow over any new intelligence agency findings about Iran and nuclear weapons development.

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A new California law Assembly Bill 5 is designed to provide legal protections to workers at independent contractors, including Lyft and Uber ride sharing companies. California Gov. Gavin Newsom says "the hollowing out of our middle class has been 40 years in the making and the need to create lasting economic security for our workforce demands action." This could lead to gig workers being classified as employees, or if renegotiated would enable gig workers to organize as unions to negotiate with the companies. Lyft and Uber have proposed as an alternative to raise the minimum wage to $21 an hour, and a fund to pay for sick leave.

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Nikos Voutsis, Greece's interior minister, says Greece lacks the money to make debt repayments of 1.6 billion euros to the IMF in June 2015. A proposal by the Left Platform, a faction within Syriza party led by energy minister Lafazanis, which has support of 30 of the 149 Syriza representatives in the Greek parliament, calls for not making debt repayments and looking for an alternate plan. It was defeated by the central committee of the Syriza party on May 24, 2015, with the vote 95 to 75 showing intense opposition within Syriza. Instead Syriza voted for a proposal to call for mutually beneficial negotiations and a deal that would preserve its core goals- a low target for the primary budget surplus, avoid more cuts to pensions, and restructuring Greece's debt to include an investment plan for economic recovery. Both sides in the negotiations, the EU/IMF and Syriza government in Greece, reached an impasse as the negotiating tactics of finance minister Varoufakis led to German finance minister Schauble also taking a tougher stance, saying he could not rule out Greece defaulting on its debt. ...

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Hard Brexiters include Boris Johnson who insist on this at any price. Soft Brexiters include Treasury Secretary Hammond, who want to minimize disruption to the economy. Liam Fox and Michael Gove just want to make it work, that is all. A list of ministers on either side is shown here as prime minister Theresa May faces a split in her Conservative party in June 2018.

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Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe brought Nigeria to life in American schools and colleges and in schools and colleges throughout the world. He started as an obscure writer from Nigeria's rural southeast. His early novels were written in the fifties and sixties an embodied a perod of great expectations in Africa after independence. "Things Fall Apart," wa published in 1958, and sold 10 million copies in 50 languages. Other books reflected the troubles in Nigeria as things fell apart with dictatorships and wars- "Man of the People," "There Was A Country." In the seventies Achebe was editor of British publishing house Heinemann's African writer series and was instrumental in bringing a whole new set of African writers to readers around the world- Kenya's Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ghana's Ayi Kwei Armah, Cameroon's Mongo Beti. In 1982 he campaigned briefly for a political party and wrote the 68 page "The Trouble With Nigeria." After a car accident in Lagos, Achebe was paralyzed waist down and had to be in a wheelchair. During this period he went to Bard Colege in New York, and in 2009 joined Brown University in Rhode Island, and lectured extensively. He was revered in Nigeria but remained critical of Nigeria's political leaders, telling them they were "turning my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom." The gradual emergence of Nigeria and the rest of Africa from decades of strife and corruption, following the great hopes of the early post colonial era, owes much to the work of writers and other individuals like Achebe. Achebe has some important advice for writers, for business, and life in general, "if you don't like the story write your own." Another writer who writes about Nigeria and Africa was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature....

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Senator Edward Kennedy turned a close election around with an ad in 1994 attacking Romney for job cuts. The result was a 58% to 41% defeat for Romney. In Iowa a Perry ad presses this issue saying "Mr Romney made millions buying companies and laying off workers."

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The World Vaccine Summit raises about $7 billion to immunize about 300 million children for polio, diphtheria and measles, over 5 years. Prime minister Boris Johnson who opened the summit called it "the greatest shared endeavour of our times." Bill Gates donated $1.6 billion and Britain pledged 1.65 billion pounds over 5 years, making Britain the largest donor. Mr. Trump also addressed the summit in virtual manner- "we will work hard, we will work strong... good luck, let's get the answer." Mr. Johnson called for renewing "the collective resolve."  Specifically he stated: " Just as we have great military alliances like NATO.... where countries collaborate on building their collective military defence, so we now need that sam spirit of collaboration and collective defense agains the common enemy of disease." Referring to failure of early warning systems for coronavirus with crucial weeks between Jan 6 to Feb 16 lost for the West with lack of international cooperation- "It will require a new international effort to cooperate on the surveillance and sharing of information- data is king- that can underpin a global alert system, so we can rapidly identify any future outbreak. And that will mean a rapid scale-up of our global capacity to respond."  ...

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Mexico's president Enrique Pena Nieto describes his plans for increasing economic growth in an interview with Lally Weymouth. He looks back at the changes made through the Pacto de Mexico in energy, education and telecommunications, and in other areas. Changes made will allow political parties to form coalitions after 2018 following a presidential election, to form a majority in the legislature so that new legislation can be passed. A new criminal code for the entire country will override a patchwork of laws in different states. Economic growth is a high priority after disappointing 2.6% growth in the last 3 years, with infrastructure projects planned- new airport for Mexico City, doubling port capacity, new rail lines and high speed rail line Mexico City to Queretaro.

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The problems for Chrysler may not be as much the culture gap between nationalities, as Daniel Howe of the Detroit News points out, as in other areas. It is not going to be in the union area as the President's auto task force has studied the other risks facing Chrysler, and is aware of the failed effort of United airlines unions to run that airline. In the agreements by which 55% ownership of Chrysler is given to the UAW union, the government leaves the union entirely out of the management of the company, which is left to Fiat. And the UAW seeks to sell off its ownership share at the earliest favorable opportunity. The risk lies in the fact that the new models such as the 40 miles per gallon car Fiat is required to build as one of 3 milestones, each worth an additional 5% stake above the inital 20% stake, will not be built till 2012. Meantime as the President said, Chrysler will have to find ways of staying afloat in a market where it is seeing a 40-50% drop in sales each month this year over 2008, with cars that are "less reliable, less popular, and less fuel efficient than foreign competitors." ...

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With the ITU voting to let governments control the internet, the decision of the Obama administration to not renew the Commerce Department agreement with Icann to provide oversight and governance looks increasingly ill advised. China, Russia and other governments lack the same committment to an open global internet that the U.S. has. Esther Dyson, founder of Icann, says this is a bad idea. Icann provides the .com and .org addresses for the internet. For Dyson UN oversight is "a fate worse than death."

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An assessment of progress in free trade and generating jobs in N. America under the NAFTA agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The agreement was signed under President Clinton in 1994. NAFTA removed existing tariffs on over half of the exports from Mexico to the U.S. and phased out remaining tariffs between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The U.S. had two way trade of $918 billion with Canada and Mexico in 2010, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Canada is the U.S.'s top trading partner, with $462 billion in trade through Sept. 2012, and U.S. trade with Mexico- expected to overtake China- is at $369 billion in the same 9 month period of 2012.

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Alan Blinder talks about the benefits of alarge cash for clunkers program and how it could be designed around what parameters and upon which it could be broadened or narrowed. One thing he points out is that it would help the economically challenged, though how these low income people would go out and buy new cars in the midst of deep recession and credit card bills, and other debt, is a question. The German customers were not in the debt situation many lower income Americans are. The alternative approach would be to broaden the program to give the middle class the benefits, and design it around giving a boost to the depressed auto industry and the midwest region. Such a program would need adequate financing like the $20 billion, Blinder says, and would include the possibility of turning in an old clunker for a Malibu or Impala or a Focus. Only focussing on small cars would not give much of a boost to Detroit car makers, which are focussed more on the middle and larger ends of the product line. From the cleaner environment perspective and carbon emissions perspective, the cars that are 13 years or older account for 25% of the miles driven, but 75% of the pollution from cars. This and reducing dependence on foreign oil suggest that the benefits of a well designed program or a combination of programs targeting different goals such as environment, boosting the Detroit car makers, and so on , could be well worth an investment of more than the $20 billion, Blinder suggests. ...

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The 8 hour Beatles documentary "Get Back" by director Peter Jackson is described as "mesmerizing" by Jason Gay in the WSJ. It shows the making of the "Let it Be" Album, ending in a rooftop London concert, the band's final creative period. It featured on Disney+ on November 25. It is a performance but an exhilarating one, with none of the documentary devices, no rambling talk heads, just the camera taking you there, says Jason Gay, to let you see the band's talents and shortcomings.