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Chile, Mexico and the U.S. rank high in the diabetes rate for top soda consuming countries. In the U.S. the diabetes rate is at 7.7% of the population, in Chile 9.6% and Mexico 9%. Soda consumption per capita was at 165 litres in the U.S., 146 litres in Mexico and 134 litres in Chile, and 145 litres in Argentina where the diabetes rate is at 3.9%, for 2012. A new public service ad in Mexico City subway stations says it all, showing an ad with a soda bottle and the words- "Would you take 12 teaspoonfuls of sugar? Soda is sweet, diabetes isn't." The new Pacto de Mexico agreed to by all major political parties includes the soaring diabetes rate in Mexico as a problem to be tackled, including lunches at public schools and the consumption of coke and sodas by children. A particular acute problem in Mexico is the lack of clean drinking water in many areas and the dependence on coke and sodas for liquids. But bottled water could be used in its place if available at lower prices. One proposal is for a soda tax which could generate $2 billion and be used for setting up clean drinking water fountains in schools and other places. Elected officals in Mexico are firm about the need for action, as Mexico recently became the first country over 100 million inhabitants with the highest obesity rates at 7 adults out of 10 over the age of 20 obese or overweight, and the consequently high diabetes rate. Diabetes is the No. 2 killer in Mexico, and a serious health danger. Coca Cola gets its second highest revenues from Mexico after Europe, and the situation has evolved after years of heavy coke advertising to the point where Coca Cola is taken at every meal by some Mexican families, and is a sign of prestige. The company's response is to fight the public service ads with ads showing people burning off 149 calories by walking. The country now faces a long and uphill fight. Russia is one of the countries which is also conducting a similiar fight against soda drinks. The Bloomberg Philanthropy is financing efforts against soda drinks in Mexico, as part of its campaign against smoking and sodas as health hazards, and this maybe Bloomberg's bigger contribution to society than his service to New York City. Developing middle income countries such as Mexico, Chile, India, China, Brazil, are the hardest hit by soaring diabetes. And the costs to their health systems in 10-20 years from uncontrolled obesity and diabetes will be enormous. The U.S. is a developed country with similiar high rates of obesity and diabetes, with soaring medical costs, and serious problems that strangely have not received the public awareness and efforts that one should expect. ...

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The White House is considering steps to limit access of graduate students from China to highly sensitive technologies being developed at American Universities.  About 1 million foreign students study in the U.S. and about one third are from China. An incident at Duke University involving technology that was being developed for radar detection of jets is cited in this report. Under measures being considered are restrictions on private research facilities in the U.S. and putting a large range of export goods under the existing restrictions. The main focus is the "Made in China 2025" program which forms the basis of a loss of technological advantage for the U.S. as seen by the White House. This is part of the trade negotiations with China and adds an additional aspect to the negotiations make them even harder.

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This article in Zeit Online emphasizes that the deep sense of unease and anxiety about the future among working class white people is behind the shift in American politics. This shift has a lot to do with the basic identity of the U.S., the borders, and  the ability to generate decent jobs at decent wages. The populous states of the midwest in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin helped tilt the outcome to Trump. It is pointed out that this shift is not simply a result of tax breaks for wealthy people and corporations. It goes a lot deeper than that- a growing anxiety about identity, borders and decent wages with decent jobs is what worries non college educated people who make up a larger proportion of voters in some midwestern and eastern states. Democrats also put themselves in an unsustainable position by pushing trade agreements such as TPP as an Obama legacy- even in the face of strong evidence that core working class Democratic voters, unions, and other working class groups had fervently opposed it. It is not that there are fewer liberals today- about 21% in 2012 and the same in 2016. Simply that the anxiety was too high about issues such as borders, identity, and manufacturing jobs that Democrats lost sight of. ...

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There is concern that though President Da Silva has had success in his term in office, he is leaving problems for the new administration. One expert says he leaves a giant question mark behind him. One of the problems is high spending by his administration. After the financial crisis of 2008, the government flooded massive state run banks with cash, ordering the banks to to lend heavily to businesses and consumers. The government also increased its own spending on contracts and projects. Public spending has continued to grow since 2008, and federal expenditures as a percentage of the economy have doubled during Da Silva's term in office. In an editorial recently, the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, says the government should have used the high growth in the economy to cut public spending and improve the public finances. Because the Rousseff administration is a continuation of Da Silva's administration, and includes many of the same people, the daily asks if the Rousseff team's promises to cut spending in 2011 are believable. Inflation in 2010 is at 6%. The other serious problem is an highly overvalued currency, and volatile capital inflows from developed countries. The boom in China has helped Brazilian commodities and agricultural exports, a slowdown there would affect Brazil's economy. ...

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This report in DW.com shows that Germany is only now coming to grips with Merkel's policy to China. A policy that had no idea where the relationship was headed and no grasp of its implications for Germany in the way that Merkel's policy shaped economic relations with Russia with an overdependence on natural gas supplies. It is left to the newly elected Greens-SPD coalition to face the consequences of that policy as Germany faces rationing of gas for the winter between industry and households. Annalena Baerbock, Germany's Foreign Minister says clearly that it is unacceptable that force should be used in international relations. Baerbock told a UN conference - "We do not accept when international law is broken and a larger neighbor invades a smaller neighbor in violation of international law- an of course that also applies to China."  Clearly China and Russia are different in their economies and industry. China is the world's largest exporter and depends on international law and freedom of navigation on the oceans as a trading nation that it has become with over 1 trillion dollars in exports in 2022. It is through freedom of navigation on the oceans and respect for international law that an exporting and manufacturing nation that makes for export is able to conduct its affairs.    ...

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The amazing story of Katalin Kariko who came to the US from Budapest, Hungary, in 1989 taking a position as research assistant professor at the UPenn Medical School.The work of Katalin Kariko in mRNA vaccine research that led to the discovery of mRNA vaccines was derided at first at Penn leading her work to be shunted to a lab on the outskirts of town and having her pay cut in a demotion, says this WSJ report. It won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2023. Universities are not places where new ideas can get a boost when there is much skepticism and constant pressure for research funding on more conventional lines. Less opportunity for experimentation that can lead to new discoveries that revolutionize science and medicine.  Kariko and others working as research assistant professors were shunned at Penn and referred to as "aliens" because inthe interests of research they took lower paid positions. As it turns out Kariko felt liberated during the period of her being demoted, to work even more patiently on the mRNA molecule, one that was more difficult than the DNA molecule most researchers had focused on. This report in WSJ shows a picture of a Budapest street with a large mural of Kariko. Unfortunately few people in her adopted country know about the work of this remarkable scientist to whom is owed so many millions of people's protection with mRNA vaccines. ...

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Last month the Nevada probate commissioner said Rupert Murdoch could amend his irrevocable trust if he is acting in good faith and in the interests of his 4 children. A trial to determine if this is in good faith begins in September 2024. The current trust for Murdoch and his news properties is an irrevocable trust set up 24 years back in Reno, Nevada. It gives one vote each to Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence after Rupert Murdoch's death. He is 93 years. Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch have views that have led to Fox News and Wall Street Journal news coverage that is seen as extreme. James ran the News operations with Lachlan till he could no longer support the shift, a shift consistent with his father's views. William Barr, an Attorney General for Bush and Trump is a legal adviser to Rupert Murdoch in the effort to give voting rights to Lachlan, so he has a majority. James says he is uncomfortable with the shift at the networks and that it would hurt them in the long run that the gains in ratings are short term and have led to releasing insidious forces in the US. James's wife Kathryn is a climate change activist. The siblings say the original trust had "an equal governance provision" and want a voice. They also say the move to give Lachlan majority voting rights disenfrachises them. The courts in Nevada will take up this case with the siblings working together in opposition to Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan. ...

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“I would advise none of the countries to panic. I wouldn’t try to retaliate because as long as you don’t retaliate, this is the high end of the number.” This is the ceiling number Bessent told countries around the world about the Rose Garden Tariffs chart of April 2, 2025. Just don't retaliate and negotiations would work things out. Bessent said some countries say they would work with China. I have this to say to Spain about China, he said, it is like someone with brooms and a bucket of water, it keeps on going, production never stops, that is the Chinese model. What Bessent is saying is that the Chinese model is to keep doing what they have always done non stop with no intention to change- build capacity, overcapacity, and ship production overseas to saturate markets with production and destroy industrial base of other countries- from computers to solar panels to electric cars. China is also looking at it's very recent history just the last 15 years as proof of its superiority in cost and quality and efficiency in production as evidence that US and EU is in decline. Forgetting that this was possible with US assistance and desire to lift the Chinese people out of centuries of poverty. For the 19th and 20th century Britain, the US and Europe were leaders in cost, quality and efficiency. US , India and the EU are coming back using their ingenuity, creativity and talented workers and engineers. ...

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The dire situation for basic education in the U.S. states during the pandemic in 2020 and what this means for children growing up is the subject of this WSJ report. Early retirements and quarantines have forced some school administrators to have parents, even bus drivers to conduct classrooms with children. Asymptomatic teachers are allowed in classrooms. Public school employment in U.S. in November was down 9% from February lowest since 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics. The shortage is compounded by layoffs of support staff such as teachers' aides and clerical workers, leaving the burden to be taken up by teachers.  More than 40 states in the U.S. report shortfalls in math, science and special education. The worse off states include Arizona, where school districts were not able to hire certified teachers for 78% of 6,145 open positions in August, and one third of the positions are still vacant. This report looks at the situation and the damage as teachers handle larger classes of over 50 children, do online and in person classes simultaneously, deep clean their classrooms, and take turns as crossing guards. The result burnout for teachers, more teachers quit, parents are frustrated and students do not make progress. Much of the capital investment allocation in the U.S. has gone badly wrong with capital chasing a tech industry with the industry reaching saturation and diminishing returns in, in speculative ventures, at the neglect of infrastructure, manufacturing, health and education. A recent WSJ article points to dilapidated or outdated infrastructure as one of the reasons American manufacturing has suffered. ...

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Analysts point out that there is not much room for austerity cuts in Italy and Spain without cutting into muscle. This is because these countries have moved to make austerity cuts much earlier. Their budget deficits are actually less than what they were when they joined the euro currency zone. In the case of Italy the budget is actually in surplus, to the amount of 2% of GDP, when the financial position excludes interest on debt. And Italy has now moved to reduce the deficit to 3.9% of GDP in 2011. Under pressure from the ECB Italy has announced its aim of balancing the budget by 2013. Because both Italy and Spain have growth rates estimated at below 1% for 2011, analysts believe it is important to emphasize growth.

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Marketing campaigns in 2011 for the Toyota Siena, Honda Odyssey, Chrysler Dodge Grand Caravan, Ford C-Max. Sales are up 42% for Honda Odyssey since October 2010, when 2011 models and campaign was introduced. The campaign has helped increase sales by 18.5% through November 2010, for Toyota's Siena. This is double the industry average for minivans and is a bright spot for Toyota, whose overall sales have been flat since the recalls. Toyota's Siena campaign shows rapping parents with kids in the back, making it cool to be seen in a minivan. Toyota's national marketing manager says the stories they heard were that people just did'nt want to be seen in a minivan, the soccer-mom joke or feeling playing a part in this. These ads hope to dispel that notion.

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Li Keqiang, China's new premier, is a member of the "Class of 77," who gained entry to Peking University when university entrance exams were reinstated after Mao's death. This is a period of great curiosity in China about the outside world. Li described it this way in 2008: "In this period knowledge was expanding with the speed of an explosion. I came here not just for knowledge, but to mold a kind of temperament, to master a kind of academic discipline." This he did by working extremely hard trying to master the English language and Western legal theory. He is now the only leader in China who can speak fluent English and is familiar with western concepts of law. For this he owes much to one of his professors, Gong Xiangrui, who studied at the London School of Economics in the 1930's and supported a multiparty system for China. Li was selected as one of the students to translate "The Due Process of Law" by Lord Denning, a British jurist. He spent the next 15 years in the Communist party's Youth League and moved up through the ranks. Many of the "Class of 77' " are still close friends and in academic positions in Singapore, Hong Kong and other universities. He understands the weaknesses in China's legal system because many of his close friends are lawyers, judges and law professors. Evidence of his intellectual openness, is his return to Peking University for a masters degree in economics years later, his thesis on urbanization, and his sponsorship through the Development Reform Commission think tank and the World Bank's Zoellick, of the report published in 2012, "China 2030." That report called for China to change course and reverse the role of state owned firms in the economy, giving consumers a bigger role. Like many of China's leaders this openness also meant during the period of turmoil of the Mao period and the decades following this, of a reticence to talk about political change that came over the entire country, in the words of the 2012 Chinese Nobel Prize Laureate's name, Mo Yan, a kind of "Don't Speak." Taking any kind of political position was simply too risky. The presence of 4 older Politburo members in their mid-60's who are close allies of former president Jiang Zemin and likely to preserve the status quo, also suggests a cautious approach in making changes. One key difference between Jinping- Keqiang from the Jintao-Wen Biao leadership is that Jinping has experience in provincial leadership positions in Hebei, and Keqiang was provincial leader in Henan, China's most populous province, as well as leader in industrial Liaoning province. By odd contrast Hu Jintao was a leader in the remote Tibet region and Wen Biao was a geologist in the northeast for many years. This gives the new leadership team a first hand knowledge of conditions in populous provinces, and the connections with the World Bank's Zoellick a kind of window to the outside that no other leader has had. Jiang Zemin, a former mayor of Shanghai, China' most westernized city in the 1930's and today, was himself a experimenter in his own right when he initiated the changes tht gave China entry into the World Trade Organization. His support of Xi Jinping gives Xi the needed backing for making change happen when the time comes....

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Paul Volcker outlined the work remaining to be done to make the U.S. financial system safe in an interview with Gretchen Morgenson in October 2011. On Fannie and Freddie he says it is important to get rid of Fannie and Freddie at the first opportunity, because they simply shouldn't exist, and it was a mistake to have institutions of this type that mix profit making private opportunities with an implicit government guarantee. If a government wants to help low income people find housing, subsidize them directly, don't do it in this way by hiding the liability behind a quasi-private institution, says Volcker, in the interview with Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times. Volcker sees a point of vulnerability in the industry of money market mutual funds, which operate without reserve requirements and capital requirements. The money market funds did a huge amount of lending to European banks and aggravated the pressures on them when they pulled back. One way to correct this is to require mutual funds to post the value of their assets every day to reflect market fluctuations. Safeguards on bank deposit accounts, such as FDIC insurance and bank capital requirements, do not exist for money market mutual funds. Other areas Volcker emphasized are strong enforceable capital requirements for banks, making derivatives transparent and standardizing them, and rotating auditors....

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Andhra Pradesh on India's southeast coastline with 25 parliament seats and Bihar in India's north and east with 40 parliament seats and long history of being part of the BJP led National Democratic Alliance are now key to a five year term for prime minister Modi in India. Modi's BJP party won 240 seats out of 543 in parliament.  Chandrababu Naidu of Telegu Desam Party won 135 seats in the state Assembly election in Andhra Pradesh (NDA), all but 18 seats. It wins 22 of 25 seats in India's parliament (NDA). It also shows the wide swings in Indian elections that no party is safe. Telgu Desam Party (NDA)  won on the platform of a double engine government at state and federal levels to create jobs and modernize its rural agricultural economy. In the last 2019 election the Opposition YSRCP party won almost all the seats in the state assembly and in 2024 lost almost all the seats. In 1995 Telegu Desam Party joined Atal Bihari Vajpayee's BJP to form a government and during elections that followed for Vajpayee's 5 year term (1999-2004) he was part of the NDA. He has served three terms as chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, two terms before Telengana was formed and one term after Telengana split off from Andhra Pradesh. Andhra Pradesh is centered around the Vizag region on India's south eastern coastline and the cities of Vijayawada and Guntur with a 1000 kilometer coastline on Bay of Bengal. ...

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Capital outflows from China by legal and other methods tolerated by the authorites comes to $225 billion or 3% of GDP in the year ending Sept. 2012, according to research by the the Wall Street Journal. The research looked at foreign exchange reserves and factors that affect reserves such as foreign direct investment, trade surplus, interest on foreign assets and exchange rate fluctuations. Estimates by Lombard Street Research are higher- at $300 billion for this period. By comparison Journal research shows the capital outflows for 12 months to March 2009 during the global financial crisis was $110 billion. An extreme situation is the 23% of GDP in capital outflows from Indonesia during the global financial crisis. Money transfer agents are widely used by wealthy Chinese to move money overseas and are tolerated by the authorites- everything from financing tution for children to buying condos in Cyprus can be done this way. Cyprus gives EU citizenship to any person investing 300,000 euros in a property. Increased foreign investment by Chinese companies and earnings by exporters that are kept overseas are also part of this outflow....

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Prof. Admati, of Stanford, says that with the March 2012 stress tests the Fed has prematurely announced the banks are healthy. Prof. Cole of DePaul University, questions some of the assumptions used by the Fed as too optimistic even though it used a 13% unemployment rate and decline in stock and real estate values by 21%. He says the loss of $56 billon on home equity lines of credit and second lien mortgages, 13% of the portfolio, is highly underestimated. He says the legal liabilities of banks are also underestimated.

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With Heathrow airport in London operating at 98% of capacity, Britain's government is considering two options- building a third runway expansion, or scrapping Heathrow and building a large new airport east of London. A commission will report on this by the end of of 2013. Passengers at UK airports are forecast to grow from 219 million passengers in 2011 to 315 million in 2030.

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Typical of so much of what is written about the World Health Organization and its role in the pandemic, this podcast in the WSJ fails to quickly convey the critical function of the WHO as an early warning system the world has depended on, including China. The H1N1 epidemic originated in Mexico. Asian countries including China and India depended on very quick response from the country where the epidemic originated  in allowing entry into the affected area for experts from advanced countries such as the U.S. The global response was then coordinated across countries quickly with complete transparency. The head of China's CDC himself faced a problem with transparency with the provincial authorites in Wuhan. 1.    Fundamentally this quick entry was denied the U.S. Request by U.S. to China was made on Jan. 6 for U.S. team to go to Wuhan, quick permission was denied and given only about 6 weeks later on Feb 16. This delay is the crux of the problem for the U.S.. Taiwan confirmed human to human transmission on Jan. 1, the WHO was saying this was not clear as late as Jan. 14. These costly delays are what the U.S.  letter is about.  The head of the CDC China Gao Fu called Dr. Redfield head of CDC in the U.S. on the next day after he suspected Wuhan provincial authorites were vague about what was happening. Gao Fu was alarmed when scanning the internet on December 30, 2019, about rumors of a vaguely worded lung disease in internal memos of Wuhan. He called Wuhan authorites and was not getting clear answers on that day, then deciding on December 31 to send his own team to Wuhan, as reported in German magazine Der Spiegel- Hackenbroch, Zand, 05/20/2020.  Der Spiegel says in its special report on the early period in Wuhan that Gao Fu was so alarmed about what was happening enough to be in tears in his series of calls with Dr. Redfield in the immediate days that followed. The date was shortly after the GAO Fu sent the team to Wuhan, December 31 and New Years Day 2020, as reported in Der Spiegel. See the link to Lyrarc gist of Der Spiegel's "A Failed Deception: The Early Days of the Coronavirus in Wuhan."  2.  President Trump points out the standards of the WHO- in the concluding point of his letter to WHO- when a three time prime minister of Norway, Gro Brundtland was head of the WHO during the SARS crisis of 2003. She acted quickly and decisively and no time was lost. It is this failure of the early warning system under the new president of the WHO after 2017 Dr. Tedros that alarms the U.S.  with about 100,000 deaths.  3.  This failure it can now be said was partly a result of a election in 2017 for the position of WHO president which was flawed. This was the first time a WHO head, an important position was put up for an election. The Executive Board was responsible for this appointment since the founding of the WHO as part of the UN, based in Geneva, Switzerland, after World War II. This system worked. The election was clearly a bad process for appointing the president of the WHO which should be done entirely on the capabilities of the person holding this position not on a flawed voting process. It is flawed because India and Bangladesh hit by a cyclone during the coronavirus have suffered greatly, as have other countries, but had only 2 votes for 1.5 billion people, when Barbados (385,000 population) and Laos (7 million) which had less than one  hundredth the population had the same number of votes. The U.S. had one vote. The election resulted in lobbying and a process in which many candidates stayed away because they simply would not go through such a process. The position was too important to the world- most of the advanced countries had forgotten about the danger of epidemics to let this happen by 2017, as shown in the way the austerity years led to cancellation of the preparations for pandemic in France and Britain. The austerity years and neglect of public health during these tech boom years in the western world made it possible for this to happen. 3.   Along with the 1 month ultimatum action is already being taken to restore the effectiveness of the importance of the Executive Board. The head of the health ministry in India, Dr. Harsh Vardhan, has been appointed the new chairman of the Executive Board on May 22. This restores the voice of billions of people in Asia in the process, and brings the major countries with the greatest risk in a pandemic into the decision process for tackling the pandemic, this includes the rest of the world.     ...

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A rapid increase in the number of Russians with favorable views of the US going up past 30% as one sign of the effort to improve US Russia relations by Trump and Putin is seen in March 2025. A call by Trump to Putin will take place March 18, 2025 to start discussions on how to settle the Ukraine conflict including land, power plants and exchanges and getting to the root cause of the war- NATO expansion. Some solutions include NATO being disbanded in its current form as archaic as there is no Soviet Union, its original goal being stopping Soviets from setting pro- Soviet governments, setup in Czechoslovakia and attempts to do this in Greece and Turkey. Truman formed NATO for this purpose in 1949 after the Berlin Blockade by Soviets. WIth nuclear arsenals being replenished in Russia and China, India, Japan, small nuclear states such as North Korea, Pakistan, the situation is different today with responsible policies needed today on this issue which are impeded by the idea of NATO on the borders of Russia and the Eastern European and British view of Russia as the pre-eminent threat not shared by India, Brazil, China and the new administration of DJT in the US. A long period of peaceful coexistence and arms control developed in the late 1960's, 1970's and 1980's between the US, German Federal Republic and Soviet Union/ GDR Germany. ...

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A detailed discussion of P/E ratios and opinion of different experts on why the U.S. stock market may be overpriced in 2012. The divergence between P/E ratios in Europe and the U.S. is of special concern. P/E ratios for 10 years in Germany and France are at 12, compared to 22 for the U.S. The gap between U.S. and German and French valuations is about 10%, compared to a 120 year average of 1.7 percentage points, says the chief investment officer of Citi Private Bank in London. Safety is one factor, but the divergence is too wide to be accounted for by safety alone.

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After repeated efforts to open up Mexico's oil industry in the last decade by the PAN party and stalling by the PRI opposition, Mexico finally makes the sorely needed changes to its constitution which will allow foreign oil companies to compete with Pemex. In Dec. 2013 the PRI Nieto government and the PAN join together for the two thirds majority in Congress to change 3 key articles in Mexico's constitution- 25, 27, 28. These articles are vestiges from an earlier era of nationalistic oil laws following the nationalization of the oil industry by President Cardenas in 1938. Brazil under president Cardoso opened up its oil industry by passing consitutional amendments in 1997, allowing foreign oil comapnies to compete with Petrobras. Argentina is in the process of attracting western oil companies to develop its shale oil reserves. Mexico faces the prospect of becoming a oil importer by 2020 if oil production remains stagnant at current levels of 2.5 million barrels a day, creating a new urgency for action. Pemex officials say Pemex can only come up with $25 billion a year of the $60 billion needed to develop Mexico's deep water reserves and shale oil and gas reserves. Under new legislation Mexico will allow profit-sharing contracts, production-sharing contracts, and licenses where foreign oil companies would pay royalties and taxes to the government. A major change supported by the PAN party is setting up a sovereign oil fund modeled on the Norwegian Oil Fund to send part of the oil income into long-term savings and pensions. A trust run by Mexico's autonomous central bank will manage the fund, according to a final draft. The changes are important for the Mexcian economy to increase the growth rate, and coupled with other changes for competitiveness and anti-monopoly legislation in the domestic economy. Additional changes coming from the Pacto de Mexico to the education system and other areas, form a major bipartisan effort for the first time in Mexico's recent history to improve Mexico's competitiveness in the global economy....

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The Dow Jones Average is outdated says the WSJ, and belongs to the age of slide rule, human stock selection, and does not belong in an age of automated index tracking.The 7 large Tech stocks make up 13.9% of the Dow Jones Average and 33% of the S&P 500. And Alphabet, Meta and Tesla are not part of the Dow Jones Average. As a result Dow Jones was outperformed by S&P 500 by 10 percentage points in 2023 and 2024.

Just 5 stocks United Health, Goldman Sachs, Home Depot, Caterpillar and Sherwin Williams make up 32% of the Dow Jones Average.

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A comprehensive study on immigration's impact on the U.S. by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in 2016, looks at the broad fiscal and economic impacts of immigration. On the drawbacks the new immigrants can lead to lower wages for earlier waves of immigrants and high school dropouts. It can also burden government finances, education budgets at local and state levels. On the plus side it leads to more innovation, entrepreneurship and technological change in the economy. Other facts that are new in the report and run against the popular narrative are that 53% of immigrants had at least some college, including 16% with graduate education, as of 2012- which explains the technological impact of being open to immigrants. It is this that helps lift overall growth says the report- "the prospects for long run economic growth in the United States would be considerably dimmed without the contributions of high-skilled immigrants." About 42.3 million immigrants live in the U.S. in 2014, 13% of the population, increasing from 24.5 million or 9% in 1995. Unauthorized immigrants doubled in this period to 11 million.  A surprising result considering the popular idea of anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. is that a WSJ/NBC poll shows 54% of respondents saying immigration helps more than it hurts. In 2006 only 45% to 42%, considered immigration as beneficial to the country. Immigration is an issue today even though in recent years the large scale deportations under the Obama administration and difficulty finding jobs have reduced the flow of immigrants - since 2009 about 300,000-400,000 new unauthorized immigrants arriving and similar number leaving.   ...

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The Cass Commission for Britain's NHS on how transgender affects children has concluded that there are dangers in the gender affirming care for minors.

Cass Commission's 4 year research for Britain's National Health Service concludes that gender affirming approach is mistaken. The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Department of Health and Human Services, are not a taking a science based approach to this important issue for parents of children, and the serious unease this is causing across the Nation in 2024, is shown in a report in the NYT by Pamela Paul.

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EU Japan South Korea face serious negotiations ahead, regardless of ITT ruling on May 28, 2025 saying the president did not have emergency powers. The ruling does not apply to sector by sector action by DJT just not across the board tariff of 50%. And the ruling is being appealed.  Initial analysis is that this does nothing to affect the US president's other options to use other legal authorites and laws, conduct sector by sector investigations of harm done to the US in unfair trade, take action on sector by sector basis on steel, semiconductors, autos, pharmaceuticals.  Another factor is that all are allies, EU and India is dependent on US for security cooperation, and Japan, South Korea are entirely US dependent on security. Japan also has a past history of unfair trade practices and the prime minister senior officials both understand the US need to rebuild manufacturing, and support this. This is also true of the UK which has completed it's trade negotiations and deal with the US, and sees the ITT or other actions as an internal matter for the US people. ...