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In a Fox News Interview with Sean Hannity Venezuela's Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado says her stand-in Edmundo Gonzalez won by 70% of the vote in the 2024 election. In 2026 she says she would get 90% of the vote. She tells Hannity:  "I do want to say today, on behalf of the Venezuelan people, how grateful we are for his courageous mission.” She wants to share the Nobel Peace Prize with DJT.   Secretary of State Marco Rubio, points out that one reason the US is working through the interim leadership is that most of the Opposition has left Venezuela. DJT has said "it would be very tough" for Machado to become the leader of Venezuela because of the military, gangs and other militias that Chavez and Maduro have created that would disrupt the country's transition. DJT's view is that “We have to fix the country first. You can’t have an election. There’s no way the people could even vote...No, it’s going to take a period of time. We have — we have to nurse the country back to health." The key is maintaining the county's stability after Maduro and this is what the US president intends to do first. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed to this, that most of the Opposition is now outside Venezuela, sadly. Rubio told NBC Meet the Press - “We are dealing with the immediate reality. The immediate reality is that, unfortunately and sadly, but unfortunately the vast majority of the opposition is no longer present inside of Venezuela. We have short-term things that have to be addressed right away.”  For getting the right result to restore Venezuela and the US to carry out the Monroe Doctrine in the best possible way- the US is taking each step carefully to achieve good results well into the future. ...

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A major problem for getting grain out of Ukraine by truck and rail is the EU bureaucratic paperwork, says this BBC report. For truck routes long waits at the border are common and queues can stretch as long as  25 kilometres or 16 miles. By rail the Ukraine rail system is wider than the EU's so that the grain has to be transferred for rail on the border.This can take as much as 30 days or 16 days. This is limiting the shipments say Ukraine farmers and most of it is at this time corn shipments.

For years Ukraine farmers were used to sending grain out through the port of Odessa on the Black Sea. This is now closed till negotiations lead to its opening or EU and the US finds some other way to do it.

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Latin America makes up about half the world's deaths in the last 2 weeks of June with over a million infected in Brazil, and millions pushed back into poverty.

Mexico's antipoverty agency says 10 million, Peru 2.5 million says the central bank will be pushed into poverty. A entire generation of gains on poverty could be wiped out in 2020.

Goverments not just in Brazil, but also Mexico have not played an active role. Contrast this with India where the Indian prime minister said around March 21 that in stark terms India could be set back 21 years in the next 21 days or do the lockdown completely and be able to withstand it. And Merkel in Germany when she said back by the end of March that the virus could take the lives of millions of people in Germany if the country did not lockdown effectively.

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Russia uses SCO or Shanghai Cooperation Organization to present it's case on Ukraine saying a coup supported by the US and Europe was the root cause of the crisis, in other words an effort to turn a Russian language country against Russia with it's effort to delink from Russia and join the European Union. US seeing China as the main competitor is trying under a Republican administration to bring Russia back into the European and US fold. The Europeans Germany and France, UK under Macron, Starmer and Merz are pushing back and see it primarily from the Northern European perspective of a Russian threat as they have over centuries of rivalry in Europe since 1600. China sees Germany and German led EU as its main source of western technology, trade and capital needed for a state run capitalism to function effectively. Germany seeks to keep it's China relations on a even keel for its economic interests, so does China. In this situation it can be surmised that it is the Europeans that asked DJT to sanction India for buying Russian oil to cut Russian source of oil resource sales by $119 billion leaving China's $136 billion purchase of oil from Russia aside (knowing China would not cancel sales easily), to buy time till Germany can build up arms supply to Ukraine. India is buying time to make a gradual shift to stand with the US and the improved US-Russia relations under the Republicans can only help India gradually shift to where it always stands- with the English speaking people of the world, the US and Britain, a policy Gandhi firmly supported and which India as an ancient civilization of the Buddha and the Bhagavad Gita finds itself at home with.   ...

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President Richard Nixon was named by a grand jury in 1974 but was never charged with a crime says WSJ. By the time he left office Nixon's reputation had suffered severe damage. NYT reports that this is different with Mr. Trump who seeks the nomination of the Republican party in 2024, raising a whole new set of issues of what is and is not appropriate behaviour for the office of the president of the US or for that matter any high office in the United States of America. Ultimately new standards will be set and the past few years make be looked back on as an anomaly in the history of the US.

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Problems facing the energy industry in India include lack of coal supplies to use all of the existing electricity generation plants. Lack of investment and modernization in the coal industry is holding back tapping of large coal reserves. India is expected to see a huge surge in energy demand in the next twenty years, with the International Energy Agency saying India will need $1.6 trillion in investment in power generation, transmission and distribution through 2035, and $550 million investment in coal, oil and gas sectors.

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As the coronavirus pandemic reaches the 20 month mark in October 2021 and the government reaches a target of 1 billion vaccinations given in India, prime minister Modi talks about his experience handling the vaccination drive in this interview. It covers a wide range of topics from his initial experiences in development in Gujarat, translating this experience to the national setting, the multiple yojanas or projects from Swachh Bharat (Clean India), toilets for all, bank accounts for the whole population, cooking gas for women, decisions taken for Aadhar, digitization, GST. His 35 years spent in poverty as a social worker that gave him a clear idea of the aspirations of the working poor. On the achievement of one billion vaccinations- It was the careful preparation that happened as early as March 2020 that carefully anticipated all possible problems and tackled each one of them that made it possible. "Vaccinating such a large number of people comes with its own share of complexities. Ensuring proper temperature control of complexities, cold chain infrastructure across the length and breadth of the country, timely delivery from the manufacturing plant to the remotest vaccination delivery point, supply of needles and syringes, training of vaccinators and preparing for adverse reactions, from quick registration to certificate generation to reminder for next appointment. We needed to look at the entire logistics, planning, and progress of the vaccination drive." To understand the person completely one has to go back to the origins of his experience, skills learned, and his inspiration for the effort. Modi entered the chief minister's office in the western Indian state of Gujarat facing the Arabian sea in 2001. He entered office at the time of the Bhuj earthquake in Gujarat and describes his taking the chief minister's office as accidental as he had been a social worker for 30 years. "Let alone reluctance to join electoral politics, I had nothing to do with the political domain itself. My surroundings, my inner world, my philosophy- these were very different. Right from my younger days,my bent was spiritual. The philosophy of "Jan Seva Hi Prabhu Seva" Serving the people is akin to serving the Divine, which was propounded by Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Swami Vivekananda inspired me. It became the driving force in whatever I did." In 2014 it was with the inspiration from Swami Vivekananda and taking up Vivekananda's vision for the Indian people that Modi began his campaign to lead the BJP party. It may be looking back that Vivekananda guided Modi in all his projects for a Clean India, Jal Jeevan, Indian infrastructure that benefits the last man in the queue in the country, commitment to hard work. "Global experience says government should be there for those whom nobody is there. Government's whole focus should be on helping them." To do this, to meet the needs of that last person left out in India, he could see that old notions of opposites had to be set aside. "Outdated theories such as the private sector vs the public sector, government vs. people, rich vs. poor, urban vs. rural, are still on people's minds and they try to fit everything into this." Governments since independence in 1947 followed the same political and economic thought. After Gandhi negotiated with the British government for self rule or Swaraj an experimental form was set up with provincial governments ministries with limited powers formed in the 1930's through elections. Many of these ministries had the same problems that were found after independence in 1947, as one sees in the writings in the Gandhi library. They lasted for a few years before they were dissolved by the British government. These problems were more evident under Nehru and Indira Gandhi right into the 1970's and beyond. This was followed by a period of relative stagnation. Most ministries failed to seriously address India's economic problems, urbanization issues and agricultural issues remained unaddressed, and industry building was done with a limited vision and scaled down goals. In some ways the elections created a political class interested in perpetuating itself and did not build administrations based on learning, hard work and delivering on projects with scaled up targets to match the dire needs of the country. One sees similarities with France before 1960, before De Gaulle. A mosaic of peoples all separate from each other, with agriculture the main occupation, and most agriculture done the way it was in the nineteenth century by hand and using horses and cattle- this is the picture of France shown in Nous Paysouns, We Farmers, a documentary on Le Monde French television in October 2021. It was De Gaulle who supported a shift to presidential form of government for France that helped with the transformation through modernization and infrastructure development. Tractors were introduced in 1960 to mechanize agriculture. Road, bridges, rail transport, logistics were planned in the way Gati Shakti master plan for India is now being executed. There can be no transformation without this. Unstable coalition governments in France and lack of clarity and decision making before 1960 made such development impossible. India entered such a period in the 1970's. "The politics of our country is such that till now, we have seen only one model in which governments are run to build the next government (sarkar banane ke liye chalayi jaati haye). My fundamental thinking is different. I believe we have to run the government to build the nation (desh banane ke liye sarkar chalani haye)."  Chalta haye, Chalne do. What is will not change. Families, farmers and workers in India, for a long time accepted this without questioning.  "I take decisions based on Gandhiji's talisman that sees how my decisions will benefit or harm the poorest or weakest person." "While taking decisions, I stop even if the slightest of vested interests is visible to me. The decision should be pure and authentic, and if the decision passes through all these tests, then I firmly move forward to implement such a decision."           ...

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DJT Executive Order for Maritime Revival,  Bipartisan effort for US Maritime Revival by Senators Todd Young (R) and Mark Kelly (D). If not much is done it will put the US behind in maritime shipping by a generation. The US and India are both starting from a low point but accelerating their effort. India's effort to connect the Arabian Sea with the Mediterranean is India's plan with Italy and other countries. The US is recalibrating the US ports by bringing them back under the US such as the Panama Canal ports, and imposing costs on competitors so that it can compete on a level playing field. Mike Waltz in the DJT administration was pushing maritime infrastructure  development during his time in the US Congress.

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Common sense works where activism raises questions about what is being said in ESG- a different grab bag for each person. Larry FInk of Black Rock uses the word exactly for what it is not more not less- that is Transition Investing. Transition Investing being exactly what the word says it is investing in projects that build the transition to a world that is not affected by climate change as it is today. When climate change is real and the dangers are there for all to see, so called environmental, social and corporate governance going under acronym ESG was just too complicated and redundant. Fink has done the right thing. States like Texas are now working with Fink on investments in their state.

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The supply chain chaos that is not good for American or European companies is shown here and how it is good only for warehouses that store these products for long periods. In March just 7% of the sea shipments from Asia to North America arrived on time, for Europe this was just 6%. This WSJ report says even big companies can expect to pay 5 times the freight rate than in 2019. New trouble looms in the form of more lockdowns in China with its zero covid policy and wage negotiations with dockworkers in Los Angeles and Long Beach. Stockpiling is one way to ensure availability which means additional costs. Vacancy rates for logistics property are at 4% in the US and 3.5% in Europe. All this points to the need for reshoring and bringing manufacturing back home. Companies need to invest $1 trillion over 5 years to relocate all foreign manufacturing based in China that is for markets in US, Europe and other parts of the world. As companies make plans for the shift to bring manufacturing back home, half the money going into real estate is still going to logistics properties and industrial logistics in the meantime, says this WSJ report ...

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Drier weather is affecting wheat production in Europe, India, Brazil and other countries. This is happening as the war in Ukraine and blockade of Black sea ports such as Odessa is affecting supplies from Ukraine. A more than 5% fall in French wheat production is expected. France is the fifth largest producer of wheat after China, India, Russia, and the US. It is the 4th biggest wheat exporter. EU forecasts for wheat are for about 279 million metric tons in 2022-2023 growing season, down 4% because of dry weather. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization FAO says in its twice a year Global Food Report that global grain production including corn, wheat and other grains is expected at 2.78 billion metric tons in 2022 down almost 16 million metric tons from 2021. It is the first decline in 4 years and much of this is from the problems in Ukraine. India has banned wheat exports for food security reasons after the drier weather.  And Russian production of grains faces problems because paying for Russian grains is more complicated. ...

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A study by the Pew Research center shows minorities are the ones hardest hit in the millions of foreclosures taking place in the US. Counties with black or Latino majorites and the New York region are hit severely. What appeared to be a boon five years ago as black home ownership rose sharply after decades of discriminatory lending and zoning practices, has now turned into a curse with families losing homes to foreclosure, neighborhoods seeing increasing crime and declining house values, and renters being evicted. Lenders like Mozilo's Countrywide and other similiar lenders simply used the idea of home ownership as a flag to get political support for a wild west in lending practices, which allowed predatory lending to take place in the deregulatory atmosphere of the time. See the link to the impact on minorities. Nowhere has it been shown more pointedly that prudence and character in leaders in all areas is the essential conditon for progress, making free enterprise a necessary condition but subject to this essential condition, than in the way the housing and foreclosure crisis is hitting the American and the world economy in so many ways. This is evident in neighborhoods like this one on 145th st. in Jamaica, Queens, whaere black households making more than $68,000 a year are five times as likely to hold high interest subprime mortgages as whites of similiar incomes. Defaults occur three times as often in minority census tracts as mostly white ones. And 85% of the worst hit neighborhoods have majority of black and Latino homeowners. Which may also explain why there is not agroundswell of support for serious government foreclosure prevention measures like bankruptcy legislation and other legislation such as that suggested by Martin Feldstein and others for homeowners nearly or already under water, when faced with fierce lobbying by the banks and financial institutions. Consumer advocates say years ago many banks drew red lines around black neighborhoods and refused to lend, then as deregulation became the rage five years ago, these banks under unscruplous leaders targeted these neighborhoods for subprime lending. A dozen banks and lending companioes that made big profits from subprime loans accounted for half the loans given to the New York region'sblack middle -income borrowers in 2005 and 2006, a case of reverse redlining that the N.A.A.C.P. says in its lawsuit against these lenders. Housing and Urban Development Sec. Shaun Donovan, in aspeech to New York University said that 33% of the subprime mortgages given out in New York City in 2007, went to borrowers with credit scoresthat should have qualitifed them for conventional prevailing-rate loans. For anyone taking out a $350,000 mortgage, says the NYT, a difference of three percentage points - a typical spread between conventional and subprime loans- tacks on $272,000 in additional interest over the life of a 30 year loan. ...

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It is shocking to see the virtual lack of cultural or other people to people contacts between the two largest regions in Asia, and most populous regions in the world, India and China. There appears to be a near total lack of understanding on both sides at the university and government level of the importance of setting up these contacts, so that misperceptions do not exist on either side and better relations can be built using such contacts. Rana Mitter, a expert on Modern China at Oxford University, says in an interview in the Times of India, that India and the 1962 conflict occupy less attention in the Chinese mind because other issues such as the relations with the U.S., ASEAN and Japan, take up more space. Mitter says India should emphasize its pluralism, democracy, and peaceful engagement in its external relations.  Mitter puts less emphasis on the 50 day standoff between India and China on the border at Doklam, Bhutan region, when he responds to a question about the risks of a conflict. He points to a bigger problem that affects relations between the two countries- the lack of exchanges that bring Chinese students, faculty, and government personnel to India, the difficulty of obtaining visas. This lack of cultural exchanges between the two countries is a major issue, considering also that trade and business exchanges are taking place and growing during this lack of cultural exchanges.  As a result it appears that business and economic relations guide the China-India relationship today, with people in China's key ministries and government, in universities and local government, lacking an understanding of India. Mitter makes this clear that cultural exchanges need to be established. Even a search for China- India dialogue brings up little information with a location in Beijing but none in India. It is mind boggling that the relations between the two most populous regions in the world are based on a huge lack of contacts and exchanges that would improve perceptions and understanding.  Britain's effort offers a model to follow as Tsinghua University in Beijing, as part of China's C9, has set up cultural exchanges with British universities in the ongoing cultural exchanges between Britain and China. ...

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Greg Ip and other experts say the US economy is different today because nothing like the collapse of supply chains and the pandemic leading to shortage of workers has happened in the last 50 years. One has to go back to 1947 in the postwar period to see how the nation adjusted between supply of labor after World War II and supply of goods, to understand today's economy, says Greg Ip in the WSJ.

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A career in pictures shown in The Washington Post that stretches back to the 1970's with elections to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and Mayor of that city. Feinstein ran unsuccessfully for governor before winning the Senate seat from California. She represents the first wave of California's women politicians, followed by Nancy Pelosi who went on to become Speaker in the US Congress, and now Kamala Harris who is vice president.

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A look at how Germany voted on a map of Germany gives a better idea of what really happened in the 2021 election. The narrow margin of about 2% of Social Democrats over Christian Democrats looks different from the map. The CDU black color region is mostly all of southern Germany, the region includes Bavaria with its capital Munich. And parts of West Germany around Cologne.

In Cologne and Berlin the Greens dominated.

The rest of Germany is all Social Democrats red. Only in parts of the  east in Saxony and Thuringia one finds AfD far right.

Geographically SPD red is all over Germany except for the southern region of Bavaria. A seat Merkel held for 30 years went to the Social Democrats SPD party,

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An exceptional journalism story of what happened on Sept 16 and September 17, 2008, and the aftermath, by Pulliam, Rappaport, Lucchetti, Strasburg and McGinty, when Morgan Stanley stock lost more than half its value and was at risk of collapsing. What caused the collapse in price? This article shows how the biggest names in financial institutions were buying protection with credit default swaps, and as the price of these swaps skyrocketed on Sept 16 and Sept 17, the shortselling in Morgan Stanley's shares also skyrocketed. Shortselling on Sept 17 reaching nine times the normal, with 39 million shares sold short adding to the 31 million shares sold short in the prior two days, according to trading records examined by WSJ. It was at this point, on the pleas of John Mack CEO of Morgan Stanley, the SEC stepped in to temporarily suspend short selling. It is hard to clearly isolate the shortselling that went on for protection, from the shortselling for speculation, but hedge funds were involved and some of the shortselling was done to make a quick profit. Citigroup has faced the problem of losing half the share's value in a couple of days in the week of November 17, and shortselling in Citigroup's shares contributed to the collapsing stock. See the 3 graphs setup to show the influence of credit default swaps on short selling, and the on share price for Morgan Stanley. On Monday November 24, the government announced a rescue plan for Citigroup. That the uptick rule has not been reinstated as yet, means that when one looks back at this period a few years from now it will show errors in handling this economic and financial markets crisis were made, different from that in the 1930's, but with serious consequences. ...

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Largest drone and missile attacks on Kviv and Lviv of the war on August 20 2025 soon after DJT meeting with Putin in Alaska and EU leaders meeting at White House. This has raised concerns that Russia is not seriously working to end the war. The lack of EU peacekeeping force acceptance by Russia poses serious obstacles to Ukraine or the EU supporting an agreement that has no safeguards. It means the war may continue for some time till both sides see no gains from continuing the war. Russia's position at this time is that territorial changes need to be made in eastern region.

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Starmer's visit to China and the result being halving of tariffs- it comes 8 years after Theresa May's visit 2018.  Starmer is following his intution  to set an independent course for Brtian's foreign policy. It makes sense as the US is using common sense in coming back to basics, to getting its own hemisphere policies right. How could there be a situation like that in Venezuela and Mexico as with the drug cartels operating as states within states- what would Teddy Roosevelt say about this? So we now have the Monroe Doctrine, the return of the Panama Canal, the restructuring of the oil industry in Venezuela, and other action. This also means Canada and UK, India, European Union can pursue policies that are common sense. It means for Britain a new openness with China after 8 years inward looking with Austerity, Brexit and Covid. For a smaller economy it makes sense for Britain to have agreements on trade as it signed with India, and now with China. Carney, Starmer and soon Merz will have worked out relations with China on trade and exchanges. For Europe and the US over concentration of making goods in China can be corrected while still engaging with China. For the EU the visits Germany's Merz made to the kite festival an India and Leyen/Costa of the EU following up with trade agreements are all part of common sense to not just reduce over concentration in China, but also to build a new partnership with India to form a 2 billion people market. All of which happened suddenly as European nations realized how to work out new arrangements following the war with Russia over Ukraine and China's support for Russia, taking up the cues from DJT common sense action in its backyard. "I'm a pragmatist, a British pragmatist, applying common sense," the prime minister tells BBC on the plane and says he wants to "make Britain face outwards again."  ...

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Steve Bannon is described in this indepth report by Scott Shane as a workaholic, born to working class family with his father a telephone line operator, who went to Virginia Tech and joined the Navy in the hope of advancing a career in politics. At Virginia Tech he won a leadership position of the student organization. He was described by another student who knew him well as passionate but not likely to get much done. The period at Virginia Tech and in the Navy were the Carter years followed by election of Ronald Reagan. The election of Reagan had a huge influence on Bannon- the same overtones of that campaign of Reagan are seen today in the forgotten men and women, white working class families that Conservatives then and Tea Party Conservatives in the Obama years felt ignored. The downward drift of the lower middle class families that saw incomes drop as manufacturing hollowed out in the U.S. with foreign competition, the failure of establishment politicians of both parties to protect American manufacturing and working class families, added to the sense of angst for Bannon. Bannon just like politicians in the Obama camp such as Emmanuel, found the way to politics through finance and gains made as the banking sector and financial institutions made huge financial gains by 2008. This was a stepping stone for their political ambitions. Emmanuel who is also a workaholic and passionate about his views worked to elect a black president, Bannon choosing to do the opposite and push for bringing back the Reagan era. Most on the liberal side see him as part of a racist movement. Reagan was none of those things. How does one reconcile the two? It is possible that seeing the fight against the established politics as an impossible task, Bannon in his passionate temperament did not object to the support of right wing extremists, in the same way that Trump did. As both Trump and Bannon have people of Jewish origin and black people in their circle of friends or family. What incensed Bannon as described here by Scott Shane of the NYT, was that after the financial crisis of 2008, hardly any bank executives who had committed wrongdoing went to jail, his father's line operator retirement savings were devastated by the financial crisis, and working class families struggled harder than ever, that his daughter at West Point was with mostly children of working class families who were the ones fighting America's wars. Many ironies abound in the story. Bannon got his business start in the same financial institutions that were involved in the financial crisis of 2008, Bannon & Co was acquired by Societe Generale. He is from an Irish Catholic working class family in Richmond and attended Benedictine High School, with a mother Doris that worked on the campaign to elect Douglas Wilder, a Democrat, as the first African American governor of Virgina.  The other ironies are in that Bannon sees Trump as "an imperfect vessel" but still good enough, and Trump sees himself as "making all the decisions" when asked about Bannon, as a range of interests struggle to form a coherent movement on the right in American politics- an unlikely combination of a telephone operator's son and real estate magnate's son who built his own real estate business in luxury real estate towers far removed from ordinary men and women they represent. ...

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The problem of elites in the US controlling most of the wealth and funding of candidates is discussed in The Times by Matthew Syed. The distortions in the American system of democracy and lack of funding of infrastructure, basics of education, healthcare, and public services, the misallocation of capital by capital markets in the current state, a reversal of everything Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and FDR- Truman set out to do, that is a result of the current situation prevailing in America.

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In the middle of the pandemic US Congress approved $190 billion in aid to schools. Of this 20% was to be spent addressing learning loss for children. The pandemic period taking 50 million children out of schools is now seen as the biggest disruption in history of American education. It set student progress in math and education back by two decades and widened the gap between wealthy and poor children. These learning gaps remain unaddressed even as money runs out in 2024.

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China chooses periodic blockades or air-sea coordinated exercizes around Taiwan's 12 mile waters as a strategy to respond to US Indo-Pacific strategy of keeping lanes of sea traffic and navigation on oceans open to all nations. This is seen as less risky than an outright invasion. Military exercises in August 2022 are seen as preparing for such a strategy.  The US is the destination for $541 billion and Europe $521 billion in products Made in China in 2021, which make China the manufacturing powerhouse in the world. Without the export of $1 trillion in Chinese products thousands of factories and millions of Chinese workers would remain idle. It is unbelievable that China is risking so much with its Taiwan policy with no idea of what the consequences would be years from now. It took China three decades after the gradual opening by 1990 and a willingness on the part of American and European governments and business to give up much of their own manufacturing leading to loss of jobs in communities across both America and Europe and much pain from this loss, for China to get to $1 trillion in exports. This situation may never come back as the supply chains shift and jobs return home and to countries that are becoming competitive in infrastructure and capabilities in Asia. Such competition between nations is not unknown as it was with Imperial Japan in the Pacific just 100 years back. The US maintains its position as keeping navigation on the oceans of the world open and rule of law, and it is on these foundations that China was able to get the strong manufacturing and exporting position it has now that no nation has enjoyed in history to this extent. Only the British come close in the nineteenth century. So much of China's progress in the twentieth century was a result of cooperation and support from America, from the first university Tsinghua in Beiijing, to the war against imperialist forces of Japan, to the rebuilding of China's manufacturing and technological competitiveness with American business cooperation. ...

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The U.S. faces a critical gap in its coronavirus effort - the lack of one centralized source of reliable quality data. What we have today says this report in WSJ, are many disparate sources of information, without any uniform set of rules, different chronologies, and lacking consistency, all feeding into national or global databases run by individuals or private organizations that lack the resources needed. Not  the centralized government source for quality data that is being used in other countries. This is the second of articles in the WSJ on this problem. The first was on the John Hopkins database run by students and a professor lacking the funding or the resources for such a critical task, dependent on disparate and multiple sources of information without any set of rules. Other sources at the University of Washington or run by private institutions face similar problems. The data coming out of these databases is only as good as the data going in, say experts. As a substitute for quality data from a centralized U.S. government source these sources cannot give the decision makers in states the confidence they need, and the federal public health decision makers the confidence they need in their decisions for reopening in stages, says this report in the WSJ. ...