LyrArc Article Gist
Germany protests the British government's efforts to pressure the Guardian newspaper to hand over documents leaked by Snowden on security surveillance.

LyrArc Article Gist
Christopher Lawton's interview with Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia Corporation, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Nokia will introduce a high end smart phone, the Lumia 900, at the C.E.S. gathering. Nokia has very little presence in the smartphone part of the business. In the third quarter of 2011, Nokia lost 39% of its global smartphone sales to the Apple iPhone and other competitors using the Android software. Elop says the Lumia offers a smoother experience and has social media integrated better in this product than rival smartphones. Asked about potential failure, Elop says Nokia will continue to learn from its experience and improve the product. He says Nokia is a 147 year old company and has reinvented itself in the past. He sees the competitive struggle in this business as similiar to a long marathon rather than a sprint.

LyrArc Article Gist
The India-Pakistan-Afghanistan issues are still framed in the old way in terms of communalism, cold war then and the war on terrorism now. These policies were a legacy of the colonial policies of an earlier empire designed to preserve foreign rule, with a policy of perpetuating divisions between communties on religious and other lines. Modernization, the spread of mass communications that makes possible the reduction of prejudice and division by assimilating different values and beliefs into acommon aspiration for progress and better living standards, and the spread of education, commerce, and technological progress, create the conditions that should put this behind us. Put behind us communalism, and the political and military structures of communal states. Pakistan needs to be transformed from a communal state with a military structure designed to preserve that state - resulting in conflicts with its neighbors- into a state that represents a community and a religion, but in all other ways seeks peaceful coexistence and economic integration with the rest of South Asia. A good example of this is Mexico with its own culture, language and religion (Spanish Catholicism), and Canada with its own bilingual French-English heritage and British political structures and allegiances, both arriving at an arrangement of peaceful coexistence and economic integration with the USA with its different political structures and culture and sporadic conflicts with Canada and Mexico. This has promoted the peaceful development of the North American region. The US involvement in the region can then be seen as a misguided effort that continued framing the region's differences in the old British way or in a cold war stereotyping, first with John Foster Dulles in the India-Pakistan conflicts, and then with Reagan in the Afghan anti-Soviet war. This has worked to exacerbate the conditions that led to slow progress in the drive for economic development, infrastructure building and modernization in all of South Asia. Just as in Europe, as in North America, the processes of economic development work best when a policy of inclusiveness and integration of different communities and people is followed. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Combined percentage of homes in foreclosure and delinquent homeowners is 14.41% or about 1 in 7 mortgage holders.

LyrArc Article Gist
Related to Mervy King's stand as Governor of the Bank of England about moral hazard, that if you let them off easy then these crises will recur and no penalty for excesses. But we can see that when this happens people who committed wrongdoing will be investigated, their reputations destroyed and the prospect of jail time.

LyrArc Article Gist
Though the numbers are relatively small about 450 migrants crossing in small boats to Britain, the strong response shows the political sensitivity to border crossing in Britain. Britain called on the Royal Navy to patrol the waters in the English Channel. This comes at a time when the issue of Brexit is dividing Britons. The Brexit referendum Leave vote benefitted from pictures of the migrant crossings into Europe from the Mediterranean. Placed on buses these posters were very effective in promoting the Leave campaign, even though at the time  the migration shown taking place was not into Britain but on the borders of Turkey, Greece, Hungary and Germany.