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Fannie Mae will make a payment of $59.4 billion to the U.S.Treasury as a result of improvement of conditions in the housing markets that enable Fannie to writeup the value of devalued assets on its balance sheet. Fannie showed a profit of $8.1 billion for the first quarter of 2013 from its activities of guaranteeing and investing in home loans in the U.S. In 2008 the U.S. government bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the agencies received $117 billion in government assistance since then. With this $59.4 billion about $95 billion has been paid back to the U.S. Treasury. This also delays the debt ceiling deadline to Oct. 1, 2013 by generating more revenues for the U.S. Treasury in addition to higher tax revenues.

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Ji Chaozhu, immigrated to the U.S. during the Japanese invasion of China on the advice of Zhou Enlai. He studied in the U.S and returned to China in 1949. He was the main interpreter for the Chinese leaders in their meetings with American leaders from 1954-1979.

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Spending a minimum of 250,000 euros on a house in Greece gets an investor a five year renewable visa. Chinese investors seeking a European base are buying or constructing homes in Athens, and the islands of Santorini and Corfu. This is reviving the residential building market in Greece after years of bailouts by the European Central Bank. Chinese middle class investors see the presence of Chinese companies such as Cosco which owns part of the port of Piraeus as a sign it is safe to invest in Greece. Property prices dropped 40% in 2010. In 2018 prices went up by 2% and building permits by 10%, according to the Bank of Greece. Real estate investment was up 20% in 2018 with Chinese investment companies buying into whole apartment blocks in Athens to draw investors.

Greece had a record 33 million tourists in 2018. A 320 billion euros bailout ended in 2018. 

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A study done at the University of Wisconsin's Population Health Institute by health sciences professor, David Kindig and PhD candidate Erika Cheng, shows the impact of smoking, graduation rates, poor choices and availability of food, and incomes, in declining life spans of women in some parts of the U.S.

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The flow of the Amazon river in Colombia is reduced by 90%, an alarming sign after the lack of rainfall.

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Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist of the Romney campaign points to the Romney campaign's success in getting a majority of votes of people making over $50,000, a majority of white voters under 30 by a 7 point margin, winning the votes of a majority of America's middle class, and falling short of a win of the Electoral College by 320,000 votes. He says Obama turned Democratic party weaknesses of being too liberal and too dependent on minorities into advantages. The Pew Research Center and other expert opinion cited as the principal reaon for the defeat, Romneys failure to empathize with voters. He appeared callous in his image with Hispanic voters with his self-deportation stand, and similiarly his position on the auto bailout was shown as callous in a barrage of political ads by the Obama campaign in the midwestern states, the remark about the 47% dependent on government help simply reinforced this notion of being insensitive to concerns of the less affluent. The candidate never succeeded in shaking off impressions in the minds of voters of being a private equity executive who could not empathize with weaker sections of the community, which were reinforced by heavy negative advertising in the 2012 election. Stevens says nothing about the short sightedness of a callous immigration policy of self-deportation adopted by a former governor of Massachusetts, in the face of Census statistics showing more children of minorities, especially Hispanics, born each year than children of any other demographic group in the U.S. The changing demographics may have made a crucial difference in many states....

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Dionne,Jr., says the failure of the "supercommittee" to reach a deal would not be a failure at all if it leads to a flawed deal that does not generate enough revenues, such as the $300 billion in tax increases proposed by Jeb Hensarling. If the deal also makes 90% of the Bush tax cuts permanent this would make deficit reduction harder. Under such terms not reaching a deal, and having automatic reductions triggered by that outcome may be the preferred outcome, says Dionne,Jr.

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The walkoff grand slam hit by Freddie Freeman in the last minutes of the 1st game in the American baseball World Series between finalists NY Yankees and LA Dodgers, a great sports rivalry since 1941. The great hitter Joe DiMaggio of the Yankees even made it into literary fame in Ernest Hemingway's nostalgic stories of an aging sailor in Cuba remembering Yankee hitter DiMaggio's grit and persistence in Old Man and the Sea.

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Gordon Brown before a packed room of foreign journalists enjoys a brief moment of satisfaction as he reminds a Swedish reporter who asks him if he is Flash Gordon, "no, just Gordon, just Gordon" and his whole face lights up. Running for public office he says means you take the ups and downs with equanimity.

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Petrobras plans a public offering of shares in September 2010 to raise money for a capital increase. This will finance its large offshore drilling investment plans.

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Living with Uncertainty and knowing one will not know what lies ahead, one will be ignorant much of the time, acceptance of death as inevitable, is part of living. 

Physicist Feynmann says-

“I’m smart enough to know I’m dumb”, Feynmann, saying: “I can live with doubt, uncertainty and not knowing.” He accepted a lack of understanding a certain level of ignorance about what the future will bring. In 1910 no one thought there would be a world war and pandemic in 2 years, we did not know that the pandemic was a year away in 2018.

The Bible and Bhagavad Gita have admonitions about this. Wisdom is knowing that we lack the understanding and knowledge of the universe, that there is something else we call Spirit that guides the world and what is called the Imperishable Brahman that is within us and pervades all.