LyrArc Article Gist
The need to increase the reading of non-fiction books. The problems with TikTok video, You Tube video and social media as distractions. Even Wikipedia reference is giving one bits and pieces of information. Only an effort to read and read books expands one's horizons and learning. The irony of getting a bachelor's degree at 22 years and then stopping reading except an occasional book across most of the people in the US, Europe, India and other nations.

LyrArc Article Gist
After a long year of frustration with a small faction of 20 Congressmen in the Republican party led by Mr Gaetz Mr. McCarthy is taking on this group as it seeks to oust him from the Speaker's position. He will need Democratic support. This report looks at the changing situation in the US Congress. America needs a bipartisan approach to tackle major problems of infrastructure, climate change, wages and the cost of living, and education. It does not make sense to allow a few members of Congress to thwart the nation's plans to tackle its problems and challenges.

LyrArc Article Gist
Mr. Boris Johnson resigns as member of parliament on June 8, 2023, with criticism of the Rishi Sunak Tory government. The Guardian shows the years in office 2019- 2022 of the man who took Britain out of the European Union, and his years in office during the pandemic. From 2016 to 2018 he was Foreign Secretary.  He was preceded by David Cameron of the Conservatives who setup a coalition government in 2010 with austerity policies till 2016, much of whose latter years as prime minister were overshadowed by Mr. Johnson leading the Brexit faction in the party and as Mayor of London. In 2023 with Britain under a cost of living crisis and in financial stress after the austerity years, this period looks like a lost decade for Britain- with the failure of its leaders under the Tories.

 

LyrArc Article Gist
Geetanjali Shree win the International Booker prize for the best fiction novel translated from other languages into English. Her book Reti Samadhi is about an older woman coping with the effects of the 1947 partition of India and has what Geetanjali Shree calls the meandering mind of women spanning 725 pages in Hindi. "Woman are stories in themselves, full of stirrings and whisperings that float in the wind, that bend with each blade of grass," says Shree in the opening pages of the novel. Shree writes about a teenager who goes through the traumatic experience of partition as a teenager and experiencing depression at an older age decides to confront the experience by going to the place where it happened a second time. Shree is from Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh (UP).  UP a Hindi speaking state is getting into the international field as the experiences of the region are being shared in other languages. It is now at the forefront of rapid development in India under the Modi administration and a state administration that sees India's largest state in an international context. Bringing Hindi, its tone and rhythm, and the style and exuberance of the author to a English reader, is a challenge that was handled well by Daisy Rockwell of the US. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Boris Johnson was never for austerity and says this in his new book, yet he failed to make the major investments in the British economy in the way Biden has done in the US, and in some ways has left Labor's Starmer with difficult decisions with the strained budget finances of Britain. Of the investments he protected from John Osborne and his austerity plans as chancellor under Cameron Boris Johnson says- “Those big investments – Crossrail, the Olympic site, the Westfield Centre at Shepherd’s Bush – were fortuitously timed for London: vast counter-cyclical programmes that kept the spades going into the ground and people in work.” This was as Mayor of London in 2016. Of Osborne and Cameron so little is left, and so little came out of the period of austerity other than the failed investments Britain failed to make, simply a lost decade for Britain. And the diversion of Brexit under Johnson not taking Britain to a good place for the standard of living of the British people. Of the intraparty conflicts in the Tories he says Sunak's resignation as chancellor should never have happened calling it "worse than a crime," and a mistake for Sunak, the party, and the country. Johnson says that many days as PM he would come back to No.10 flat, exhausted and working into the evening when he should have been talking to colleagues, MP's to keep them all together. After Sunak's resignation from Boris Johnson's cabinet the Tory Conservatives split further apart, this time in the Boris Johnson faction of the party. Sunak's elevation to prime minister was short lived ending up with the Tories going downhill from there.  On the singular goal that led to the splits- that of Brexit- Johnson has little more to say than that in his travels he had found people wanted more Britain. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Saudi Arabian deputy defense minister Prince Khalid says polls show Saudis younger than 30 years old favor improved relations with Israel. As a first step Israeli planes would be allowed to fly over Saudi Arabia and control over two islands in the region would be handed over to the Saudis.  President Biden as a candidate had concerns about human rights in Saudi Arabia. Following the war with Ukraine and improving Saudi Israel relations it now appears likely that this will have an impact in improving US relations with the Saudis. Prince Khalid visited Washington and William Burns has also visited the Middle East for the Biden administration as it seeks to get Saudi Arabia to increase oil production following the EU oil embargo on Russian oil.  Saudis under Prince Salman who heads the administration are pushing to modernize Saudi Arabia and build ties for a broader relationship with the world than the traditional ties in the Middle East of Arab countries.The Saudis are improving relations with India and India was the first country to ship vaccines to Saudi Arabia. UAE and Qatar have also improved relations with the Modi administration in India. With China  engaged in trade and technology friction with the US after US investment and aid to China during the last 2 decades and the long period of aid to China during the Japanese invasion, the US is building new relationships in Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East. The new Saudi US relationship would be different from that of the old Saudi relationship as Saudi remains a monarchy but under the new administration and a younger generation of Saudis sees itself as a modernizing influence in the region. Biden sees these new factors as it looks to rebuild relationships in Asia.   ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Jose de Cordoba of the WSJ provides this excellent story on the nature of the migration crisis in the U.S. that is creating political divisions in the U.S. What is causing this surge in migration to the U.S.? Cordoba provides some useful insights to understand the nature of this problem. Nine out of ten migrants in Guatemala which sends most of the migrants from Central America are moving north from Guatemala through Mexico to the U.S. for financial reasons, it points out. Only 10% are because of violence in the region, the rest for financial reasons according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration The jump in apprehension of Guatemalans at the American border shows a surge from 15,000 in 2007 to 236,000 in 9 months of 2019, according to U.S. government data. The surge began in 2008 and jumped in 2014 after U.S. court rulings that first required migrant children to be allowed to join relatives in the U.S. followed by a ruling in 2015 that allowed a parent to join the children and allowed court proceedings to take place that takes years. The result was that smugglers advertised on radio and families sold small plots of land to join relatives in the U.S. who had gone before them. The migration is also specific to certain areas hit by damage to crops, including coffee crop from drought, or certain towns that simply sent more people simply for financial reasons advertised openly.  For 8 hours of work a migrant could make at $12 per hour amount of $96 per day, in Guatemala the daily wage would be about $5.  Overwhelmingly it is financial reasons or economic opportunity that sends migrants north. After it became known that kids could help migration the people in family groups apprehended at the border jumped from about 40,000 in 2015 to 390,000 in fiscal 2019. Smugglers charge $8600 per adult and half that for a child and an adult that can be dropped off at a checkpoint. The efforts of president Trump to close the border to this migration include having Mexico sign an agreement to police its southern border with Guatemala using its newly setup National Guard. As a result the migration has actually surged in 2019 with migrants seeing this as their one last opportunity to join relatives in the U.S. or to migrate to the U.S. The Trump administration tried separating families because of the loophole in the law that allows children to be not deported and parents to join their children. But this created a public outcry and the effort now is to close the loophole in the law. It is also strange that as many migrants are coming from one town Joyabaj  with population 100,000 as from Guatemala City the capital population 2.5 million. In fact the economy has grown by 3.4 % a year in Guatemala and efforts have been made to improve conditions with the help of donor countries in the West for several years, though the drought conditions exist. The situation is similar to that in Europe. If one looks at the violence by gangs in central American region after the end of the guerilla wars and compares it to the wars in Syria and Iraq, one can see how humanitarian concerns preceded what eventually turned out tobe a full blown migration for economic reasons. Initially chancellor Merkel adopted a humanitarian stance but failed to recognize that there was another side to his situation that would attract a wave of economic migrants from places as far apart as North Africa to Afghanistan. Poverty has existed in these regions for many many years before the current migration, with drought and lack of economic opportunity going far back in time. Merkel only recently recognized this problem and the new CDU leader Kambrauer has clearly recognized this. CDU policy shifted in 2018-2019 with curbs on economic migration that has reduced it to a trickle. This process is underway in the U.S. at its border with Mexico and for Mexico with its border with Guatemala. In the short run Europe and the U.S. are paying a price. Not just in the way it has divided each country with a far left and a far right eroding the centrist parties that existed before. In some cases centrist parties that were popular on the right and the left now hve leaders from a far right or a far left faction within the centrist ruling parties. Boris Johnson in Britain, Trump in the U.S., leaders in Italy, Austria and Hungary. Or as in Germany and Spain new far left or far right parties causing the centrist parties to dwindle in influence or as in Germany this combined with a shift to the Green Party in Germany and Liberals Party in Britain as a show of disapproval for how the migration issue has been tackled.  The Economist in a July 2019 issue also points out that the country's own citizens have fared worse with migration. It shows how the Conservative Party's austerity cuts for welfare budgets was popular in Britain as long as eastern European migration at high levels in Britain were allowed starting with the Labour party under Blair. This disproportionately hurt the middle class and the poor after the hit already taken from the faulty banking caused recession. With the drop in migration it is now felt by a majority in Britain that the austerity cuts have just gone too far and a mood is set in to restore many of the cuts and fund public services. Meantime some of the damage has been done and will take a decade to correct as the issues that mangled the centrist parties and led to fragmentation on views of what society should look like have taken place with Brexit and high levels of poverty, income inequality in Britain, lack of investment in infrastructure with overallocation to tech with declining productive benefit for every additional dollar spent. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
The return of street bombings in Iraq by Al Quaeda affiliates leads to increased sectarian violence in 2013. Sunnis feel they are targeted as Iraqi government forces conduct searches following bombings, and issue residence cards for Sunni areas to prevent infiltration by Al Quaeda terrorists. Sunnis fear the formation of Shiite private militia groups.

LyrArc Article Gist
Bradley and Nabhan of the WSJ report from Quara Tepe in Iraq and the weak Iraqi military unable to control parts of the country from attacks by better armed and trained ISIS militants, some from the old Iraqi army before the U.S. invasion and others from the war in Syria. The failure of the Maliki government to bring together Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, as a new election apporaches and Maliki is likely to be elected for a third term. A divided parliament and the lack of U.S. presence after the withdrawal in 2011 at Malik's insistence. The U.S. has refrained from supplying the Iraqi military for fear of aggravating ethnic tensions, with the Sunnis saying Maliki is practicing ethnic cleansing under the guise of fighting terrorism. Under Maliki Iraqi airspace has been used to supply the Assad regime from Iran, according to some reports, making the U.S. wary of supplying the Iraqi military as it has little influence left.