Seeing electricity in water pipes; NFL players live longer than other men; Debt and rage of Athens 2004; Queen's speech hints at banking reform; Mexican wave against 'economic dictatorship'; Milk the faith, worship the cow; Asia youth entangled in social media

1 Seeing source of electricity in water pipes (The New York Times) The water that comes out of taps in New York City runs downhill 125 miles from the Catskill Mountains, every last drop the product of 19th-century genius and scheming that made the modern metropolis possible. Now comes a new proposition for what is arguably the world’s greatest urban water system: people are trying to figure out if, on its way to your shower, the water can also drive turbines and make electricity. “We’re not talking about building the Hoover Dam,” said Frank Zammataro, the president and founder of Rentricity Inc., a company that has installed small generators that create electricity from the flow in water systems in Keene, NH, and near Pittsburgh. If it works out, and there are many reasons it might not, hydroelectric power harvested from the city’s water mains could be a renewable source of carbon-free power, like solar and wind. But unlike those sources, this one would be completely predictable.

2 NFL players live longer than other men (The New York Times) The NFL is making some of its former players aware of a study that found that they are likely to live longer than men in the general population. The study was commissioned by the players union and was sent by the league Tuesday to men who played in the NFL before 1993. The study did not address the cognitive and mental health issues that have recently been linked to repeated blows to the head and that currently dominate the conversation about player safety. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Niosh) which conducted the study, said in its summary that it was now studying neurodegenerative causes of death among the same group.

The government study found a lower death rate among former NFL players than among men in the general population —  the institute had expected to find that 625 members of the group it studied would be dead based on estimates from the general population, but instead found that 334 of the retired players had died. Former players also had a lower rate of cancer-related deaths —  85 players died from the disease, compared with the 146 cancer-related deaths researchers at the institute expected. And the rate of deaths from heart disease was lower, too — 126 players died from heart disease; Niosh had expected 186 deaths.

3 News Corp net income up 47% (San Francisco Chronicle) Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the global media conglomerate under fire for phone hacking and alleged bribery in Britain, posted a 47% increase in third-quarter net income thanks to strong performances at its pay TV networks and its movie studio. The results beat analyst expectations. The company also announced it would buy back another $6.1 billion worth of shares in the coming year, a move that should bolster the share price. Shares jumped 97 cents, or 5%, to $20.35 in after-hours trading. Net income in the three months to March 31 rose to $937 million from $639 million a year ago.

4 Debt and rage of Athens 2004 (The Guardian) In the soft Attic light, Athens's Olympic sports complex does not look like such a bad place. Men and women jog gently under its great steel arches, athletes go in and out of its giant installations, cyclists race up and down its lanes. Just, one thinks, as it should be, eight years after the birthplace of the Olympics, the city that invented the greatest show on Earth, defied sceptics by holding its own "dream games". But then you notice little things. The clocks have stopped – along the corridors of endless basement offices, outside changing rooms beneath and around the site's velodrome.

Eight years after hosting the Games and as Greece prepares to light the flame ahead of London 2012 in Olympia, Athens's Olympic park, once billed as one of the most complete European athletics complexes, is no testimony to past glories. Instead, it is indicative of misplaced extravagance, desolation and despair.

No one quite knows how much the Olympic Games cost Greece – although many think they played a major role in producing the debt that spurred the country's economic downfall. The estimates vary even though a parliamentary committee is supposed to have announced a figure. The socialist Pasok party, which oversaw most of the preparations, believes they cost €6bn. The conservative New Democracy party thinks it is more like €10bn. And then there are people like Sofia Sakorafa, a former Pasok MP and champion javelin thrower who participated in two Olympic Games, who calculates the cost to be nearer €27bn.

5 Queen’s speech hints at banking reform (The Guardian) The government signalled its determination to press ahead with banking reform in the Queen’s speech but intends to provide more details on 14 June when George Osborne delivers his Mansion House speech. The white paper outlining how the government intends to force banks to erect a ringfence between their high street and investment divisions will be published alongside the chancellor's set-piece speech next month.

Kevin Burrowes, UK financial services leader at PwC, said: "Formally signalling intent to pursue ringfencing helps eliminate uncertainty but, in reality, the banks are already well aware this would be pursued by the government. All banks are already undertaking enormous changes to their business models in light of trading outlook and pressure to generate acceptable returns for investors for the increasing capital that has to be invested." In the speech, the Queen said that "measures will be brought forward to further strengthen regulation of the financial services sector and implement the recommendations of the independent commission on banking.

6 China’s imports, exports slow (BBC) China's export and import growth slowed in April raising fears about a sharp slowdown in its economy and triggering calls for monetary policy easing. Exports rose by 4.9% in April from a year earlier, down from the 8.9% annual growth seen in the previous month, a sign that global demand may be slowing. Meanwhile, imports rose just 0.3% on the year, down from 5.3% in March, indicating a fall in domestic demand. China has been trying to boost domestic consumption to rebalance its growth. "It is quite a revealing number. What we are seeing in China at the moment is an economy that is very much exposed to the global volatility," Alistair Thornton of IHS Global Insight in Beijing said.

7 A Mexican wave against ‘economic dictatorship’ (The Guardian) The recurring image of the indignados, the Spanish movement that protested against the ‘economic dictatorship of the markets’, is a kind of democratic Mexican wave of upraised, waving hands. This Saturday, May 12, the waving hands of the indignados will return to the plazas of Spain, and the Mexican wave will ripple outwards as part of a day of action for the 99% in hundreds of cities worldwide, from Athens to Santiago. The indignados grasped early on that the economic crisis was also a political crisis, and their struggle is for a fundamental renewal of democratic politics. While the markets can destroy livelihoods in milliseconds, the slow, halting meetings in the plazas, and the smaller local assemblies that spread from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, embody participatory democracy.

A three-day encampment is planned for this weekend in Plaza del Sol in Madrid and other Spanish squares to make visible their numbers and demands. These include ‘not one more euro to rescue the banks’, ‘quality education and health’ and ‘dignified and guaranteed housing’. This is in a context of palpable rising frustration among the general population, as a bailout for Spain looks ever more likely. Youth unemployment is over 50%, university fees doubled, and Bankia, a bank with assets that come to almost a third of the Spanish economy, is about to receive between 5bn euros and 10bn euros of public money. Meanwhile repression by the state is becoming increasingly fierce

8 The two faces of might (Rahul Singh in Khaleej Times) April 20 was a day of pride for India and, in particular, for the Indian armed forces. On that morning a 20-tonne missile, Agni V, was launched at a target 5,000 kms away. At about the same time as this proud achievement was being celebrated, an unseemly controversy was exploding within the army. But before going into that, a little background on the Indian armed forces is called for. Indian soldiers and officers fought valiantly as part of the British army in both World Wars. When India and Pakistan became independent countries in 1947, their armies were divided as a matter of course.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, an idealist and well-meaning pacifist, neglected the army, imagining that China, with whom there was a boundary dispute, would not escalate the issue. He was grievously wrong. In a brief war in the Himalayas, the poorly-equipped and unacclamitised Indian troops were badly defeated by the battle-hardened Chinese. Since then, Indians have, by and large, been proud of their armed forces for being non-political, unlike the Pakistan and Chinese armies, and an institution of integrity.

That reputation, however, has lately come into question. And the questioning has come from the present army chief, General VK Singh. He recently stunned the Indian public by claiming that in 2010, a senior retired General, Tejinder Singh, had offered him a bribe of Rs 14 crore (about $3 million) to approve a supply of imported sub-standard military trucks.

The matter is still playing out (the army chief retires at the end of May) but it has badly dented the image of the army. Earlier, two Indian generals were court-martialed over a land scam. Clearly, the rot runs deep. So, though celebrations over the success of Agni V are in order, introspection at the high-level corruption creeping into the Indian forces is also called for. The Indian media has often highlighted, with a touch of delight, the widespread corruption in the Pakistan army. Now, for a change, the Pakistani public and media must be having a good laugh – at India’s expense.

9 Milk the faith, worship the cow (Jawed Naqvi in Dawn) After intense debate in the constituent assembly between modernists and reactionary lobbyists the new Indian state agreed to encourage citizens to move away from the slaughter of the milch cow. The directive principle advocated by the founding fathers was a compromise of sorts between two rival political tendencies and not as forthright as, say, Mughal emperor Babar’s advice to his son to desist from cow slaughter in his kingdom lest it hurt his subjects’ feelings. And though the members of the constituent assembly may not have conclusively legislated to halt the cow slaughter practised by various social strata and regions of India they unwittingly ended up creating and even protecting a new milch cow, one with greater utility to the political elite. This milch cow assumed the identity of obscurantism and its conjoined twin, communalism.

Hindu-Muslim communalism in India has mutated from its purpose that prevailed prior to Independence. There is neither the foreign master to stoke it for social control, nor a feudal order that leans on its survival for its own sustenance. Its new users, ironically enough, are the beacons of hope for a new shining India — the astute corporate elite that is overwhelmingly upper caste, and their downstream urban offshoots. The rural sociology continues to get succour from levers of social control forged in caste, though vestiges of religious bigotry are not entirely absent.

In this suffocating climate, I was heartened to see the Supreme Court on Tuesday directing the central government to abolish the Haj subsidy for Muslims in 10 years and invest the amount — averaging over Rs 6.5bn a year for last five years — in education and other measures for social development of the minority community. However, the worry is that despite the Supreme Court’s bold initiative, the state will find a way to cultivate the religious order that has served its purposes so well. There is already a move under way to revive the old campaign to ban cow slaughter.

10 India grapples with Haj funding (The Wall Street Journal) The program was started by the government in 1993 when the practice of sending haj pilgrims by sea was suspended. Last year, nearly 125,000 Muslim pilgrims used the subsidy that cost the government six billion rupees ($120 million), according to official figures. Now, however, the program is in jeopardy after the Supreme Court ordered the government to gradually scrap its subsidy policy – a stance that some Muslim organizations agree with.

“A very large majority of Muslims would not be aware of the economics of their pilgrimage and if all the facts are made known a good many of them would not be very comfortable that their haj is funded to a substantial extent by the government,” the court said. Zafarul Islam Khan, the president of All India Muslim Majlis Mashawarat, one of the oldest Muslim organizations in India, said Muslims have “never demanded” the subsidy and “actually been asking for its withdrawal.” He said people from other religions don’t get subsidies for pilgrimages: “Why should we? We all are equal citizens of the country.”

11 Asia youth entangled in social media (The Wall Street Journal) Young people in Singapore and China may need a break from all the time they’re spending online. A recent survey of youths between the ages of 19 and 26 in Singapore, China and the US by advertising agency JWT found that more than half find it too demanding to keep up with their activities on Facebook, Twitter and the like. Managing their commitments on the social networks – which were designed in part to ease communication between people – is now becoming a chore, according to the survey’s results.

In China, nearly two thirds of those surveyed said they felt pressure to be in constant contact with various social media sites – most notably Qzone, weibo (microblogs) and Ren Ren – with 58% saying that this obligation to social media is stressful. More than half said that this stress has increased from just a year ago. The Chinese market is one of the most robust in the world for social media, and according to a survey by McKinsey released last month, 91% of Chinese respondents said they visited a social media site in the last six months.