1 India services output
shrinks (Anant Vijay Kala in The Wall Street Journal) India's services sector
output in July contracted for the first time since October 2011 as new orders
declined amid weak economic conditions, fanning worries of a prolonged economic
slowdown. The seasonally adjusted HSBC Service
Sector Business Activity Index fell sharply to 47.9 in July from 51.7 in June.
A figure above 50 indicates an expansion in activity.
Indian authorities have
been hoping that an improvement in the services sector, which contributes about
60% to India's gross domestic product, would foster a recovery in the economy
that expanded at the slowest pace in a decade last fiscal year. Last week,
Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, on completion of a year in office, said
services sector growth this year would be as strong, if not better, than last
year. Services output had increased 7.1% in the last fiscal year ended March
31. However, the latest data underline worries that conditions in the services
sector are also deteriorating, damping prospects of an economic recovery.
Findings of a similar
survey by HSBC and Markit released last week showed India's manufacturing
growth remained extremely weak. The index to measure manufacturing activity was
at 50.1 in July, slower than June's 50.3 and marginally above the threshold
that separates expansion and contraction. HSBC Monday said new orders received
by services sector firms declined for the first time since April 2009.
2 Irony: Fleeing to
Russia to tell the truth (Eric Margolis in Khaleej Times) The dramatic revelations of fugitive whistleblower Edward
Snowden brings back sharp memories of Soviet-era dissidents, jailed, banished,
locked in foul psychiatric hospitals for daring to speak the truth. In
my day, those seeking justice and freedom used to defect from the East Bloc to
the United States and Britain. Now, ironically, we see a major defector, Edward
Snowden, fleeing to Russia.
While
the corporate-owned US news networks sugarcoat or obscure the NSA and
Afghanistan War scandals, it’s left to Russian TV (RT) to tell Americans the
facts. Who would have thought? We journalists used to mock Pravda and Trud as
party mouthpieces. Today, it’s the party line all the time from the big US
networks, online news, and newspapers. The Republican far right calls Snowden
and Manning traitors; some demand the death penalty.
We recall the horrific
case of a Chicago gang member Jose Padillo during 9/11 hysteria. In an order
signed by president George W. Bush, Padillo was accused on the flimsiest
grounds of being an enemy combatant and stripped of all legal rights. He was
held for over three years in solitary, tortured, sleep and sensory deprived,
and injected with psychotropic drugs. Padillo was broken physically and
mentally, then sent to prison for 17 years. Such a gruesome fate could await
Manning and Snowden.
Snowden
and Manning were, in my view, patriotic Americans warning their nation that its
ruling elite, obsessed with power and global hegemony, had veered way off
course and were violating the US Constitution. However foolhardy, they acted
with courage and honour.
3 Amazon's Bezos buys Washington Post (Christine Haughney in The New York Times) The Washington Post,
the newspaper whose reporting helped topple a president and inspired a
generation of journalists, is being sold for $250 million to the founder of
Amazon.com, Jeffrey P. Bezos, in a surprise deal that has shocked the industry.
Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company,
and the third generation of the Graham family to lead the paper, told the staff
about the sale late Monday afternoon. They had gathered together in the
newspaper’s auditorium at the behest of the publisher, Katharine Weymouth, his
niece.
“I, along with Katharine
Weymouth and our board of directors, decided to sell only after years of
familiar newspaper-industry challenges made us wonder if there might be another
owner who would be better for the Post”, Mr. Graham said. In the auditorium, he
closed his remarks by saying that nobody in the room should be sad — except, he
said, “for me.” The announcement was greeted by what many staff members
described as “shock,” a reaction shared in newsrooms across the country as one
of the crown jewels of newspapers was surrendered by one of the industry’s
royal families.
Mr. Graham stressed that
Mr. Bezos would purchase The Post in a personal capacity and not on behalf of
Amazon the company. The $250 million deal includes all of the publishing
businesses owned by The Washington Post Company. The sale, at a price that
would have been unthinkably low even a few years ago, represents the end of
eight decades of ownership by the Graham family of The Post since Eugene Meyer
bought The Post at auction on June 1, 1933. The Post’s daily circulation peaked
in 1993 with 832,332 average daily subscribers. But like most newspapers, it
has suffered greatly from circulation and advertising declines. By March, the
newspaper’s daily circulation had dropped to 474,767. The company became
pressed enough for cash that Ms. Weymouth announced in February that it was
looking to sell its flagship headquarters.
As of 2012, the newsroom, which once had more
than 1,000 employees, had fewer than 640. People there on Monday described the
mood as “somber” with “a lot of people kind of in disbelief.” Ken
Doctor, an analyst at Outsell, said that the Post sale reflected a broader
trend of newspaper ownership returning to local investors rather than large,
publicly traded enterprises. “Newspapers are not really much creatures of the
marketplace anymore,” said Mr. Doctor. “They’re not throwing off much in
profits. They need shelter from the pressure of quarterly financial statements
and reports.”
4 How to 3-D print a housekey (Caleb Garling in San Francisco
Chronicle) Most house keys are simply a piece metal, finely cut — and that’s
precisely what 3D printers are meant to mimic. Two MIT students David Lawrence
and Eric Van Albert have shown how they could easily replicate Schlage Primus
keys, a common high-security blank of key.
This isn’t the first time
keys have been replicated, but does remind us that most
keys are simple objects, and if you can decipher the code that goes into building
them, you can replicate them. Shapeways and i.Materialise allow people to
upload design files and then mail them the 3D printed finished product.
“In the past if you wanted a Primus key, you had to go through
Schlage. Now you just need the information contained in the key, and somewhere
to 3D-print it,” 21-year old Van Albert said. “You can take a high security
‘non-duplicatable’ key and basically take it to a virtual hardware store to get
it copied,” adds 20-year-old Lawrence.
Applications for 3D printing are creeping into all facets of our
lives — both good and bad. While craftspeople and DIY enthusiasts have new ways
to create objects straight from a CAD file, there are also applications that
have made people very uneasy. Cody Wilson has famously been working on a 3-D
printed gun, for instance. Scanners are the other half of 3D printing’s power —
being able to capture the dimensions of an object, turn it into a digital file
and then print it back off again. The two students claim that the keys can even
be replicated from a simple photograph. Keys may say “Do not replicate” at the
top, but that doesn’t mean people will listen.
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