1 Coalition grows against IS (Straits Times) Three
more European countries on Friday promised warplanes to join the US-led air
armada battering Islamic State targets in Iraq, as coalition forces seek to
destroy the jihadists' oil business.
Britain, Belgium and Denmark approved plans to join
the war in the air, but Washington warned up to 15,000 "moderate"
rebels would need to be trained and armed to beat back the militants in Syria,
where they have set up their de facto capital.
The Pentagon said air strikes - which continued for
a fifth day in Syria - had disrupted lucrative oil-pumping operations that have
helped fund the militants, but that a final victory, perhaps years away, would
need local boots on the ground. The new European countries recruited to the
Iraq operation are expected to add a total of 19 fighter jets in the air
campaign over the country.
2 Saving eurozone through debt forgiveness (Bob
Swarup in The Guardian) The eurozone debt crisis never went away. It merely
acquired a misleading veneer of resolution thanks to grand promises, political
chest-thumping and frazzled financial markets that were desperate to believe in
happily ever after.
Today, there is an accentuated sense of deja vu.
Europe faces the spectre of deflation. Some members, such as Italy, have
toppled over the edge for the first time in more than half a century. Germany
threatens recession, and France is a basket case. Enter quantitative easing
(QE) as the white knight, as envisaged by the European Central Bank. This is
fast becoming a modern-day rain dance. QE is not a cure. It is a shot of
morphine that sedates an ailing patient while doctors figure out what to do in
the long term.
Europe has a singular problem. It has far too much
debt, and in a globalised world much of it is bound in a complex web,
particularly among the weaker economies – namely Portugal, Ireland, Italy,
Greece and Spain – and their main creditors: France, Germany, the UK and the
US.
This is a game of dominoes. Any solution that does
not involve large-scale debt forgiveness is doomed to failure. In the 1920s,
the Dawes plan - an ambitious scheme of credit easing to tackle the intractable
debts left by the first world war - fuelled an enormous bubble that ended in
the great depression, as the underlying reality of sovereign insolvency became
clear. It also created a fertile political climate for the nationalism that
ended so disastrously more than a decade later. Money is divisive when things
turn sour.
Here is a solution for Europe that tackles the root
cause. Write down the debt – not piecemeal, as events force you discordantly to
that realisation, but rather coordinated and on an ambitious Europe-wide scale.
This acknowledges that the system is saturated with debt, much of it bad, and
restores the capacity for future economic growth. This is not unprecedented.
The Brady bonds are an earlier example that successfully tackled the seemingly
intractable Latin American debt crises of the 1980s. Europe needs its own Brady
bond plan.
3 Smart phones, dumb people (Sushmita Bose in
Khaleej Times) My smarty-pants phone is synced in with Facebook, and,
apparently, one of my friends had posted something about her ‘birthday’ gifts
already arriving on her wall; so Smarty picked up on the cues and decided to
flag me, and I wished her on the wrong day. (Three days later, it again sent me
a reminder — this time, for the socially-correct date/occasion).
It’s all very unnerving, this tendency of trying to
second-guess in an attempt to make life easier for the customer — who is king
(or queen). They are saying that there will be a time, soon, when smartphones
will shape our thoughts, and one will be as smart as one’s smartphone is… we’ll
be, literally, walking the talk.
I am not of a fan of technology and I firmly believe
that Smarty and its ilk have had a dehumanising effect on homo sapiens, while
holding the species in thraldom. Having said that, I have to admit there have
been some rather nice interfaces. I’ve discovered an overtly social side to
myself thanks to apps like Whatsapp and BBM. And I’m infused with a false sense
of security about my filmmaking abilities when I create short snatches of
moving pictures on Story Maker; maybe smartphones make me delusional — but,
hey, more power to them.
Recently, I downloaded a free app (it actually
happened by chance, when I touched an icon above the one I had to touch in
order to play a round of Sudoku) that keeps track of the number of steps every
day. Alongside, it also calculates the number of calories I am expending.
Smartphones, in the palm of our hands, are a
manifestation of tech overtaking our lives. We’ve been copouts, willing
genuflectors, happy to be guided and auto prompted. A couple of days ago, I
read the bizarre findings of a survey: 77 per cent respondents (in a developing
market like India, so imagine how far gone the figures would be if it were a
developed one) said that, by 2025, they would have been to a house that speaks
to them and reads their mind. My hand is already talking to me. And reading my
mind.
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