1 San Francisco Chronicle reporting that income for top 1% grew 275% from 1979 to 2007. Between 1979 and 2007, the report, culled from IRS data, found: Income for the top 1 percent of US households grew by 275%, four times the increase for the next highest group, and 15 times that of the lowest income group. As higher-income households saw their share of the national income pie rise, lower income households saw theirs fall. The top fifth of the population saw a 10 percent increase in their share of after-tax income, most of it going to the top 1 percent. "All other groups saw their shares decline by 2 to 3 percentage points."
2 San Francisco Chronicle on Steve Jobs wanting Apple to avoid the Walt Disney trap. Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, at a memorial tribute to Steve Jobs at the company's campus last week, shared a piece of advice Jobs gave him before his death on Oct. 5. "Among his last advice he had for me, and for all of you, was to never ask what he would do. 'Just do what's right,' " Cook said. Jobs wanted Apple to avoid the trap that Walt Disney Co. fell into after the death of its iconic founder, Cook said, where "everyone spent all their time thinking and talking about what Walt would do." Walt Disney was surrounded by a cadre of creative people who were every bit the equal of Jobs' lieutenants, but they became haunted by the question, 'What would Walt do?' "
3 Muammar Gaddafi’s driver Huneish Nasr on the dictator’s last moments, in The Guardian. Huneish Nasr last saw the boss he served for 30 years standing in the ruins of Sirte looking confused as all hell broke loose around them. "Everything was exploding," said Nasr, Muammar Gaddafi’s personal driver, recalling the moments before the deposed dictator was caught last week. "The revolutionaries were coming for us. He wasn't scared, but he didn't seem to know what to do. It was the only time I ever saw him like that." Nasr said he threw his hands up in surrender as gun-toting rebels approached. He was knocked to the ground with a rifle butt, which blackened his left eye. Gaddafi was being pulled from a drainpipe just before Nasr fell. He caught a final glimpse of his master being swarmed over by rebels. Then blows rained down on them both.
Nasr said he spent the last five days of the siege with Gaddafi, moving from house to house to evade fighters. Still wearing the blood-spattered purple checked shirt he wore last Thursday when Gaddafi was killed, Nasr, a man in his mid-60s, said his former boss could not seem to grasp what was unfolding around him. "He was strange," said Nasr. "He was always standing still and looking to the west. I didn't see fear in him. I was with him for 30 years and I swear by God that I never saw any bad behaviour in him. He was always just the boss. He treated me well," he added. Like many of the members of the tyrant's inner court, Nasr came from the Gaddafi tribe. Without the tribal name – and decades of service – he would have been unlikely to have won a place at his master's side during the final days. In the early hours of Tuesday, Gaddafi's loyal driver was thrown in the back of a van and driven deep into the desert with a handful of others. He saw his former boss lowered into an unmarked grave and covered with sand. It was a fate he never expected for a man he had seen as infallible. Nasr's own fate is far less certain.
4 The Guardian on Yemeni women burning veils. Hundreds of Yemeni women set fire to veils on Wednesday in protest at the government's crackdown on demonstrators, after overnight clashes in the capital and another city left 25 people dead. The women spread a black cloth across a main street in Sana'a and threw their full-body veils, known as makrama, on to a pile, sprayed it with oil and set it ablaze. As the flames rose, they chanted: "Who protects Yemeni women from the crimes of the thugs?" Women have taken a key role in the uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh's authoritarian rule. This month the Yemeni activist Tawakkul Karman was awarded the Nobel peace prize along with two Liberian women, for their struggle for women's rights. Wednesday's protest was not related to women's rights or issues surrounding the Islamic veil. The act of burning their clothing is a symbolic Bedouin gesture signifying an appeal to tribesmen for help, in this case to stop the attacks on the protesters.
5 The Guardian’s report that the world may miss economic benefits of 1.8 billion people. The world is in danger of missing a golden opportunity for development and economic growth, a "demographic dividend", as the largest cohort of young people ever known see their most economically productive years wasted, a major UN population report has warned. The potential economic benefits of having such a large global population of young people will go unfulfilled, as a generation suffers from a lack of education, and investment in infrastructure and job creation, the authors said. World population is close to crossing 7 billion. Of this 7 billion, 1.8 billion are aged between 10 and 24, and 90% of those live in the developing world.
6 The Guardian report about Rajat Gupta being accused of running an instant messaging service with Raj Rajaratnam. Prosecutors said Gupta had provided disgraced trader Raj Rajaratnam with an "instant messaging" service from inside some of America's most esteemed boardrooms. The indictment accuses Gupta of entering into an insider arrangement with Rajaratnam, founder of the hedge fund Galleon Group. Rajaratnam was sentenced to 11 years in jail for insider dealing offences this month. Best known as the former head of consultancy group McKinsey, where he worked for 34 years, Gupta was in the upper echelons of the corporate establishment in America, courted as a non-executive director by some of the biggest companies in the world. As well as Goldman Sachs, past directorships also include Procter & Gamble and the parent company of American Airlines. The charges against Gupta carry a maximum sentence of 105 years imprisonment and are part of a crackdown on Wall Street.
7 George Soros comparing Eurozone problem to collapse of USSR, on BBC. Soros said both cases had the same air of disintegration. He also said that the "plan", as we understand it, might get the single currency through the next three months, but it would not tackle the underlying problems. Growth was a massive problem. And they were going to have to write off a lot more Greek sovereign debt - not just the bonds held by private investors.
8 Khaleej Times querying, ‘Do you honour your parents?’ Not so long ago it would have been unthinkable for a grown up child to place his parents in a home and move on. The cultural ingraining over centuries in Asia and the Middle East would forbid the thought. Yet, as technology and the nuclear family kick in the unthinkable slowly creeps onto the cards. It is more practical to put aging parents into a home with facilities, it gets them better medical attention, they have company, they are not at the mercy of their children’s whim nor are they parcelled off to another offspring every six months. All these are fairly good reasons and none of them goes against logic nor do they indict anyone for loving their parents less. Parental dignity can be placed on hock by uncaring children who do not want their lifestyle curtailed. They then are a liability. But, can you do it?
9 The Wall Street Journal about scores of hotel-owing Patels scarred by debts. Alkesh Patel, a 44-year-old immigrant from India, borrowed about $5 million to open the Best Western Plus motel on Main Street in this city of 17,500 north of Portland, Ore. Five years later, Mr. Patel still works the front desk with his wife, chats with the housekeeping staff and helps do laundry while making the morning rounds, much as family members have done at other motels nearby for two decades. But Mr. Patel doesn't own the Best Western anymore. The bank that lent him the money failed in 2008, and his loan was sold to one of the many investment firms specializing in buying distressed assets from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in the wake of the financial crisis. The new owners of the loan demanded $3 million in repayment. Mr. Patel didn't have it, so the owners foreclosed. Mr. Patel's comedown from property owner to hired help is part of a commercial real-estate slowdown that has swept through the roadside lodging business in the US. About half of the nation's 50,000 motels are owned or controlled by immigrants who trace their origin to the state of Gujarat in western India, many with the last name Patel.
10 The Wall Street Journal on Tibetans setting foot on smuggled home soil. Many Tibetans living in exile have long harbored the desire to set foot on Tibetan soil. On Wednesday morning, Tibetans based in the Indian hill town of Dharamsala did just that. And they didn’t have to go very far: Tibetan soil was brought to their doorstep, courtesy of Tenzing Rigdol, a New York-based artist. Mr. Rigdol arranged for 20 tons of soil to be smuggled from Chinese-controlled Tibet to the Dharamsala area, where it was stored in a secret location. By Wednesday morning, in a surprise stunt, the soil had been laid out on a stage in a basketball court, ready to be walked over by Tibetan exiles.
11 The Wall Street Journal on China’s shadow banking as the next sub-prime. We’re still cleaning up the mess from the massive debt-fuelled housing bubble in the US when suddenly we’ve got to deal with Europe’s public finances. We haven’t even gotten started on that one when a third debt debacle starts rumbling, in China. We all know by now the standard-issue worry about China — too much debt-fuelled building too fast, raising the risk of a hard landing. There’s an additional wrinkle to the story, too, one that might be more worrying, as it has a bit of the feel of the sub-prime mortgage debacle that took down the global economy just a few years ago. We’re talking about a large, off-balance-sheet world of debt, China’s “shadow banking” system, which has grown to make up about 22% of all new financing in China, Barclays Capital reports.
12 The Dawn on Japan battling a falling birth rate. Companies have been urged to give their employees more time off to procreate; shops have offered discounts for larger families; and the government has introduced child allowances to lift the birth rate. Yet try as it may, Japan appears unable to stop its inexorable slide into long-term population decline. The long-term trend points to an accelerated decline. The current population will dip below 100 million in 2046, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Tokyo, before sinking to below 45 million in 2105.
13 Swaminathan Aiyar arguing in The Economic Times that even flawed crusaders (like Team Anna Hazare) can win. If Tamil Nadu leader Jayalalithaa with her dreadful record can be viewed by voters as a means to oust the corrupt DMK, then clearly India is fertile territory even for flawed crusaders.
14 Business Line quoting Shoppers Stop and Future Group officials, stating Diwali fizzled out on poor consumer sentiment. (Good old news reporting without attempting to weave in a growth angle or a feel-good twist.)
15 Business Line editorial on the Reserve Bank of India being a one-trick pony. If raising interest rates is the only trick a pony knows, there is no telling how much money would cost in India, even as elsewhere in the world its price nears zero.
16 The International Herald Tribune on falling prices angering Chinese homeowners. Property owners in Shanghai and other big Chinese cities are protesting as measures to cool the once-overheated real estate market prompt developers to cut prices. There is worry that the market could collapse, angering many middle-class owners who put their savings into property, expecting prices would only rise. Upset home buyers gathered outside a developer's sales office in central Shanghai over the weekend, demanding refunds after learning of the discounts now being offered. The state news media reported similar gatherings in other cities over efforts by property companies to trim inventories of unsold homes by offering discounts of as much as 40% from recent prices. Smaller cities are still booming, thanks to a gradual shift of investment inland from the coastal areas, said Xue Jianxiong, an analyst. “There will be an even more serious correction in the future, when the smaller cities see growth weaken due to the impact of the debt crisis on exports.There could be a drop of up to 50%”, Mr Xue said.
17 Mint quick edit on the Centre raising minimum support price of wheat on the same day that RBI raised policy rates by 25 basis points. No better recipe for food inflation, it says.
18 Financial Chronicle cartoon showing RBI governor D Subbarao saying, “We are hoping to wish you a happy X-mas if not a happy Diwali”.
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