1 Eurozone on brink of double dip (The Guardian) The eurozone is on the brink of following Britain into a double-dip recession after its economy shrank between April and June. GDP across the 17-nation bloc fell by 0.2% in the second quarter of this year and economists believe the downturn is continuing. Better-than-expected figures from Germany and France were offset by sharp contractions elsewhere, with the Spanish, Italian, Finnish and Portuguese economies all shrinking. The wider European Union also suffered a 0.2% contraction.
Europe's debt crisis is hitting exports, domestic sales and consumer confidence, adding to the pressure on European leaders. Tim Ohlenburg, senior economist at the Centre for Economics and Business Research, said Europe's woes, including plunging business sentiment and weakening trade, are dragging the world economy down.
The eurozone has avoided entering a technical recession, defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, because growth was flat over the first three months of 2012. Howard Archer of IHS Global Insight predicted that GDP will fall again during the current quarter. Archer said the eurozone was "struggling against tight fiscal policy in many countries, high and rising unemployment, muted global economic activity and ongoing serious sovereign debt tensions that weigh down on confidence and limit investment."
2 Advertising sector's 'big change' (BBC) The advertising industry has been transformed by social media, says David Jones, boss of global agency Havas. He said the development of the likes of Facebook and Twitter meant the sector needed to be more "open and collaborative". He also said that social media meant companies had to re-evaluate how they approached sponsorship deals.
In particular, he criticised Visa's sponsorship of the 2012 Olympic Games.Under the terms of Visa's exclusivity agreement with the games, its cards are the only ones which can be used to buy tickets, or are accepted at the Olympic venues. Mr Jones said this had annoyed people. Visa has declined to comment.
Thanks to social media, companies can now connect directly - and cheaply - with customers. Mr Jones denied that this meant that the advertising industry was becoming irrelevant. He said this was shown by the fact that the advertising sector now outperforms the wider economy, whereas it used to track it. Yet he admitted that social media was a risk for the very largest advertising companies who were not quick or nimble enough to react.
3 Whither does India go? (Krishna Pokharel in The Wall Street Journal) "Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour?" asked Jawaharlal Nehru on India's independence on August 15, 1947. Sixty-five years down the line, India is still aspiring to, and has yet to live up to the aspirations that Nehru said India should endeavor to achieve: "To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India. To fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease. To build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman."
But those words mainly address the second part of the question. The key to achieving these worthy goals lies with the answer to the first part of the question: Whither do we go? For Nehru, the answer to that question, as evident from his actions, was a socialist utopia that was also secular and democratic. For Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru’s mentor and father of the new nation, the answer to that question was an India that lived through "self-rule" of its villages and individuals. They had rather different answers to the same important question. But answers they had and they tried to steer the nation in the direction they thought fit.
The tragedy with today’s India is the lack of leaders who can answer the question "Whither do we go?", or answer it with any hope of taking large numbers of Indians along the road they propose with them.
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India and Pakistan; Neighbours in the dark (Mahir Ali in Khaleej Times) India and Pakistan have ostensibly followed different trajectories since independence, yet many of the problems they face are remarkably similar. Corruption, for instance — although Pakistan may have had something of a head start. Poverty, malnutrition and rapid population growth. The disparities in Pakistan are barely less grotesque. And wealth tends in both cases to trickle out rather than trickle down.
There’s something peculiarly schoolboy-ish about the clash between the executive and judiciary in Islamabad, but then there are a number of respects in which both Pakistan and India betray symptoms of juvenility. There are taboo areas; intellectual barriers that it’s considered unwise or unpatriotic to transgress. They revolve around matters of faith, interpretations of history, questions of territorial integrity.
It is not surprising that there should be unilluminated areas in a secular democracy, too, but surely the logical way of dispelling the darkness would be to bathe them in light? Perhaps one day the two of them will grow up, accept their shared history and immutable geography, and learn to coexist if not as the best of friends, then at least as congenial, cooperative neighbours. Perhaps.
5 India's tryst with destiny (Rahul Singh in Khaleej Times) Has India fulfilled that "tryst with destiny" that Nehru spoke of glowingly 65 years ago? Sadly, not yet. To gauge how far India has to go, one has to only look at China. In 1947, India was ahead of China in almost every parameter. Even as late as 1980, the gap between the two countries was small.
China started its big push over 30 years ago, a decade before India, when its leader declared that he did not care what the colour of a cat was, as long as it caught mice. The message was clear: Ideology would take the back seat. The country is almost fully literate and its healthcare system on a par with the developed world. To be sure, India scores over China as far as democracy and the rule of law goes. But it is only a matter of time before the Chinese government becomes more representative and accountable.
Economic power is usually reflected in the sporting arena. That is where the contrast with India is most glaring. At the just concluded London Olympics, China garnered the largest number of gold medals, almost 40, of any country except the USA. And India’s medal count? Six, not one of them gold! That says it all.
6 Creepy corpse business in South Africa (The Sowetan) For R50, unscrupulous undertakers can buy a list of all the patients who died at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital the night before. Mortuary staff at the hospital - the biggest on the continent - are accused of colluding with unregistered funeral undertakers, who, using the list, approach families of the deceased to sell them funeral packages even before the hospital has notified the family of the death.
This practice has enraged the Soweto region of the South African Funeral Practitioners Association, which said the practice had come to its attention. The association added that this was tarnishing the image of legal undertakers. An undertaker, who refused to be named, said undertakers camp at the hospital and wait for the night shift staff to give them the lists of those who had died. They then use the list, which has next-of-kin details, to contact the families of the dead. They offer them burial packages, with many extras they fail to provide.
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