Barack Obama bounces back; When poll donation hardly pays; Brits and the taste for invasion; Generation of 'supercentenarians'; White skin and Pakistan

1 Barack Obama bounces back (BBC) US President Barack Obama has been re-elected to a second term, defeating Republican challenger Mitt Romney. With results in from most states, America's first black president has secured the 270 votes in the electoral college needed to win the race. Mr Obama prevailed despite lingering dissatisfaction with the economy and a well-funded challenge by Mr Romney. With swing states Virginia, Florida and Colorado still too close to call, Mr Obama has won 281 electoral votes to Mr Romney's 203.

Under the US constitution, each state is given a number of electoral votes in rough proportion to its population. The candidate who wins 270 electoral votes - by prevailing in the mostly winner-take-all state contests - becomes president. The popular vote, which is symbolically and politically important but not decisive in the race, remains too close to call.

On Tuesday, the president held the White House by assembling solid Democratic states and a number of important swing states such as Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. His narrow victory in Ohio, a critical Mid-Western swing state, sealed the victory. Mr Romney won North Carolina and Indiana, two states Mr Obama won in 2008, as well as the solid Republican states. But he was unable to win in Ohio or other states needed to breach the 270 threshold.

2 When poll donation hardly pays (Eduardo Porter in The New York Times) The most expensive election campaign in American history is over. Executives across America can now begin to assess what their companies will get in return for the roughly $2 billion spent by business interests. Regardless of the outcome, the conclusion is likely to be not very much. From the point of view of shareholders, corporate contributions will probably turn out to be, at best, a waste of money. At worst, they could undermine their companies’ performance for a long time.

As Wall Street knows well, the pitfalls of political spending start with picking the wrong horse: the financiers who broke so decisively for Barack Obama in 2008 changed their minds after the president started labeling them fat cats and supported a financial reform law they hate. This time they put $20 million in the campaign of Mitt Romney, more than three times what they contributed to President Obama’s re-election. 

A study published last summer by scholars at Rice University and Long Island University looked at nearly 1,000 firms in the Standard & Poor’s 1,500-stock composite index between 1998 and 2008 and found that most companies that spent on politics — including lobbying and campaign donations — had lower stock market returns.

3 London jobs fall to lowest in 20 years (Simon Bowers in The Guardian) City job numbers are expected to fall to their lowest level in two decades next year as banks and investment houses continue to make deep cuts to ailing operations, according to a study. The number of people employed in the financial sector in London, excluding most accountants and lawyers, has already sunk below 250,000 this year, 11% down from last year. It was more than 350,000 before the financial crisis struck.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) suggests the City is being forced to shed jobs against a backdrop of depressed trading in currencies, gilts and equities, as well as a sustained drought in corporate mergers and acquisitions. The thinktank predicts the tally will fall again next year, to 237,036, before stabilising. The last time the City employed that few financial workers was 1993. Last month PwC's joint survey of the finance industry, in conjunction with the CBI, found 60% of banks reporting lower headcount for the three months to the end of September.

Last week UBS announced up to 3,000 posts would go at its London offices, part of a wider cull of 10,000 staff. Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank have also announced job cuts, while Barclays and Societe Generale have indicated they are looking at shrinking their respective investment banking operations.

4 Brits and the taste for invasion (Richard Seymour in The Guardian) The other countries must feel so left out. New research shows that practically everyone has been invaded by British troops at one point or another. A “staggering 90% of the world’s nations” have been overrun by the turbulent Brits – Sweden, Mongolia and the Vatican City are among the 22 to have been tragically overlooked.

If you think this is a facetious tone to adopt, it is nothing compared with the knockabout, what-a-larf tone of some of the coverage that has been lavished on this new book. In a way, this is what the book set out to accomplish. As its author says, it is lighthearted fun, and it claims not to take a moral stance on Britain's empire.

The research certainly has some pedagogical value. For one thing, it shows the scope of empire's activities to extend well beyond the formal boundaries of the colonial sphere. It takes into account the activities of pirates and privateers acting on behalf of the crown just as much as invading armies. This does not just disclose the sheer scale of the enterprise of empire, shocking as it may be. It indicates that there may be much more to empires than the establishment of formal colonies, and that the time of empire may sprawl well beyond its previously delimited boundaries.

5 Generation of ‘supercentenarians’ (Rupert Jones in The Guardian) Britain's oldest man, Reg Dean, celebrated his 110th birthday on Sunday. But it may not be long before he is overtaken in the age stakes by a new breed of "supercentenarians". The boss of one of Britain's main financial bodies has revealed that several insurers are currently modelling pension products on the basis that their customers could reach the age of 120 or even 125.

Speaking to hundreds of actuaries at a conference, Otto Thoresen, director general of the Association of British Insurers, added that within our lifetime it will be "the norm" for people to live to 100 or more. But this, he said, threw up huge challenges in terms of getting people to save more for what may end up being a very long retirement. Life expectancy has been growing steadily for decades, and the government has already predicted that 27% of today's under-16s will reach 100 – a total of 3.3 million people.

Legal & General on Tuesday quoted Office for National Statistics data showing that the number of UK people aged 100 or more has increased five-fold – from 2,500 in 1980 to 12,640 in 2010 – and said that projections suggest the number of centenarians in the UK will exceed 160,000 by mid-2040.

6 White skin and Pakistan (Rafia Zakaria in Dawn) White skin, many claim, means a connection to an Aryan heritage, a direct relation to the conquering hordes who came thousands of years ago. It also means distance from the native Dravidian race — the small, dark people who inhabited the subcontinent and toiled for centuries along its rivers and mountains. Those dark people, it is assumed, are all on the other side of the border; being Pakistani means descent from Alexander and the Aryans.

If heroines and heroes are always white, villains are always dark. The ruling calculation of skin colour hence tabulated that what is dark is poor and dirty and what is white is pure and good; Pakistan is the land of the pure, and so we must all be white. In the past century, the racial creation of whiteness is located most recently in the ethic propagated by the Nazi regime in Hitler’s Germany. In the run-up to the Second World War, everyone in Germany wanted to look Aryan; it meant they were safe and belonged to the ruling race. They never came to the subcontinent to swell their ranks.

Recent American overtures have served to re-entrench Pakistan’s post-colonial ghosts: roads being used to supply foreign armies as they were before, borders deemed negligible when they come in the way of the geo-strategic ruminations of fair-skinned superpowers. But none of these impositions, all courtesy of the mostly white world, seem to have dulled the Pakistani obsession with fair skin. The reasons for this contradiction — a hatred of white people coupled with a reckless, limitless obsession to look like them — can only be speculated upon.

As Pakistani men search for their fair brides, and Pakistani children dream of fair princes and princesses, frowning confusedly at their own brown skin, they plant afresh the myth that to be good and strong they must also be white. As Pakistani girls bleach their skin, rubbing steroids and acids on their faces to strip them of pigment, they enact again the preoccupation of a nation unsure of its origins and its future. Without the creams and peels and ointments, the coloured skin will always grow back brown and resolute, begging to be loved and acknowledged but failing again and again.

Fears of a triple-dip recession; 'Most important week of 2012; Why darker women must be featured in ads; India monsoon may fail more often

1 Fears of a triple-dip recession (Josephine Moulds in The Guardian) Hopes the economy is on the road to recovery have been dampened by figures showing retail sales stalled last month and growth in Britain's services sector almost ground to a standstill. Britons shied away from spending on big-ticket and luxury items in October, leading to the weakest sales growth in almost a year, according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC). Meanwhile, expansion in the UK's services sector – which accounts for three-quarters of UK GDP – slowed to a crawl as new business failed to make up for projects completed during the month.

Chancellor George Osborne had seized on news last month that the economy emerged from double-dip recession, growing by 1% in the third quarter of 2012, as evidence that his policies had put Britain "on the right track". But early signs for the fourth quarter now suggest the economy could shrink again, raising the prospect of a triple-dip recession.

Rob Wood, an analyst at Berenberg Bank, said: "With manufacturing output suffering from weak exports and domestic demand, and the service sector flirting with contraction, a fall in GDP in the fourth quarter now looks most likely." The BRC said like-for-like sales fell 0.1% last month, compared with October last year. It was a crushing blow after September's figures, which showed growth of 1.5%, had raised hopes Britons had got used to austerity and were out spending again.

2 'Most important week of 2012' (Stephanie Flanders on BBC) In the City they've dubbed it "the most important week of the rest of 2012". You can see why. If you were feeling dramatic, you could say that more than half of global GDP will be "in play", one way or another. America will - we hope - decide on who will be its president for the next four years; the Chinese will start the formal handover to its new leaders, and the central banks of the eurozone and the UK will decide whether they need to do more to support their fragile economies. 

Put it another way: the next few days will help determine the long-term economic direction of countries accounting for just over a quarter of global output. Those central bank meetings will also set short-term economic policy for countries that are responsible for another third.
Oh yes, and the Greek parliament will also be voting (probably on Wednesday) on further budget cuts that will determine whether it can get the next 31bn-euro tranche of its European-IMF rescue package. With widespread defections, it looks like the government will pass these measures only with the tiniest of majorities, if at all.

3 Why darker women must be featured in ads (Shazia Mirza in Dawn) It’s a class, power, colonial and self esteem issue. The idea that if you’re white you have money, class, power, a better chance of a better class of husband and therefore, a better life. Traditionally people from lower castes were poorer people who worked in the fields and never married out of their castes, so produced generations of dark skinned children who struggled for progress. As time goes on, and people become better educated, this must change.

Women are destroying their beautiful bodies in an attempt to get lighter skin and tighter parts. Advertising is a huge problem, and in places like India and Pakistan, darker women need to be featured more in ad campaigns and magazines, but the self esteem of a nation must grow. Dark skinned women need to know that they are just as beautiful as light skinned. This extends to all parts of the world; I’ve noticed Beyoncé is turning more Michael Jackson by the day.

As we walked out of a shop we saw an Asian woman with a white face and black hair. My friend pointed her out to me and said, “Now she’s gone too far”. She was like a slightly tanned Father Christmas; it didn’t look right or attractive. Someone tell these women, people in the west are dying to have their tanned skin and they are beautiful just the way they are.

4 India monsoon may fail more often (Straits Times) The Indian monsoon is likely to fail more often in the next 200 years threatening food supplies, unless governments agree how to limit climate change, a study shows. The monsoon rains could collapse about every fifth year between 2150 and 2200 with continued global warming, blamed mainly on human burning of fossil fuels, and related shifts in tropical air flows, it said.

"Monsoon failure becomes much more frequent" as temperatures rise, Dr Anders Levermann, a professor of dynamics of the climate system and one of the authors at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said.

India's monsoon, which lasts from June to September, is vital for India's 1.2 billion people to grow crops such as rice, wheat and corn. India last faced a severe widespread drought in 2009 and had to import sugar, pushing global prices to 30-year highs.

5 Zapiro cartoon in Johannesburg Times on the US election

http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2011/06/13/zapiro-cartoons

Credit crisis returns to Europe; India can recover from economic torpor; Who killed the British high street?

1 Credit crisis returns to Europe (Floyd Norris in The New York Times) The credit crisis, which made it difficult if not impossible for companies and individuals to borrow during the worldwide recession, appears to have returned to Europe. In the euro area as a whole, the amount of credit outstanding has fallen to levels lower than they were a year ago, according to figures released last week by the European Central Bank. In some countries within the euro zone, including Italy and Spain, credit is falling at a faster rate now than it did during the first crisis.

The difficulty in obtaining credit seems likely to make it even harder for the countries that have been hurt the most to recover and begin to grow again. The figures show that while the ECB has relieved the immediate financial pressures on both governments and banks by making it easy for them to borrow, it has not managed to extend that easy credit to those who need money the most.

In Ireland and Spain, the easy credit helped to finance large housing bubbles, which then burst during the crisis. In both of those countries, the amount of outstanding loans rose at a pace above 30% a year at the peak of the cycle. A falling total of loans means that on a net basis, no new loans are being issued, although banks might be relending some of the money being repaid on old loans.

2 India can recover from economic torpor (Kenneth Rogoff in The Guardian) India’s recent fall from macroeconomic grace is a lamentable turn of events. After many years of outperformance, GDP growth has slowed sharply. Annual output will most likely rise by less than 5% this year, down from 6.8% in 2011 and 10.1% in 2010.

India's recent torpor has underpinned a remarkable shift in global opinion. And yet changes currently afoot might just turn things around. India's octogenarian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has recently awakened to the desperate need for renewed momentum. For a country as poor as India, only sustained rapid growth can lead to enduring development gains. India's poverty rate fell by half between 1981 and 2010, to just under 30% – a remarkable achievement. But faster-growing East Asia has experienced significantly greater progress, with the poverty rate falling from 77% to 14% over the same period.

Why has India's growth acceleration fizzled? For many years, India benefited from the long-lasting impact of economic liberalisation in the early 1990s. Back then, Singh, as finance minister, played a central role. He could count on the IMF – which had real policy leverage, owing to India's need for a bailout programme in 1991 – to provide external support to counter the huge internal obstacles to reform. Today, however, there is no external counterweight to the domestic political pressure that is stalling further liberalisation.

Some argue that central government paralysis is inevitable in a democracy of 1.2 billion people, and that the only way to re-energise India is to establish a looser confederation of its constituent states. Devolution would unshackle the economically more successful states. And, by combating the culture of aid dependency in economically weaker states, India's poorer regions might benefit in the long run as well.

As dysfunctional as a decentralised Europe seems to be these days, India might benefit from moving a few steps in that direction, even as Europe itself struggles to become more centralised. Devolution might sound unrealistic, but once upon a time so did the European Union. If Singh's new reform agenda is again blocked, perhaps it will be time for a more radical assessment.

3 Who killed the British high street? (The Guardian) In 2015 it was a parlour game; but by 2020, it was a serious worry, the subject of Commons debates. Who killed the British high street? What analysts had long warned of had finally come to pass. Once-handsome town centres were now a collage of pound shops and boarded-up fronts. Their only visitors were the elderly and the teenage: those without broadband on tap, or cars to get out to the A-road retail parks.

The high street wasn't killed by one blow, but by a series, some of which initially didn't seem so serious. There was the collapse of Woolworths at the start of the credit crunch. But looking back, 2012 was the turning point: the year when Clinton Cards, Blacks, Peacocks, Game and JJB Sports went under. Easily the biggest shock was Comet, which plunged into administration just weeks before Christmas, putting more than 6,000 jobs at risk.

Which meant that by 2020 the death of the high street was no longer hyperbole: it was a fact. And who was to blame? Poor managers, certainly. Too many British retailers focused on slashing costs rather than serving customers, a model that upmarket Apple spurned.

Some said the main culprit was George Osborne, for increasing public-sector unemployment and jacking up VAT. In those headwinds, who'd fork out for a new dishwasher? Others pointed to cash-starved councils, hungrier for car park fees than to take the long view on their commercial centres. Still others pointed out that a change of guard on the high street was inevitable: for too long Britain's economy had been based on buying and borrowing, not making and earning.

All were factors. But ultimately the British high street died of neglect, with no agency willing to map out a different future for it. The result was town centres standing desolate, even as former customers gave their cash to internet retailers rather more sophisticated in their tax planning than their sales advice. However convenient, shopping in 2020 was a cheerless business – and one in which more money ended up in fewer hands.

Sandy damage may be $50bn; 'Too big to fail' remains real; The co-branded employee; Great depression of individuals; Ganga -- sacred yet sullied

1 Sandy may have caused $50bn damage (The New York Times) Economic damages inflicted by Hurricane Sandy could reach $50 billion, according to new estimates that are more than double a previous forecast. Some economists warned that the storm could shave a half percentage point off the nation’s economic growth in the current quarter. Losses from the storm could total $30 billion to $50 billion, according to Eqecat, which tracks hurricanes and analyzes the damage they cause. On Monday, before the storm hit the East Coast, the firm estimated $10 billion to $20 billion in total economic damages.

Eqecat predicted that New York would bear 34% of the total economic losses, with New Jersey suffering 30%, Pennsylvania 20% and other states 16%. That includes all estimated losses, whether covered by insurance or not. The estimates and the share that will be covered by insurers are far from certain at this point, as government officials, property owners and insurance adjusters struggle to assess the destruction. 

2 ‘Too big to fail’ remains real (Simon Johnson in The New York Times) Prominent voices within the financial sector are increasingly insisting on one point: We have ended “too big to fail.” The idea is simple: through a combination of legislation (the Dodd-Frank legislation of 2010) and supportive regulation (particularly regarding how big banks would be handled in the event of “liquidation”), very large financial institutions are no longer perceived by investors to be too big to fail.

Unfortunately, while tempting, this idea is completely at odds with the facts. The market perception that some financial institutions are “too big to fail” is alive and well. If you want to remove that perception, you need to break up our biggest banks. In a paper prepared recently at the behest of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (Sifma), Federal Financial Analytics Inc. argues that “too big to fail” has effectively been ended.


You can theorize that “too big to fail” should have been removed by the recent reforms or will be eliminated by the passage of time. But as a practical matter “too big to fail” is still with us. Implicit government guarantee lowers the funding costs for very large financial institutions because investors are convinced that debt issued by these firms is less risky than, for example, debt issued by small and medium-size banks.  The point is to have multiple fail-safes in the system — do not rely on any one reform too much. You really do not know what will prove effective, particularly as the financial system continues to evolve and the nature of risks changes.

3 The co-branded employee (Alexandra Samuel in The Wall Street Journal) Meet your newest management headache: the co-branded employee. A growing number of professionals are using social media to build a personal, public identity—a brand of their own—based on their work. Think of an accountant who writes a widely read blog about auditing, or a sales associate who has attracted a big following online by tweeting out his store's latest deals.

Co-branded employees may exist largely below the radar now, but that's changing fast, and employers need to start preparing for the ever-greater challenges they pose for managers, co-workers and companies. Their activities can either complement a company's own brand image or clash with it. Companies that fail to make room for co-branded employees—or worse yet, embrace them without thinking through the implications—risk alienating or losing their best employees, or confusing or even burning their corporate brand. Part of this change is generational. Younger employees show up on the job with an existing social-media presence, which they aren't about to abandon—especially since they see their personal brands lasting longer than any single job or career.

Social-media services like LinkedIn and Facebook also encourage users to build networks and share their professional as well as personal expertise. And increasingly, companies are recognizing that these activities have a business value. When a management consultant leads a large LinkedIn group, he builds a valuable source of referrals and recruitment prospects; when a lawyer tweets the latest legal news, she positions her firm as the go-to experts in that field. How can an employer resist?

And yet, there is a downside: Co-branded employees can raise tough questions about how to contain their online activities—and how to compensate them. It also isn't easy for managers to balance responsibilities among the bloggers and non-bloggers within a team. And it takes an effort to make sure employees' brands align with the company's.

4 Great depression of individuals (Khaleej Times) Hefty bailouts by Western governments and quantitative easing by top central banks across the globe may have prevented developed economies from sinking into a depression, but at the individual level, the continuing recession is causing untold mental miseries for ordinary people. A report by the Health and Social Care Information Centre in the UK, based on a survey of 8,000 general practitioners, reveals that one out of every 10 persons in the country is suffering from depression.

Worryingly, over the past 12 months, the number of people suffering from depression has shot up from 4.9 million to 5.1 million in the UK, says the survey. Not surprisingly, Ed Miliband, the Labour party leader, described mental illness as “the biggest unaddressed health challenge of our age”, which “blights the lives of millions”. The Labour leader has called for a change of culture while dealing with mental health, as had happened with other illnesses — including cancer and Aids — that were considered taboo in the past.

The economic downturn of the past four years, along with the concomitant uncertainties of job losses and pay cuts, has undoubtedly had a devastating impact on millions of people, triggering a wave of mental diseases. Psychiatrists have warned of an epidemic of mental ailments in countries such as the UK. Experts also claim there is a well-established link between economic well-being and mental state; the poorer parts of the UK have more people suffering from such ailments than the economically vibrant regions. A recent Gallup poll in the US revealed that 31% of impoverished Americans said they have been diagnosed with depression at some point, as against just 15.8% of those who were not poor.

Carl Gustav Jung, the renowned Swiss psychologist and thinker, had once remarked that about a third of his patients suffered from no clinically definable neurosis, “but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives.” And this, he added, “can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.” Tough economic times apparently reflect this neurosis.

5 Ganga – sacred yet sullied (Neeta Lal in Khaleej Times) Gangajal – the “holy water” of the Ganges, the world’s most sacred river for Hindus — is revered like an elixir in Indian households. Despite a strong hold over the collective national psyche, it is surprising to note the sorry pass the country’s ‘national river’ has come to today. Its muddied waters — once glutinous and azure and full of plump fish — are a lethal cocktail of garbage waste, chemicals, sewage and human and livestock corpses. 

They are also the dumping ground for over 1.3 billion liters of sewage everyday. Over 50 tanneries, 10 textile mills and other industrial companies, it is estimated, shove 37 million gallons of waste per day into the river. Worse, the offenders get away unpunished — or with paltry fines at best — as there is no strict law to take them to task.

A welter of recent reports have underscored the grave dangers the Ganges’ water poses to human health. According to the National Cancer Registry Program, those living along the river’s banks are highly prone to cancer. Due to the relentless discharge of effluents into the river — including toxic industrial wastes such as arsenic, fluoride and other heavy metals — cases of gall bladder cancer among those inhabiting the river’s coasts are the second highest in the world, while those of prostate cancer are the highest in the country, says the program.

The freshly minted, state-sponsored ‘Mission Clean Ganga’ mandates an investment of Rs 15o billion over the next 10 years to cleanse the river. Failure to fulfill this goal, say ecologists, will not only create the world’s worst health disaster zone but also spike the momentum of India’s industrial and economic growth.

6 Pak girl killed for talking to boy (Dawn) A Pakistani couple killed their teenage daughter by pouring acid on her face and body after they caught her talking to a boy, police and a doctor said on Thursday. The parents of the 16-year-old confessed to police in Kotli, a town in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, that they attacked their daughter after she had spoke to the boy outside their house, said Mohammad Jahangir, a local doctor at the hospital where she was brought.

“There were third-degree burns on her scalp, face, eyes, nostrils, both arms, chest, foot and lower part of legs. Even her scalp bone was exposed,” he said, adding that the mother initially told the hospital their daughter tried to commit suicide. Police have arrested the parents.

Almost 1,000 women lost their lives last year in so-called “honour killings” in the conservative South Asian nation, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Activists say the actual number is much higher as most cases go unreported.