US jobless lowest since 2008; Top ship fuel supplier goes bankrupt; The rise of unreason

1 US jobless lowest since 2008 (Heidi Moore in The Guardian) The US unemployment rate fell to its lowest level since 2008 on Friday, in a move hailed as a sign of progress by economists despite 9 million people remaining out of work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that the unemployment rate fell to 5.8%, as employers added 214,000 jobs in October. The industries that added the most jobs were “food services and drinking places, retail trade, and health care” the BLS said.

In its report, the BLS said that the number of unemployed has fallen by 1.2 million this year and the number of long-term unemployed has fallen by 1.1 million. Justin Wolfers, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for international economics, called the jobs numbers “a great report” and publicly hailed one of the BLS’s data points, the household survey, which suggested that 683,000 people found new jobs in October.

Others were sceptical of the household survey. “These data, remember, are much less reliable than the payroll numbers, and can’t be taken seriously month-to-month,” wrote Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics. Others warned about embracing too much optimism. The National Women’s Law Center, similarly, objected that most of the gains were jobs gains were in low-paying minimum-wage jobs.

One measure that economists put emphasis on is the “labor force participation rate,” which measures how many Americans are working as a percentage of the overall labor force. That percentage, a very low 62.8%, is nearly the lowest since the recession of 1978. Joblessness also shows stark differences by ethnic group. The black unemployment rate, at 10.9%, is more than double the white unemployment rate of 4.8%.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/07/us-unemployment-rate-falls-economy

2 Top ship fuel supplier goes bankrupt (BBC) The world's largest ship fuel supplier, OW Bunker, has filed for bankruptcy after alleged fraud. The company's troubles came to light earlier this week when it discovered suspected fraud by senior employees in a Singapore-based subsidiary. OW Bunker is Denmark's third-largest company and supplies 7% of the world's bunker fuel, used in shipping.

Shipping lines were trying to find alternative suppliers in the wake of the news. The company owes 13 banks $750m and says it cannot survive without new credit. OW Bunker's chairman, Niels Henrik Jensen, said in a statement: "It is now clear that such facilities will not be made available. Nor is a sale as a going concern a realistic option."

The company said it had discovered fraud by senior employees in its Singapore-based subsidiary, Dynamic Oil Trading. OW Bunker only became a public company this year when it joined Copenhagen's Nasdaq in March. Its float was a market highlight, the second biggest initial public offering of shares since 2010.

In October it published figures estimating a trading loss of $24.5m, but has now increased that to $150m. The alleged fraud at DOT is potentially one of the biggest financial market scandals to hit Singapore in 10 years.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29961566

3 The rise of unreason (Pervez Hoodbhoy in Dawn) Some 300 years ago the age of reason lifted Europe from darkness, ushering in modern science together with modern scientific attitudes. These soon spread across the world. But now, running hot on its heels is the age of unreason.

India’s prime minister recently proclaimed that the people of ancient India had known all about cosmetic surgery and reproductive genetics for thousands of years. Here’s his proof: “We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realise that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb.”  And a staggering number of Pakistanis believe that everything from quantum mechanics to black holes and genes were anticipated 1,400 years ago.

Once evidence becomes irrelevant, everything becomes possible. Take, for example, the question of whether Ram Janmabhoomi is actually the birthplace of Rama, the seventh avatar of Vishnu. Is this located precisely where Emperor Babar built the now-demolished Babri mosque? No conceivable archaeological evidence can adjudicate the matter. In fact it is impossible to establish on physical grounds the existence of Rama, much less the coordinates of his birthplace. But, the tragic events of Dec 6, 1992, owed to this belief. The scars of that terrible carnage have yet to heal.

It is not just South Asia where unreason is on the rise. The US, the centre of high science, is now struggling with various crackpot anti-science movements. However, determined opposition has kept astrology, creationism, UFOs, magnetic therapy, etc. away from the mainstream.

India has a strong Nehruvian past and Indian rationalists have strongly opposed so-called Vedic mathematics and cosmology, and revamping school curricula. The price has not been small. For example, Dr Narendra Achyut Dabholkar was murdered in Pune almost a year ago. He had helped draft the Anti-Jadu Tona Bill (Anti-Black Magic Bill) which political parties like the BJP and Shiv Sena opposed, claiming it would adversely affect Hindu culture, customs and traditions.

But nowhere in the world has unreason grown faster, and become more dangerous, than in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Polio workers here have shorter lives than soldiers in battle. More importantly, with schools, colleges, and universities actively working to crush young minds rather than enlighten them, this fight against unreason is surely going to be a much tougher one.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1142961/the-rise-of-unreason

ECB could pump €1tn into Eurozone; Obama seeks $3bn for air war against ISIS; Twenty five years after the German wall

1 ECB could pump €1trn into Eurozone (Angela Monaghan & Phillip Inman in The Guardian) The European Central Bank is ready to pump up to €1tn of fresh stimulus into the flagging eurozone economy to ward off a dangerous deflationary spiral, ECB president Mario Draghi has signalled.

Draghi said that the bank’s governing council was unanimously willing to announce more unconventional measures, signalling the possibility of creating electronic money – or quantitative easing – should a deteriorating economy make it necessary. “Should it become necessary to further address risks of too prolonged a period of low inflation, the governing council is unanimous in its commitment to using additional unconventional instruments within its mandate”, he said.

Eurozone inflation is 0.4%, far short of the central bank’s target of close to 2%. Separately, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned in a stinging report that France, Germany and Italy must agree to jolt the eurozone economy back to life or face a long period of low growth, low inflation and an increasing debt burden.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/06/european-central-bank-1-trillion-euro-eurozone-quantitative-easing

2 Obama seeks $3bn for air war against ISIS (Straits Times) US President Barack Obama will ask lawmakers for an additional $3.2 billion to pay for the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), including funds to train and arm Baghdad government forces, officials said on Thursday.

The funds will help cover the cost of replacing bombs in the weeks-long US-led air campaign against ISIS jihadists and assistance for Iraqi army troops and Kurdish forces battling the ISIS on the ground, two defence officials said.

The air war in Syria and Iraq - which commanders say could last years - has involved thousands of sorties and hundreds of bombing raids, at a daily cost of $8.3 million, according to the Pentagon. But independent analysts say the price tag is higher if the full cost of the air operations are taken into account, particularly numerous flights by sophisticated surveillance aircraft. According to the Pentagon, the air war - dubbed Operation Inherent Resolve - cost $580 million as of Oct 16.

http://www.straitstimes.com/news/world/united-states/story/obama-wants-414-billion-more-us-air-war-against-isis-officials-201411

3 Twenty five years after the German wall (Mahir Ali in Khaleej Times) It was 25 years ago this week that the wall came tumbling down. It didn’t exactly crumble until the bulldozers came to the party, but ordinary folks were able to begin chipping away at it with little danger of being shot down. No other structure defined the Cold War quite so solidly, and seemingly ineradicably.

Back in the early 1960s, when the wall was a novelty, young Germans got killed trying to climb over or dig under it. US president John F. Kennedy told his aides in 1961 that it wasn’t “a very nice solution, but a wall is a helluva lot better than a war”.

Just as the wall symbolised the Cold War, its downfall 28 years later was a crucial juncture in the remarkable transformation that occurred during the latter half of the 1980s, beginning with Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascent to the pinnacle of the Soviet hierarchy in 1985. Gorby, as he popularly became known in the West, had realised that the Soviet Union’s claim to being a workers’ paradise was substantially spurious.

The fact that many East European countries have veered to the opposite end of the ideological spectrum — with Hungary a clear example, while Poland and the Czech Republic have attracted ignominy by collaborating with the CIA’s extrajudicial activities — is one of many unfortunate consequences of the process that acquired unstoppable momentum 25 years ago this week.

And the existence, meanwhile, of pockets of nostalgia for the verities of the communist past across Eastern Europe and Russia is a reminder that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, making it necessary for the post-capitalist path to be delineated once more.

It’s been a largely unrewarding process so far. It is not inconceivable, though, that shocks to the system roughly equivalent to the demolition of the Berlin Wall could usher in a more constructive phase in the progress of the 21st century.

http://khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2014/November/opinion_November10.xml&section=opinion

Eurozone weakness continues; Downward mobility on the rise; Europe loses 421m birds in 30 years

1 Eurozone weakness continues (BBC) More evidence of economic weakness in the eurozone has come from the latest retail sales figures and a survey of business growth. Retail sales in the 18-nation bloc fell 1.3% in September from August, official data from the Eurostat statistics agency showed.

The Eurostat figures show that Germany, traditionally the driver of eurozone growth, suffered the biggest fall in retail sales, down 3.2% for the month. The next biggest fall was in Portugal, down 2.5%. Rises in retail sales came only in smaller eurozone countries, such as Malta, Luxembourg and Austria.

Meanwhile, Markit's composite PMI reading, based on surveys of thousands of companies across the eurozone, edged up from 52 to just 52.1. Although any reading above 50 indicates expansion, October's minimal rise was smaller than economists had hoped for. "The eurozone PMI makes for grim reading, painting a picture of an economy that is limping along and more likely to take a turn for the worse than spring back into life," said Chris Williamson, Markit's chief economist.

The European Commission has predicted that the eurozone would grow by just 0.8% this year. The forecast is below the 1.2% estimate the commission made in spring. It also cut its growth forecast for 2015 to 1.1% from 1.7%.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29911806

2 Downward mobility on the rise (Patrick Butler in The Guardian) More people are moving down, rather than up, the social ladder as the number of middle-class managerial and professional jobs shrinks, according to an Oxford University study.

The experience of upward mobility – defined as a person ending up in an occupation of higher status than their father – has become less common in the past four decades, the study says, leaving children of those who benefited from it with worse prospects than their parents had.

Dr John Goldthorpe, a co-author of the study and Oxford sociologist, said: “For the first time in a long time, we have got a generation coming through education and into the jobs market whose chances of social advancement are not better than their parents, they are worse.”

The UK’s boom in managerial and professional level public services and industrial jobs during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s saw an increase in the proportion of children born into professional and managerial families. The decline in these jobs meant that the number of individuals at risk of downward mobility were higher. Goldthorpe added: “The emerging situation is one for which there is little historical precedent and that carries potentially far-reaching political and wider social implications.”

Society needed to actively renew its stock of “top end” jobs if it did not want consign graduates to lower level jobs than their parents, said Goldthorpe. “We need a high-tech sector and a high-powered public sector to create demand for people with qualifications.”

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/06/downward-mobility-graduates-parents-jobs-careers

3 Europe loses 421m birds in 30 years (Khaleej Times) Europe has an estimated 421 million fewer birds than three decades ago, and current treatment of the environment is unsustainable for many common species, a study has shown. The population crash is related to modern farming methods and the loss and damage of habitats, according to the study published in science journal Ecology Letters.

The study found that about 90 per cent of the decline occurred in the most common bird species, including grey partridges, skylarks, sparrows and starlings. Meanwhile the population of some rarer birds had increased in recent years, likely due to conservation efforts and legal protections.

Such a decline in common birds is concerning as “it is this group of birds that people benefit from the most”, according to University of Exeter researcher Richard Inger. The scientists estimated the loss of bird populations by analysing data on 144 species of European birds, collected from surveys in 25 countries, often by voluntary fieldworkers.

http://khaleejtimes.com/kt-article-display-1.asp?section=editorschoice&xfile=/data/editorschoice/2014/November/editorschoice_November2.xml

Europe, Asia factories slump; Europe dominates prosperity rankings; Rolls-Royce to cut 2,600 jobs

1 Europe, Asia factories slump (Khaleej Times) Factories across Asia and the eurozone reported a general loss of momentum last month that speaks volumes about the need for more policy stimulus on top of Japan’s latest efforts to ignite growth. A second month of price-cutting in the eurozone, alongside only tepid expansion in Germany — the bloc’s growth engine — and contractions in France and Italy, will be disconcerting for the European Central Bank as it faces a real risk of deflation.

Meanwhile, regional manufacturing surveys from Asia were littered with unwelcome landmarks, including a five-month low for activity in China, a four-month trough for South Korea and a 14-month low for Indonesia. Markit’s final October manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index was 50.6, beating September’s 50.3 but shy of an earlier flash estimate of 50.7. October marked the 16th month the index has been above the 50 line that divides growth from contraction.

Germany’s manufacturing industry returned to modest growth last month but new business fell slightly for a second month as Russian sanctions and a general economic slowdown weighed on demand. Adding to the gloom, the surveys showed French factory activity contracted faster than in September and Italian manufacturing slowed at the sharpest rate in 17 months. British factories also reported a decent month of October.

HSBC’s version of the China PMI, compiled by Markit, was a whisker firmer at 50.4 in October, from September’s 50.2, but showed growth slowing in output and new orders, while companies trimmed staff levels for the 12th straight month. China’s official PMI for services fell to 53.8 in October, down from September’s 54.0 and the weakest reading since January, the National Bureau of Statistics said. Taiwan’s PMI slipped to the lowest in 13 months at 52.0. A rare bright spot was India, where the HSBC PMI rose to 51.6 in October, from 51.0 in September, extending its run above 50 to a full year.

http://khaleejtimes.com/biz/inside.asp?

section=internationbusiness&xfile=/data/internationbusiness/2014/November/internationbusiness_November10.xml

2 Europe dominates prosperity rankings (Amy Sedghi in The Guardian) Norway has been named the most prosperous country in the world for the sixth year in a row by a global prosperity ranking, which rates countries on how they perform in areas such as economics, health, education and freedom. European countries dominate the top 30 of the Prosperity Index, while the UK has jumped three places on last year’s rankings and has been named the most prosperous of all the major EU countries in 2014. It has been placed above Germany at 14th and France at 21st place.

It also warns that the US is “no longer perceived to be the ‘land of the free’” and is placed 21st for the personal freedom, below countries such as Uruguay and Costa Rica. Following Norway in second place on the overall rankings is Switzerland. New Zealand, which is placed third, is the highest climber of the latest release with its jump up attributed to its economic resurgence. Almost two thirds of the countries listed in the top 30 are European nations, with 16 of these being EU member states.

Think tank and publisher of the index, the Legatum Institute name the UK as a “world leader in entrepreneurship” and credit this as one of the reasons for its rise in the rankings. According to the think tank, Russia is the worst performing country in Europe, having fallen seven places to 68th position. Low rankings in governance (113th) and personal freedom (124th) are attributed to the drop in overall ranking.

The index assesses 142 countries and looks at 89 individual variables across eight sub-indices: economy, entrepreneurship and opportunity, governance, education, personal freedom, health, safety and security and social capital.

At the bottom of the rankings is the Central African Republic which also has ranked last for entrepreneurship and opportunity and second to last in the health category. Sub-Saharan African countries take nine of the bottom 10 places on the health sub-index with Sierra Leone named as the worst performing country for this category. In its study, the think tank warns: “the health systems in the majority of countries in the region are underdeveloped and ill-prepared to face serious threats to public health, such as the recent outbreak of Ebola in West Africa.”

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/nov/03/european-countries-dominate-in-global-prosperity-rankings

3 Rolls-Royce to cut 2,600 jobs (BBC) Engineering group Rolls-Royce has said it is planning to cut 2,600 jobs over the next 18 months. It said most of the jobs would go in its aerospace division, with most of the posts being shed in 2015. It is not clear where the cuts will be made from Rolls-Royce’s global workforce of 55,000, 24,000 of whom are in the UK.

The company’s chief executive John Rishton said: “The measures announced today will not be the last, however they will contribute towards Rolls-Royce becoming a stronger and more profitable company.” Last month, Rolls warned that its underlying revenues for 2014 would be 3.5-to-4% lower than expected. The company said voluntary redundancy would be offered, although it could not rule out compulsory redundancies.

Today’s announcement on job losses is likely to be the start of a series on cutting costs for Rolls Royce. After a profits warning in February and October, the company is under pressure to act. Aviation – where these job losses are – has not been as affected by the economic downturn and Russian sanctions as Rolls Royce’s land and sea businesses, and those divisions will now be under scrutiny. Those with good knowledge of the company have told me that the 2,600 job losses will be split between civil and defence aviation in the UK and the US, with two-thirds of the losses coming in the UK.

Rolls-Royce is the second largest aero-engine maker in the world. It has customers in more than 120 countries, including more than 380 airlines and leasing firms, 160 armed forces, 4,000 marine customers including 70 navies, and 1,600 energy and nuclear customers. Rolls-Royce said the job losses would cost it £120m over the next two years, but would bring “annual cost benefits” of £80m once implemented.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29900087

'Australia faces years of low growth'; India air pollution cuts crops yields by nearly half; One World Trade Center open for business

1 ‘Australia faces years of low growth’ (Michael Koziol in Sydney Morning Herald)  Australia will suffer sub-trend growth for years to come as economies transition from a pre-Lehman to a post-Lehman world, JPMorgan's top markets watcher says. John Normand, the bank's head of FX and international rates strategy, said Australia was part of a large contingent of nations undergoing a lingering structural adjustment in the wake of the financial crisis, which could take years to complete.

"In Australia, going from pre-Lehman to post-Lehman means living with less mining activity as a driver of growth," he said. Sluggish growth was the new normal, Mr Normand said, with the US, UK, New Zealand and potentially Mexico the only countries growing at an above-trend rate. "That's it. It's a small club."

Last week's Federal Open Market Committee announced the end of quantitative easing and expressed confidence about employment and the domestic economy. The Fed might still worried about the non-US world, but it didn't rate a mention. "These non-US economies are going to lag the US economy in terms of growth [and] non-US central banks will lag the fed in terms of raising rates."

Other areas that had big transitions to make in the "post-Lehman world" were China, where reliance on fixed investment would need to give way to domestic consumption, and Europe, where corporate-driven growth would have to replace debt-driven models, Mr Normand said.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/australia-faces-years-of-low-growth-jpmorgan-20141104-11f5bv.html

2 India air pollution cuts crop yields (Azeen Ghorayshi in The Guardian) Air pollution in India has become so severe that yields of crops are being cut by almost half, scientists have found. Researchers analysed yields for wheat and rice alongside pollution data, and concluded significant decreases in yield could be attributed to two air pollutants, black carbon and ground level ozone. The finding has implications for global food security as India is a major rice exporter.

Black carbon is mostly caused by rural cookstoves, and ozone forms as a result of motor vehicle exhaust, industrial emissions, and chemical solvents reacting in the atmosphere in the presence of sunlight. Both are “short-lived climate pollutants” that exist locally in the atmosphere for weeks to months, with ozone damaging plants’ leaves and black carbon reducing the amount of sunlight they receive.

Comparing crop yields in 2010 to what they would be expected to be if temperature, rainfall and pollution remained at their 1980 levels, the researchers showed that crop yields for wheat were on average 36% lower than they otherwise would have been, while rice production decreased by up to 20%. In some higher population states, wheat yields were as much as 50% lower.

Using modelling to account for the effects of temperature increase and precipitation changes in that time, they were able to show that 90% of this loss is attributable to the impact of the two pollutants. The results are specific to India’s seasonal patterns, the crops, and its high pollution levels, but may extend to other places with similar problems, such as China.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/03/india-air-pollution-cutting-crop-yields-by-almost-half

3 One World Trade Center open for business (BBC) More than 13 years after the original towers were destroyed in the 9/11 attacks, New York's World Trade Center has re-opened for business. Employees at publishing giant Conde Nast are starting to move into the 104-storey One World Trade Center.

The $3.8bn skyscraper took eight years to build and is now the tallest building in the US. It is 60% leased and the government's General Services Administration has signed up for 275,000 square feet. "The New York City skyline is whole again," Patrick Foye, executive director of the Port Authority, which owns the restored site, said in a statement.

The 1,776ft (541m) tall skyscraper is at the centre of the site, which includes a memorial in the footprints of the old towers and a museum, opened this year. An observation deck at the top of the building will eventually be open to the public.

TJ Gottesdiener of the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill firm that produced the final design said the high-rise went beyond the city's existing building code, and was built with steel-reinforced concrete. The new World Trade Center is the centrepiece of the 16-acre site where the twin towers once stood, before they came crashing down, killing more than 2,700 people.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29884205

World economy flying on only one engine; End of US QE is whimper, not bang; Fixing India's graft problem

1 World economy on only one engine (Nouriel Roubini in The Guardian) The global economy is like a jetliner that needs all of its engines operational to take off and steer clear of clouds and storms. Unfortunately, only one of its four engines is functioning properly: the Anglosphere (the US and its close cousin, the UK).

The second engine – the eurozone – has now stalled after an anaemic post-2008 restart. Indeed, Europe is one shock away from outright deflation and another bout of recession. Likewise, the third engine, Japan, is running out of fuel after a year of fiscal and monetary stimulus. And emerging markets (the fourth engine) are slowing sharply as decade-long global tailwinds – rapid Chinese growth, zero policy rates and quantitative easing by the US Federal Reserve, and a commodity super-cycle – become headwinds.

The risk of a global crash has been low, because deleveraging has proceeded apace in most advanced economies; the effects of fiscal drag are smaller; monetary policies remain accommodative; and asset reflation has had positive wealth effects. But serious challenges lie ahead. Private and public debts in advanced economies are still high and rising. Rising inequality is redistributing income to those with a high propensity to save (the rich and corporations), and is exacerbated by capital-intensive, labor-saving technological innovation.

Fortunately, rising geopolitical risks – a Middle East on fire, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Hong Kong’s turmoil, and China’s territorial disputes with its neighbors – together with geo-economic threats from, say, Ebola and global climate change, have not yet led to financial contagion. So the global economy is flying on a single engine, the pilots must navigate menacing storm clouds, and fights are breaking out among the passengers. If only there were emergency crews on the ground.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/02/world-economy-flying-one-engine-us-growth

2 End of US QE is whimper, not bang (Robert Peston on BBC) As the Fed Reserve ends quantitative easing, those who prophesied that these trillions of dollars of debt purchases would spark uncontrollable inflation have been proved wrong. But QE could still prove toxic. The most striking thing about quantitative easing, the unprecedented massive purchases of debt by the central banks of the big rich developed countries, and especially by the US Federal Reserve, is how anti-climactic it has all been.

When QE started at the end of 2008, many were the voices warning that the economy of the world was heading into dangerous uncharted territory. Well, on the day the US Federal Reserve brings to a close this intriguing chapter in the long and not always distinguished history of central banking, by ceasing its exceptional purchases of bonds, it may be fair to say that QE has all been a bit dull - or 50 shades of grey, without any sex.

That said. we have probably learned two things. First, that if there has been inflation, it has been in asset prices, rather than in items of everyday consumer expenditure. And by boosting share prices, the cost of capital was cut for businesses, and should have stimulated investment by them.

When launched, QE was billed as a big, bold and imaginative way of restarting the global economy after the 2008 crash. t probably helped prevent the Great Recession being deeper and longer. But by inflating the price of assets beyond what could be justified by the underlying strength of the economy, it may have sown the seeds of the next great markets disaster.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29817100

3 Fixing India’s graft problem (Amrit Dhillion in Straits Times) Only the prospect of jail frightens corrupt Indian politicians. They are impervious to all other humiliations. Jayalalithaa Jayaram, the colourful chief minister of Tamil Nadu and one of India's top women leaders, recently experienced one such.

A court found Jayalalithaa guilty of corruption on Sept 27, in a case that began 18 years ago when income tax officials raided her home. This is the first time a serving chief minister has been convicted under the Prevention of Corruption Act and gone to jail. The sentence is four years in jail. She will also be disqualified from holding office because the Supreme Court last year ruled that convicted MPs cannot continue as MPs. She has also been fined one billion rupees.

Hardly any Indian politician has gone to jail for corruption. If this ruling is to do any good, it will be to deter other corrupt leaders. But an 18-year trial? There lies the problem. Who is going to be deterred when it takes so long for the wheels of justice to get going?

Recent developments in India have indicated a rising intolerance for corruption. Why does India have fewer than 15 judges per million population, compared with the US, which has over 100 judges per million? Is it really impossible to produce more judges? As a result of these flaws, India has 30 million pending cases clogging the system. According to legal experts, it will take 466 years for the Delhi High Court alone to clear its backlog.

If one reason had to be singled out to explain the audacity of politicians over corruption, it must be this. Apart from the Law Ministry needing to reform the legal system to make it faster, India could set up fast-track courts to handle corruption cases involving MPs or civil servants. Only fast and draconian punishment can be effective in dealing with the greed psychosis that afflicts Indian politicians.

http://www.straitstimes.com/news/opinion/more-opinion-stories/story/fixing-indias-graft-problem-20141103

China growth outlook hazy; Murder capitals of the world; How Google, Yahoo blend art and engineering

1 China growth outlook hazy (Khaleej Times) China’s factory activity unexpectedly fell to a five-month low in October as firms fought slowing orders and rising costs in the cooling economy, reinforcing views that the country’s growth outlook is hazy at best. The official Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) eased to 50.8 in October from September’s 51.1, the National Bureau of Statistics said, but above the 50-point level that separates growth from contraction on a monthly basis.

Underscoring the challenges facing the world’s second-largest economy, the PMI showed foreign and domestic demand slipped to five- and six-month lows, respectively, with overseas orders shrinking slightly on a monthly basis.

It has been a tough year for China’s economy. Growth fell to 7.3 per cent in the third quarter, its lowest level since the 2008-09 global financial crisis, as the housing market sagged and domestic demand and investment flagged. The cooldown, expected to be China’s worst in 24 years this year according to a Reuters poll, came despite a flurry of government support measures.

But the raft of measures — which were issued over a space of a few months — have failed to sustain momentum in the economy, prompting authorities to take one of their most drastic policy actions this year by cutting mortgage rates in September.

http://khaleejtimes.com/biz/inside.asp?xfile=/data/internationbusiness/2014/November/internationbusiness_November6.xml&section=internationbusiness

2 Murder capitals of the world (John Vidal in The Guardian) The Honduran city of San Pedro Sula is officially the most violent in the world outside the Middle East and warzones, with more than 1,200 killings in a year, according to statistics for 2011 and 2012. Its murder rate of 169 per 100,000 people far surpasses anything in North America or much larger cities such as Johannesburg, Lagos or São Paulo. London, by contrast, has just 1.3 murders per 100,000 people.

Research by security and development groups suggests that the violence plaguing San Pedro Sula and many other Latin American and African cities may be linked not just to the drug trade, extortion and illegal migration, but to the breakneck speed at which urban areas have grown in the last 20 years. The faster cities grow, the more likely it is that the civic authorities will lose control and armed gangs will take over urban organisation, says Robert Muggah, research director at the Igarapé Institute in Brazil.

Simon Reid-Henry, of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, said: “Today’s wars are more likely to be civil wars and conflict is increasingly likely to be urban. Criminal violence and armed conflict are increasingly hard to distinguish from one another in different parts of the world.” The latest UN data shows that many cities may be as dangerous as war zones. While nearly 60,000 people die in wars every year, an estimated 480,000 are killed, mostly by guns, in cities.

More than half the world now lives in cities compared with about 5% a century ago, and UN experts expect more than 70% of the world’s population to be living in urban areas within 30 years. The fastest transition to cities is now occurring in Asia, where the number of city dwellers is expected to double by 2030, according to the UN Population Fund.

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/nov/01/murder-capitals-world-city-violence

3 How Google, Yahoo blend art and engineering (Wendy Lee in San Francisco Chronicle) An important lesson learned by Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer happened in the early hours of Halloween when she was working at Google. It was 15 years ago, and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin asked Mayer to put a new logo for Google on its homepage. Replacing the o’s in Google were two smiling pumpkins. At first, Mayer hesitated. She pointed out the pumpkins were just made out of clip art and were pixelated, but Brin insisted the logo go up.

The art would show “we’re people and we’re excited for Halloween,” Brin told her. The unique logo ended up being a success, with Google users commenting online that they were excited to see the artwork. It humanized the site and showed the “flair of personality” from its employees, Mayer said. “It was an important lesson for me,” she said.

Mayer said at Yahoo, she tries to let that element of humanity and emotional connection come through in its products. “Yahoo is about personalization, how we can take sports, news, finance and mail and make it feel like it’s tailored to you, customized to you,” Mayer said.

Mayer said art and engineering were a part of her life at a young age. Her mother, an art teacher, taught her about art history and her father is an engineer. She said the two topics “are not all that different.” “Engineering that isn’t beautiful has its drawbacks, and art that isn’t engineered is also less interesting,” Mayer said.

http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2014/10/31/yahoos-marissa-mayer-says-art-and-engineering-arent-that-different/