Germany: Chancellor Angela Merkel moves left as German politics realign

Earlier this year, with the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) coming off a string of regional election triumphs, most observers expected Angela Merkel to become more conservative. Some within her own parliamentary bloc indeed demanded she do just that. But the opposite has happened. If anything, the chancellor and the CDU-CSU have maneuvered further left.

Part of the reason is the dictates of electoral numbers. The results of the September 24 national election meant that, with the extremes of the AfD and the Left party being deemed off-limits, Merkel's only viable coalitions involve either the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) or the left-wing environmentalist Greens. There is no non-left path to power.

But changes to political culture and Merkel's own personal inclinations have also encouraged realignment and effectively shifted the center further to the left. It was part of the accepted wisdom in Germany in the last 30 years that the conservatives' natural allies were the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), which has leaned towards the conservatives as coalition partner since the early 1980s, but had been in a coalition with the SPD before that.

Read more: Chancellor Angela Merkel moves left as German politics realign | In Depth | DW | 24.11.2017

USA: Looking Into the Crystal Ball: 22 Predictions for 2018

1. The artificial intelligence (AI) hype bubble will burst.

2. Face-to-face interactions will increase.

3. More beauty consumers will move to Indie brands.

4. Mental health house calls will become more common.

5. The money will be in the 35-plus demographic.

6. More people will strive for simplicity.

7. "Big Data" will become "Big Fresh Data."

8. Trust will be tech's biggest hurdle.

9. Artificial intelligence (AI) will drive smart video meetings.

10. The divide between machine learning (ML) haves and have nots will grow.

11. Cybersecurity will be table stakes for executive competency.

12. Ownership will decrease.

13. The subscription model will become standard for all industries.

14. Enterprises will think smaller.

15. Corporate America will increase its role in our political, legal and social lives.

16. Consumers will expect more voice controls.

17. Reach and scalability will continue to remain vexing problems.

18. Data will take the gossip out of the real estate industry.

19. Machine learning will begin to transform business at every scale.

20. Expect to see even more data-driven hires and acquisitions.

21. The tech industry will continue its transformation into an experience business.

22. Wellness will play an even larger role across all industries.

Details: read more click here: Looking Into the Crystal Ball: 22 Predict

UN - The US inability to admit reality - by Thierry Meyssan

Decidedly, very little has changed since 11 September 2001. The United States continue to manipulate international public opinion and the tools of the United Nations, no doubt for different reasons, but still with the same contempt for the truth.

In 2001, the representatives of the United States and the United Kingdom, John Negroponte and Stewart Eldon, assured that their two countries had just attacked Afghanistan in legitimate defence after the attacks committed in New York and Washington.

The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, promised to hand the Security Council a complete dossier presenting proof of Afghan responsibility. 16 years later, this document has still not been seen.

n 2003, the same Colin Powell came to explain to the Security Council, during a speech which was relayed by the televisions of the whole world, that Iraq was also implicated in the attacks of 11 September, and that it was preparing new acts of aggression against the United States by means of weapons of mass destruction.

 However, once he had retired from his functions in the US government, General Powell admitted on a TV channel in his own country that the many accusations in his speech were all false [3]. 14 years after this speech, we are still waiting for the United States to apologise to the Security Council.

US methods after 2001 were totally different from any that had preceded them. In 1991, President Bush the Father had made certain that he had international law on his side before he attacked Iraq, having pushed President Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait and to dig in. He had thus obtained the support of almost all the nations in the world. On the contrary, in 2003, Bush the Son settled for lying and then lying some more. Many States distanced themselves from Washington, and we saw the greatest pacifist demonstrations in History, from Paris to Sydney, from Beijing to Mexico.

In 2012, the UN Department of Political Affairs drew up a project for the total and unconditional surrender of Syria [4]. Its director, US citizen Jeffrey Feltman, ex-Under-Secretary of State for Hillary Clinton, used all the means at his disposal to create the greatest coalition in History and accuse Syria of all manner of crimes, none of which were ever proven.

If the States which possess the Feltman document have decided not to publish it, their intention is simply to preserve the United Nations. It is indeed inacceptable that the might and means of the UNO were used to promote war, when the institution was created in order to preserve peace. Since I am not held to the same obligations as a State, I have published a detailed study of this ignoble document in “Right Before Our Eyes”
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In 2017, the UNO-OPCW Joint Investigative Mechanism, created at the request of Syria in order to investigate the use of chemical weapons on its territory, became the object of the same struggle which had earlier opposed Hans Blix to Washington. Except that this time, the fronts were reversed. In 2003, the UNO was defending peace. This is no longer the case, since Jeffrey Feltman was reappointed and is still the number 2 of the UNO. This time it’s Russia which is opposing the pro-US international civil servants in the name of the Charter.

For the complete report click here At the UN - US inability to admit reality, by Thierry Meyssan

Insurance Industry: Top insurance industry issues in 2017

Ongoing changes in technology, demography, and consumer needs and expectations continue to disrupt the insurance industry. Combined with recent regulatory and financial reporting developments, these changes are putting severe strain on traditional business models.

Many insurers are responding by reimagining their internal operations and business strategies, but the pace of change outside the industry has been relentless and even proactive companies are struggling to remain on the cutting edge.

Top Insurance Industry Issues in 2017 focuses on changing business and operating models and the key developments that are causing and being influenced by this change.

Read more: Top insurance industry issues in 2017: PwC

Paris Climate Accord:Trump’s isolationism on full display at international climate talks in Germany - by Ramon Cruz

Apart from Trump, his cabinet and his most ardent fossil fuel industry supporters, there is a complete global political consensus on the urgency of the problem and the collective action needed to tackle it.

Another highly visible affair was the shadow U.S. delegation composed of several state governors spearheaded by California Gov. Jerry Brown and prominent former elected officials such as Bloomberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Gore.

Many delegates regarded the grouping as the de-facto U.S. delegation, which was, without a doubt, much busier and more popular than the onecomposed of officials from the White House. This shadow delegation’s “America’s pledge” is a message to the rest of the world that the U.S. is still engaged.

Read more: Trump’s isolationism on full display at international climate talks | TheHill

Germany: German coalition talks collapse- by Peter Teffer

The liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) pulled out of coalition talks in Germany on Sunday (19 November), leading to an uncertain political uture for the EU's largest member state.

The move is a blow to Angela Merkel, leader of the centre-right CDU and chancellor of Germany since 2005, who was expected to lead the coalition government for a fourth time.

But talks between CDU, its Bavarian sister party CSU, the Greens, and FDP, progressed slowly and missed a self-imposed deadline last Thursday.

FDP's leader Christian Lindner said on Sunday that after weeks of talks, there were still many open issues and conflicting goals, but "no common basis for trust".

"It is better not to rule than to rule wrongly," said Lindner around midnight on Sunday.

Read more: Germany: German coalition talks collapse- by Peter Teffer

The Rich and Poor Gap: Societies Are Headed Toward Revolution, Suggests Inequality Study

There’s a common thread tying together the most disruptive revolutions of human history, and it has some scientists worried about the United States. In those revolutions, conflict largely boiled down to pervasive economic inequality. On Wednesday, a study in Nature, showing how and when those first divisions between rich and poor began, suggests not only that history has always repeated itself but also that it’s bound to do so again — and perhaps sooner than we think.

In the largest study of its kind, a team of scientists from Washington State University and 13 other institutions examined the factors leading to economic inequality throughout all of human history and noticed some worrying trends. Using a well-established score of inequality called the Gini coefficient, which gives perfect, egalitarian societies a score of 0 and high-inequality societies a 1, they showed that civilization tends to move toward inequality as some people gain the means to make others relatively poor — and employ it. Coupled with what researchers already know about inequality leading to social instability, the study does not bode well for the state of the world today.

“We could be concerned in the United States, that if Ginis get too high, we could be inviting revolution, or we could be inviting state collapse. There’s only a few things that are going to decrease our Ginis dramatically,” said Tim Kohler, Ph.D., the study’s lead author and a professor of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology in a statement.

Currently, the United States Gini score is around .81, one of the highest in the world, according to the 2016 Allianz Global Wealth Report.

Kohler and his team had their work cut out for them, as studying inequality before the age of global wealth reports is not a straightforward task. It’s one thing to measure modern day economic inequality using measures of individual net worth, but those kind of metrics aren’t available for, say, hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo during the Paleolithic. To surmount this obstacle, the researchers decided to use house size as a catch-all proxy for wealth, then examined the makeup of societies from prehistoric times to modern day using data from 63 archaeological digs

Overall, they found that human societies started off fairly equal, with the hunter-gatherer societies consistently getting Gini scores around .17. The divide between rich and poor really began once humans started to domesticate plants and animals and switch to farming-based societies. Learning to till the land meant introducing the concept of land ownership, and inevitably, some people ended up as landless peasants. Furthermore, because these societies no longer lived as nomads, it became easier to accumulate wealth (like land) and pass it down from generation to generation.

The Gini scores got higher as farming societies got bigger. The small scale “horticultural” farmers had a median Gini of .27, and larger-scale “agricultural” societies moved up to .35. This pattern continued until, oddly, humans moved into the New World — the Americas. Then, over time, the researchers saw that Gini scores kept rising in Old World Eurasia but actually hit a plateau in the Americas. The researchers think this plateau happened because there were fewer draft animals, like horse and water buffalo, in the New World, making it harder for new agricultural societies to expand and cultivate more land.

Overall, the highest-ever historical Gini the researchers found was that of the ancient Old World (think Patrician Rome), which got a score of .59. While the degrees of inequality experienced by historical societies are quite high, the researchers note, they’re nowhere near as high as the Gini scores we’re seeing now.  

A global report from Credit Suisse showed that modern humans are continuing the trends set by our predecessors: Now, the report showed, half of the world’s wealth really does belong to a super-rich one percent, and the gap is only growing. Historically, Kohler says in his statement, there’s only so much inequality a society can sustain before it reaches a tipping point. Among the many known effects of inequality on a society are social unrest, a decrease in health, increased violence, and decreased solidarity. Unfortunately, Kohler points out, humans have never been especially good at decreasing inequality peacefully — historically, the only effective methods for doing so are plague, massive warfare, or revolution.

Read more: Societies Are Headed Toward Revolution, Suggests Inequality Study | Inverse