He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.

“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”

This is the most revolutionary idea I’ve heard in news since I saw David Cohn’s new start-up spot.us, which is pioneering a community-funded model for local reporting. It’ll be interesting to see how well this works. Clearly quite a bit of reporting can be done from afar. As with any matter of outsourcing, the real question is: what can’t be done from India?

…the immediate result of the Mumbai terror attacks will be a further hardening of inter-communal relations within India. The latest attacks will also increase the likelihood that in national elections slated for early 2009, the result will be a BJP-led government, as Hindus, who comprise the overwhelming majority of Indian voters, take on another layer of insecurity.

Internationally, this event will further aggravate Indian-Pakistani relations, making it harder for the incoming Obama Administration to effect a rapprochement between the two countries, necessary for progress in Afghanistan, where the two subcontinental states are engaged in a proxy struggle that goes on behind the immediate conflict between the United States and al-Qaeda.

With global growth prospects for 2009 weaker than they have been in a long time, China’s economy is braced for a significant further slowdown, says the World Bank’s latest edition of the China Quarterly Update. Fortunately, China’s domestic economy has several sources of strength, including still robust growth in several parts and strong macroeconomic fundamentals that provide room for policy stimulus to dampen the downturn. What does this all mean, for China and the rest of the World?

Brad Setser at the Council on Foreign Relations sums up the following top 7 take-aways:

1. China was no workers’ paradise during the boom years.
2. China really is a manufacturing and investment driven economy.
3. China’s current slowdown was made in China, not in the world.
4. There is more bad news ahead.
5. The fiscal stimulus is real, but modest. 
6. The last thing anyone needs to worry about is fall in Chinese demand for US treasuries.
7. The way China manages its reserves matters immensely for the world not just China

A commitment to the common good over individual gain; an ethos that reaches across traditional divisions such as race, ideology, and partisanship. The Millennials are not a “Generation Me” but rather a “Generation We.” They are strongly progressive, socially tolerant, environmentally conscious, peace-loving, and poised to lead the biggest leftward shift in recent American history. They volunteer in record numbers and declare themselves ready to sacrifice their self-interest for the greater good. They do not fit neatly into any classic ideological category and are clearly eager to establish a new paradigm.

A comprehensive rejection of the country’s current leadership and dominant institutions. Whether it is Congress and the federal government, major corporations, or organized religion, these young Americans believe the large institutions that dominate so much of our modern society have comprehensively failed, placing narrow self-interests ahead of the welfare of the country as a whole.

A clear sense of generational identity. By 10:1 (90% to 9%), respondents agreed that their generation shares specific beliefs, attitudes, and experiences that set them apart from generations that have come before them. By 68% to 31%, they feel that their generation has “a great deal” or “a fair amount” in common with young adults of their generation in other countries, rather than “just a little” or “nothing at all.” They even say, by 54%-44%, that they have more in common with young adults of their generation in other countries than they have with Americans of older generations.

When asked about the best way to address the challenges facing the country, the leading choice by far was “through a collective social movement” (60% made this their first or second choice, 38% their first) as opposed to individual action and entrepreneurship (35%), media and popular culture (33%), government action (40%), or international cooperation (30%). Note that the number choosing a collective social movement as their first choice (38%) was more than twice the number choosing any other option as their first choice. 

Small Precautions asks a good question: 

I wonder whether people under 30 don’t always have opinions of this sort. In other words, I wonder whether these values are enduring features of this generation, or rather something that will change as they age. I’m mindful of the cliche that anyone who’s not a liberal at age 20 doesn’t have a heart and anyone who’s not a conservative at 40 doesn’t have a brain.

I wonder. Perhaps it is always true that the youth feel sympathetic and rebellious, but I find it hard to believe that every generation would have shown the same numbers as we see above. Call me sappy, but reading this report inspires me to be part of the change that my cohort will bring to the world. 

• The cocaine market in the U.S. is maturing, leading to turf wars
• President Calderón allowed some of the barons to be extradited to the U.S., removing the executives from a number of operations and leading to succession battles
• President Calderón sent in the army to confront the gangs, which has stirred the pot

These gangs rank among the best example in the world today of the global guerrillas that John Robb has predicted. They’re on our southern doorstep, and we’re funding them with our weekend partying. 

Foreign Policy already has some insightful analysis of the potential causes: it could be a new terrorist group as the “Deccan Mujahideen” claim, it could be the well-known Lashkar-e-Taiba expressing their usual Islamist rage, or it could be the local Indian Mujahideen reacting to the strikes of the Mumbai anti-terror squad. One CNN anchor backs the latter theory: 

…terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna says that the Indian Mujahideen are most likely to blame, and they are the same group as the Deccan Mujahideen. “No other group has the capability,” he said, emphasizing the group’s strength in Mumbai. He also pointed out that such attacks would have taken months of planning.

Family: New Relationships, New Responsibilities – Emerging patterns of marriage, remarriage and childbearing, including alternative family arrangements, will change the way we currently view family. Families will be “chosen,” not just inherited. There will be peer caretaking and social care matching services. Boomers will be challenged by greater distance between family members and greater responsibility for the financial well-being of children and grandchildren, contributing to slowed personal wealth accumulation.

Global Economy: More Competition, More Collaboration – Boomers will be the first generation to age in a truly global economy, giving them access to more learning resources, new ways to collaborate, financial products from around the world and healthcare abroad, dubbed “medical tourism.”

Community: Gaps and Gains – Boomers will use new ways to build communities to close the gap created by decreased mobility, polarization, social fragmentation and health challenges. Like their younger counterparts they will participate in online social networks, virtual retirement communities and community blogging. They will be challenged by elder abuse, anti-boomer backlash and ageist zoning laws.

Environments: Unsustainable Pasts, Sustainable Aging – A degradation of the environment will bring risks from new diseases and fewer sustainable food and energy sources. These challenges will bring food and energy collectives, do-it-yourself (DIY) products and green technology.

Personal: Health and Identity – Boomers will live longer, but will suffer from new chronic diseases and widespread depression from aging, illness and other concerns. They will manage their health differently with biometrics and online tools that will challenge privacy, but will allow them to share and benefit from new information found on all parts of the globe.
Institutions: Dissatisfaction, Distrust, Reinvention – An erosion of the trust people have had in institutions will bring new banking/investment vehicles, peer-to-peer loans and new structures to manage new capitals. Financial security will be threatened by diminished government and employer safety nets and low personal savings.

We never realized how much our security could be attributed to distance and inconvenience — how difficult it is to recruit, organize, coordinate, and communicate without formal organizations. That inadvertent measure of security is now gone. Bad guys, from hacker groups to terrorist groups, will use the same ad hoc organizational technologies that the rest of us do. And while there has been some success in closing down individual Web pages, discussion groups, and blogs, these are just stopgap measures.

Unfortunately, the U.S. will be forced to navigate this dangerous environment with a small fraction of its former resources. The endless defense budgets of the last century are gone. Which means the development of the new strategies — not new gear — to fight this chaotic and complex panoply of non-state foes will become the seminal security challenge of our time.

The world of 1929-33 was one that lacked shock absorbers such as Social Security and deposit insurance to insulate people from economic disaster. In the 1930s, some of the world’s largest economies—Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Italy—were run by leaders hostile to the very notion of market capitalism. Today, U.S.-style market capitalism is under assault from self-inflicted wounds, and Germany, Italy, and Japan (Russia, not so much) are working with the United States to cope with a common problem.