I had today a meeting with the group of the Gramene research project at Cornell University. The head of the group Panka Jaiswal is from India. The other group members I met were from Taiwan, China and Eritrea, no US American.
I know, there are many people who take this as a weakness of the US American System. The research is based on the presence of PhD Students and Postdocs especially from Asian countries. You can see this also as an expression of the strenghts of the American system. It has still enough softpower to attract the talented people from all over the world.

From June 11-13 I participated in the meeting of the GFIS Implementation group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA. GFIS is the Global Forestry Information Service (https://www.gfis.net), a partnership operation of IUFRO, CIFOR (CGIAR), NBII (US-Gov), FAO and other partners.

In the occasion of George Ws visit to Rome the entire left went to the streets to demonstrate against the America President. Obviously neither a visit of Mr. Putin nor of Mr. Ahmadinejad nor of Mr. Omar al-Bashir would have triggered a similar reaction. The ideological status of the left is painful and embarrassing. But I felt also embarrassed by Marco Panella's idea to organize a counter demonstration to support the USA. Couldn't we get a free, indipendent, not subaltern but admiring position regarding the European offspring on the other side of the Atlantic?

Quando ho visto oggi sul tappeto rollante in palestra gli impressioni dal family day sulla TV non sapevo se piangere o ridere. Questo accumulo di ipocrisia e bigotteria era veramente insopportabile. Tornato a casa ho ripreso la bicicletta e sono andato a Piazza Navona per partecipare alla manifestazione dell'orgoglio laico. Comincio a dire: meglio insieme con falce e martello e i communisti rifondati per difendere le libertà individuali che con questi come Rutelli, che ha detto di non participare al "family day - che ridicolo in inglese- " perchè ero vice presidente del consiglio.