Across the world, the bruising struggle over an Islamic center near ground zero has elicited some unexpected reactions.

For many in Europe, where much more bitter struggles have taken place over bans on facial veils in France and minarets in Switzerland, America’s fight over Park51 seems small fry, essentially a zoning spat in a culture war.

But others, especially in countries with nothing similar to the constitutional separation of church and state, find it puzzling that there is any controversy at all. In most Muslim nations, the state not only determines where mosques are built, but what the clerics inside can say.

The one constant expressed, regardless of geography, is that even though many in the United States have framed the future of the community center as a pivotal referendum on the core issues of religion, tolerance and free speech, those outside its borders see the debate as a confirmation of their pre-existing feelings about the country, whether good or bad.

Read it all.

[Paul] Otellini singled out the political state of affairs in Democrat-dominated Washington, saying: “I think this group does not understand what it takes to create jobs. And I think they’re flummoxed by their experiment in Keynesian economics not working.”

Since an unusually sharp downturn accelerated in late 2008, the Obama administration and its allies in the U.S. Congress have enacted trillions in deficit spending they say will create an economic stimulus — but have not extended the Bush tax cuts and have pushed to levy extensive new health care and carbon regulations on businesses.

“They’re in a ‘Do’ loop right now trying to figure out what the answer is,” Otellini said.

Read it all.

I will tell you something candidly. As a priest standing before a congregation, it is quite an experience to be mindful not only of those gathered in Trinity Church, but also of those watching from afar: England, Kenya, Australia, Germany, and in towns and cities across the United States…

This is true for people in the pews as well. It is challenging to maintain the intimacy of an in-person parish setting when the world is watching. Part of the story of Trinity’s near ten years of webcasting its 11:15 a.m. Sunday service is this congregation’s ability to say of its liturgical tradition, yes, this is worth sharing. On the other hand, there are times when our connectivity creates intimacy that would not have existed otherwise, or enhances that which was already there.

I’m thinking now of the time recently when the Very Rev. Robert Osborne, Dean of St. John’s Cathedral in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, read the Prayers of the People for the opening Eucharist of Trinity Institute. There he was with his flock, in Winnipeg, and here he was as a presence in Trinity Church, connecting two congregations in the same spiritual place.

Read it all–and I love the Georgia story–KSH!

US officials have confirmed the existence of videotapes of the 2002 interrogation of an alleged 9/11 plotter, reportedly at a secret prison.

The tapes, which the Associated Press said were found under a CIA desk, are said to show Ramzi Binalshibh at a Moroccan-run jail once used by the CIA.

But a US official downplayed their significance, saying they “show a guy sitting at a desk answering questions”.

They are said to be the only recordings from a defunct CIA secret jail network.

Read it all.

China surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy last quarter, capping the nation’s three- decade rise from Communist isolation to emerging superpower.

Japan’s nominal gross domestic product for the second quarter totaled $1.288 trillion, less than China’s $1.337 trillion, the Japanese Cabinet Office said today. Japan remained bigger in the first half of 2010, the government agency said.

China led the world out of last year’s global recession with an economy that’s more than 90-times bigger than when leader Deng Xiaoping ditched hard-line Communist policies in favor of free-market reforms in 1978. The country of 1.3 billion people will overtake the U.S., where annual GDP is about $14 trillion, as the world’s largest economy by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief economist Jim O’Neill.

Read it all.

Seldom does the United States look at Europe with economic envy. The past few weeks, however, have been one of those rare phases. Concern about America’s stumbling recovery has been rising, just as anxieties about the euro area’s economy have faded. The dollar is the weakling among rich-world currencies…. But Americans should take a little heart: it is too soon to despair about their economy. And Europeans should show a little caution: it is too soon to be sure that theirs is firmly back on its feet.

Read it all.

Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game””as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do””make sure its every move is “good for consumers” and “fair” to competitors.

Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find “creepy….”

Mr. Schmidt is surely right…that the questions go far beyond Google. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says.

Read it all.

In 1993, not so terribly long ago, I signed up for my first e-mail account. I remember using it to compose and exchange haikus with other novice faculty about our daily travails, to keep up with friends from graduate school, and to sign up for more electronic mailing lists than I could possibly follow.

One year later, while I was still goofing around with my new electronic toy, cultural critic Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies, “Ten, fifteen years from now the world will be nothing like what we remember, nothing much like what we experience now. . . . We will be swimming in impulses and data””the microchip will make us offers that will be very hard to refuse.”

He must have had a crystal ball. In precisely the amount of time Birkerts predicted, I have gone from marveling at the novelty of e-mail to being simultaneously resentful of its hold on my life and unable to imagine how I would live without it.

Read it all.

Gone are quiet classrooms with desks all in a row and a teacher at the blackboard.

Instead, a peek into nearly any classroom across the Miss-Lou will reveal noise, movement and technology that sometimes does the teaching.

And though little about how children learn today seems normal to adults, educators insist that learning in a global society means parents, grandparents and guardians must do a little learning of their own.

Read it all.

This year, the U.S. public debt is projected to reach 62 percent of the economy””up from 40 percent in 2008 and nearly double the historical average, according to recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates. The financial crisis and recession drove much of this debt swing, yet larger problems loom in the future.

By 2030, the CBO projects that debt will more than double to 146 percent of GDP.[1] The only good news, if it can be called that, is that the U.S. is not alone. Two recent studies by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) highlight the significance of the global debt challenge and stress the need for governments to aim higher than short-term deficit reductions. For the U.S., one of the most poorly positioned countries, addressing the long-term debt challenge must include prompt reform of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Read it all.

Cheap labour has built China’s economic miracle. Its manufacturing workers toil for a small fraction of the cost of their American or German competitors. At the bottom of the heap, a “floating population” of about 130m migrants work in China’s boomtowns, taking home 1,348 yuan a month on average last year. That is a mere $197, little more than one-twentieth of the average monthly wage in America. But it is 17% more than the year before. As China’s economy has bounced back, wages have followed suit. On the coasts, where its exporting factories are clustered, bosses are short of workers, and workers short of patience. A spate of strikes has thrown a spanner into the workshop of the world.

The hands of China’s workers have been strengthened by a new labour law, introduced in 2008, and by the more fundamental laws of demand and supply (see article). Workers are becoming harder to find and to keep. The country’s villages still contain perhaps 70m potential migrants. Other rural folk might be willing to work closer to home in the growing number of factories moving inland. But the supply of strong backs and nimble fingers is not infinite, even in China. The number of 15- to 29-year-olds will fall sharply from next year. And although their wages are increasing, their aspirations are rising even faster. They seem less willing to “eat bitterness”, as the Chinese put it, without complaint.

Read the whole thing.

A new Anglican relief agency is a step closer after a Lambeth Palace summit earlier this month.

Participants from across the Anglican Communion met with the Archbishop of Canterbury from July 12-14 to plan how to turn the proposed Alliance into reality.

Professionals from five continents working on advocacy, relief and community development programmes reviewed responses to a public consultation on the foundational document and the issues arising from them, and worked together to chart a way forward for the first few years of the Alliance.

read the whole thing (subscription required).

The 70-million strong Lutheran World Federation has struggled to live up to its own vision of inclusiveness regarding the role of women, the general secretary of the church grouping, the Rev. Ishmael Noko, has told LWF members.

“Equitable participation in God’s mission is the hallmark of an inclusive communion. Member churches are therefore urged to take appropriate steps towards the ordination of women, and, where it is not the case, to put in place policies of equality,” Noko said in his address to the LWF’s highest governing body on 21 July in Stuttgart, Germany.

Noko, who is set to retire from his position in November after 16 years, was delivering his report to the Lutheran grouping’s 11th assembly, taking place from 20 to 27 July.

Read it all.

Everybody in the west knows the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. The grasshopper is lazy and sings away the summer, while the ant piles up stores for the winter. When the cold weather comes, the grasshopper begs the ant for food. The ant refuses and the grasshopper starves. The moral of this story? Idleness brings want.

Yet life is more complex than in Aesop’s fable. Today, the ants are Germans, Chinese and Japanese, while the grasshoppers are American, British, Greek, Irish and Spanish. Ants produce enticing goods grasshoppers want to buy. The latter ask whether the former want something in return. “No,” reply the ants. “You do not have anything we want, except, maybe, a spot by the sea. We will lend you the money. That way, you enjoy our goods and we accumulate stores.”

Ants and grasshoppers are happy. Being frugal and cautious, the ants deposit their surplus earnings in supposedly safe banks, which relend to grasshoppers. The latter, in turn, no longer need to make goods, since ants supply them so cheaply. But ants do not sell them houses, shopping malls or offices. So grasshoppers make these, instead. They even ask ants to come and do the work. Grasshoppers find that with all the money flowing in, the price of land rises. So they borrow more, build more and spend more.

Read it all.

Hugh Hendry has a big mouth, as Hugh Hendry will tell you.

With a sharp wit and a sharper tongue, Mr. Hendry, a plain-spoken Scot, has positioned himself as the public contrarian thinker of this city’s very private hedge fund community.

The euro? It’s finished, Mr. Hendry proclaims.

China? Headed for a fall.

Read it all.

U.S. officials need to outline more clearly their plans to reduce the nation’s fiscal deficit, said Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley’s non-executive chairman for Asia.

“What the markets are ultimately going to want is far more specificity and credibility on deficit reduction and normalization of Fed policy,” Roach, 64, said during a radio interview with Tom Keene on Bloomberg Surveillance.

President Barack Obama said on July 15 his economic- stimulus program is gradually pulling the U.S. out of the economic slump. The nation’s budget deficit is forecast to swell 14 percent this year to a record $1.6 trillion. Obama has said he will offset spending by more than $1.2 trillion over 10 years, partly through a freeze on many domestic programs and more than $800 million in higher taxes and fees on households earning more than $250,000.

Read it all.

In his message, which will be broadcast Sept. 12 over our 200-station network, President [Jimmy] Carter had this to say:

All people of faith who take the Bible seriously — both the New Testament and the Hebrew text–very much agree that God’s heart is with the poor and the vulnerable. Jesus proclaimed at the beginning of his early ministry that he had come to “bring good news to the poor.” The Bible includes several thousand verses on the poor and on God’s response to injustice.

This eminent Sunday school teacher (he still teaches two or three Sundays a month at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga.) is the special capstone speaker for our “Day 1” series on “Faith & Global Hunger.” The first four episodes in the series aired on consecutive Sundays from June 13-July 4 (for transcripts, audio, and video of the series, visit http://hunger.day1.org).

This series features notable church leaders discussing the issue of global poverty and how the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MGD) can address that issue….

The Right Rev. Michael Curry, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, issued a passionate call to serve the poor individually and corporately in his sermon “Can I Get a Witness?” …

Read it all.

At one level the World Cup has been a short-term boon. Tourists emptied out of the tour buses, made purchases from street merchants and visited the Hector Pieterson Museum situated across the street from Holy Cross. They got back on the buses to return to their hotels in suburbs with high walls, confident that they saw the real Soweto.

“I live on the other side of Soweto and I haven’t seen a tour bus yet,” [Anglican priest Stepehn] Morero said.

But now that the monthlong circus has left town, the hard questions that were raised by community activists before the World Cup are back: Who won? Who lost?

The event has generally been hailed as a great success, with talk now turning to a South African Olympics as a possibility. New stadiums were constructed along with new roads leading to the stadiums, construction that helped create thousands of jobs. But is South Africa ”” and a majority of South Africans ”” better off than before the World Cup came to town?

“How much of the profit FIFA makes will be left to develop the poor communities?” Morero said. “I do not think it is going to move the ball forward. There has been a concern from the community over who profits from the World Cup.”

Read it all.

Congratulations to them.

Facebook, the social network service that started in a Harvard dorm room just six years ago, is growing at a dizzying rate around the globe, surging to nearly 500 million users, from 200 million users just 15 months ago.

It is pulling even with Orkut in India, where only a year ago, Orkut was more than twice as large as Facebook. In the last year, Facebook has grown eightfold, to eight million users, in Brazil, where Orkut has 28 million.

In country after country, Facebook is cementing itself as the leader and often displacing other social networks, much as it outflanked MySpace in the United States. In Britain, for example, Facebook made the formerly popular Bebo all but irrelevant, forcing AOL to sell the site at a huge loss two years after it bought it for $850 million. In Germany, Facebook surpassed StudiVZ, which until February was the dominant social network there.

With his typical self-confidence, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 26-year-old chief executive, recently said it was “almost guaranteed” that the company would reach a billion users.

Read it all.

The goalkeepers had stopped penalty kicks a minute apart, the referee had nullified an apparent penalty kick goal and Pedro’s seemingly sure effort had tagged the left post. Perhaps nothing was going to enter the net Saturday at Ellis Park.

But on another evening of spellbinding theater at the World Cup, Spain’s David Villa scored the breakthrough goal on an 83rd-minute shot that struck the right post, dribbled along the goal line and kissed the base of the left upright before crossing the barrier.

Read the whole article.

England’s and Mexico’s misfortunes prompted a previously recalcitrant Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, to apologize on Tuesday for refereeing errors and to announce that he would reopen the discussion about the use of goal-line technology in soccer.

“I deplore when you see the evident referees’ mistakes,” Blatter told reporters. “It has not been a five-star game for referees. I’m distressed by the evident referees’ mistakes.”

The teams from England and Mexico paid the price for FIFA’s resistance to upgrade its officiating at this World Cup when they were eliminated in the Round of 16 after obvious mistakes by the referees.

Read it all.

The Netherlands reached the quarterfinals of the World Cup when standouts Arjen Robben and Wesley Sneijder scored in each half of a 2-1 victory over Slovakia on Monday.

Read it all.

Two goals by Carlos Tevez – one hugely-controversial and the other a wonderful strike – sent Argentina through to the World Cup quarter-finals with a 3-1 victory over Mexico.

The offside rule states there should be two players between the striker and the goal – there was not even one when Lionel Messi’s ball found Tevez’s head, and then the net to put Diego Maradona’s side in front.

Mexico went into meltdown and a defensive howler by Ricardo Osorio allowed Gonzalo Higuain to make it 2-0. It was Tevez who sewed the match up in brilliant fashion – and legitimately this time – early in the second half with Mexico left only to savour a stunning reply by Manchester United’s new signing Javier Hernandez.

Read it all.

I am still in shock that Frank Lampard’s obvious goal was not allowed. Very good to hear Jurgen Klinsman on ESPN say “it’s a disgrace.”

In fact, the Americans were at a deficit from the start of the tournament. They gave up the two quickest goals of this World Cup ”” in the fourth minute against England in their first match and in the fifth minute Saturday against Ghana in their last. Over 4 games and almost 400 minutes of soccer, the United States led for only three minutes, the final ticks of the clock against Algeria, in its only win.

The Americans had to come from behind in three of their four games, often playing better when their fortunes appeared most dire.

Early deficits against England and Slovenia forced Coach Bob Bradley’s team to play with more urgency, pressing forward in the attack rather than waiting for opportunities to counterattack. Throughout the tournament, Bradley encouraged his players to draw strength from what he called the “difficult moments” they encountered in the past. But like adrenaline junkies, they seemed unable to perform without them.

“The warning signs were there,” Landon Donovan said. “Getting scored on early, and it came back to bite us.”

Read it all.

Ugh.

The United States team bus, emblazoned with the slogan “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Victory,” was mobbed when it rolled through Pretoria on Wednesday.

The rowdy crowds that lined the streets did not pelt the bus with balloons filled with goat urine or bombard the team with slurs and deafening music, as they sometimes do when the Americans play a World Cup qualifier in Central America. Instead, the red-white-and-blue-clad supporters showered the team with chants of “U.S.A.” and serenaded it with toots from their vuvuzelas.

“It is not often you see them lining up on the road before the game, all dressed up and chanting and banging on the bus,” Coach Bob Bradley said after the Americans beat Algeria, 1-0, on Wednesday. “That was a really special moment for the team.”

Read it all.

Oscar Tabarez admitted luck was on Uruguay’s side as they beat South Korea 2-1 to progress to the quarter-finals.

South Korea hit the post with a Park Cho-Young free-kick early on, but Uruguay were soon ahead through Luis Suarez after some poor defending.

Lee Chung-Yong then scored a deserved equaliser as South Korea dominated the second half, but that sparked a reaction that led to a stunning 80th-minute winner from Suarez.

“It was a difficult game to play and I think our win means more because of this,” Tabarez said. “We were surprised by their play. We wanted to finish the game in the second half. Their goal was key to our win because we improved after that. We showed class in the final minutes and Suarez scored two spectacular goals for us.”

Read it all.

The first task for anybody these days who wants to follow world news in an intelligent way is to figure out what to ignore. All over the world, commissions are meeting, legislatures debating, leaders are making speeches, demonstrators are marching, sabers are rattling and so on. Nobody can follow it all or make sense of it all. So, from the standpoint of the generalist or the engaged citizen the question is how to achieve ”˜intelligent ignorance’: how to figure out what you don’t need to follow so that you can focus like a laser on what really counts.

The approaching G-20 summit in Toronto is an excellent subject to ignore ”” a classic pseudo-event that will be breathlessly and minutely covered by the ’serious’ press at which much will be said and little done. Over the last two weeks I myself have saved great swathes of time by skimming lightly across rather than delving deeply into such subjects as whether the United States and Germany will engage in a catfight over fiscal stimulus and whether China’s decision to loosen its control over its currency will reduce the pressure on China at the G-20. It is as close to certain as anything can be that nothing will take place at the G-20 that changes German or American fiscal plans or in any way shape or form affect China’s currency policy in any substantive way. There is no point whatever in covering these subjects, and just because journalists are stupid and lazy enough to write these pieces and editors are misguided enough to run them is no reason why you, dear reader, should waste your precious time reading them. Indeed, to the extent that you allow yourself to be deceived into the belief that what is happening in Toronto is an event rather than a pageant you will actually be degrading your ability to follow world affairs.

Read it all.