There’s nothing like a good conference to create opportunities for new deals, and F.ounders last week in New York was just such an event. Indeed, on the panel I ran about the international tech scene, Dimitry Grishin, the co-founder and chief executive of Russian e-mail and social networking giant Mail.ru, sat next to Liam Casey, CEO of PCH International, a man described as “Mr China” for his ability to make, ship and deliver just about any piece of hardware, including some for a well known tech brand you’re probably using right now.

This was perhaps more than fortuitous. For Grishin had that day announced his plans to invest in a personal robotics fund. Grishin Robotics will have $25 million to play with, searching for personal robotics technology and startups catering to everyday people.

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Greece’s conservative New Democracy party eked out a slim victory in Sunday’s elections and will seek to form a pro-austerity coalition government with other parties to take the immediate steps needed to comply with strict financial targets set by its international lenders.

The outcome is likely to ease fears””at least temporarily””of a Greek exit from the 17-nation euro zone, but political uncertainty is likely to continue as parties embark on contentious coalition talks, which, even if successful, may not result in a lasting government.

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After spending yesterday in Berlin, I can tell you the German government is mightily fed up with all this speculation – and fed up with getting blamed for everything bad happening in the global economy (last week’s cover of the Economist, for example).

I interviewed the Deputy Finance Minister – Secretary of State Steffen Kampeter – after the German chancellor’s strident speech to the Reichstag.

He made clear that on one major point – eurobonds – the speculation about what Germany might be willing to accept in time for the summit was simply wrong.

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Pittsburgh is beginning to restore its long-dormant reputation for innovation and entrepreneurial excellence.

It was here that high-profile entrepreneurs the likes of Andrew Carnegie and George Westinghouse built companies that came to define entire industries and generate vast wealth. But the region’s emergence as an industrial center came at a price: a large-company mentality took hold and lingered for decades, even as the foundations of its manufacturing economy began to crumble.

As recently as the 1980s, the notion of working for a large, stable company was more socially acceptable than risking failure by starting a company. That attitude has begun to change, and Pittsburgh’s entrepreneurial spirit is stirring anew. Hundreds of startups have emerged in recent years, producing everything from medical devices to data storage equipment to online shoe-fitting software.

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The mainstream parties “looted Greece, and afterward they took the Greek flag and they offered it to Angela Merkel,” the German chancellor, Mr. [Alexis] Tsipras said in a campaign rally in Athens Thursday.

Though Syriza’s message has caught on, not all of the disaffected are ready to embrace the party. Anna Konstantoulaki, a third-year Spanish-literature student at the University of Athens, voted in May for a tiny party. She doesn’t know what to do now. She is upset with mainstream parties but not sure Mr. Tsipras is capable of running the country.

“I am very confused,” she says. “The last few days, I can’t stop thinking about what is going to happen.” She adds: “I’m scared, actually.”

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How much money does the U.S. government forgo by not taxing religious institutions? According to a University of Tampa professor, perhaps as much as $71 billion a year.

Ryan Cragun, an assistant professor of sociology, and two students examined U.S. tax laws to estimate the total cost of tax exemptions for religious institutions ”” on property, donations, business enterprises, capital gains and “parsonage allowances,” which permit clergy to deduct housing costs….

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Here is what these award-winning companies do differently to create great workplaces:

They hold managers and individuals accountable for making engagement a part of everyday work, rather than just conducting a survey once a year.
Their leaders set a positive example for the rest of the organization by helping their teams thrive.
The have unique coaching and training opportunities for both top- and bottom-performing managers. They address the needs of both groups and offer steps to help each group improve.

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The hundreds of billions of dollars that banks, insurance companies and other international investors poured into this country after the advent of the euro financed roads and houses, raised wages and helped Constantine Choutlas sustain a 1,000-person construction firm with projects such as building the athletes’ village for the 2004 Olympics.

What it did not do was build a competitive economy, and when the rest of the world woke up to that fact and the money rushed away, so did Choutlas’s business.

“You could see it wouldn’t last. The country was just borrowing money,” Choutlas, whose Proodeftiki Technical has been scaled back to a handful of employees, said as he jabbed a finger in the air for emphasis. “Nobody, nobody, nobody, said lets take a look at where we are going.”

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For one thing, such a bailout is illegal under the Maastricht Treaty, which governs the euro zone. Because the treaty is law in each member state, a bailout would be rejected by Germany’s Constitutional Court.

Moreover, a bailout doesn’t make economic sense, and would likely make the situation worse. Such schemes violate the liability principle, one of the constituting principles of a market economy, which holds that it is the creditors’ responsibility to choose their debtors. If debtors cannot repay, creditors should bear the losses.

If we give up the liability principle, the European market economy will lose its most important allocative virtue: the careful selection of investment opportunities by creditors. We would then waste part of the capital generated by the arduous savings of earlier generations. I am surprised that the president of the world’s most successful capitalist nation would overlook this.

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St. Gregory the Great Episcopal Church now has the ability to harness the sun.

In recent days, the church, located in Southeastern Athens-Clarke County, installed a 7.5-kilowatt solar array that will be used to generate energy that will help to significantly lower the church’s energy costs.

A main purpose of the solar array, though, is to make the church a better steward of the environment. And it also will allow more of the church’s resources to go toward helping those in need instead of toward power bills, said Andrew Lane ”” also known as “Captain Planet” ”” chairman of the Green Guild/Creation Keepers at St. Gregory the Great.

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The Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral received approval Friday to demolish two historic buildings in the 3700 block of Chestnut Street, clearing the way for construction of a 25-story apartment tower.

At a lengthy hearing of the city Historical Commission, the cathedral and its private development partner agreed to conditions imposed by the commission that seek to insure that a portion of development profits flow into repair and renovation of the historic cathedral’s bell tower.

“We are committed to preserving the church itself,” the Rev. Judith Sullivan, cathedral dean, told the commission. “We are all about preservation.”

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…the idea of having leisurely conversations about Jesus is just, well, too slow. The only adult formation things that have been in any way successful are sermon podcasts and daily e-mailed bits of wisdom, prayer or scripture.

A mentor once gave me some good advice: stop doing things that aren’t working. This makes all the sense in the world, but it’s hard to do. It is hard to give up the picture I have in my head about what a church is supposed to look like: people sitting around on couches in the parish hall, Bibles open.

But at least in my ministry context, that just isn’t working anymore. And personally, I’m done with the roller coaster of getting seduced by the latest thing that’s supposed to work, putting mountains of energy into making it really good and then getting cranky with people because they don’t come. So we stopped it all.

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After clinching Spain’s €100 billion bank bailout, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy flew to Poland on Sunday for the Spanish team’s soccer match, declaring “this matter is now resolved.”

Not so fast, prime minister.

On Tuesday, Spain’s long-term borrowing costs soared to their highest level since the country joined the euro zone. Investors have apparently concluded that the rescue is potentially a much better deal for the banks and their shareholders than for the government, its taxpayers and bondholders.

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The recent recession wiped out nearly two decades of Americans’ wealth, according to government data released Monday, with middle-class families bearing the brunt of the decline.

The Federal Reserve said the median net worth of families plunged by 39 percent in just three years, from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. That puts Americans roughly on par with where they were back in 1992.

The data represent one of the most detailed looks to date of how the economic downturn altered the landscape of family finance. Over a span of three years, Americans watched progress that took almost a generation to accumulate evaporate. The promise of retirement built on the inevitable rise of the stock market proved illusory for most. Homeownership, once heralded as a pathway to wealth, became an albatross.

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…there are too many unanswered questions. How much capital will actually be provided? Which banks will need to be recapitalized? How will the process be managed? The answers won’t be known until two independent valuation experts have reported at the end of June. The International Monetary Fund assessment estimates €37 billion was needed to ensure all banks had a 7% core Tier 1 ratio on a phased-in Basel III basis. But the market will probably demand at least 9% on a fully loaded Basel III basis after substantial new write-downs, suggesting a number much closer to the full €100 billion.

One key unknown is where the bailout money will come from. Will it be from the old euro-zone bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, or the new European Stabilization Mechanism, due to come into existence in July? If it comes from the ESM, existing government bondholders will be subordinated””no small concern given €100 billion is more than 10% of Spanish government debt outstanding. That could affect the willingness of bond markets to keep funding the government.

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A growing number of cities across the United States are making it harder for the homeless.

Philadelphia recently banned outdoor feeding of people in city parks. Denver has begun enforcing a ban on eating and sleeping on property without permission. And this month, lawmakers in Ashland, Ore., will consider strengthening the town’s ban on camping and making noise in public.

And the list goes on: Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, San Diego and more than 50 other cities have previously adopted some kind of anti-camping or anti-food-sharing laws, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

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Thousands of state workers could find themselves facing a life-changing decision later this month ”” whether to retire or not ”” and with less than a week to make it.

Lawmakers are poised to make major changes in the state’s Retirement Systems that would affect the more than 214,000 state and local government employees covered by that pension system.

State senators want some of the changes to take effect July 1.

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Europe may have sidestepped its latest catastrophe, at least for the moment, by hammering out a €100 billion bailout plan for Spain’s failing banks over the weekend.

But the intervention will do little to address the problem that continues to plague the Continent’s increasingly vulnerable financial institutions. Namely: a longstanding addiction to the borrowed money that provides the day-to-day financing that they need to survive.

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When Father Christopher H. Smith was a child, he’d peek through the eucalyptus trees in his grandparents’ yard on Sunday mornings at the drive-in theater next door to watch a man give a sermon on the top of a tar-papered snack bar, the same place where he’d grab his popcorn on movie evenings. The man atop the snack bar was the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, preaching from humble beginnings at the Orange Drive-In Theater.”We thought that was very cool,” Smith said.

Now, decades later, Smith has found himself linked to Schuller once again. On Saturday, he was officially named to the top post of Episcopal vicar at the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange’s new central church in Orange County – the Crystal Cathedral.

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A sharp increase in the number of women having abortions in their early thirties is partly being driven by the financial crisis of recent years, experts say.

The figure for women between the ages of 30 and 34 rose by 10% between 2009 and 2011, according to figures from the Department of Health. By contrast, the number of girls under 18 who had terminations over the same period dropped by more than 18%.

Over the past decade, the abortion rate for women aged 30 to 34 has increased faster than for any other age bracket ”” from 14.2 women per thousand in 2001 to 17.2 in 2011.

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This retirement oasis in the desert has long beckoned those who want to spin out their golden years playing golf and sitting by the pool in the arid sunshine.

But for Clare Keany, who turned 62 last fall and cannot find work, it feels more like a prison. Just a few miles from the gated estates of corporate chieftains and Hollywood stars, Ms. Keany lives in a tiny mobile home, barely getting by on little more than $1,082 a month from Social Security.

“I would rather be functioning and having a job somewhere,” said Ms. Keany, whose pixie haircut, trim build and crinkling smile suggest someone much younger than her years. “I really don’t enjoy living like this. I’ve got too much to do still.”

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Spain’s banking crisis did not come out of the blue.

In the 1990s, the Spanish suffered a bout of collective madness. Interest rates fell from 14 per cent (with the peseta) to 4 per cent (with the euro) in a matter of weeks.

In 1998, the centre-right government passed a law that increased the amount of land for development. Developers got rich, selling the idea that property would always go up in value. You could buy a flat on the Mediterranean for $156,000 and sell it the next day for $234,000; by the end of the month it would be worth $390,000…..

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Anglican Archbishop Jeffrey Driver has accused the Commonwealth government of gambling with the future of young Australians as it considers changes to gambling regulations.

Proposed changes to online betting laws outlined in the government’s interim report on the Review of the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 include the legalisation of new forms of online gambling that the Archbishop believes could create a new wave of problem gamblers.

“The proposed changes to online betting have the potential to open up more opportunities for Australians, especially young Australians, to gamble online,” Archbishop Driver said. “Young people are the most attuned to the digital revolution but also the most vulnerable to its disadvantages or dangers.”

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Europe is to offer Spain a bailout package of up to €100 billion ($125 billion) to help rescue the country’s banks and keep the 17-country eurozone from breaking apart.

After months of fierce denials, Spain admitted it would tap the fund as it moved faster than expected to stem the economic crisis that has ravaged Europe for two years.

Spain becomes the fourth – and largest – European economy to ask for help and its admission of help comes after months of market concern about its ability to pay its way. In recent weeks investors have demanded higher and higher costs to lend to Spain, and it became clear it would be just too expensive for the country to borrow the money necessary for a bank rescue from the markets.

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Every generation has an incentive to borrow money from the future to spend on itself. But, until ours, no generation of Americans has done it to the same extent. Why?

A huge reason is that earlier generations were insecure. They lived without modern medicine, without modern technology and without modern welfare states. They lived one illness, one drought and one recession away from catastrophe. They developed a moral abhorrence about things like excessive debt, which would further magnify their vulnerability.

Recently, life has become better and more secure. But the aversion to debt has diminished amid the progress. Credit card companies seduced people into borrowing more. Politicians found that they could buy votes with borrowed money. People became more comfortable with red ink….

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Although they have rented it out to a restaurant for the past five years, the owners of one building in Aspe have never paid property tax. Nor have they ever paid tax on the apartments that house two of their employees. But that may be about to change. Last week, the city’s government voted to partially rescind the exemption that the Catholic Church, landlord of those three properties and another eight more in town, has long enjoyed. And thanks to the crisis that threatens to upend Spain’s economy, it’s not the only place demanding change.

Three different laws, including a 1979 agreement with the Vatican, exempt the Catholic Church from paying property tax in Spain. The same provision holds for other recognized religions and non-profit organizations like the Red Cross, yet because Catholicism is the dominant religion in Spain, and because the Church’s holdings there are so vast (España Laica, a pro-secularism group, estimates that were it not for the exemption, the church would annually owe 2.5 to 3 billion euros in property taxes), critics have long argued that the arrangement is part of the preferential treatment granted the Catholic Church. It’s only now, however, with austerity measures bearing down and a European bailout looming, that anyone has thought to put that criticism into action. Economic pressure, in other words, may well accomplish what 33 years of democracy have not.

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In theory, fewer homeowners will mean municipalities will rake in less revenue from property taxes. But Pendall believes local governments will simply adjust to make rental properties “a larger share of the tax pie.”

And within those communities, some businesses will feel the pinch. Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, says a wave of renters would have an obvious impact on the massive consumer industry that supports homeownership.

“My subjective experience is that when people buy a house, they immediately start renovating and fixing it ”” going on Sunday afternoon to Home Depot, doing things that I think people would never do for houses that they rent,” he says.

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From manufacturers in the Midwest to upscale retail shops in Manhattan, a wide variety of American companies are feeling the pinch of Europe’s economic contraction, helping to hold back recovery in the United States.

Ford, the iconic U.S. car company, says that Europeans are not only buying fewer cars, but are replacing fewer parts. Kraft Foods, which is behind such brands as Swedish Fish and Dentyne, says sales of candy and gum in Europe are lagging. And jeweler Tiffany & Co. says fewer European tourists are shopping at its flagship Fifth Avenue store.

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Many of LinkedIn’s 161 million members worldwide, who use the site to form professional connections, were also bombarded Wednesday by e-mail from unfamiliar parties urging them to click on links to verify e-mail addresses. LinkedIn and eHarmony join the list of several major websites, including retailer Zappos.com, that were hacked in recent months.

Wednesday’s cyberattack on LinkedIn, which affects as many as 6.5 million users, came on the heels of a discovery that LinkedIn’s mobile app on Apple devices tracked users’ calendar events and synched them to its server without users’ knowledge, a practice that could violate Apple’s privacy regulations.

The encrypted password hash codes, which can be deciphered to uncover users’ passwords, could give the hacker access to users’ accounts once the codes are cracked, according to IDC tech industry analyst Al Hilwa.

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The eurozone sovereign debt emergency showed no signs of abating yesterday as the Spanish government desperately haggled over the terms of its expected bailout and the European Central Bank refused to ease monetary policy for the currency bloc, despite signs of stricken European economies sinking still deeper into recession.

Madrid’s Economy Minister, Luis de Guindos, insisted once again he was not making any plans to follow Greece, Portugal and Ireland in requesting a bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. But, behind the scenes, Spanish ministers accept that an external rescue of the country’s beleaguered banking sector is now necessary. Spain is trying to persuade its European partners to allow the European bailout fund to inject capital directly into its banks, rather than diverting the money through the state. Madrid fears that a full-blown national bailout would be accompanied by an onerous EU/IMF inspection system.

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