It wasn’t supposed to be like this. After six decades of peace, Europe should be basking in a golden age of prosperity. Instead its young are being ravaged by unemployment, with a record 5.6 million under-25s out of work.

Just over a million of the young unemployed are in Britain, the worst level in the country since figures began to be collected by Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, in 1983.

Bleak as Britain’s young jobless rate of 22.3 per cent is, the picture is far worse in eurozone countries enforcing deep austerity measures. As Spain’s jobless count broke the 5 million barrier yesterday, unemployment for those aged 16 to 24 was put at 51.4 per cent, meaning that for the first time in a modern European country a majority of the young are out of work.

In Greece the young jobless figure is 46.6 per cent, and in Portugal 30.7 per cent, according to Eurostat.

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Twitter has promoted itself as a beacon of free speech, and that image was burnished when revolutionaries used the social media service to organize protests during last year’s Arab Spring uprising.

But in what many view as an about-face, Twitter now says it has the power to block tweets in a specific country if the government legally requires it to do so, triggering outrage around the world, especially in Arab countries.

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Bishops led the House of Lords on Monday evening to vote in favour of an amendment excluding child benefit from the proposed cap on benefits in the Welfare Reform Bill.

Children’s charities welcomed the amendment, proposed by the Bishop of Ripon & Leeds, the Rt Revd John Packer, as a safeguard for those ”” about a quarter of a million children ”” who are ex­pected to bear the impact of the cap.

“The Government must not ignore the fact that the Lords have spoken out to defend the plight of some of the country’s most disad­vantaged children,” the Children’s Society’s policy director, Enver Solomon, said.

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One might add to the list of the many causes of the divide: cynicism spread by cynical popular culture and mass media; hyper-individualism (St. Ayn Rand) and denigration of community and support of “the common life;” polarization in politics and the loss of civility in “discourse;” quick-fix solutions to problems in religious, educational, and cultural life where patience would have more to offer; certainly the move into the world(s) of virtual reality with artificiality and insubstantiality in the bytes-world; radical pluralism and the jostling it brings. I know, I know: there is an up side to most of these, but we need to remind ourselves of more causes of division and isolation of “classes” than get much attention in Charles Murray’s world.

That being said, [Charles] Murray is still worth a read, not least of all because of data with which he works and statistics he presents. Of the numerous “worlds” he headlines for the “white working class”: “Marriage down 36 percentage points;” “males with jobs working fewer than 40 hours per week, ” “percentage doubled;” “secularism up 21 percentage points. . . .”

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America is coming apart. For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world””for whites, anyway. “The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. “On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day….”

When Americans used to brag about “the American way of life”””a phrase still in common use in 1960””they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled….

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The Pentagon budget will actually shrink next year, for the first time since 1998, under a proposal released by the Obama administration that will cut the size of the Army and Marine Corps, trim the number of fighter aircraft and ships, and seek congressional approval for another round of military base closures.

The cuts are part of a broader effort by the Pentagon to decrease its projected spending by $487 billion over the next 10 years, in accordance with a deficit-reduction deal President Obama reached with Congress in August.

The budget is also an attempt to realign the Pentagon’s accounts with Obama’s new military strategy, which he unveiled this month and which seeks to “rebalance” the armed forces toward Asia while maintaining their presence in the Middle East, principally to deter Iran.

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The Bishop of Lagos has called upon the President of Nigeria to convene an all-party, all-ethnic congress to negotiate the future of the West African nation in the wake of a week-long general strike that followed the government’s lifting of price controls on fuel.

On 16 January 2012 President Goodluck Jonathan capitulated to union demands and partially restored the state-subsidy on fuel. The week of civil strike saw the military deployed in the streets of Lagos and most major cities.

President Jonathan conceded that the “government appreciates that the implementation of the deregulation policy would cause initial hardships” and agreed to subsidize the price of fuel.

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In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra ”” their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. As they say, if horses could have voted, there never would have been cars. But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, “In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs ”” about 6 million in total ”” disappeared.”

And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet….

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The history of civilisation is a history of public goods. The more complex the civilisation the greater the number of public goods that needed to be provided. Ours is far and away the most complex civilisation humanity has ever developed. So its need for public goods ”“ and goods with public goods aspects, such as education and health ”“ is extraordinarily large. The institutions that have historically provided public goods are states. But it is unclear whether today’s states can ”“ or will be allowed to ”“ provide the goods we now demand….

The industrial revolution expanded the activities of the state in innumerable ways. This was fundamentally because of the needs of the economy itself. Markets could not, on their own, provide an educated population or large-scale infrastructure, defend intellectual property, protect the environment and public health, and so on. Governments felt obliged ”“ or delighted ”“ to intervene, as suppliers and regulators, or subsidisers and taxers. In addition to this, the arrival of democracy increased the demand for redistribution, partly in response to the insecurity of workers. For all these reasons, the modern state, vastly more potent than any that existed before, has exploded in the range and scale of its activities. Will this be reversed? No. Does it work well? That is a good question.

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The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that it was likely to raise interest rates at the end of 2014, but not until then, adding another 18 months to the expected duration of its most basic and longest-running response to the financial crisis.

The announcement means that the Fed does not expect the economy to complete its recovery from the 2008 crisis over the next three years. By holding short-term rates near zero beyond mid-2013, its previous estimate, the Fed hopes to hasten that process somewhat by reducing the cost of borrowing.

The Fed said in a statement that the economy had expanded “moderately” in recent weeks, but that unemployment remained at a high level, the housing sector remained in a deep depression, and the possibility of a new financial crisis in Europe continued to threaten the domestic economy.

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Scarcely two weeks ago, in its Hosanna-Tabor decision upholding the right of churches to make ministerial hiring decisions, the Supreme Court unanimously and enthusiastically reaffirmed these longstanding and foundational principles of religious freedom. The court made clear that they include the right of religious institutions to control their internal affairs.

Yet the Obama administration has veered in the opposite direction. It has refused to exempt religious institutions that serve the common good””including Catholic schools, charities and hospitals””from its sweeping new health-care mandate that requires employers to purchase contraception, including abortion-producing drugs, and sterilization coverage for their employees.

Last August, when the administration first proposed this nationwide mandate for contraception and sterilization coverage, it also proposed a “religious employer” exemption. But this was so narrow that it would apply only to religious organizations engaged primarily in serving people of the same religion. As Catholic Charities USA’s president, the Rev. Larry Snyder, notes, even Jesus and His disciples would not qualify for the exemption in that case, because they were committed to serve those of other faiths.

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Google is overhauling the way it treats user data, linking information across its array of email, video and social-networking services so that information gathered in one place can be used in another….

the changes could irk privacy critics because of the sheer volume of information collected ”” including your location, list of contacts and the contents of your email.

Google hopes to improve the user experience across its different services and give advertisers a better way to find customers.

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Every summer, Volkmar and Vera Kruger spend three weeks vacationing in the south of France or at a cool getaway in Denmark. For the other three weeks of their annual vacation, they garden or travel a few hours away to root for their favorite team in Germany’s biggest soccer stadium.

The couple, in their early 50s, aren’t retired or well off. They live in a small Tudor-style house in this middle-class town about 30 miles northwest of Frankfurt. He’s a foreman at a glass factory; she works part time for a company that tracks inventories for retailers. Their combined income is a modest $40,000.

Yet the Krugers have a higher standard of living than many Americans who have twice that income.

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The competition for Americans’ gambling dollars is heating up, as several states eye major casino projects in a bid to reverse their fortunes in a tough economic climate….

Authorizing casino gambling is “easy politically right now,” says Douglas Walker, associate professor of economics at South Carolina’s College of Charleston and author of The Economics of Casino Gambling. “People want jobs and they don’t want higher taxes. Legalizing casinos can be argued to create jobs and tax revenues.”

Never mind that some gambling analysts say that gambling doesn’t help the long-term financial stability of a state.

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Iran has said an oil embargo adopted by European Union foreign ministers over the country’s nuclear programme is “unfair” and “doomed to fail”.

The measures would not prevent Iran’s “progress for achieving its basic rights”, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said.

The sanctions ban all new oil contracts with Iran and freeze the assets of Iran’s central bank in the EU.

The EU currently buys about 20% of Iran’s oil exports.

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Drone strikes rely on fallible intelligence from local informants, which leads to errors. The price is innocent people’s lives. It also sets a dangerous international precedent – that the secret extrajudicial execution by one country, to kill people in another country, with minimal oversight and no judicial process, is acceptable. This is the policy being carried out by drones.

At a very basic level, it is difficult to gauge whether the policy actually works. Supporters claim the policy has successfully disrupted terrorist networks. Yet suicide attacks in Pakistan and violence in Afghanistan and Iraq have often intensified following the drone deaths of senior al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives.

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In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village called Xiaogang gathered in a mud hut to sign a secret contract. They thought it might get them executed. Instead, it wound up transforming China’s economy in ways that are still reverberating today.

The contract was so risky ”” and such a big deal ”” because it was created at the height of communism in China. Everyone worked on the village’s collective farm; there was no personal property.

“Back then, even one straw belonged to the group,” says Yen Jingchang, who was a farmer in Xiaogang in 1978. “No one owned anything.”

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Britain has sunk deeper into debt. Three years after bubble burst, the UK has barely begun to tackle the crushing burden left by Gordon Brown. The contrast with the United States is frankly shocking.

The latest report on “Debt and Deleveraging” by the McKinsey Global Institute shows that total public and private debt in the UK is still hovering at an all-time high. It has risen from 487pc to 507pc of GDP since the crisis began….

It is a very different picture in the US where light is emerging at the end of the tunnel. American banks, firms, and households have been chipping away at their debts, more than offsetting Washington’s double-digit deficits.

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No wonder the Medicaid system has so many critics in South Carolina. During the year that ended September 2010, about $490 million in public money was paid in error by the state.

The program intended to help the neediest was apparently helping others, too. Meanwhile, some of the people who needed help were not given it.

According to a recently released federal audit, an estimated 10.7 percent of South Carolinians approved for Medicaid should have been ruled ineligible. Then there were overpayments to hospitals and behavioral health providers due to coding errors.

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In an election-year decision certain to disappoint religious conservatives, the Obama administration announced Friday that church-affiliated institutions will get only one additional year to meet a new rule to cover birth control free of charge.

Friday’s announcement by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius doesn’t apply to houses of worship. Churches, synagogues, mosques and other places of worship were already exempt from the birth-control-coverage rule.

But in many cases, other religious-affiliated employers such as hospitals and universities traditionally haven’t provided any birth-control coverage for their employees.

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When people heard that Mitt Romney’s federal income tax rate was about 15 percent, the immediate reaction of many was to assume that their own rate was higher. The top marginal rate is 35 percent, after all, and the marginal rate on a couple with $70,000 in taxable income is 25 percent.

The truth is that most households probably pay a lower rate than Mr. Romney. It is impossible to know for sure, given that he has yet to release his tax return. What is clear, though, is that a large majority of American households ”” about two out of three ”” pays less than 15 percent of income to the federal government, through either income taxes or payroll taxes.

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Graham said the opposition to PIPA and SOPA “have raised some really legitimate questions.”

“I consider intellectual property real property, but I do believe the content part of the debate has been very resistant to technological changes,” he said of the film and recording businesses. “And if this bill can be made better, let’s do it.”

Graham supports wide and inexpensive distribution of mass media, “but there’s got to be a revenue stream or you’re going to destroy the creative content providers.”

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Commander [Layne] McDowell banked and aligned his jet’s nose with the canyon’s northeastern end. Then he followed his wingmen’s lead. He dived, pulled level at 5,000 feet and accelerated down the canyon’s axis at 620 miles per hour, broadcasting his proximity with an extended engine roar.

In the lexicon of close air support, his maneuver was a “show of presence” ”” a mid-altitude, nonlethal display intended to reassure ground troops and signal to the Taliban that the soldiers were not alone. It reflected a sharp shift in the application of American air power, de-emphasizing overpowering violence in favor of sorties that often end without munitions being dropped.

The use of air power has changed markedly during the long Afghan conflict, reflecting the political costs and sensitivities of civilian casualties caused by errant or indiscriminate strikes and the increasing use of aerial drones, which can watch over potential targets for extended periods with no risk to pilots or more expensive aircraft.

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Some commentators have been quick to hail the ruling. It’s “the greatest Supreme Court religious liberty decision in decades,” opined the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which acted as co-counsel to Hosanna-Tabor.

On the other side, David Gibson, a columnist for Commonweal, observed in a post on the magazine’s blog that while the ruling “is clearly the right one,” celebration seems premature. Under the headline “High court: Religions are free to be jerks,” Gibson cautioned about how churches might exercise their protected right.

“How can churches be held to account?” he wrote. “This is a real difficulty, given that religious institutions behave just as badly as secular groups, and often worse. And that truly does hurt the witness of religious communities.”

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We almost hope this was a political call because, on the substance, there should be no question. Without the pipeline, Canada would still export its bitumen ”” with long-term trends in the global market, it’s far too valuable to keep in the ground ”” but it would go to China. And, as a State Department report found, U.S. refineries would still import low-quality crude ”” just from the Middle East. Stopping the pipeline, then, wouldn’t do anything to reduce global warming, but it would almost certainly require more oil to be transported across oceans in tankers.

Environmentalists and Nebraska politicians say that the route TransCanada proposed might threaten the state’s ecologically sensitive Sand Hills region. But TransCanada has been willing to tweak the route, in consultation with Nebraska officials, even though a government analysis last year concluded that the original one would have “limited adverse environmental impacts.” Surely the Obama administration didn’t have to declare the whole project contrary to the national interest ”” that’s the standard State was supposed to apply ”” and force the company to start all over again.

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Roswell, Georgia–The waiting list for subsidized housing here, just 40 families long a year ago, is up to 500. The number of children eligible for free or reduced lunch is up 50%. A little more than a year ago, the Methodist church began seminars for marriages strained by job losses.

Roswell is a pre-Civil War cotton mill town that grew into a wealthy bedroom community of Atlanta as the metro area prospered. More than half the city’s 88,000 residents have four-year college degrees. But Roswell sits in a region with an unusually severe case of long-term unemployment: About 40% of the unemployed in the Atlanta metro area in 2010, the most recent local data available, were out of work for a year or more versus the national average of 29%.

One of them is Marcy Bronner, 57 years old. When she lost her job at Pennzoil back in 2000, it took her seven months to find a new one at Quintiles, a bio- and pharmaceutical-services company….

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From Philadelphia to Newark, N.J., New York to Boston, Cleveland to Chicago to Detroit and beyond, the church of the immigrants is going the same route as the old industrial America of our forebears. The huge plants — churches, schools and parish halls — markers of another era, like the hulking steel mills and manufacturing plants of old, can no longer be sustained. There aren’t enough Catholics left in those places, not enough priests and nuns and certainly not enough money to maintain the church as it once was.

According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington, the church in the United States has lost 1,359 parishes during the past 10 years, or 7.1 percent of the national total, and most of those have been in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest.

“I’m developing a theory that one of our major challenges today is that American Catholic leadership is being strangled by trying to maintain the behemoth of the institutional Catholicism that we inherited from the 1940s and ’50s,” New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan told NCR’s John Allen in the recently released book-length interview A People of Hope.

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The homily at Friday’s service could not have been more appropriate. Mark Greene, now executive director of the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity (LICC) that John Stott founded, summed up Stott’s unwavering commitment to Biblical teaching on the calling, convictions and lifestyle of all those who would claim Christ as their saviour.

“He yearned not only for the conversion of medics, lawyers and factory workers, he yearned for the transformation of medicine, law and manufacturing,” said Greene. Stott’s emphasis was on whole-life disciple-making, on the supreme transformative power of the gospel in the individual and through the Christian individual into the workplace. He longed for lay Christians to be biblically envisioned and equipped for that mission in their daily lives.

“What would Stott’s emphasis on whole-life disciple-making say to us today in areas such as the moral and directional crisis in our economy ? “ Greene asked the assembled congregation, an audible silence falling across the great church, as he referred to both to the bankers of the city and the Occupy protesters in their tents still spread across the churchyard outside.

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