A former delivery driver has filed a federal lawsuit against a soft-drink bottling plant in a Chicago suburb that he said fired him shortly after he asked to time his lunch break to attend weekly prayers at a mosque.

According to the lawsuit, Nathan Henderson had worked for the American Bottling Company in Harvey for only a month in early September 2007 when his boss pulled him aside to discuss reports that Henderson was taking time to say his five daily prayers during the workday. Because those breaks lasted only a minute or two and didn’t interfere with Henderson’s work, his boss added that he didn’t have a problem with it, the suit said.

The suit alleges that when Henderson then asked permission to take his lunch break in time to correspond with the Friday Jumma prayers, the weekly congregational prayer in the Muslim faith, his superior told him he could not do so.

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The 2010 office and working costs of bishops in the Church of England… [were] published… [this week]. Figures for individual bishops were first published, for the year 2000, in December 2001. Bishops’ office and working costs were previously published as a total figure.

Bishops’ office and working costs for the year ended 31 December 2010 are published on the Church of England website .

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The archbishops’ silence ”“ and that of the wider church ”“ on the crisis at the cathedral is extraordinary, then, given their past remarks. But the truth is they gain nothing from commenting on it.

Siding with protesters would undermine the bishop of London and the dean of St Paul’s, who are already under fire for their actions, and represent an extrajudicial intervention not often seen in the Church of England. To ally themselves with their beleaguered colleagues would make them hypocrites. Those who have aired their views are retired ”“ like Lord Carey ”“ or relatively unknown outside Anglican circles.

However infuriating their reticence, the clerics who bashed the bankers during the global financial meltdown are unlikely to put themselves forward to debate the merits or otherwise of Occupy London, a subject made toxic by the prospect of eviction, but it is inconceivable that they do not have opinions on the events at St Paul’s.

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“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”

–Peter Drucker (1909-2005)

Twenge, the Generation Me author, turned me on to the existence of a concept called “locus of control.” Essentially, it’s a measure of whether you think your destiny is controlled by you or outside forces. For years, young people have increasingly placed their loci of control outside themselves, and this is true of my generation more than any yet. It seems unlikely that a global financial crisis that revealed just how deeply ingrained, intertwined, and intractable are the world’s problems is doing much to counteract that trend. Yet someone like Desi manages to place the locus of control firmly within himself, centered narrowly on his own life and the people he knows. Notwithstanding what that attitude portends for social justice (nothing good), maybe it’s the only way to feel like you are in charge of your own destiny, by focusing your lens ever tighter.

Another phrase I now can’t get out of my head is “managed decline.” It’s been batted around in the context of Europe; George Soros splashily said it about the U.S. dollar a few years ago; and Ken Layne, the Wonkette Cassandra, used it when we spoke. It also strikes me as a fairly good way of describing the process of getting older. That’s what we’re doing when we decide that we can be okay with having more unpredictable careers and more modest lifestyles, if that’s what’s in store: Even as we hold out hope that something will reverse the trajectory, we are managing our decline, we are making do.

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It is a familiar tale of modern China with a sadly predictable denouement. A group of people wake up to find demolition notices affixed to their homes. After they reject the government’s compensation as too meager, a dark campaign of harassment ensues. The bulldozers arrive in the dead of night. Score another win for the boundless authority of the state.

But the struggle unfolding at Huaxiang World Famous Garden, a gated, suburban-style community on the exurban fringe of the capital, is not like a majority of redevelopment battles that each year lead to the forced eviction and dispossession of countless families.

The residents involved are by and large middle class and privileged ”” doctors, financiers, retired government bureaucrats ”” who thought they were immune to such capriciousness. Among their ranks is one of China’s most successful fiction writers, Yan Lianke, whose satirical novels about famine, AIDS and the cruelties of the Cultural Revolution plumb the suffering of ordinary Chinese.

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Student question. Personally like to thank you for saving me winter algebra last year through Khan Academy investment. Is there a need for a teacher role anymore?

Gates. If you go from kindergarten to college, certainly the need for adult supervision hopefully goes down somewhat. But remember education to some degree is about motivation. If you’re motivated to learn physics, read Feynman’s book. Education is not about the unique availability of information, it’s about curating info into form that student chooses to ingest. Always will be teacher, but most replaceable in terms of lecture. We have about 20 schools now that have agreed to design entire experience around Khan lectures.

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…the real drama Thursday was in the meeting with the bankers, held in the offices of Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, in the huge modern building here where the summit meeting was being held. Besides Mr. Van Rompuy, Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy, others present were Christine Lagarde, the former French finance minister who runs the International Monetary Fund; José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission; and Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the euro zone finance ministers.

While they gave in, the bankers, represented by Charles Dallara, managing director of the Institute of International Finance, praised the deal. Later on Thursday, he explained to reporters that the bankers, too, were frightened of setting off a credit event, activating credit default swaps and other complex financial instruments, with unclear but potentially dire consequences for the global financial system.

“We attached a great deal of significance to this being voluntary,” Mr. Dallara said. “We knew what it would take in our mind in terms of the basic elements to be voluntary. It was not at all times clear through the negotiations that all parties placed the same priority on this being voluntary,” he said, an indirect reference to the German chancellor.

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For decades, the popular image of Mormon style has been shaped by clean-cut young missionaries on bicycles in dark suits, white shirts and skinny black ties ”” and more recently by the sculptured coif of the presidential candidate Mitt Romney or the sporty style of the motocross-bike-riding Jon Huntsman, another Republican presidential candidate.

But the boundaries of Mormon style are expanding. The highly visible “I’m a Mormon” ad campaign (the subject of a major push on television, billboards, the subway and the Internet) seeks to quash strait-laced stereotypes by showing off a cool, diverse set of Mormons, including, besides Mr. [Brandon] Flowers, a leather-clad Harley aficionado, knit-cap-wearing professional skateboarder and an R & B singer with a shaved head.

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The Church of England has made a series of demands of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, after a face-to-face meeting with directors in which it raised “serious ethical concerns” about the company, after the phone-hacking scandal.

The secretary to the Church’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG), Edward Mason, flew to the United States to attend the News Corp shareholders’ meeting and vote against the re-election of Rupert Murdoch’s sons, James and Lachlan, to the board of directors.

The Church holds $6 million in shares in News Corp, and wants to use its influence to try to change the company’s corporate governance.

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The inevitable resignation of the Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s, Giles Fraser, via the predictable medium of Twitter, is a sad day for one of our great national churches. But the departure of this able man, and now the planned reopening of the cathedral, should at least bring to an end the hand-wringing and posturing of the past two weeks. My paramount concern throughout has been that the reputation of Christianity is being damaged by the episode, and, more widely, that the possibility of fruitful and peaceful protest has been brought into disrepute.

The Blitz only closed St Paul’s for four days. By contrast, the Occupy London Stock Exchange protesters, camped outside Wren’s masterpiece, managed to put it out of business for a week. It has been a debacle that should prompt urgent public debate both within the Church of England, and throughout society at large.

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As Sir John Major wrote this morning in the FT, this does not solve EMU’s fundamental problem, which is the 30pc gap in competitiveness between North and South, and Germany’s colossal intra-EMU trade surplus at the expense of Club Med deficit states.

It is therefore unlikely to succeed. It means that Italy, Spain, Portugal, et al must close the gap with Germany by austerity alone, risking a Fisherite debt deflation spiral. As I have written many times, this is a destructive and intellectually incoherent policy, akin to the 1930s Gold Standard. It risks conjuring the very demons that Mrs Merkel warns against.

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The report is expected to be made public ahead of an Oversight Health panel hearing on Thursday. The title of the hearing is “ObamaCare’s Hidden Marriage Penalty and its Impact on the Deficit.”

The report concludes that fewer than 2 million couples ”” out of 60 million nationwide ”” are projected to benefit from the insurance subsidies, while “almost half of the beneficiaries of the tax credit will be unmarried individuals without dependent children.”

“These numbers,” the report says, “suggest that an impact of the [law’s] health insurance tax credit will be to introduce a significant new marriage penalty into the tax code.”

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I’m as passionate a believer in capitalism as anyone. My Krzysztofowicz cousins (who didn’t shorten the family name) lived in Poland, and their experience with Communism taught me that the way to raise living standards is capitalism.

But, in recent years, some financiers have chosen to live in a government-backed featherbed. Their platform seems to be socialism for tycoons and capitalism for the rest of us. They’re not evil at all. But when the system allows you more than your fair share, it’s human to grab. That’s what explains featherbedding by both unions and tycoons, and both are impediments to a well-functioning market economy.

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…rare is the analysis that traces all these problems back to the structural change in money that was brought about in the early 1970s.

We went from a hard-money regime, in which there were restrictions on the power of central banks and financial institutions to create money and credit, to one where money became purely paper. There were no restrictions remaining on the power of governments to finance unlimited debt. Banks could create credit seemingly without limit. Central banks became the real power in the world economy.

None of this was true under a gold standard. That system limits the expansion of credit by an indelible physical fact. There was a limit, a check, a rule that went beyond the whim of financial masters and politicians. The Vatican seems to understand this.

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France is moving towards a moment of truth. The euro crisis, an unpopular president, rivalries within the Socialist party and a flatlining economy are forcing into question the balancing act performed by successive leaders for the past three decades. Abroad, the nation of Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle likes to think of itself as Europe’s leader. This perception is now under threat. Meanwhile, at home, the very nature of the Fifth Republic is increasingly under question. Half a century after the general saved his country from disintegration and gave it a strong executive system of government, opinion polls suggest that an incumbent president could be defeated for the first time in 30 years.

Things will come to a head as France moves to its next presidential election starting in April 2012 against the backdrop of the European sovereign debt crisis, which began in Greece but has raised systemic political issues that France would rather avoid. Long gone are the balmy days of the 1980s when François Mitterrand, the former French president, and Helmut Kohl, erstwhile German chancellor, held hands at the first world war battleground of Verdun to symbolise the reconciliation between the two major protagonists of Europe’s 75-year civil war. Today, President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel peck one another on the cheek when they meet but, reflecting their nations, they are poles apart in temperament and mindset as they approach Europe’s existential challenges. While the Germans put their faith in rule-based systems, the French prefer to bank on their ability to conjure a solution out of adversity.

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Max Schrems wasn’t sure what he would get when he asked Facebook to send him a record of his personal data from three years of using the site.

What the 24-year-old Austrian law student didn’t expect, though, was 1222 pages of data on a CD. It included chats he had deleted more than a year ago, “pokes” dating back to 2008, invitations to which he had never responded, let alone attended, and hundreds of other details.

Time for an “aha” moment.

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Update: There is a BBC article on this here.

European leaders have reached a “three-pronged” agreement described as vital to solve the region’s huge debt crisis.

They said banks holding Greek debt accepted a 50% loss, the eurozone bailout fund will be boosted and banks will have to raise more capital.

Shares on European markets rose sharply on news of the deal.

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[Tim] Ticknor’s story reflects how, across the nation, the middle class’ share of the nation’s income is shrinking. Reno, which has among the highest rates of unemployment and foreclosures in the United States, is a stark example: The share of income in the metro area that was collected by the middle class fell from 49.8% in 2006 to 45.8% in 2010, the year after the 18-month recession ended.

A USA TODAY analysis of Census data found the Reno area was among 150 nationwide where the share of income going to the middle class — generally made up of households that make $20,700 to $99,900 a year — shrank from 2006 to 2010. Metro areas where the middle class’ share of income dropped outnumbered those where it grew by more than 2-to-1.

“The lower share of income is a way of saying income inequality is growing in the middle,” says Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, who has studied the shift. “The vast middle has less of the pie than it had before.”

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If start-up activity is the true engine of job creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. Simply put, from kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, you learn very few skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business. Skills like sales, networking, creativity and comfort with failure.

No business in America ”” and therefore no job creation ”” happens without someone buying something. But most students learn nothing about sales in college; they are more likely to take a course on why sales (and capitalism) are evil.

Moreover, very few start-ups get off the ground without a wide, vibrant network of advisers and mentors, potential customers and clients, quality vendors and valuable talent to employ. You don’t learn how to network crouched over a desk studying for multiple-choice exams. You learn it outside the classroom, talking to fellow human beings face-to-face.

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After [Education Secretary Arne] Duncan’s visit there was some back and forth between the Obama administration and Oregon City on how the money should be spent. But ultimately, the Department of Education said it should be given to teachers as direct bonuses. It also said it wanted to restrict the funds to schools with lots of low-income students, which would have excluded half of Oregon City’s schools.

Oregon City wanted to put the money into a shared fund, possibly for teachers’ continuing education.

Nancy Noice, president of the Oregon City teachers union, said one solution the feds proposed was that employees hand their bonuses back to the district. But Noice says that didn’t seem workable.

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I was on Wall Street two weeks ago, and I’ve been in Silicon Valley this past week. What a contrast! While Wall Street is being rattled by a social revolution, Silicon Valley is being by transformed by another technology revolution – one that is taking the world from connected to hyperconnected and individuals from empowered to superempowered. It is the biggest leap forward in the IT revolution since the mainframe computer was replaced by desktops and the Web. It is going to change everything about how companies and societies operate.

The latest phase in the IT revolution is being driven by the convergence of social media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga – with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smartphones and “the cloud” – those enormous server farms that hold and constantly update thousands of software applications, which are then downloaded (as if from a cloud) by users on their smartphones, making them into incredibly powerful devices that can perform myriad tasks.

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The 14th crisis summit in 21 months starts with a meeting of all 27 European Union leaders at 6 p.m. The real business gets under way at 7:15 p.m. when chiefs of the 10 non-euro nations depart, leaving the rest to hash out a strategy that they already say requires more work.

The cancellation of a finance ministers’ meeting to precede the summit underscored the holes in the plan. The finance chiefs will now meet at an as-yet undetermined time after the summit to complete its main elements, including safeguarding banks and writing down Greek debt, according to an EU official.

Global exasperation with Europe’s response is deepening, with politicians from Australia to North America prodding the euro area to get ahead of the crisis before it infects the world economy.

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Emily Hatcher, 26, is working overtime to find a job.

She keeps a strict schedule. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday she spends six to eight hours applying for jobs. The other days of the week, she sharpens her skills by taking computer classes online and networking.

The college graduate with a degree in early childhood education works as a babysitter and a substitute schoolteacher….

[She]…is [also] part of a job-networking group that meets at…[Roswell United Methodist Church] every other Monday.

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Among the findings in this particular evaluation was that only 11 of the 35 cyber security weaknesses identified in a 2010 review had been fully corrected by the 2011 look-see.

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In another political aftershock from the summer’s rare East Coast earthquake, a bid by the mayor of Washington to secure federal aid for the damaged Washington National Cathedral is drawing criticism from those who say it runs counter to separation of church and state.

Mayor Vincent C. Gray is seeking $15 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for repairs to the cathedral, which was seriously damaged in the 5.8 temblor Aug. 23.

But Joseph L. Conn, director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, blogged on the organization’s website, “Asking the taxpayers to pick up the tab sets a very bad precedent and jeopardizes a critically important edifice that protects us all: the wall of separation between church and state.”

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Financial turmoil in global markets continues to play havoc with the value of the U.S. dollar, but technology continues to make the transfer of donor dollars to missionaries quicker and easier.

American missionary income in China has dropped 25 percent in recent years because of the dollar’s decline against the Chinese yuan, said a missionary leader who requested anonymity. “In 24 years of missionary ministry, I have never seen things as tough as they are now.”

“It’s a complaint we hear almost every day,” says Bill Bray of Christian Aid Mission, which supports indigenous missionaries in 122 nations. “They need more money because of the exchange rate.”

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More than a week after welcoming anti-corporate protesters onto its grounds, London’s historic St. Paul’s Cathedral now wants them to go away because their presence is costing too much money.

Asking the demonstrators to leave peacefully after nine days of occupying a makeshift tent city in the churchyard, St. Paul’s dean, the Rev. Graeme Knowles, said “we have done this with a very heavy heart.”

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