More people are living with family amid high unemployment rates and a slow economy, but while the phenomenon is keeping the poverty rate lower, it has wider negative economic consequences.

In a presentation as part of its wider report on income, poverty and health insurance, the Census Bureau noted a big jump in the number of individuals and families doubling up. Census says 69.2 million, or 30%, were doubled-up in 2011, up from 61.7 million adults, or 27.7%, in 2007. “Doubled-up” households include at least one person 18 or older who isn’t enrolled in school and isn’t the householder, spouse or cohabiting partner of the householder.

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Researchers at the quiz show Q.I. in the UK hosted by Stephen Fry claim to have calculated length of Goldman Sachs defense sent to the SEC.

They say would take 11 ½ years to read.

Per: The Telegraph

The costs related to death, such as a funeral and a headstone, have collectively risen by £400 in a year to £7,248, a report says.

The cost is 20% higher than four years ago, according to the report commissioned by financial services company Sun Life Direct.

The cost of funerals was key to the increase, it said,

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[There are] 21 participants in the Mother-to-Mother program, an initiative made possible through a $70,000 grant from the Sisters of Charity Foundation of South Carolina. The 12-month project targets high- poverty, unemployed mothers who do not have a high school diploma and in many cases test below the eighth-grade level in reading or math.

The goal is for them to earn a GED and WorkKeys certificate, which is an assessment that measures real-world job skills.

“We want to move toward this program model for everything we do,” said Eileen Chepenik, the association’s executive director.

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Financial turmoil in Europe is no longer a problem of small, peripheral economies like Greece. What’s under way right now is a full-scale market run on the much larger economies of Spain and Italy. At this point countries in crisis account for about a third of the euro area’s G.D.P., so the common European currency itself is under existential threat.

And all indications are that European leaders are unwilling even to acknowledge the nature of that threat, let alone deal with it effectively.

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Germany’s Finance Ministry is studying the potential impact of a Greek debt default, working through scenarios which include Greece abandoning the euro to reintroduce the drachma, Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine reported on Saturday.

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The dismal state of the economy is the main reason many companies are reluctant to hire workers, and few executives are saying that President Obama’s jobs plan ”” while welcome ”” will change their minds any time soon.

That sentiment was echoed across numerous industries by executives in companies big and small on Friday, underscoring the challenge for the Obama administration as it tries to encourage hiring and perk up the moribund economy.

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Mr. [Jürgen] Stark’s resignation, nearly three years before his term was up, is widely viewed as another fissure in the edifice of European unity, which has suffered as wealthier countries like Germany have been asked to underwrite poor performers like Greece.

“It’s a very bad sign,” said Daniel Gros, director of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels. “It means that the split within the E.C.B. that we thought was far down the road is here now.

“It puts a shadow over the E.C.B. and risks financial markets asking, ”˜How long can they go on buying these Italian bonds?’ This indicates that the answer is, ”˜Not as long as I had thought.’ “

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Check it out.

Harvinder Sian from RBS said the sovereign humiliation of Greece by EU creditor states smacks of colonialism and can expect to meet fierce resistance. It may be tempting for Greece to precipitate a “hard default” before the second rescue package comes into force and switches a large stock of debt contracts from Greek law to English law, he said.

It is not clear who is in the stronger position in the latest round of brinkmanship between Greece and the German bloc. If pushed too far, Greece can set off a powderkeg. The International Monetary Fund says European banks are highly vulnerable and need to raise their capital by €200bn. Many of the weakest are in Germany.

The Greek crisis has spilled over into Cyprus, raising the risk that a fourth country will soon need an EU bail-out….

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Please note that any comments not on the actual content of the speech will not be retained–thank you–KSH.

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Belgian security firm GlobalSign has temporarily stopped issuing authentication certificates for secure websites.

It comes after an anonymous hacker claimed to have gained access to the company’s servers.

If confirmed, it would be the second security breach at a European certificate authority in two months.

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Carol Willison has made lots of financial sacrifices for her two children over the years, including paying most of her older daughter’s medical school tuition. But Willison’s generosity has reached its limits.

Not only doesn’t the 60-year-old Seattle woman plan to leave her daughters an inheritance when she dies, she’s trying to spend every last dime on herself before she goes.

“My goal is when they carry me away in that box that my bank account is going to say zero,” Willison said. “I’m going to spoil myself now.”

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The Paris-based organization expects the economies of euro-zone powerhouse Germany and fiscally troubled Italy to contract. Germany’s gross domestic product is set to fall 1.4% in the fourth quarter on an annualized basis, leading the weighted average GDP of the three biggest euro-zone economies to fall 0.4%, according to the OECD’s interim economic forecasts.

The forecasts suggest Italy’s GDP will fall 0.1% in the third quarter on an annualized basis before barely returning to growth at 0.1% in the fourth quarter.

“Growth is turning out to be much slower than we thought three months ago, and given the high uncertainty, the risk of a period of negative growth … has gone up,” OECD chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan said.

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The ruling is “a clear rejection of eurobonds”, said Otto Fricke, finance spokesman for the Free Democrats (FDP) in the governing coalition.

Above all, the court ruled that the Bundestag’s fiscal sovereignty is the foundation of German democracy and that Article 38 of the Basic Law prohibits transfer of these prerogatives to “supra-national bodies”.

By stating that there can be no further bail-outs for the eurozone without the prior approval of the Bundestag’s budget committee, the court has thrown a spanner in the works and rendered the EFSF almost unworkable.

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Inside the narrow valley, Taliban insurgents were dug into the high ground and hidden inside a village, pouring down deadly fire at Afghan forces and their American advisers. Armed militants swarmed the low ground to try to finish off the troops.

[Marine Cpl. Dakota] Meyer’s team was pinned down near the village. He wasn’t going to wait and see whether they would get out. Defying orders to stay put, Meyer set himself in the turret of a Humvee and rode straight into the firefight, taking fire from all directions. He went in not once, but five times, trying to rescue his comrades.

During about six hours of chaotic fighting, he killed eight Taliban militants and provided cover for Afghan and U.S. servicemen to escape the ambush, according to a Marine Corps account of the events.

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While many Americans worry that the Social Security Administration won’t have enough money left to pay their benefits when they retire, the agency is doling out millions of dollars to people who aren’t even alive.

The Social Security inspector general estimates that the agency has made $40.3 million in erroneous payments to deceased beneficiaries — even though the administration had already recorded their deaths in its records. The estimate is based on a sample tested during its most recent audit in January 2008, the watchdog agency said.

One man told CNNMoney that he notified Social Security four years ago that his mother had passed away, but he still can’t get the agency to stop sending her checks every month.

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Switzerland is once again at the top of the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Competitiveness Report, followed by Singapore, which has overtaken Sweden, then Finland with the US now in fifth place, slipping two slots since last year.

The report was published Wednesday morning 7 September by the Geneva-based organization that organizes an annual meeting of world business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland every January. The full report is available online.

Japan remains the top Asian country, at number 9 and China has advanced one place to number 26. Slovenia and Montenegro had steep falls of more than 10 places, while Sri Lanka rose by an impressive 13.

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The decision seemed to place fewer restrictions than some had expected on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ability to react to the European debt crisis, while the high public standing of the court should lend broader legitimacy to government efforts to shore up the European currency. But, some analysts said, the ruling could hamper Mrs. Merkel’s power to take quick measures.

The court’s president, Andreas Vosskuhle, said the ruling did not represent a “blank check for additional rescue packages.”

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Six years after clubbing the night away in Leeds as a student, a young Anglican pastor is returning to her former haunts ”“ as “pioneering minister” to the night-time economy.

Beth Tash, 27, is taking on hundreds of after-dark venues in the Yorkshire city as a new form of parish, as part of a scheme already serving the local business community and residents of city centre flats.

The archdeacon of Leeds, the Ven Peter Burrows, said: “If you go into Leeds on any Friday or Saturday night and see the huge number of young people coming into the city, it is obvious that the church isn’t engaging with the club culture. Because of that, this is a very significant and exciting appointment.”

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To dissuade the owners of electric cars from recharging their vehicles at peak times, and encourage them to do so in the wee, small hours of the morning instead, some electricity companies are introducing off-peak pricing for electric cars. Off-peak pricing is a common way of persuading people to run appliances such as washing machines at times of low demand. It is, though, a rigid arrangement that cannot respond to fluctuations in the requirement for power. Far better, reckon Alex Rogers and his colleagues at Southampton University, in England, for car owners to be represented in their interactions with the local power supplier by agents that can negotiate a deal on their behalf. These agents would bargain with one another, and with the power company, to charge the cars in an area in the most efficient way. The twist is that the agents Dr Rogers proposes to recruit for the task are not people, but computer programs.

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The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, aka super Congress or super committee, is Congress’s answer to its own inability to break the hold of partisan gridlock that took America to the brink of default on Aug. 2, prompting the first-ever downgrade of the nation’s credit rating.

The panel, which on Thursday holds an organizational meeting open to the public, has a sweeping mandate to propose cuts to spending and entitlements and recommend tax reform by Nov. 23. Congress must vote the package up or down ”“ no amendments or filibuster ”“ by Dec. 23, or trigger a $1.2 trillion package of automatic spending cuts, equally divided between defense and domestic spending.

“Never has Washington had an all-or-nothing panel that is empowered and backed by a firm timeline like this one is,” says John Ullyot, a public-affairs consultant in Washington and former GOP Senate staffer. “The starter pistol will fire right after Labor Day.”

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Bishop Thomas McMahon from the Catholic Diocese of Brentwood and Bishop Stephen Cottrell of the Anglican Diocese of Chelmsford paid a pastoral visit to the Dale Farm site last Tuesday. They talked and prayed with some of the Travellers who face imminent eviction from the site by Basildon Council. Both Bishops also talked to the significant numbers of journalists on the site about their concerns.

The Bishops subsequently issued the following statement: ‘The Travellers’ community at Dale Farm, near Basildon, invited us to visit them today. An eviction notice is due to take effect at 12 midnight tomorrow. We prayed with Christian and non-Christian families and children who are under extreme stress, and expressed our solidarity with them.

‘This is a desperate situation. It is important that people should know that it is a humanitarian crisis, whatever they make of the legality and politics of the situation. The travellers are frightened and anxious people. If elderly and infirm people were shown on TV being forced out of their homes, we wouldn’t think we were watching something happening in England, but that is what will happen here….

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Microsites are not new to higher ed Web strategy. But as the creeping aesthetics of the app world make traditional college websites appear tedious, some institutions have begun experimenting with more offbeat microsites to collect information from prospective students and alumni.

“While these have always been around, one of the big differences now is that these sites often have a more cutting-edge, radical design,” says Mark Greenfield, director of Web services in enrollment and planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a consultant at the higher ed consulting firm Noel-Levitz.

“It’s as if the creative folk living in a straitjacket of the ‘official’ design format suddenly find themselves with no constraints at all,” says Bob Johnson, president of the higher ed marketing firm Bob Johnson Consulting.

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This policy brief reviews the deepening marginalization of marriage and the growing instability of family life among moderately-educated Americans: those who hold high school degrees but not four-year college degrees and who constitute 51 percent of the young adult population (aged twenty-five to thirty-four). Written jointly by two family scholars, one of them a conservative (W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project) and the other a liberal (Andrew J. Cherlin, professor at Johns Hopkins University), it is an attempt to find common ground in the often bitter and counterproductive debates about family policy. We come to this brief with somewhat different perspectives. Wilcox would emphasize the primacy of promoting and supporting marriage. Cherlin argued in a recent book, The Marriage-Go-Round, that stable care arrangements for children, whether achieved through marriage or not, are what matter most. But both of us agree that children are more likely to thrive when they reside in stable, two-parent homes. We also agree that in America today cohabitation is still largely a short-term arrangement, while marriage remains the setting in which adults seek to maintain long-term bonds. Thus, we conclude by offering six policy ideas, some economic, some cultural, and some legal, designed to strengthen marriage and family life among moderately-educated Americans. Finally, unless otherwise noted, the findings detailed in this policy brief come from a new report by Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America.

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The court’s judgment, highly anticipated in European capitals and financial markets, will settle whether Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government breached the German people’s property rights in agreeing to the initial bailout of Greece in 2010.

The court also is due to rule on whether the German government should have asked the country’s parliament before taking part in the bailouts of Ireland and Portugal, as well as on the legality of the European Central Bank’s purchases of government bonds.

Legal analysts say the court is unlikely to rule that aid for euro-zone partners is unconstitutional, but that the judges could make future loan packages for euro countries subject to approval by Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag.

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To reduce unemployment, the economy must create enough new jobs to absorb entrants into the labor market and the existing out-of-work. [Heidi] Shierholz has calculated how many jobs would be needed to lower unemployment (9.1 percent in August) to 5 percent over five years. Her estimate: 16.9 million. That’s an average of 282,000 jobs a month. The trouble is that this rate of job creation far exceeds the present level (105,000 a month since early 2010) or even the level (240,000) achieved during the boom between 1993 and 2000.

You can tinker with Shierholz’s assumptions, but the main conclusion doesn’t change. Even with rapid job growth, unemployment will descend slowly. With sluggish growth — or another recession — it may remain high indefinitely. There are no quick fixes. Unemployment will increasingly define our economic prospects and politics.

It’s not only the jobless who will be affected. No one has yet repealed the law of supply and demand.

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Germany is divided over Europe’s bailout fund. Finland may be jeopardizing Greece’s latest rescue. And Italy is suddenly backpedaling on austerity.

Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi, the current and incoming presidents of the European Central Bank, had a sharp message for Europe’s leaders Monday as financial markets swooned: Get your act together.

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The job market is even worse than the 9.1 percent unemployment rate suggests.

America’s 14 million unemployed aren’t competing just with each other. They must also contend with 8.8 million other people not counted as unemployed ”” part-timers who want full-time work.

When consumer demand picks up, companies will likely boost the hours of their part-timers before they add jobs, economists say. It means they have room to expand without hiring.

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