“I sincerely hope,” he continued, “that the international community can offer social protection to minors to defeat this plague.” The Holy Father went on to say, “Let us all renew our commitment, especially families, to ensure the tutelage of every boy’s and girl’s dignity and the chance to grow up healthy.”
“A serene childhood,” he concluded, “allows children to look with confidence to the life and future.”
Four armed men ransacked Antony Akatakpo’s home in front of his wife and two children in the Nigerian city of Port Harcourt, shot him in the leg and bundled him into the trunk of his Mitsubishi Endeavor.
Akatakpo, the 34-year-old breakfast show presenter at Wazobia FM who’s known as Diplomatic Akas Baba, was driven to a forest hideout and held blindfolded for a week, fed on plain bread and threatened with death unless his family paid a 10 million naira ($61,289) ransom. He said he was dumped on a city highway on March 20 after the gunmen received less than half the sum they demanded.
“I was praying and calling on God to help me, rescue me,” he said by phone from Port Harcourt, the hub of Africa’s biggest oil industry in southeastern Nigeria. “They wanted to collect their own share of the money I was making for my family.”
The nanny state may have drained civil society, but simply removing the nanny state will not restore it. There have to be programs that encourage local paternalism: early education programs with wraparound services to reinforce parenting skills, social entrepreneurship funds to reweave community, paternalistic welfare rules to encourage work.
Second, conservatives should not be naïve about sin. We are moving from a world dominated by big cross-class organizations, like public bureaucracies, corporations and unions, toward a world dominated by clusters of networked power. These clusters ”” Wall Street, Washington, big agriculture, big energy, big universities ”” are dominated by interlocking elites who create self-serving arrangements for themselves. Society is split between those bred into these networks and those who are not. Moreover, the U.S. economy is increasingly competing against autocratic economies, which play by their own self-serving rules.
Sometimes government is going to have to be active to disrupt local oligarchies and global autocracies by fomenting creative destruction ”” by insisting on dynamic immigration policies, by pumping money into research, by creating urban environments that nurture innovation, by spending money to give those outside the clusters new paths to rise.
Primate of the Church of the Province of Central Africa (CPCA) and Bishop of Northern Zambia, the Most Revd Albert Chama explained the purpose of the workshop during the opening ceremony held June 6 at the Chamba Valley Exotic Hotel in Lusaka.
He said: “One of the things which the church in Africa grapples with has to do with the financial sustainability of the church. However, this workshop is not about lecturing but learning from what has been done somewhere.”
Archbishop Chama challenged the participants to “open their hearts and minds” and learn from one another. He also emphasised that for the Church in Africa to be successful, there is need to learn from what other dioceses have successfully done and replicate it in their own areas.
This artificial conception of money perhaps lies behind the pathological tendencies of high finance which are destructive of real wealth. Our governments and finance sectors are so often permitted to act in a criminal manner because we assume that money is amoral, disconnected from any right order, and thus open to manipulation by the masters of high finance. If we are to change this situation in a lasting way, we need to change the way we think about money, wealth and power.
We are not, of course, going to banish extortion or amoral instrumentalism just by having better metaphysics. Criminals, extortionist and abusers of power were as common and as powerful in the Middle Ages as they are today. Yet if we do not appreciate the relationship between the prevailing order of wealth and power and the metaphysical assumptions upon which they rest, we will be condemned to repeat the same cycle of inequity and instability.
The main game, indeed, is the struggle for our minds. Plato saw this most clearly. As long as we believe that illusions are reality, we are controlled by those who manipulate the collective illusions that structure the operational norms of the world as we know it.
How do we get money tied to the realities of real human life so that it becomes a fair function of the actual production and distribution of real wealth?
Air Force veteran Charles Fitch is alive today, most likely because of “personalized” cancer treatment that used to be the stuff of science fiction, all thanks to cancer research and treatment based on genomics.
In regards to medicine, genomics basically refers to the analysis of a individual’s complete set of DNA, or genome, and how to treat diseases based on the mutations or other changes that have occurred to genes in the sequence.
Fitch, a 53-year-old grandfather who lives in Mount Pleasant, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in June 2011, a few weeks after he started having chest pains. Lab results showed that he had a low, and later plummeting, level of platelets in his blood.
Clemens Fuest, from the Mannheim-based organization best known for its widely-watched economic sentiment index – told German business daily Handelsblatt that the euro zone region could be at a “turning point.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this…I am concerned by the danger that the ECB is producing new bubbles with its policy of cheap money,” he told the newspaper.
“We have all the ingredients of a bubble: The prices of real estate and stock markets continue to rise, and on the bond markets, yields are falling despite high risks.”
Last week, funeral director Caleb Wilde wrote a blog post about who to seek out when dealing with grief. His basic advice: find a therapist before you seek out your pastor. The reasoning goes that therapists, with their training in the psychological aspects that arise in times of grief, are better qualified than clergy to deal with things like depression.
I agree. In fact, this article caused me to think about a few roles that pastors are expected to take on to varying degrees, but ultimately are unqualified to fulfill. Beyond a few continuing education classes that help us better understand some of the issues that inevitably arise in ministry with individuals or organizations, to be a pastor is to be one thing and not another. A certain amount of dabbling is inevitable and a certain amount of understanding is necessary, but there come points when certain issues are best left to the experts.
So I present three things that pastors are not, even though at times maybe we or our parishioners think we are or want us to be. In the interest of balance, I’ll present a similar list of things that we are later this week.
The Charleston VA, operating on a $350 million budget, serves 60,000 veterans, schedules 700,000 appointments annually and employs about 2,000 people. Isaacks said more than 99 percent of patients are scheduled for an appointment in Charleston within 14 days.
“I wish everyone had this quality of care,” said Navy veteran Paul Hedden, 68, of James Island. “I’ve never had to wait terribly long for anything.”
There are no secret waiting lists at this facility, Isaacks insisted.
“I’ve heard story after story about the incredible things we’re doing for patients, but they’re all mad about the parking,” he said. “Parking is really the biggest complaint that we get in Charleston right now and we’re in the process of addressing that.”
The longer that Americans are unemployed, the more likely they are to report signs of poor psychological well-being. About one in five Americans who have been unemployed for a year or more say they currently have or are being treated for depression — almost double the rate among those who have been unemployed for five weeks or less.
[Book authors Mian and Sufi] argue that, rather than failing banks, the key culprits in the financial crisis were overly indebted households. Resurrecting arguments that go back at least to Irving Fisher and that were emphasised by Richard Koo in considering Japan’s stagnation, Mian and Sufi highlight how harsh leverage and debt can be ”“ for example, when the price of a house purchased with a 10 per cent downpayment goes down by 10 per cent, all of the owner’s equity is lost. They demonstrate powerfully that spending fell much more in parts of the country where house prices fell fastest and where the most mortgage debt was attached to homes. So their story of the crisis blames excessive mortgage lending, which first inflated bubbles in the housing market and then left households with unmanageable debt burdens. These burdens in turn led to spending reductions and created an adverse economic and financial spiral that ultimately led financial institutions to the brink.
This interpretation resolves the anomalies that Mian and Sufi highlight. Households do not spend while they are still overly indebted, which precipitates slow growth even after banking is restored to health. Spending slowdowns are caused by household over-indebtedness, so of course they precede problems in the banking system. And, when consumers do not spend, businesses have less need to borrow to finance investment, inventories or receivables.
Their analysis, presented with far more depth and subtlety than I have been able to reflect here, is a major contribution that furthers our understanding of the crisis. It certainly affects what I will examine in trying to predict and forestall future crises. And it should influence policies aimed at crisis prevention by demonstrating the insufficiency of keeping financial institutions healthy and by making a case for macroprudential measures directed at preventing runaway growth in household debt.
Read it all (my emphasis).
When Ray Cannata reads the Bible, he is often struck by how rooted it is in specific places. The pastor of Redeemer New Orleans, an evangelical Presbyterian church near Tulane University, notes that in almost any biblical passage you are likely to be told where something occurred”””to remind you,” he says, that the Gospels are “an earthly thing. . . . It’s not a fairy tale. It’s not ‘Once upon a time.’ ” The Rev. Cannata and other religious leaders””like the theologian Fred Sanders at Biola University outside Los Angeles””have taken that message to heart, calling it “the theology of place.”
“We believe Jesus is God in the flesh, breaking into time and place in history,” Rev. Cannata says. “He didn’t pick Greece. He didn’t pick Illinois. He picked Bethlehem….”
People behave a certain way when they expect they will run into their fellow churchgoers, notes Will Tabor, a campus minister at Tulane University and a Redeemer member, who says he also often sees other congregants during the week.
This year’s college graduates will have to be more creative to land a job they want.
The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 fell to 5.6 percent in 2013 from 6.4 percent at the recession’s peak in 2009. Among 22-year-old degree holders who found jobs in the past three years, more than half were in roles not requiring a college diploma, said John Schmitt, a labor economist for the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.
Many graduates have traveled nontraditional pathways to find employment in their desired fields. Rory Molleda, 22, started an unpaid internship at Washington’s D.C. United soccer team a week after finishing Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, a year ago.
Forty job applications later, he networked his way to a paid position at another company that wasn’t exactly what he wanted. In January, he landed his “dream job” as a team operations coordinator for D.C. United and said he feels lucky.
The European Central Bank cut its deposit rate below zero and said it would announce further measures later today as policy makers try to counter the prospect of deflation in the world’s second-largest economy.
ECB President Mario Draghi reduced the deposit rate to minus 0.10 percent from zero, making the institution the world’s first major central bank to use a negative rate. Policy makers also lowered the benchmark rate to 0.15 percent from 0.25 percent.
A bill that would have established the Lowcountry’s first comprehensive research university may have lost its best chance of passing Wednesday when some of the S.C. Senate’s most powerful voices put up a significant roadblock to the measure.
The lengthy Senate debate also featured an emotional plea from Sen. Harvey Peeler, R-Gaffney, the Senate majority leader, who lamented the aggressive, often personal politics that he said Charleston legislators employed to see the bill passed.
While the bill is not entirely dead, Sen. Larry Grooms, R-Charleston, who has fought for the measure, worries that a failure to get a vote on the bill with just one full day left in this year’s legislative session means the Senate may have lost its best chance to pass it.
The summer driving season is upon us, a time when road-trip dreams meet the open road. There’s just one thing standing in the way: the gas station.
Think filling up is expensive? It’s all relative. The cost of filling up the 39-gallon tank of a Chevrolet Suburban in [one country] is $381.81. In [another country], it’s just $1.56.
Read it all and try to guess your country’s rank before you look. Note also that the % of an average daily wage for one gallon of gas is yet another difference across the globe.
With five months to go until the Affordable Care Act’s 2015 open enrollment season, states that had troubled exchanges during the inaugural sign-up period are scrambling to either upgrade their sites or transition to the federal exchange””all on the taxpayer’s dime.
A new analysis from the Wall Street Journal finds that the cost for Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada and Oregon to overhaul their exchanges or transition to healthcare.gov will be as high as $240 million in total.
Consumers’ willingness to pay for digital content is in danger of being held back by their rising spending on internet access, according to a new forecast that raises questions about the media industry’s hopes for streaming music and video subscriptions.
The report from consultancy PwC, to be released on Wednesday, estimates the total size of the industry will grow to $2.15tn by 2018. But the fortunes of the market’s three segments will vary, with internet access revenues growing faster than both consumer spending and advertising.
That suggests internet providers such as Time Warner Cable and AT&T will be poised to capture a growing share of industry revenue. Streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify , the latter of which had Macklemore & Ryan Lewis as its most popular music artists last year, will also be well-positioned to lead growth in consumer spending, as they capture subscribers willing to pay for round-the-clock access to movies, television shows and music.
When a church closes its doors, it is a sad day for its parishioners. When it is slated for demolition, it is a sad day for the larger community, as Lilian Grootswagers realized in 2005 when she and her neighbors in the small Dutch village of Kaatsheuvel learned that St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church was due to be torn down and replaced by a four-story apartment block.
Leaping into action, Ms. Grootswagers started a petition drive, collecting 3,250 signatures, almost one-quarter of the village’s population, and sought help on a national level. As it turned out, St. Jozefkerk, built in 1933 as the centerpiece of an unusual architectural ensemble, was eligible to be on a register of historic buildings.
Today, nine years after it held its last Mass, the church is still standing, empty but awaiting its next incarnation. Its rescue was a victory for a widening effort across Europe to preserve religious buildings in the face of rapid secularization and dwindling public resources.
When 83-year-old Maybell Prewette spent one night in an Eden, N.C., hospital a few years ago because she felt dizzy, she was stunned to find out that a couple puffs of allergy nasal spray cost her more than $600.
Medicare didn’t cover the prescription because Prewette was never admitted as a patient at the hospital.
Instead, she was kept overnight for observation. The federal Medicare program doesn’t cover the cost of drugs self-administered by “observation status” patients.
Prewette called her local pharmacy after she was discharged and discovered it charges $30 for the same nasal spray. The hospital marked the medicine up 2,000 percent.
The Fellowship at Two Rivers divested itself Sunday of a Donelson campus exponentially larger than the former megachurch needs, voting to sell its 220,000-square-foot building and 37.5-acre grounds to the Catholic Diocese of Nashville.
The diocese will pay $12.5 million and move operations from the Catholic Center at 2400 21st Ave. S., spokesman Rick Musacchio said. He said the relatively small center has forced the diocese to spread programs among locations across the city.
The vote, taken after a morning sermon stressing that every Christian ”” not just the biblical “superheroes” ”” has the power to enact change, was nearly unanimous. Only one obvious “no” hand went up.
Five months after Colorado became the first state to allow recreational marijuana sales, the battle over legalization is still raging.
Law enforcement officers in Colorado and neighboring states, emergency room doctors and legalization opponents increasingly are highlighting a series of recent problems as cautionary lessons for other states flirting with loosening marijuana laws.
There is the Denver man who, hours after buying a package of marijuana-infused Karma Kandy from one of Colorado’s new recreational marijuana shops, began raving about the end of the world and then pulled a handgun from the family safe and killed his wife, the authorities say. Some hospital officials say they are treating growing numbers of children and adults sickened by potent doses of edible marijuana. Sheriffs in neighboring states complain about stoned drivers streaming out of Colorado and through their towns.
The bond markets have grasped something that continues to elude many economists. We live in a confused world. Yet the underlying story is simple. The US middle continues to hollow out, even as the economy continues to grow.
But the latter’s upside is limited by the crisis in the former. Unless the middle class starts to post healthy income gains, we will be stuck in what has been annoyingly named the “new normal”.
Neither the Democratic nor the Republican party ”“ nor most of their European counterparts ”“ appears to have an answer. President Barack Obama pushes for a higher minimum wage, which would certainly help the poorest sections of the US labour force. But it would do nothing to fix the central problem. And Republicans keep arguing for lower taxes on the wealth creators. Ditto. They have argued each other to a standstill.
Both parties might find it instructive to look north to Canada, which has endured its harshest winter in 20 years.
FIFA’s investigative report and related documents, which were obtained by The New York Times and have not been publicly released, raise serious questions about the vulnerability of the World Cup to match fixing. The tournament opens June 12 in Brazil.
The report found that the match-rigging syndicate and its referees infiltrated the upper reaches of global soccer in order to fix exhibition matches and exploit them for betting purposes. It provides extensive details of the clever and brazen ways that fixers apparently manipulated “at least five matches and possibly more” in South Africa ahead of the last World Cup. As many as 15 matches were targets, including a game between the United States and Australia, according to interviews and emails printed in the FIFA report.
Although corruption has vexed soccer for years, the South Africa case gives an unusually detailed look at the ease with which professional gamblers can fix matches, as well as the governing body’s severe problems in policing itself and its member federations. The report, at 44 pages, includes an account of Mr. [Ibrahim] Chaibou’s trip to the bank, as well as many other scenes describing how matches were apparently rigged.
The Diocese of Gloucester has stepped in to help support the two remaining credit unions in Gloucestershire.
The diocese has given struggling Gloucestershire Credit Union £4,000 and is helping another to “grow capacity”.
It follows the launch of the Church of England scheme to promote the use of credit unions over payday lenders.
Heroin was once the scourge of the urban poor, but today the typical user is a young, white suburbanite, a study finds. And the path to addiction usually starts with prescription painkillers.
A survey of 9,000 patients at treatment centers around the country found that 90 percent of heroin users were white men and women. Most were relatively young ”” their average age was 23. And three-quarters said they first started not with heroin but with prescription opioids like OxyContin.
In contrast, when heroin first became popular in the ’60s and ’70s, most users were young minority men who lived in cities. “Heroin is not an inner-city problem anymore,” says , a psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who led the study.
A rebound in house prices and near-record-low interest rates are prompting homeowners to borrow against their properties, marking the return of a practice that was all the rage before the financial crisis.
Home-equity lines of credit, or Helocs, and home-equity loans jumped 8% in the first quarter from a year earlier, industry newsletter Inside Mortgage Finance said Thursday. The $13 billion extended was the most for the start of a year since 2009. Inside Mortgage Finance noted the bulk of the home-equity originations were Helocs.
While that is still far below the peak of $113 billion during the third quarter of 2006, this year’s gains are the latest evidence that the tight credit conditions that have defined mortgage lending in recent years are starting to loosen. Some lenders are even reviving old loan products that haven’t been seen in years in an attempt to gain market share.
One of the phrases quoted a good deal in relation to this conference ”“ including on this programme yesterday ”“ was Jesus’s remark in what we often call ‘The Sermon on the Mount’: “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” But, it seems to me that Jesus is polarising to make a point. In fact, he precedes this statement with: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.”
This is a very powerful way of putting the question raised earlier: who is money for? If you love people ”“ and not just in a generic way, but in the detail of the real people who come uninvited across your path (think Good Samaritan, for example) ”“ then money is a means of enabling people to thrive ”¦ or, maybe in the short term, just survive. But, what if you assume that money and wealth exist for their own sake ”“ and for the sole good of the person who accumulates both? It is not hard to see what sort of an economist Jesus might have been”¦
Undoubtedly, the system we have grown in the last century has brought massive benefits. But, we are now responsible for how we hand this on to our grandchildren. So, we are still left with the question that the conference began with yesterday: does the economy serve people or do people serve the economy? The answer will tell us what sort of people we have chosen to be.
Read it all and the BBC link is there.
Although parishioners at St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church held their last service there in November, hymns might be heard again from the nearly 100-year-old church as soon as this fall. Riverview Presbyterian Church, now on Kanawha Boulevard, plans to buy the church building and move in.
“It had always been the hope of folks from St. Paul and Trinity [Evangelical Lutheran Church] that it would be purchased by a church or a community organization, so this is a real godsend,” said Trinity Lutheran’s Rev. Randy Richardson.
The Trinity and St. Paul congregations joined last year because of St. Paul’s dwindling membership. There were only about 40 voting members when the church closed.