As 2014 dawns, ObamaCare’s most disruptive changes to the health care system are just now getting under way. For American businesses, that means a raft of new taxes that will pose devastating consequences for their employees and the broader economy.

Paramount among them is a new tax on health insurers (HIT) that’s projected to “hit” them for more than $100 billion over the next decade. ObamaCare’s architects intended to eat into the margins of insurers with this levy ”” and even set it proportional to each company’s market share, so that bigger insurers pay more.

But the truth is that firms in every sector will pay it, as insurers will simply pass the tax along to employers in the form of higher premiums.

Indeed, premiums are expected to jump 2% to 3% over the course of this year thanks to this tax. By 2023, they could be about 4% higher.

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Something is going right with the British economy, and Chancellor George Osborne is keen to take the credit, “The plan is working”, he announced a few days ago in a speech in the West Midlands. But for many of those I meet, as I visit church supported projects across the Diocese of Manchester, if the plan really is working, then it’s the wrong plan.

I can offer one cheer for the chancellor. The figures for non-welfare related public spending grew year on year under the previous government in a quite unprecedented fashion, one that could only ever be sustained by a continuous rise in national wealth. Once the banker led scandals of six years ago broke, and plunged much of the globe into deep recession, that was never going to remain affordable. Deep cuts in public expenditure became inevitable; someone would have to bear the brunt. As the chancellor said this week, there are no easy answers; tough decisions still need to be made. In an economy that can never be trusted to grow consistently it is fair to say that the proportion of national income spent by government will need at some stage to return to something closer to the historic post-war average. Whether it should be falling so quickly, and whether Mr Osborne has in his head a long term target for it rather lower than the norm, are matters worthy of public debate.

I can raise a rather bigger cheer for British workers and their employers. Unlike many previous recessions this one was not a result of a systemic lack of international competitiveness. And so the solution didn’t have to be, and wasn’t, mass unemployment. A combination of loss of overtime, shorter working hours, miniscule pay increases and early retirement has allowed many British families to tighten their belts and survive. The independent decisions of the Bank of England to keep interest rates, and thereby mortgage payments, low have played an important part too. All of this has placed the nation in a better state of readiness to expand output now that the global economic climate is becoming warmer.

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Payrolls dropped at nursing homes, home health agencies, hospitals, and doctors’ offices. Outpatient care centers gained jobs.

This is only a single monthly jobs report. December’s decline in health-care jobs might be a blip that could be revised to a gain in future months. But the industry did slow hiring in 2013. A look at the average job gains in health care over the last 12 months shows the sector adding about 21,000 a month, compared with 25,000 per month the year before.

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The Vancouver School of Theology (VST) is selling its Iona Building, in the theological neighbourhood of the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus, to UBC for an agreed price of $28 million.

The deal has yet to be finalized by both sides, but the schools announced in a joint press release that UBC plans to take possession of the building in July 2014 and begin using the facility, which will house UBC’s Vancouver School of Economics.

VST, an independent theological school, plans to use part of the proceeds of the sale to continue its existing operations as a theological college at UBC and to set aside a substantial portion of the remainder in an endowment that will generate income to support professional and pastoral training. It retains ownership of nearby Somerville House and Chapel of the Epiphany. The Iona Building was built in 1927 on land leased from UBC for 999 years.

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Cannonball jellyfish are bland at best. In China, where slivered, dry jellyfish are commonly served before banquets and strewn across salads, cooks don’t use the cellophane-like strips without first dousing them in soy sauce or sesame oil.

Tabasco works too, said University of Georgia food safety professor Yao-Wen Huang, who in the 1980s earned the nickname “Cannonball King” for his work developing a jellyfish processing system.

According to Huang, the allure of jellyfish is its distinctive texture, suggestive of a cross between a potato chip and a stretched-out rubber band. “We call it crunchy-crispy,” said Huang. “It’s like when you eat chitterlings, you’re not really hungry that you want food. You want that mouthfeel.”

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Legalisation is just the first step. Pot must also be regulated. Because it is more dangerous than chocolate or chips, it needs to be subject to more stringent safety checks than food. As with alcohol, anybody who wants to produce it for sale, or sell it, should be licensed, as they will be in Colorado. It should carry clear labels showing its tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content, just as cans of beer display their alcoholic strength””consumers should know what they are smoking. Colorado seems to be handling this well: labels are clear, safety rules stringent.

Deciding how to tax the stuff means asking some fundamental questions. Where governments want to raise revenue without distorting markets, the best approach is to charge businesses a flat fee, like a cab licence. Firms then have an incentive to do as much business as they can. But where governments want to discourage consumption””as with cigarettes and alcohol””they should tax each unit sold.

Although marijuana does not harm people as reliably as cigarettes do, nor””as alcohol does””incite citizens to kill each other, it is not good for you. And although too little research has been done on the extent of the harm it can do, it is thought to raise the risk of schizophrenia and undermine motivation. This argues for a consumption tax, and a fairly stiff one at that.

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Thousands of small satellite dish-based computer systems that transmit often-sensitive data from far flung locations worldwide ”“ oil rigs, ships at sea, banks, and even power grid substations ”“ are at high risk of being hacked, including many in the United States, a new cyber-security report has found.

Very-small-aperture terminals, or VSATs, are workhorses for the oil and gas industry, utilities, and even news media. Journalists send reports via VSAT from firebases in Afghanistan, energy companies gather production data from oil drilling operations, and retail outlets send sales data back to corporate headquarters every day. Banks use VSATs for transactions between branches and headquarters.

But at least 10,500 of those terminals globally are wide open to being hacked, including some used in critical US infrastructure systems, according to the new report by IntelCrawler, a Los Angeles-based cyber-security firm.

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The U6 unemployment rate tabulates not only people without work who are seeking full-time employment but also counts “marginally attached workers and those working part-time for economic reasons.”

Please take the time to study this graph of U-6 at the top and look carefully at the other numbers. What do you see? Seasonally adjusted U-6 unemployment is now
still higher than it was in November of 2008, over 5 years ago. While there has been improvement from the worst levels of the great recession, it is hardly anywhere near what could be called healthy.

Those of you who are data hounds (like yours truly) will perhaps appreciate the table here; there is much more material at the BLS website–KSH.

In a blow to hopes that the economy was finally gaining momentum, the government reported on Friday that employers added jobs last month at the slowest pace in three years, although some experts cautioned that wintry weather in many parts of the country may have skewed the data.

In December, employers added just 74,000 jobs, the Labor Department said, well below the 200,000 gain many economists had been looking for. The latest figures were a reversal from healthier monthly payroll gains in the fall that had convinced many economists ”“ as well as policy makers at the Federal Reserve ”“ that the labor market was on a more solid footing.

The unemployment rate did fall to 6.7 percent from 7 percent in November, the lowest since November 2008. But that was largely because of people dropping out of the work force rather than finding jobs.

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Do higher living standards for the poor mean that the war on poverty has succeeded? No. To judge the effort, consider LBJ’s original aim. He sought to give poor Americans “opportunity not doles,” planning to shrink welfare dependence not expand it. In his vision, the war on poverty would strengthen poor Americans’ capacity to support themselves, transforming “taxeaters” into “taxpayers.” It would attack not just the symptoms of poverty but, more important, remove the causes.

By that standard, the war on poverty has been a catastrophe. The root “causes” of poverty have not shrunk but expanded as family structure disintegrated and labor-force participation among men dropped. A large segment of the population is now less capable of self-sufficiency than when the war on poverty began.

The collapse of marriage in low-income communities has played a substantial role in the declining capacity for self-support. In 1963, 6% of American children were born out of wedlock. Today the number stands at 41%. As benefits swelled, welfare increasingly served as a substitute for a bread-winning husband in the home.

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The rise of affordable flying video cameras is creating one-upmanship among amateur and professional videographers seeking spectacular cinematic shots.

Several manufacturers of remote-controlled drones designed to carry camcorders wowed the crowds at the Consumer Electronics Show this week. They included DJI, Parrot and Yuneec Technology.

“It’s a big and growing market,” said D. Andrew Knight, a representative for New York City-based retailer B&H Photo Video, which sells DJI Phantom quadcopters.

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He fed the 5,000 and walked on water but now a new advertising campaign suggests that Jesus can work miracles in another area altogether.

Advertisements for a Christian dating agency are set to raise more than eyebrows with a claim that believers make “better lovers”.

The slogan, to appear in London Tube carriages from next week, appears to be based on spam emails promoting herbal anti-impotence drugs.

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Oregon replaced Washington, D.C., which had held the top spot for the previous five years as workers sought out government jobs. The nation’s capital fell to fourth place last year, tying with South Dakota.

Other top destinations for those seeking to relocate included South Carolina, with 60 percent of moves made for those coming into the state, North Carolina (58 percent), and Nevada (56 percent).

“Business incentives, industrial growth and relatively lower costs of living are attracting jobs and people to the Southeastern and Western states, such as South Dakota, Colorado and Texas,” said UCLA economist Michael Stoll.

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Restaurateur Michael De Beyer wants to sell his fine-dining German restaurant, but at the right price, and all for a good cause.

A 19-year-old employee of De Beyer’s has been diagnosed with a ping-pong size tumor in her brain, he said. And in December, when doctors first made their diagnosis, De Beyer’s jack-of-all-trades hostess, waitress, bus-girl and kitchen aide didn’t have health insurance, he said.

De Beyer said he is willing to help any way he can, even if that includes selling the only German restaurant owned by an actual German in the Houston region, as he describes his Montgomery restaurant of 15 years, the Kaiserhof Restaurant and Wunderbar.

“I’m not able to just sit by and let it happen,” De Beyer said. “I couldn’t live with myself; I would never be happy just earning money from my restaurant knowing that she needs help.”

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Interviewer: I’d just like to bring you a comment regarding northern Nigeria and the presence of Boko Haram. . . ”˜How can Nigeria become an economic powerhouse when Boko Haram are busy causing calamities on its people.’ How much of it is a deterrent to Nigeria’s prospects of becoming this economic superpower?

JW: If I may say so, I think the problem with that comment is that it’s looking at a map with too small a scale. Northern Nigeria is a very very long way from Lagos, and a very long way from the Middle Belt. And we’re talking not northern Nigeria but north-eastern Nigeria in particular. North-western is an ethnically, and in many ways religiously, slightly different kettle of fish, and so is the south-west and the south, south where the oil is, is yet another area, and Lagos is its own city state in a very powerful way. So, yes it is a very serious problem. Any area where there’s war and killing is an absolute tragedy. And the attacks on the Christian population there are very severe, the attacks on Muslim leaders are very severe, and on government figures. But, it is not holding back the south. If you look at most of Nigeria, the south of Nigeria in particular, as an independent country it is growing at a rate that defies description. The economy there is more vigorous than one can describe.

– See more at: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/5222/transcript-archbishop-justins-bbc-world-service-interview-on-nigeria-with#sthash.Kbrq0uJt.dpuf

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[Glenn] Greenwald was the first but not the only journalist that Snowden reached out to. The Post’s Barton Gellman had also connected with him. Now, collaborating with documentary filmmaker and Snowden confidante Laura Poitras, he was going to extend the story to Silicon Valley. Gellman wanted to be the first to expose a top-secret NSA program called Prism. Snowden’s files indicated that some of the biggest companies on the web had granted the NSA and FBI direct access to their servers, giving the agencies the ability to grab a person’s audio, video, photos, emails, and documents. The government urged Gellman not to identify the firms involved, but Gellman thought it was important. “Naming those companies is what would make it real to Americans,” he says. Now a team of Post reporters was reaching out to those companies for comment.

It would be the start of a chain reaction that threatened the foundations of the industry. The subject would dominate headlines for months and become the prime topic of conversation in tech circles. For years, the tech companies’ key policy issue had been negotiating the delicate balance between maintaining customers’ privacy and providing them benefits based on their personal data. It was new and contro­versial territory, sometimes eclipsing the substance of current law, but over time the companies had achieved a rough equilibrium that allowed them to push forward. The instant those phone calls from reporters came in, that balance was destabilized, as the tech world found itself ensnared in a fight far bigger than the ones involving oversharing on Facebook or ads on Gmail. Over the coming months, they would find themselves at war with their own government, in a fight for the very future of the Internet.

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Just six months ago, 35-year-old Air Force veteran Robert Wright returned to the Charleston area with his wife and four children to face an uncertain future.

A large cyst on Wright’s brain had resulted in his medical retirement from the service he joined in 1997, serving multiple deployments overseas. With a stent in his brain and unable to work, Wright would be staying at home with wife Bethany, 33, who home-schools their four children, two of whom have medical issues as well.

They never expected that home would be a new 5-bedroom house, fully furnished and mortgage-free, in the emerging McKewn subdivision in North Charleston.

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In the field of higher education, reality is outrunning parody. A recent feature on the satire website the Onion proclaimed, “30-Year-Old Has Earned $11 More Than He Would Have Without College Education.” Allowing for tuition, interest on student loans, and four years of foregone income while in school, the fictional student “Patrick Moorhouse” wasn’t much better off. His years of stress and study, the article japed, “have been more or less a financial wash.”

“Patrick” shouldn’t feel too bad. Many college graduates would be happy to be $11 ahead instead of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, behind. The credit-driven higher education bubble of the past several decades has left legions of students deep in debt without improving their job prospects. To make college a good value again, today’s parents and students need to be skeptical, frugal and demanding. There is no single solution to what ails higher education in the U.S., but changes are beginning to emerge, from outsourcing to online education, and they could transform the system.

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Why has the prosperity gospel prospered? Anyone involved in ministry today is aware of how widespread this new teaching is. It has reached almost every nation. I was surprised to find it even in Cuba on one of my many trips to that Caribbean island.

It would be easy to say that the spread of the prosperity gospel is simply the result of a lack of biblical knowledge, and certainly no one can deny that. The movement misinterprets Scripture, selectively uses biblical texts at the expense of others, missing the balanced view of the whole counsel of God on health and wealth. And in an era when many teachers of the Word are not preaching expositionally, all kinds of heresies would arise.

But two questions remain: why this heresy? And why now? I would suggest that there are deep evil roots in people’s hearts and strong secular ideas in the heart of our society””and even in the church””that serve as fertilizers for this harmful seed.

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American consumers in 2013 were more upbeat than at any time in the previous six years as views on the economy, finances and the buying climate improved.

The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index…averaged minus 31.4 for 2013, the highest since 2007, when it was minus 10.5. The weekly index fell for the first time since mid-November, dropping to minus 28.7 for the period ended Dec. 29, from minus 27.4.

An improved job market, higher stock prices and rising home values lifted sentiment at the end of the year and helped drive holiday retail shopping. Stronger wage and employment growth would help propel bigger gains in confidence and encourage Americans to boost spending, which accounts for almost 70 percent of the economy.

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The 41 employees of Extreme Dodge in Jackson, Mich., are very familiar with trade-ins, but this year they’re learning about trade-offs as they come face to face with the new realities of health care. A few workers say they’re getting a great deal, but most have a severe case of sticker shock.

“I feel like I’ve been taken to the cleaners,” said Neal Campbell, a salesman.

Read it all or watch the video report from NBC.

A gleaming white Apple store of weed is how Andy Williams sees his new Denver marijuana dispensary.

Two floors of pot-growing rooms will have windows showing the shopping public how the mind-altering plant is grown. Shoppers will be able to peruse drying marijuana buds and see pot trimmers at work separating the valuable flowers from the less-prized stems and leaves.

“It’s going to be all white and beautiful,” the 45-year-old ex-industrial engineer explains, excitedly gesturing around what just a few weeks ago was an empty warehouse space that will eventually house 40,000 square feet of cannabis strains.

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Archbishop Welby, speaking on the Today programme on Radio 4, said that a review of the investment had been completed. He said: “They are working out how they can dispose of those shares without disposing of millions and millions of pounds of investment at a loss because they have a responsibility to pensioners.”

The Archbishop also admitted that there has been a “change in attitude” towards the Christian faith in Britain and that Church membership was in decline.

He said that he was nevertheless “extremely hopeful” for the future of the Church of England because of new initiatives such as the “Fresh Expressions” scheme, where congregations meet in unorthodox venues such as pubs, clubs and skateparks.

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…at a few minutes past 6am, Chris Aldridge obediently announced to a nation of banker-bashers that Jenkins reckons it will take “up to a decade to rebuild people’s trust in his bank following the financial crisis and a succession of scandals”.

That line had been pretty well aired in February when Jenkins smoothed: “I see becoming the ‘go-to’ bank as a five to 10-year journey,” but no matter. It was repeated throughout the show’s three hours as a constant reminder to listeners that ”“ whatever Barclays’ staggeringly broad sins of the past (mis-selling, rigging interest rates, violating sanctions) ”“ it is now firmly on the side of the angels.

For those still too sleepy to grasp the show’s theme of simultaneously serving God and Mammon, there was more to come. Somehow, Jenkins then managed to introduce an endorsement for his bank from the Lord himself ”“ or at least one of his representatives on Earth, in the form of the show’s star guest, Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury.

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“He envisages a shore-based team of qualified captains working in a replica 3D bridge, similar to the simulators used for training today, that could operate a fleet of a dozen ships at the same time.”

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Several days into the Christmas shopping season at the Northgate Mall here, the Rev. Dan Anderson stood improbably in a storefront between Sci-Fi City and the Loveable You Portrait Studio. An older couple, strolling past, slowed down to regard him.

Father Anderson, 66, wore the brown habit of the Franciscan friar, its plain humility broken only by a name tag affably identifying him as Dan. The former shoe store that he occupied contained holiday decorations, a brimming coffeepot and a life-size statue of the order’s founder, St. Francis of Assisi. On one table rested a glass fishbowl for prayer requests.

The couple asked Father Anderson if they could confess, and he guided them to a quiet corner. They spoke, he listened, and as the minutes passed, 15 or more, they gathered the courage to ask their question of both the friar and the universe: A relative of theirs had committed suicide. Was he in heaven?

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A handful of employees–now ex-employees–of a Miami chiropractic office say they got more than a paycheck for their labors.

The workers say they were force-fed an indoctrination in the rituals of Scientology, the controversial religion that counts such celebrities as Tom Cruise and John Travolta among its members. Those rituals, the workers complained, included occasionally having to sit perfectly still in a spare room at the office, facing one another for an eight-hour stare-down–as well as yelling at ash trays and talking to the walls.

They also had to devour the books of the late L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology’s founder, including his seminal work, “Dianetics,” the complaint alleged.

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As interments of veterans and their dependents climb to a record level, the Department of Veterans Affairs is rushing to add burial space at the fastest rate since the Civil War.

The project is adding thousands of burial sites and vault spaces across the country. But a Nevada congresswoman is pressing the VA to add more national cemeteries, especially in Western states that now have few cemeteries but whose senior populations are growing.

“The prestige of being buried in a national cemetery is something every veteran is entitled to,” said Rep. Dina Titus, a Democrat, who has been prodding the VA to open more such cemeteries in places like Nevada. It is among about a dozen U.S. states that lack a federally funded and operated national cemetery, and rely mostly on veterans’ cemeteries run by states or Native American tribal governments.

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