(AP) — Nancy Killefer: can’t be Obama performance officer because of failure to pay unemployment tax

The first full day of business at the Primates meeting in Alexandria, Egypt, has been held in a relaxed atmosphere with primates generally positive about the days ahead.

The media spokesman for the primates meeting, Australia’s Primate, Archbishop Dr Phillip Aspinall, said day two of the meeting included a presentation by five Primates about the impact of the current situation on province mission priorities.

Archbishops Fred Hiltz from Canada, Thabo Makgoba from Southern Africa, Henry Orombi from Uganda, Stephen Oo from Myanmar and Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori from the United States made presentations.

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Citing allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct, an Anglican bishop has suspended the lead minister of a year-old church that broke off from the national Episcopal Church, officials said Monday.

The Rev. Lorne Coyle, of Christ Church of Vero Beach, was suspended effective 2 p.m. Sunday because his bishop received an out-of-state woman’s allegations that she and Coyle, who is married, had an affair, said the church’s senior warden, Jim Reamy III.

The bishop, from Virginia, met with Coyle last week in Vero Beach to inform him of the accusation.

On Sunday, Coyle stood in front of the 400-member congregation and confirmed he had sexual relations with an adult women over a period of years, Reamy said. Coyle left the building before the recessional hymn.

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There has been a “pulling back from the language of sanctions and teeth” in the crafting of the Anglican Covenant, the Primate of Australia told reporters at the Primates’ Meeting in Alexandria on Feb 2.

The Most Rev. Philip Aspinall said that whereas earlier drafts of the covenant envisioned sanctions for violations, disciplinary mechanisms were not likely to make it into the final draft.

“Hitting people over the head with sticks” was not what the Anglican Communion wanted to do to provinces that violated the Covenant, Archbishop Aspinall said. Instead, the covenant””designed to set the parameters of Anglican life and worship””is evolving into a document about “koinonia”¦fellowship”¦of communion” between churches, and would not be a sanctions-based legal code, he explained.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury has criticised churches that have too many events on their noticeboards.

Churches should concentrate less on activities and more on “praying” he said at a service in Egypt, where is chairing the meeting of the Primates of the Anglican Communion.

Dr Rowan Williams, preaching at the dedication of the new St Mark’s pro-cathedral in Alexandria, also criticised people who back-stab and undermine each other, interpreted as a reference to the internecine Anglican wars which seem to be drawing to a surprisingly peaceful close in this heartland of the Christian Creed.

Dr Williams told more than 30 Primates of the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion who are in Alexandria in an attempt to heal the rift over homosexuality that all churches needed to make more room for prayer and place less emphasis on being so “busy”.

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Many American Muslim leaders are eager to help President Barack Obama improve the image of the United States in the Islamic world, but they worry that their contribution might not be welcome. The broad suspicion of Muslims in the country since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks persists in keeping many U.S. groups from working with the Muslim community, they say.

“These issues are not going to go away just because we have a president now who has more understanding of the Muslim world,” said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, an advocacy group based in Los Angeles. “We’ll actually be under more scrutiny now that these issues are going to be raised at the top of the Obama administration.”

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Call it the Great Repression. The reality being repressed is that the western world is suffering a crisis of excessive indebtedness. Many governments are too highly leveraged, as are many corporations. More importantly, households are groaning under unprecedented debt burdens. Worst of all are the banks. The best evidence that we are in denial about this is the widespread belief that the crisis can be overcome by creating yet more debt.

The US could end up running a deficit of more than 10 per cent of gross domestic product this year (adding the cost of the stimulus package to the Congressional Budget Office’s optimistic 8.3 per cent forecast). Today’s born-again Keynesians seem to have forgotten that their prescription of a deficit-financed fiscal stimulus stood the best chance of working in a more or less closed economy. But this is a globalised world, where unco-ordinated profligacy by national governments is more likely to generate bond market and currency market volatility than a return to growth.

There is a better way to go but it is in the opposite direction. The aim must be not to increase debt but to reduce it. Two things must happen. First, banks that are de facto insolvent need to be restructured ”“ a word that is preferable to the old-fashioned “nationalisation”….

The second step we need to take is a generalised conversion of American mortgages to lower interest rates and longer maturities.

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At first glance, perhaps no line item in the nearly $900 billion stimulus program under consideration on Capitol Hill would seem to offer a more perfect way to jump-start the economy than the billions of dollars pegged to expand broadband Internet service to rural and underserved areas.

Proponents say it will create jobs, build crucial infrastructure and begin to fulfill one of President Barack Obama’s major campaign promises: to expand the information superhighway to every corner of the land, giving local businesses an electronic edge and offering residents a dazzling array of services like online health care and virtual college courses.

But experts warn that the rural broadband effort could just as easily become a $9 billion cyberbridge to nowhere, representing the worst kind of mistakes that lawmakers could make in rushing to approve one of the largest spending bills in history without considering unintended results.

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Monday was the last day of Iris Chau’s 11-year career at JPMorgan Chase and she says there’s a lot she’ll miss about the job: her colleagues, her paycheck and her role managing a technical support team. But one thing she won’t miss about JPMorgan is telling people that she works there.

“For a long time, it was kind of glamorous and I had friends who’d ask me ‘Can you get me a job there?’ ” says Chau, 35, who was part of a recent round of layoffs at the firm’s Manhattan headquarters. A few weeks ago, she mentioned her work to a photographer she’d met through a friend. “And he looks at me and says, ‘Oh, you’re one of them.’ ”

Nobody in the investment banking world is expecting pity, or even a sympathetic ear, these days. But when Wall Street talks about the collapse, it talks about life on Wall Street and the industry’s uncomfortable new role as national pariah.

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In a case that pits religious freedom against the right of a defendant to face an accuser in court, a judge here has ordered a Toronto woman to testify without her face-covering niqab at a sexual assault trial.

The Toronto Star reports the case could be precedent-setting because it doesn’t appear there is any Canadian case law on the question of veiled women testifying in court.

In Canada, home to at least 600,000 Muslims, the case will be closely watched, amid fears that veiled Muslim women will be forced to bare their faces.

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US President Barack Obama has already used experts within the last few months to hold high-level but discreet talks with both Iran and Syria, organizers of the meetings told AFP.

Officially, Obama’s overtures toward both Tehran and Damascus have remained limited.

In an interview broadcast Monday, Obama said the United States would offer arch-foe Iran an extended hand of diplomacy if the Islamic Republic’s leaders “unclenched their fist.”

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A leading member of Germany’s Jewish community said Monday that Benedict XVI, the German-born pope and leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics worldwide, was sowing divisions and abetting far-right groups by rehabilitating four ultra-conservative bishops, one of whom has denied the Holocaust.

Stephan Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said in an interview that because of the pope’s nationality, Benedict had a special responsibility to avoid creating rifts between religious groups over the comments of the controversial bishop, Richard Williamson of Britain.

“The pope’s decision is particularly disturbing in that he is also a German pope,” Kramer said. “Yes, he made a statement pledging solidarity with the Jews. But, frankly, the statement was made nearly 13 days after Williamson’s interview. Why? The question is how the pope wants to proceed from here in relations with the Jewish community.”

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More than 20m rural migrant workers in China have lost their jobs and returned to their home villages or towns as a result of the global economic crisis, government figures revealed on Monday.

By the start of the Chinese new year festival on January 25, 15.3 per cent of China’s 130m migrant workers had lost their jobs and left coastal manufacturing centres to return home, said officials quoting a survey from the agriculture ministry

The job losses were a direct result of the global economic crisis and its impact on export-oriented manufacturers, said Chen Xiwen, director of the Office of Central Rural Work Leading Group. He warned that the flood of unemployed migrants would pose challenges to social stability in the countryside.

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Speaking without a script, Archbishop Williams described the city’s history in the life of the church, and touched upon some of the theological controversies of the past, alluding to the relevance of the Arian controversy in the present day. Christians should pursue stillness, quietness and diversity, he said, and not be quick to condemn those who hold opposing theological views. He urged the primates, and the congregation, to extend Christian charity to those with whom they disagree.

A question that has yet to be answered to the satisfaction of all the primates is what they hope to achieve in Alexandria. The Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon, general secretary of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), said the primates have come at the invitation of Archbishop Williams to “review the work of the Lambeth Conference”¦explore issues of common interest, [and] prepare for the gathering of the ACC” in Jamaica in May.

The contrast in visions between an activist primates’ meeting as envisioned by the 1988 and 1998 Lambeth Conferences and supported by a majority of primates, and an indaba-oriented meeting of discussion, where all points of view hold equal weight and no decisions are taken, may make Alexandria the last united primates’ meeting. None of the primates have threatened to boycott future gatherings, but archbishops on both theological sides share similar frustration with the current environment because “no one is listening anymore,” one primate said.

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Children’s lives are being blighted by “obsessive” testing, relentless advertising and a long-hours culture that contributes to family breakdown, the Archbishop of Canterbury says in a report published today.

In a scathing attack on a society that he says is organised around the needs and desires of adults, Dr Rowan Williams argues that people must change their ways if Britain is to become a better place for children to grow up in.

He also makes an impassioned plea for marriage to be encouraged and valued, not least to set an example to young people about commitment.

“In plain terms, it will not serve us as a society, and it will not serve the growing generation, if we simply regard marriage as just one option in the marketplace of lifestyles,” he says.

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Please note: the full report as well as the summary thereof may be found via the links provided here.

“Our children deserve the best we can give them, and I hope this Report will stir us to action in the wide variety of areas it touches upon. The Report shows something of the energy, the good sense and the vision of so many of our young people. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the well-being of children and young people in this country is far from being the priority it should be, and this Report spells out in carefully researched detail some of the ways in which we are failing them. It is a clarion call for us as a society to do better.”

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[Rowan] Williams said it is important to remember that “the person praying next to me is a person in whom Jesus is praying” and to try to see “the force of energy of Jesus’ life in them. When I diminish them, I am in danger of destroying Jesus’ voice in them.”

The Most Rev. John Chew, primate of Southeast Asia, spoke during the service about the importance of the companion relationship between the dioceses of Singapore and Egypt. “When great civilizations come together a lot can happen,” he said, “especially when Christ is active in all this.”

The Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, under the leadership of President Bishop Mouneer Hanna Anis, is hosting the primates for their five-day meeting. The province includes four dioceses throughout Jerusalem, Iran, Egypt, Cyprus and the Gulf.

Alexandria, known as the Pearl of the Mediterranean, was founded around 334BC by Alexander the Great. Today, the city is the second largest in Egypt and serves as the country’s main shipping port.

Before the dedication service, the primates heard about the mission of the Alexandria School of Theology from its principal, the Rev. Emad Azmi Mikhail, who said that the institution’s primary goals were to facilitate the development of local full-time teachers and to reach a wide audience throughout the Arab-speaking world. Formed in 2005, the institution grew out of Anis’ vision to broaden theological education throughout Egypt.

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