Beinart is a classic Washington scholar-journalist-pundit — a Yale and Oxford graduate who has edited the New Republic, stamped his wonk pass at the Council on Foreign Relations and now hangs out at the New America Foundation and the City University of New York. This is his second book on U.S. foreign policy, and he weighs in on politics and policy everywhere from the Daily Beast to the New York Review of Books, where he recently issued a controversial takedown of America’s pro-Israel establishment.

Unsurprisingly, this world of scholars and ideas takes on critical importance in his tale. As much as the presidents and generals who make and execute foreign policy, “The Icarus Syndrome” dwells on the thinkers, great and small, in and out of government, who have debated foreign policy throughout the decades — people such as Lippman and Kennan, as well as Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leslie Gelb, Elliott Abrams, Francis Fukuyama, Paul Wolfowitz and Beinart’s hero-foil, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr..

In other words, Peter Beinart’s book is premised on the notion that people like Peter Beinart matter greatly. (One might call that a hubris of some kind.) Yet, while Beinart deftly chronicles the battles among these thinkers and their worldviews, he is somewhat less convincing at always identifying how these debates and doctrines affect real policy and action — what presidents actually do.

If anything, his account underscores how many of the best-known and most respected intellectuals either despaired at their lack of influence, watched their ideas get twisted beyond recognition or found themselves abandoned precisely at the moment when their insights could have mattered most.

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Many Americans spent their summer vacations last year going to the local swimming hole, picking raspberries in their backyards, and spending the night in their own beds.

But this year, it looks as if Americans will hit the road ”“ perhaps kayaking in California with the leopard sharks in La Jolla Cove, learning about the world of Cleopatra at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, or shopping for Armani and Dolce & Gabbana in Milan, Italy.

Already, travel agents report, bookings are much better than last year, which qualified as a travel dud. A late May forecast from the U.S. Travel Association, a trade group in Washington, predicts a modest 2.3 percent increase in summer leisure travel compared with last year.

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Critics described the change in Church rules as “utterly unacceptable” and warned it would undermine the biblical teaching that marriage is for life.

Conservative and liberal bishops have been deeply divided over the issue, which they have been secretly discussing for months.

While Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, supported relaxing the rules, John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, is understood to have fiercely argued against a change.

But The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that the change was agreed at a meeting of the House of Bishops in May.

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The “vicar of Baghdad” has told a Hampshire congregation about the horrifying challenges facing his mission of Christianity in Iraq.

Andrew White, the Anglican Chaplain to the Iraqi capital, told fellow Christians at Southampton’s Highfield Church of the terrorism and violence that blights the lives of ordinary citizens and the church where he preaches.

During a series of addresses he said the number of Christian followers in the country has dwindled to around 200,000, from more than a million before the 2003 invasion.

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Episcopal Village, a grass-roots community organization, offers training and practical resources to help parishes and dioceses become, among other things, missionaries in their own backyards, said Ward, abbess and vicar of Church of the Apostles, an Episcopal and Lutheran “contextual” mission congregation.

Herself a church planter, Ward said the event aims to draw on local experience and expertise to assist congregations in connecting and reconnecting with their locale. It will be held at St. David of Wales Church in Portland and hosted by the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon. A similar event is planned for Sept. 24-25 in Baltimore, said Ward, EpV director.

Among other things, the agency teaches both clergy and laity to do “neighborhood field reconnaissance” as a way of syncing the church with the community’s rhythm of life. “A lot of churches aren’t really connected to those in their own zip codes,” she explained.

Also key is the question of how the church might speak to whatever its context is, whether homelessness, prostitution, or even the isolation wrought by modern technology.

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Parish endowments that were frozen in litigation between the rival Episcopal and Anglican dioceses of Pittsburgh have thawed, and the Episcopal diocese has sent checks totaling $360,000 in back interest to parishes in both dioceses.

“We were concerned that money that could have been used for ministry in these local churches had been tied up and so we’re happy to have it available again so that all of our work in mission and ministry can go forward,” said Bishop Kenneth L. Price Jr. of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh.

His diocese was awarded about $20 million in centrally held diocesan assets in a 2009 decision by Allegheny Common Pleas Judge Joseph James. Parish property is to be negotiated separately. However, the Episcopal diocese also held $2.5 million in endowment funds belonging to parishes that had pooled their money to get higher interest. The court decree indicated that parishes had the right to that money.

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Ballarat’s Anglican bishop, under investigation over complaints of bullying, has taken sick leave amid indications he may resign soon.

Bishop Michael Hough has appointed a Melbourne assistant bishop, Philip Huggins, to take temporary charge of Ballarat, with the blessing of Melbourne Archbishop Philip Freier.

It is extremely unusual for a senior priest from within the diocese not to take charge in the bishop’s absence, but The Age believes that divisions in Ballarat run so deep that no internal candidate was deemed acceptable to Bishop Hough’s supporters and critics.

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…while the Normans used their native French as the language of the court and of literature, English became the language of England’s common, conquered people. Compare English words that come from that time ”” “fire,” “work,” “strong,” “heart” ”” to French words from that era: “glory,” “cordial,” “fortune,” “guile” and “sacred.” As McCrum explains, English disappeared from the written record, but survived “underground on the lips of ordinary people.” As a result, the language became democratized very early on.

That democratic character, according to McCrum, is partially responsible for English’s eventual global domination. While French imperialists forcefully imposed their own language on foreign countries in a “top-down” manner, English imperialists took a “bottom-up” approach. English would not be “imposed from above by the government” in the colonies, says McCrum. Instead, “the troops would arrive, and the language would flow again from the ordinary people.”

It sounds nice and democratic, but McCrum isn’t arguing that British Empire was a “benign” or “culturally beneficial” influence. “Clearly, the British Empire has much to answer for,” he says. “But at the level of language, the way in which it operated was very effective from the point of spreading English.”

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I have also to announce to the House that during the night and the early hours of this morning the first of the series of landings in force upon the European Continent has taken place. In this case the liberating assault fell upon the coast of France. An immense armada of upwards of 4,000 ships, together with several thousand smaller craft, crossed the Channel. Massed airborne landings have been successfully effected behind the enemy lines, and landings on the beaches are proceeding at various points at the present time. The fire of the shore batteries has been largely quelled. The obstacles that were constructed in the sea have not proved so difficult as was apprehended. The Anglo-American Allies are sustained by about 11,000 firstline aircraft, which can be drawn upon as may be needed for the purposes of the battle. I cannot, of course, commit myself to any particular details. Reports are coming in in rapid succession. So far the Commanders who are engaged report that everything is proceeding according to plan. And what a plan! This vast operation is undoubtedly the most complicated and difficult that has ever taken place. It involves tides, wind, waves, visibility, both from the air and the sea standpoint, and the combined employment of land, air and sea forces in the highest degree of intimacy and in contact with conditions which could not and cannot be fully foreseen.

There are already hopes that actual tactical surprise has been attained, and we hope to furnish the enemy with a succession of surprises during the course of the fighting. The battle that has now begun will grow constantly in scale and in intensity for many weeks to come, and I shall not attempt to speculate upon its course. This I may say, however. Complete unity prevails throughout the Allied Armies. There is a brotherhood in arms between us and our friends of the United States. There is complete confidence in the supreme commander, General Eisenhower, and his lieutenants, and also in the commander of the Expeditionary Force, General Montgomery. The ardour and spirit of the troops, as I saw myself, embarking in these last few days was splendid to witness. Nothing that equipment, science or forethought could do has been neglected, and the whole process of opening this great new front will be pursued with the utmost resolution both by the commanders and by the United States and British Governments whom they serve. I have been at the centres where the latest information is received, and I can state to the House that this operation is proceeding in a thoroughly satisfactory manner. Many dangers and difficulties which at this time last night appeared extremely formidable are behind us. The passage of the sea has been made with far less loss than we apprehended. The resistance of the batteries has been greatly weakened by the bombing of the Air Force, and the superior bombardment of our ships quickly reduced their fire to dimensions which did not affect the problem. The landings of the troops on a broad front, both British and American- -Allied troops, I will not give lists of all the different nationalities they represent-but the landings along the whole front have been effective, and our troops have penetrated, in some cases, several miles inland. Lodgments exist on a broad front.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Another reminder of the things that are really important on this D-Day anniversary–KSH.

Simply an amazing man–KSH.

Another major topic before the Synod is the Anglican Communion Covenant. We are one of the first provinces to consider the final text. We are blessed to have had an Anglican Communion Working Group guiding our study of the drafts of the Covenant and inviting our input by way of critique and revision. And I know that those comments from our Church have been viewed by many within the Communion as constructive and helpful.

Section IV, Our Covenanted Life Together, continues to be challenging for many in the Communion. On the one hand it speaks of respect for the autonomy and integrity of each province in making decisions according to the polity reflected in its Constitution and Canons. On the other, it speaks of relational consequences for a Church should it make decisions deemed incompatible with the Covenant. These consequences could range from limited participation to suspension from dialogues, commissions and councils within the Communion. In my opinion, they reflect principles of exclusion with which many in the Communion are very uneasy. For if one is excluded from a table, how can one be part of a conversation? How can our voice be heard, how can we hear the voices of others, how can we struggle together to hear the voice of the Spirit? How can we hope to restore communion in our relationships if any one of us cannot or will not be heard?
In his 2010 Pentecost letter, the Archbishop of Canterbury speaks of “particular provinces being contacted about the outworking of these relational consequences.” To date we cannot be identified as “a Province that has formally through their Synod or House of Bishops adopted policies that breach any of the moratoria requested by the Instruments of Communion and recently affirmed by the Standing Committee and the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith, and Order”. However the Archbishop’s letter also refers to “some provinces that have within them dioceses that are committed to policies that neither the province as a whole nor The Communion has sanctioned”. One is left wondering if provinces whose Primates continue to interfere in the internal life of other provinces and extend their pastoral jurisdiction through cross-border interventions will be contacted. To date I have seen no real measure to address that concern within The Communion. I maintain and have publicly declared my belief that those interventions have created more havoc in the Church, resulting in schism, than any honest and transparent theological dialogue on issues of sexuality through due synodical process in dioceses and in the General Synod. I also wonder when I see the word “formally” italicized in the Archbishop’s letter. It leaves me wondering about places where the moratoria on the blessing of same sex unions is in fact ignored. The blessings happen but not “formally”. As you will have detected I have some significant concerns about imposing discipline consistent with provisions in the Covenant before it is even adopted; and about consistency in the exercise of discipline throughout one Communion. There are also lingering concerns in Section IV on monitoring discipline and procedures for restoring membership in our covenanted life together.

All that being said, I have every hope that our Church will embrace the request to consider the Covenant. Our Anglican Communion Working Group is committed to providing educational resources to aid our study. Bishop George Bruce will give us a brief overview of those materials in the course of Synod. I have every confidence we will use them faithfully and that we will offer valuable comments in response to the request for a Communion-wide Progress Report on the Covenant at the next meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in 2012.

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After they elected their next bishop Saturday morning, Episcopalians in the Diocese of Kentucky had a short delay in contacting him with the good news.

That was because the Rev. Terry Allen White was busy at the cathedral that he pastors in Kansas City, Mo., serving as master of ceremonies for a ceremony of ordinations of new clergy.

“He’s having a very rich day,” Bishop Ted Gulick, who is retiring later this year, said after delegates elected White on the second ballot from among four nominees.

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In essence, [Rowan] Williams and [katharine] Jefferts Schori are having a very old argument over local autonomy and central authority, Butler Bass said ”” two extreme and perhaps irreconcilable interpretations of Anglicanism.

“He’s trying to find coherent Anglican identity and enforce it in a top-down way, and she’s saying we’ve always been democratic, local, grass-roots.”

That argument seems to have reached a breaking point, the historian said.

“Scholars will look back on these letters in 150 years and say, ‘This is it. This is when it all went away,'” [Diana] Butler Bass said. “The Anglican Communion is not going to make it.”

[David] Hein agreed, saying, “A path has been chosen. It seems (Jefferts Schori) has prepared to pack her bags and go off on her own.”

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The ukulele has a mixed bag of friends, including mega-zillionaire Warren Buffett, at least three Beatles and elementary-school students in Nova Scotia. Despite many thousands of fans the world over, the small four-stringed instrument has been the butt of countless jokes and insults. But as a new documentary demonstrates, the uke has made a comeback.

The Mighty Uke: The Amazing Comeback of a Musical Underdog opens with shots of Hawaiian virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro ”” now 33 ”” in New York City wearing jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt, playing his ukulele with brilliance and brio. Director Tony Coleman describes Shimbukuro’s technique as “ukulele shock and awe. He’s an athletic performer, full of expression.” Shimbukuro’s mother handed him a ukulele when he was 4, and a little more than two decades later, his version of George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” went viral on YouTube.

Caught this on the morning run via podcast–a terrific story. Best when heard via audio (7 1/3 minutes) if you can; if you can’t please read it all–KSH.

Using two opposite strategies, one focused and one broad, scientists say they have made progress in taming two of the most intractable types of cancer.

The focused approach shrank tumors significantly in a majority of patients with advanced lung cancer marked by a specific genetic abnormality.

Even though the clinical trial was small (just 82 people, with no control group), the results were considered so striking for such sick patients that the study will be featured Sunday at the main session of the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology here.

“This is a phenomenal example of finding the right patient and the right drug very early on,” said Dr. Pasi A. Janne of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who was involved in the trial.

Really encouraging–read the whole thing.

What was sweet and surprising was that all the principals in the story comported themselves as fully formed adults, with patience, grace and dignity. And in doing so, [Armando] Galarraga and [Jim] Joyce showed kids How to Do It.

A lot of adults don’t teach kids this now, because the adults themselves don’t know how to do it. There’s a mentoring gap, an instruction gap in our country. We don’t put forward a template because we don’t know the template. So everyone imitates TV, where victors dance in the end zone, where winners shoot their arms in the air and distort their face and yell “Whoooaahhh,” and where victims of an injustice scream, cry, say bitter things, and beat the ground with their fists. Everyone has come to believe this is authentic. It is authentically babyish. Everyone thinks it’s honest. It’s honestly undignified, self-indulgent, weak and embarrassing.

Galarraga and Joyce couldn’t have known it when they went to work Wednesday, but they were going to show children in an unforgettable way that a victim of injustice can react with compassion, and a person who makes a mistake can admit and declare it. Joyce especially was a relief, not spinning or digging in his heels. I wish he hadn’t sworn. Nobody’s perfect.

Thursday afternoon the Tigers met the Indians again in Comerica Park. Armando Galarraga got a standing ovation. In a small masterpiece of public relations, Detroit’s own General Motors gave him a brand new red Corvette. Galarraga brought out the lineup card and gave it to the umpire””Jim Joyce, who had been offered the day off but chose to work.

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The Internal Revenue Service is drafting guidance that could require employers with religious affiliations to warn workers when their pensions have lost their federal safety net.

Over the past decade, more than 100 employers, including hospitals, schools, nursing homes, charities and other nonprofits, have converted their pension plans to “church plans,” a largely unregulated category of pensions that generally cover clergy and lay employees of churches and synagogues.

Church plans are exempt from federal pension rules, including those that require employers to fund the plans and insure them with the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., or PBGC, a federal agency that pays the benefits if a pension plan runs out of money.

“They said: ‘Hallelujah, I’m a church plan,’ and no longer have to meet funding requirements, or pay premiums, said Andrew Zuckerman, the IRS’s acting director of employee plans, at a meeting for pension groups this year.

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This shrinking city needs to hang on to people like Johnette Barham: taxpaying, middle-class professionals who invest in local real estate, work and play downtown, and make their home here.

Ms. Barham just left. And she’s not coming back.

In seven years as a homeowner in Detroit, she endured more than 10 burglaries and break-ins at her house and a nearby rental property she owned. Still, she defied friends’ pleas to leave as she fortified her home with locks, bars, alarms and a dog.

Then, a week before Christmas, someone torched the house and destroyed almost everything she owned.

In March, police arrested a suspect in connection with the case, someone who turned out to be remarkably easy to find. For Ms. Barham, the arrest came one crime too late. “I was constantly being targeted in a way I couldn’t predict, in a way that couldn’t be controlled by the police,” she says. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Not a short article but a very important one–read it all.

Overall, the job creation picture is still bleak. Poor sales and uncertainty continue to hold back any commitments to growth, hiring or capital spending. Job creation plans have been running far below comparable quarters in the recovery from two other major recessions.

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Almost everything Congress has done in recent months has made private businesses less inclined to hire new workers. ObamaCare imposes new taxes and mandates on private employers. Even with record unemployment, Congress raised the minimum wage to $7.25, pricing more workers out of jobs. The teen unemployment rate rose to 26.4% in May, and for those between the ages of 25 and 34 it rose to 10.5%. These should be some of the first to be hired in an expansion because they are relatively cheap and have the potential for large productivity gains as they add skills.

The “jobs” bill that the House passed last week expands jobless insurance to 99 weeks, while raising taxes by $80 billion on small employers and U.S-based corporations. On January 1, Congress is set to let taxes rise on capital gains, dividends and small businesses. None of these are incentives to hire more Americans….

It’s always a mistake to read too much into one month’s jobs data, and we still think the recovery will lumber on. But if Ms. Romer wants this to be more than a jobless recovery, she and her boss should drop their government-creates-wealth illusions and start asking why so many private employers remain on strike.

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The parish liturgy committee decided to adopt the contemporary version of the Lord’s Prayer for use during worship. From now on, at least at one of the services, we’d be “sinners” instead of “trespassers.” The next Sunday a distraught man cornered me. “You’ve taken the Lord’s Prayer away from us!”

I was shocked. What did he mean? We’d been preparing and educating people for this small change for years. How could changing a few words “take away” the Lord’s Prayer?

I thought: maybe the Lord’s Prayer was not part of this man’s daily spiritual practice. If it were, he might be using as many versions as he wanted in as many languages as he wanted or even paraphrases of his own. But maybe instead of praying it in his own time, he viewed Sunday worship as his own time, rather than as a gathering together of diverse and dissimilar people in continual growth and flux. After I came to this realization I begin hearing more “I” language: phrases such as “I came to get my ashes” on Ash Wednesday and “I had to get my palm” on Palm Sunday. My parishioners were consumers of prayer! Like customers at vending machines, they’d slide their dollars into the slot for the week’s allotment of praise, thanksgiving, intercession and petition followed by coffee hour. The formulaic general confession served as the sole opportunity for soul cleansing and maintenance. There was no preparation, no aftercare, no angels rejoicing over this one repentant sinner out of 99, no fatted calf or cloak or ring, no popping of a champagne bottle celebrating a moral victory won over self.

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Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir has been out for not quite a month, but in that time I have received more letters about the book than any book I have ever written. I am not sure why that is the case, but it seems that I have struck a nerve. That I come from the working classes evokes for many a sympathetic reading. Others respond to my having lived for over twenty years with a wife that suffered from bipolar illness. The significance of friendship for sustaining my life also seems significant to many readers. The response I find most surprising is the surprise many express about my surprise that I am a Christian.

That a theologian should be surprised about being a Christian may seem strange, particularly among folk who have little sympathy with Christianity. They often assume that theologians by definition must believe in what they think about. That, of course, is a deep mistake made, particularly in recent times. Many who become theologians in our time think their task is to try to determine how much of what has passed for Christianity they still need to believe and yet still be able to think of themselves as Christians. I discovered, however, that I did not know enough about Christianity to know what I was disbelieving….

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It is a familiar lament of single African-American women: where are the “good” black men to marry?

A new study shows that more and more black men are marrying women of other races. In fact, more than 1 in 5 black men who wed (22 percent) married a nonblack woman in 2008. This compares with about 9 percent of black women, and represents a significant increase for black men ”” from 15.7 percent in 2000 and 7.9 percent in 1980.

Sociologists said the rate of black men marrying women of other races further reduces the already-shrunken pool of potential partners for black women seeking a black husband.

“When you add in the prison population,” said Prof. Steven Ruggles, director of the Minnesota Population Center, “it pretty well explains the extraordinarily low marriage rates of black women.”

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“I spent the summer before college reading Shakespeare and staring out the window and occasionally being a roadie for my friend’s band,” says Eve Tushnet, the celibate, gay, conservative, Catholic writer. That was all good fun, she says upon meeting in Union Station, but she was ready for more, although she knew not what. “I was hoping for something very different in college.”

It is common, this freshman urge for self-invention. The football player tries his hand at poetry; the classical violinist fiddles in a bluegrass band. But Ms. Tushnet ”” whose parents, Mark Tushnet and Elizabeth Alexander, are a well-known liberal Harvard law professor and a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, respectively ”” did not imagine that she would become a Roman Catholic, nor that 10 years after graduation, her voice, on her blog and in numerous articles, would be one of the most surprising raised against same-sex marriage.

As the hundred or so daily readers of eve-tushnet.blogspot.com, and a larger audience for her magazine writing, know by now, Ms. Tushnet can seem a paradox: fervently Catholic, proudly gay, happily celibate. She does not see herself as disordered; she does not struggle to be straight, but she insists that her religion forbids her a sex life.

“The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants,” Ms. Tushnet wrote in a 2007 essay for Commonweal. While gay sex should not be criminalized, she said, gay men and lesbians should abstain. They might instead have passionate friendships, or sublimate their urges into other pursuits. “It turns out I happen to be very good at sublimating,” she says, while acknowledging that that is a lot to ask of others.

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The big news is France. With sentiment worsening across Europe, France has lost its relative safe haven status ”“ credit default swap spreads on French government debt were up sharply today.

The trigger ”“ oddly enough ”“ was Hungary’s announcement that its budget is worse than expected (blaming the previous government; this is starting to become the European pattern) and in the current fragile environment discussed yesterday, this relatively small piece of news spooked investors. But these developments only reinforced a trend that was already in place.

It did not help that the Irish Minister of Finance announced Ireland has 74.2bn euros of guaranteed bank loans, bonds, and systemic support falling due between now and Oct 1. This is around 55% of GNP. It sounds like everyone backed by the Irish government had the “clever” idea to roll over their debts to just before the guarantees expire.

The big losers are Portugal-Ireland-Italy-Greece-and-Spain as always, but Belgium is now in the line of fire, and France is clearly under pressure. The spread between French and German credit default swaps (measuring the relative probability of default) is up ”“ yesterday this was 40 basis points, today it stands at 44 (up from just 5 basis points at the end of 2009; most of the increase is since mid-March, with a sharp acceleration recently). French bonds have become illiquid, with wide bid-ask spreads; not what is supposed to happen in a safe haven. This is going to make the French angry ”“ watch for more market slanders from top French politicians over the weekend; you know they would just love to ban trading in something.

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For the second year in a row, middle-aged adults have registered the highest suicide rate in the country, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Historically, the eldest segment of the population, those 80 and older, have had the highest rates of suicide in the United States. Starting in 2006, however, the suicide rate among men and women between the ages of 45 and 54 was the highest of any age group.

The most recent figures released, from 2007, reveal that the 45-to-54 age group had a suicide rate of 17.6 per every 100,000 people. The second highest was the 75-to-84 age range, with a rate of 16.4, followed by those between 35 and 44, with a 16.3 percent rate.

The rate for 45- to 54-year-olds in 2006 was 17.2 percent, and in 2005 it was 16.3 percent.

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Listen to it all (about 6 1/2 minutes).

A shadow fell across America’s economic recovery on Friday, as the Labor Department’s monthly report showed that private sector job growth was considerably weaker than expected.

The headline numbers suggested a reason to be optimistic ”” employers added 431,000 jobs and the jobless rate fell to 9.7 percent from 9.9 percent in April. But the underlying numbers showed that almost all of the job growth came from the 411,000 workers hired by the federal government to help with the Census. Most of those jobs will disappear in a few months.

By contrast, the private sector created 41,000, far short of expectations of 150,000 to 180,000 jobs. And the number of long-term unemployed, those who out of work for 27 or more weeks, remained at its highest rate since the Labor Department began collecting such data in the 1940s.

“It’s a very, very grudging labor market,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief economists for MFR Inc. “A growing amount of evidence now points to this recovery taking a long time.”

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