Obama, at any rate, felt that they would have little value. Instead, he confronted the Germans in Cannes with a suggestion so radical that it alarmed both Merkel and Schäuble. To save the common currency, Obama proposed that the Europeans follow the example of the American Federal Reserve, which buys up almost unlimited amounts of US treasury bonds when necessary.

The Germans pointed out feebly that the ECB operates within a completely different tradition than the Fed, and that it also pursues a different mission. But it is becoming increasingly clear to Merkel and her finance minister that, in the end, only the ECB will be able to save the euro if the crisis continues to escalate. It is the only European fiscal policy institution capable of taking action, and it also comes equipped with unlimited firepower. It can never run out of money, because it can simply print new money when needed.

This is an approach Germany’s representatives in the ECB council have strongly resisted….But how long can the Germans resist the pressure from other members?

Read it all.

Mr [Ken] Costa, the chairman of the St Paul’s Initiative, established by the Church to open up a debate on ethical capitalism, said the clergy’s response to the ongoing protests outside St Paul’s Cathedral must not turn into a “reheated Faith in the City”.

In his first public comments since his appointment, Mr Costa insisted that a flourishing banking sector was “essential to any successful economy” and that financial incentives are “both valid and effective”.

He also said that stiffer regulation of financial services was not necessarily the solution to the global economic crisis, saying, “you cannot regulate into existence a culture of honesty, integrity, truthfulness and responsibility”.

Read it all.

Last week Mark Steyn wrote, “America is seizing up before our eyes,” and that is a spot-on image. She is like a brilliantly conceived machine that, poorly maintained for more years than any of us cares to admit, has gone too long untuned; the oil of her invention has thinned out and broken down and now bit-by-bit, gear-by-gear””economically, socially, spiritually””she is making an ungodly noise and grinding to a halt.

And yet people want optimism. They crave it, especially when a president is telling one half of the country that it is “time to eat your peas” while simultaneously encouraging another half to take to the streets and demand more dessert. “Where is our Ronald Reagan,” is a phrase that rises with alarming frequency, in some comboxes, and it always unsettles me to see it, because it seems so determinedly obtuse; if we can just find someone exactly like the president from thirty years ago, we will be alright. If only someone will smile and tell us it is morning in America, again, and the city has not slid down the hill!

Read it all.

The Pentagon’s use of retired generals and admirals as paid advisers has virtually ceased, plummeting from 355 “senior mentors” in 2010 to four today, according to a report released by the Defense Department’s inspector general.

Requirements to disclose their business ties, a cap on pay of $179,700 per year and limits on working for private firms were the reasons the generals and admirals gave for quitting the program, the report said.

Retired officers from several services told investigators they quit because they did not want to disclose their finances publicly. Others pointed to the pay of $86.10 per hour, with a maximum of $179,900, as too low.

Read it all.

An interesting retrospective so to speak–read it all.

When the novelist Murong Xuecun showed up at a ceremony here late last year to collect his first literary prize, he clutched a sheet of paper with some of the most incendiary words he had ever written.

It was a meditation on the malaise brought on by censorship. “Chinese writing exhibits symptoms of a mental disorder,” he planned to say. “This is castrated writing. I am a proactive eunuch, I castrate myself even before the surgeon raises his scalpel.”

The ceremony’s organizers forbade him to deliver the speech. On stage, Mr. Murong made a zipping motion across his mouth and left without a word. He then did with the speech what he had done with three of his best-selling novels, all of which had gone through a harsh censorship process: He posted the unexpurgated text on the Internet. Fans flocked to it.

Read it all.

Like many middle-class American baby boomers, Linda Carmona-Sanchez is anxious about slipping into poverty and says whatever dreams she once had about retirement in her “golden years” have turned into nightmares.

“We don’t value people here in this country, and we value you less if you’re not healthy and strong,” Carmona-Sanchez, 55, said.

“To me it would almost be a welcome blessing to know that I would die rather than to be old and have to live in poverty,” she said.

Her anxiety is widespread….

Read it all.

“A religious campus can be a lonely place for someone who doesn’t subscribe to faith,” said King, now 23 and a graduate student in biology. “We want to reach out to these people.”

The [University of] Dayton students are not alone. The Secular Student Alliance, a national organization of nontheistic students with 320 campus chapters, reports at least two other religious universities””Notre Dame and Baylor””have rejected clubs for atheist, agnostic, humanist and other nontheistic students. Students at Duquesne, a Catholic school, say they have little hope of approval on their first application this year.

Read it all.

Grant us, O Lord, so to enter on the service of our Christian warfare, that, putting on the whole armour of God, we may endure hardness and fight against the spiritual powers of darkness, and be more than conquerors through him that loved us, Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Leonine Sacramentary

I do not turn aside from thy ordinances,
for thou hast taught me.
How sweet are thy words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!
Through thy precepts I get understanding;
therefore I hate every false way.
Thy word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path.

–Psalm 119:102-105

United Nations weapons inspectors have amassed a trove of new evidence that they say makes a “credible” case that “Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device,” and that the project may still be under way.

The long-awaited report, released by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday, represents the strongest judgment the agency has issued in its decade-long struggle to pierce the secrecy surrounding the Iranian program. The findings, drawn from evidence of far greater scope and depth than the agency has previously made public, have already rekindled a debate among the Western allies and Israel about whether increased diplomatic pressure, sanctions, sabotage or military action could stop Iran’s program.

Knowing that their findings would be compared with the flawed Iraq intelligence that preceded the 2003 invasion ”” and has complicated American moves on Iran ”” the inspectors devoted a section of the report to “credibility of information.” The information was from a range of independent sources, they said; some was backed up by interviews with foreigners who had helped Iran.

Read it all.

You have to love the picture–read it all.

Read it all. Charleston Mayor Joe Riley is running to serve for his tenth term. You can take it to the bank that he will win–KSH.

Update: You may find nine election day photos here.

A major child sex abuse cover-up case ”“ that does not involve the Catholic Church.

When the case unfolding at Penn State blew up last week, I have to admit the first people I thought I would hear from those in the Catholic Church who believe their faith gets unfairly tarred on this subject. As so many high-level cases around the world have unfolded in the past decade, these Catholics often ask, rightly: What is the rate of sex abuse in other institutions?

Read it all.

Mr. Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator under Mr. Paterno, has been charged with sexually abusing eight boys across a 15-year period, and Mr. Paterno has been widely criticized for failing to involve the police when he learned of the allegation of the assault of the young boy in 2002.

Additionally, two top university officials ”” Gary Schultz, the senior vice president for finance and business, and Tim Curley, the athletic director ”” were charged with perjury and failure to report to authorities what they knew of the allegations, as required by state law.

Since Mr. Sandusky’s arrest Saturday, officials at Penn State ”” notably its president, Graham B. Spanier, and Mr. Paterno ”” have come under withering criticism for a failure to act adequately after learning, at different points over the years, that Mr. Sandusky might have been abusing children. Newspapers have called for their resignations; prosecutors have suggested their inaction led to more children being harmed by Mr. Sandusky; and students and faculty at the university have expressed a mix of disgust and confusion, and a hope that much of what prosecutors have charged is not true.

Read it all.

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s embattled prime minister, signalled on Tuesday night that he would resign after parliament passes a new financial stability law that will implement fresh austerity measures demanded by the European Union.

Giorgio Napolitano, head of state, said Mr Berlusconi had expressed his recognition of the “urgent need” to respond quickly to the expectations of Europe through the approval of the stability law, which would be amended in light of the most recent recommendations of the European Commission.

Read it all.

A group of religious sisters in Maryland is believed to be the first U.S. Episcopal order to become a Catholic religious community.

On Nov. 1, the All Saints Sisters of the Poor professed their perpetual vows at the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore.

Archbishop Edwin O’Brien, apostolic administrator of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, received the sisters into a newly erected diocesan priory at a special Mass on the feast of All Saints.

Read it all.

Ben White asked his sixth-grade students if his hair looked OK.

As he prepared to be on camera, his Webb School of Knoxville students opened video apps on their iPads to record White giving them their homework assignment.

At home, students could watch their teacher explaining exactly how to diagram nouns and verbs. The assignment was also loaded on iCalendar.

White said the iPad takes away excuses for not doing homework.

Read it all.

Please keep Mrs. Allison Lawrence, wife of Bishop Mark Lawrence, in your prayers. She has suffered a back injury and will be recuperating at home. Please, no visitors at this time. We encourage you to add her to your parish prayer list. Cards of encouragement are welcome!

Her address is:

Mrs. Allison Lawrence
Diocese of South Carolina
PO Box 20127
Charleston, SC 29413

A special U.S. committee charged with reducing the federal deficit is entering a critical week for reaching a deal but has not considered extending its Nov. 23 deadline, a panel member said Monday.

“Every member understands that time is running out,” House Democrat Chris Van Hollen, a member of the “super committee,” said in an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program. “This is the moment to get it (a deal) done if we’re going to get it done.

“The clock’s ticking. We’ve got just a little over two weeks and that includes the time that it will take to put the final touches on any agreement that we might be able to reach,” he said.

Read it all.

As student-loan default rates climb and college graduates fail to land jobs, an increasing number of students are betting they can get just as far with a degree from a less-expensive school as they can with a diploma from an elite school””without having to take on debt.

More students are choosing lower-cost public colleges or commuting to schools from home to save on housing expenses. Twenty-two percent of students from families with annual household incomes above $100,000 attended public, two-year schools in the 2010-2011 academic year, up from 12% the previous year, according to a report from student-loan company Sallie Mae.
Such choices meant families across all income brackets spent 9% less””an average of $21,889 in cash, loans, scholarships and other methods””on college in 2010-11 than in the previous year, according to the report. High-income families cut their college spending by 18%, to $25,760. The report, which is released annually, was based on a survey of about 1,600 students and parents.

Read it all.

Read it all and note the full pdf download is available at the bottom.

British bankers have admitted that they are paid too much, a report into moral standards in the City of London will reveal tomorrow.

A survey of 500 workers in City financial institutions, carried out for the Christian think-tank St Paul’s Institute, found that “a substantial number” believed they were overpaid compared with other professions ”“ particularly frontline workers including teachers and, most of all, nurses.

The results will fuel continuing bitterness towards the industry over its culpability for the financial crisis and its apparent failure to rein in huge salaries and bonuses . Last night The Sunday Times reported the publicly owned Royal Bank of Scotland is planning to pay its investment bankers about £500m in bonuses.

Read it all.

About a third of hospitals serving South Carolinians collected a combined $110 million in state and federal taxpayer money last year through a program designed to reward medical centers that provide high levels of uncompensated care.

But those 18 hospitals, which include three in the Charleston area, actually do not provide a disproportionate amount of care to uninsured South Carolinians and those enrolled in government-sponsored insurance programs.

Now the state is cutting payments to those hospitals by about 8 percent, saving taxpayers nearly $9 million annually.

Read it all.

The graph is a helpful one.

The Anglican Bishop of Chelmsford has set out his strategy for how the Essex diocese should look by 2025.

Bishop Stephen Cottrell unveiled his ‘Transforming Presence’ paper at a meeting of the diocesan synod.

He said the church had to face the prospect of fewer paid clergy, and parishioners needed be more evangelical and more open about their faith.

Read it all.

This one was new to me, I bumped into it when watching PBS Mystery’s Case Histories recently. Listen to it all–KSH.

“The only time I watch TV news now is when I’m staying in a hotel and I feel so old….There’s the stock ticker and the news crawl and those flashing graphics and eight heads screaming at each other and one’s in Tel Aviv and the other in Atlanta. It’s crazy. But after a week of it, I find myself craving it. I find my brain expanding in that chaos.”

–Composer Nico Muhly in this morning’s Wall Street Journal

Privately, U.S. officials have long complained that China and Russia are out to steal U.S. trade secrets, intellectual property and high technology. But in public they’ve been reluctant to point fingers, and instead have referred obliquely to “some nations” or “our rivals.”

That changed Thursday, with the release of a new report by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive to Congress titled “Foreign Spies Stealing U.S. Economic Secrets in Cyberspace.” The report names China as the world’s leading source of economic espionage, followed by Russia.

“China and Russia, through their intelligence services and through their corporations, are attacking our research and development,” said Robert Bryant, U.S. national counterintelligence executive, during an event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., presenting the espionage report.

Read it all.

You suggest that the Bible’s teachings come “not only in well-stated propositions, but also through brilliant stories and moving poetry.” Has the contemporary church been less effective in presenting good stories about marriage than in stating propositions?

I don’t know that I would say the church has been great at laying out rules, and I don’t think it’s actually been very practical. The theological tends to be propositions. The polemical tends to be arguments. The practical uses lots of stories to give you the gist of what a good marriage should be like. Somewhere in Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor was asked to put the basic point of her short story in a nutshell. She said, ‘If I could put it in a nutshell, I wouldn’t have had to write the story.’

I believe she says a story can’t be paraphrased.
Yes, that’s right. I think what she means is a story gives you an excess of meaning that no proposition could possibly convey, or even a set of propositions. There’s meaning that comes with a narrative that is certainly somewhat propositional””you can put some of it into propositions””but the impact is greater.

On a practical level, the church doesn’t do a great job of giving people a vision for what God wants marriage to be.

Read it all.